transience

I’m on my fourth cup of coffee of today. The first one I drank uneventfully with S around 2.30 p.m.  The second was a small sample from Trader Joe’s, and I spilled the third one seconds after buying it at a market on 86th street.

I’ve been cat-sitting for M and E while they’re away in Oberlin for Sukkot. I’ve made various attempts at wooing this cat, including exacting the love trifecta: cat treats, mackerel, wet food. She is a fickle lady, and I am determined, but I still might fail.

There is nothing quite like Sukkot in Oberlin; for one, you’ve never seen so much potato salad in your life. I have many great memories of laughing dangerously hard inside our delicate plastic shack that insulated us from the world. It’s hard to let something go knowing that it’s painfully unique, that it cannot be replicated anywhere in its pure form.

I’m such a vagrant these days when it comes to Jewish community. I just do not know what I want, or what I need. On Yom Kippur, I sat and read a novel during services. I thought about not going at all, but I think if I hadn’t, I would have eaten, or taken my Saturday back in some way that wasn’t in accordance with the reverence one is supposed to apply to Yom Kippur. On the other hand, I don’t know that I actually care. This back and forth between me and traditional observance is perpetual and uneven. On one hand, it seems important, authentic, like it could lead to something powerful. On the other, I feel like a petulant jerk.

In Judaism, you do the work, and maybe then you reap the spiritual benefit, maybe then you understand. Generally, I do not roll that way, so I end up constantly arguing with myself about the merit of keeping Shabbat and going to shul to interact with liturgy that drives me crazy. The struggle has the potential to be meaningful, I know, and I don’t wish I had been born into a different life (most of the time), where I was raised observant and didn’t question it, but it feels terribly lonely to be struggling, especially now.

There are so many different kinds of Jew I could be, that I’m going to be, but right now, I’m not patient enough to wait for the unfolding. People mimic certainty, belief, and there’s safety in that, and sometimes, often these days, all I want is safety, but this, I can’t muster the stamina to fake it, even if it’s the sincerely hopeful kind of faking.

briefly

The titles of the books on my random table in this Barnes and Noble café:

1. Why Your Life Sucks and What You Can Do About It
2. Motivate Yourself and Reach Your Goals
3. The Oxford English Dictionary
4. Learning to Love Yourself: Finding Your Self Worth
5. Beat Low Self Esteem with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Amazing, right? I wish I’d seen who was reading this pile. Maybe we would have had a conversation, in different world where I am someone who talks to total strangers. This city is full of such weird little communities, which is what I love about it, and people are congregating in coffee shops to fend off depression and loneliness. I am typing madly (on a good day) alongside them, in my own bubble of fear and curiosity and joy, contented by the their presence. That’s another thing I love about New York-no matter what, there are always others.

intervention

Once I was in an elevator and I sighed. It feels good to sigh, it feels honest, and I’d managed to forget that, and so I did it. There was one other person in the elevator with me, and I didn’t know her. She looked at me and said, “Oh, come on, it can’t be that bad!” She was smiling in a crooked, nervous way, as though I might attack her, which, to be honest, I wanted to. When did it become acceptable to evaluate a stranger’s emotional life based on their random noises? “I was just sighing,” I told her, and then I stared hard at the elevator doors until they opened and I could gratefully escape.

Maybe she was trying to rescue me, the stranger in the elevator, I don’t know. Maybe she thought I needed to talk about whatever it was that was pushing on my lungs so hard that it came out in the air between us, maybe she thought I was desperate enough to talk to someone I didn’t know about it, or maybe she thought there was safety in that anonymity. There have been many days lately when I’ve wished for someone to tell everything to, someone who has not heard it before, someone I don’t even know.

On Saturday night, M and E staged an intervention. I’d already been at their apartment for hours, so it lacked the drama of walking into a room full of sobbing loved ones about to implore you to change your destructive behavior. I’m not even sure they would call it an intervention, or that they meant to do it, but suddenly, M said, “You know this isn’t your fault, right?”, and it was on.

