process

It was perhaps ill advised that I spent three days alone in my house, sitting on the couch watching crime drama and MTV reality shows, painting with acrylics and doing crossword puzzles. It was glorious at first (pajamas all the time!), and then I got sad and crabby and realized it may have been due to the lack of sunlight and actually human contact. Winter has a colossal affect on my mood, always, especially during the time between Christmas and New Year’s. I don’t remember a Christmas when I wasn’t at least slightly blue, and it’s not because I secretly long for Jesus. Everything just comes to a halt, and then there’s this paralyzing quiet. It’s less so in the city, where most of my friends are Jews and we have a similar understanding about the role of Christianity in America, but it still reminds me of being a kid and feeling lonely, left out of the big show.

 Anyway, I emerged from my hermitage,and now I’m in Massachusetts until Thursday. Time speeds up around here, and also slows down, as if such a thing were possible. It’s because of the early darkness, I think, and the simultaneous high and low that comes with writing and caffeine, a beautiful and dangerous combination. It’s hard to explain, unless it happens to you, but mainly, it works like this:

1. Drink coffee.

2. Stare at computer.

3. Feel despair.

4. Do crossword puzzle online. Fleeting sense of accomplishment.

5. Type some words. Erase them. 6. Stare at coffee shop patrons.

7. Drink more coffee. Think about how i don’t feel caffienated and that’s weird. Am i becoming immune to caffeine? Oh Gd.

8. Think about how I will never write anything again.

 9. Doodle.

10. Shuffle songs on ipod.

11. Type more words. Continue to feel despair.

12. Listen to awesome song .

13. Jitters. Words beginning to connect. Joy!

14. Type frantically, as though I’m trying to race my own brain.

15. Finish typing. Despair returns.

16. Walk home to fend off caffeine induced rambunctiousness.

17. Repeat tomorrow.

staying put.

One thing I love about New York is that weather just makes the city more of itself. Its residents and businesses are undeterred by snow or rain or heat, they push on. I love living in a place where people are always awake, because I myself am not really conscious until about 2 pm. I like going outside at night and looking up at the buildings, at the boxes of light where people live. I need to know there are people around me, moving, being. New York is a comfort in that sense. We are weird in the same ways.

I’ve been cranky lately. My students are in finals, and I absorb their unhealthy habits. I drink too much coffee, I create projects that demand my attention until outrageous hours. Most of the time, I still think I’m 21, and that comes from hanging out on campus. College students, apparently, are the fountain of youth.

For me, winter or summer breaks felt like a dead end. I remember finals as an adrenaline rush of sleepless nights, atrocious personal hygiene, weird food, and my friend Walter and I drinking coffee in our dorm lounge while I wrote a long paper on Virginia Woolf. But slowly, inevitably, campus would empty out. I hated leaving, as if there could be anything lovelier and more genuine than the lives we lived there.

There are many things to love about the school I went to, but one of them is not the fact that they kick everyone out of the dorms during break. I slept on a lot of floors and couches in the last two years of college, since the house I’d grown up in had been sold. I’ll always be grateful to the people who gave me a place to crash back then, I never want to have to rely on that sort of kindness again. I am, if you can believe such a thing, incredibly bad at being parented, and even more self conscious about being a guest. (It’s not that I don’t want to stay at your house, but if I do, I will live in perpetual fear of inconveniencing you.)

So this has all added up to me being particularly proprietary about space, and also prone to psycho analyzing myself for an audience. It has also made me annoyed at the frequency with which people ask me what I’m going to do next. Apparently, staying at your job for longer than fifteen minutes, even in this economy is unheard of. It means you’re stagnating, because, you know, no one could be content with where they are in life. I am certainly an over achiever, but I’m getting increasingly bothered by idea that the present moment is never good enough. We’re always looking/waiting for something-grad school, a salary increase, a better apartment, a partner, a grade on a paper, spring. I can’t decide if it’s about the instant gratification that technology allows some of us to access, (do not get me started on Kindles or I phones) or if this is just part of the anxiety of living. Whatever it is, I don’t like it.

