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.