M says there will be something called Change Day, when I will wake up and be ready to consider the possibilities and take steps towards them. To me, this sounds a lot like the moment you realize you are over someone you’ve been in love with for a long time, but can’t be with in the same anymore. You actually are sick of the way you feel, there’s no longer anything charming or sexy in the wallowing, somehow, it’s no longer necessary.

We believe all sorts of horrible things about ourselves. You might say I excel at this. I’ve spent the last six months looking for signs, omens, patterns, anything that could signify the direction I’m supposed to take, but maybe the context I’ve been looking in-despair and self loathing-is not the right one. Until M suggested it, I hadn’t considered the legitimacy of telling myself different stories about myself and my ability to be a smart, functional personal in the world, because I’ve started thinking of those stories as lies. This is depression, up close, unflinching, when you literally cannot think yourself out of the crap, only further into it. For me, there’s such a vulnerability in that space-the sound of someone else’s voice and the fact that it sounds nothing like my own is so refreshing and full of potential, even when what they’re saying feels impossible to believe.

new post at the Forward

I have a new post at the Sisterhood on complicated mourning; you can read it here: http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/131255/.

the L word

A month after my mother died, I went into her bedroom to go through her things. It seemed as though she was simply away, although, except for periodic surgeries that kept her in the hospital for a few days, my mother had not spent a night away from home for at least eleven years.

In the mirror above the dresser, I saw myself opening her drawers and touching her clothing, like a thief or a tabloid reporter. On her dresser, there were perfume bottles, doilies, photographs, piles of paper, ephemera, and a small, round mirror on top of which were arranged a few long, golden tubes filled with waxy lipstick.

The story of lipstick in my life is like books, or my first love, or college- integral. I remember my grandmother putting it on, in quick, delicate dabs to her small mouth before she left the house. My mother reapplied immediately after meals, she kept a tube in her glove compartment, another in her purse.

I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup until I was thirteen, and then, the rules were specific-no mascara (not even when I was much older-my mother thought it would ruin my eyelashes), nothing on my skin, only eyeshadow (perfectly socially acceptable in the early 90’s), and something on my lips.

I wore lip gloss at first, the kind that came in fat, pastel colored tubes and tasted like melon and wax. In high school, my friend and I discovered Carmex, which came in a round blue container and made our lips buzz. I don’t remember when I started wearing actual lipstick, but as soon as I did, I could not stop. I’ve become my mother in that sense. I still don’t know what color I wear, just the number on the bottom of the tube (914C) and I never pay more than two dollars for it (unless I’m stocking up). I’ve been known to wear the same pair of pants for a week at a time, but not being able to find my lipstick elicits panic.

It’s not strange that three generations of Jewish women were and are self-conscious about their mouths; there has scarcely been a second in the last 31 years when I haven’t obsessed over what was going into or coming out of mine, or what should have been. In the end, this sweaty palmed nervosa that comes with not knowing where to find an inconsequential plastic tube is the weirdest kind of genetics, but it is mine.

the long shot

Bethesda Fountain in Central Park is a place I went to many years ago, felt enchanted by, and then forgot about, save for the memory of the enchantment. The Fountain itself is really not so exciting, it’s just a fountain covered with tourists, but the terrace is a thing of wonder.

On Sunday, I went back to the Fountain for a photography class. I don’t usually take art classes, because I fear being judged on something I really just do because I love it, and I tend to avoid things that I’m not good at (i.e. math). Nate Borofsky, in his brief but famed podcast,  said that every time he tries to copy something-music, writing, whatnot-it ends up looking entirely new and different. Until now, everything I “know” about photography, I’ve taught myself, based on reading and looking at other people’s photos and taking pictures based on things that are strange and beautiful.  It was incredibly difficult, trying to simultaneously learn and unlearn and I took more practice shots than anything else, but here are some that I like.