The other day, I asked one of my students what she’s doing after she graduates at the end of this semester. She did not punch me in the face, as she probably wanted to, but told me about her awesome plan, which I met with fanfare. What I wish I had asked her instead is, what are you doing to be present in your last moments of college? I would have told her to do is resist the part of her brain that’s programmed to control everything, that’s afraid to trip. The beautiful stuff is in the cracks.

strong is the new weak.

Yesterday I got paid fifteen dollars to talk about my mother being dead in a group of my peers. It turns out that people with a dead parent are everywhere, which seems both unremarkable and extraordinary to me.

In a nutshell: Telling someone our parent is dead is tantamount to revealing a secret life. All of us are pissed off. No one feels like they can get close to or depend on anyone. We resist the idea that this loss defines us, yet we all feel impossibly distant from those around us. Everyone dislikes being told how strong and/or brave we are.

I don’t own anything that requires dry cleaning, which I have long since considered the hallmark of adulthood, but I have felt old since I was thirteen. I have never considered myself brave or strong because my mother is dead and I’m still alive. I have, however, felt guilty, anxious, paranoid, scared and lonely.

I understand that people can’t necessarily process what they would do in a situation like mine, but it’s particularly the idea of the strong woman that’s needling me, the fact that it’s a form of praise, an assertion, a trophy.

How do we display strength? By getting up in the morning in spite of our pain? By shouldering all the responsibility? By not displaying emotion? These last two sound suspiciously like prized male characteristics. Women are traditionally and currently depicted as weak, so when we are told we are strong, are we really being praised for acting male? For defying gender expectations of what it means to be a woman, which are that we are emotional, unreliable, fragile, etc? There’s a thin line here, of course, because we all know what happens when women are too strong and assertive. There are words for women like that, and I don’t need to write them here.

The gender implications of strength and weakness are undeniable, and we as a society value them explicitly, but especially in a context where we are feeling vulnerable and struggling to understand the world. This puts the gender component in a new light for me, though. I didn’t get out of bed for three weeks after my mother died. That same semester that I was taking 20 credits (6 classes) and got straight A’s, but  I barely slept, I hardly ate, and I was basically nocturnal. Was I still strong?

first snow



It’s snowing in Manhattan tonight. In Massachusetts and Ohio, the snow stays unblemished and white for miles, and it makes you feel grateful and small. Here, it’s more rain than anything else, and what’s white becomes gray quickly. It’s pretty unremarkable, so far.

I was away last week, with J and his magical cat. I turned 31 while I was there, which so far feels like a nice age, not young and not old, but comfortable. I’m so bad at being on vacation, it basically has to be forced upon me. It’s hard to be away and hard to come home. I didn’t write very much, so when I got back here, I intended to rip into things, but I forgot about the re-entry, the part where I feel entirely overwhelmed by the past, present and future and just want to lay on my bed.

Whenever I leave a place I always feel like I’ll never come back. (Fatalism is one of my more delightful qualities.) I treat the place where I am like a sponge, I have to squeeze everything out of it, even if I have no business there. It’s completely weird, sometimes it just involves standing in a room or a restaurant or on a road, but it’s rife with desperation, so really the parts that I love have no hope of making it in those last moments.

On Sunday, J and I were walking through a parking lot, and there was an SUV parked sideways with the motor running. A woman got out in an orange coat, wearing high heels and a headband. Her face was pale and her lips red. She was in a hurry, so I don’t know if she noticed me. This all took place within thirty seconds, but it was jarred me thoroughly.

She and I had not seen each other for more than ten years, and the last time we’d spoken, it was angrily, over email. The fight made me feel insane, because I couldn’t remember what I’d done to hurt her. I have an idea now, but it seems like it’s buried under so much other shit that now I don’t know if I would recognize the person who managed to did it.

Later that day, I did what I usually do when I can’t deal with something head on-I tried to make art about it. The result was ten good sentences and a pile of ramblings. We were nerdy heroes of high school Latin together for two years. She was elegant and sassy, and I loved her fiercely. Her house and her family seemed like another world to me. There were problems, of course, but they weren’t the same as my problems, so that was better.

In high school, everyone wants to be saved, even the people who seem like they have it together. We’re finding each other online now, reconnecting via sanitized versions of ourselves. We are so much more in charge now, or at least, it looks that way.

It is wet and soggy in the city now, and there’s a hole in the bottom of my chucks. I’m going for a walk anyway.