Outside it's 56 degrees and the sky is blue and cloudless between the skyscrapers, though the buildings keep the church garden in shade for most of the day. After being buried in snow and ice the plants, nameless sprouts, are still green. The street is packed with business men and women, tourists, and students. The smoke from the food stand smells of lamb, rotating on a skewer in the back of the aluminum room on wheels. I walk with a purpose on my way to the bank. I am wearing a blazer. I belong here.
It's weird that I live in New York, I think. Everyone told me I would hate it for the first year, but I already like it here.
I can still hear Texas. I sit down to pay bills and instead I write a thousand words about Houston. I sometimes miss riding in a car between cities and the Mexican restaurants with big, square rooms. I want to write about Texas and highways and walking to the bank and what I had for lunch. I want to write about everything; everything has meaning. Something is hidden in every experience.
Monday
The In-Between Weather
It is cool and breezy outside, the sun warms up the sidewalk and the back of my neck. I'm wearing my fall jacket, a patterned thing covered in buckles that my brother convinced me to buy. It makes me a little self-conscious, but I don't care too much because of the breeze and the sun. On the train a woman is holding a string of beads in her fingers. They are all identical: blue and plastic. She has black hair and there are little diamonds on the teal frames of her glasses. She looks normal, in a coat and dress pants, except that she is speaking angrily in a language I can't understand. Each sentence seems to end in a series of repeated words: "lucka lucka lucka." Maybe she is praying, but she continues to speak occasionally after she has put the beads into her cloth purse, looking around sharply. No one seems to acknowledge this behavior. I wonder which one of us is crazy.
I walk out of the subway into the spring light and I am suddenly in several places: I am in midtown New York on a Monday morning in March, in need of some coffee. I am in the cloisters in the fall before the weather had gotten too cold, sitting on a wooden bench in the shade. I am at Rice University, standing in front of the common rooms with my best friend before class. I am in Houston in the Sixth Ward walking down the street to the coffee shop on a mild winter day with my coworkers, laughing about something.
I love this in-between weather, the cool air and the sun that makes me happy to be where I am and pulls me into the past, reminds me of all the days that felt just like this day, cool and sunny and open.
I walk out of the subway into the spring light and I am suddenly in several places: I am in midtown New York on a Monday morning in March, in need of some coffee. I am in the cloisters in the fall before the weather had gotten too cold, sitting on a wooden bench in the shade. I am at Rice University, standing in front of the common rooms with my best friend before class. I am in Houston in the Sixth Ward walking down the street to the coffee shop on a mild winter day with my coworkers, laughing about something.
I love this in-between weather, the cool air and the sun that makes me happy to be where I am and pulls me into the past, reminds me of all the days that felt just like this day, cool and sunny and open.
Friday
Time for Starbucks
I'm embarrassed to say I've been going to Starbucks just about every morning. It's convenient and quick and the coffee is better than the weak stuff the street vendor sells. I prefer Stumptown, which is just across 5th Avenue, where the staff is attractive and artsy, and the coffee is expensive but flavorful. But no matter when I go I have to wait for fifteen minutes, and I'm usually just about to be late for work becuase I can't seem to make myself get out of bed before 7:45 (or 7:50, or 8:00). This inability to wake up in the morning is also the reason I don't just make my own coffee, because I know that's what you were about to ask. I don't have a coffee pot, so making coffee involves boiling water and preparing the little filter and plastic percolator-thingy and, usually, cleaning a cup, and when I wake up at 7:45, 7:50, 8:00 I just don't have time for that.
So, hence, therefore: the Starbucks cup on my desk.
What's the problem here? Is it laziness, is it my addiction to caffeine, is it this whole notion of living on a schedule and being "on time" to work. The answer, of course, is yes (why even pretend I could narrow it down to one problem?). There's my own laziness, especially when it comes to food and drink. Sometimes, when my life feels a little like it's being flipped over like a giant pancake, I take some of the attention I was directing toward my food and direct it toward being anxious, and revert to eating peanut butter and jelly or pickles and slices of cheese for dinner. Food is not at the top of the list of the things I naturally care about, though I know it's important and should be.
Also, there's this caffeine addiction, exacerbated by the classes I'm taking that end at 10:30 at night on Mondays and Wednesdays. I usually need an extra cup of coffee to remain more or less coherent throughout class.
And then there's time. Time, or standardized time, is a modern problem and, in some respects, a modern invention and one that I'm not completely reconciled with. Ironically, trains are the cause of standardized time and also the reason I can never seem to get to work "on time," (well, that and the sleeping in too late). Radiolab had a great show on time, check it out here, which explained that before people needed to catch the train there wasn't much of a need to have standardized time. But even though modern transportation taught us live by the clock, it also regularly messes with out schedules. The R, the subway route I take to work, is an unpredictable train, usually meandering under the East River then lurching from station to station, sometimes nearly empty, sometimes packed so full I can't hold my book in front of me without poking someone in the spine. I leave my house at 8:15 or I leave at 8:25 - doesn't seem to matter, I'm still just barely on time for work, and sometimes late.
I live by minutes, those glowing green numbers on my alarm clock that burn my nights away and the ticking, blinking timepieces that tell me when I can go home or when I'm late, again, and the clock in my own head berating me for all the seconds, minutes, and hours I've wasted. My life, chopped up this way, packed full between the hours, sometimes feels as artificial as the numbers on my digital clock.
And so I stay up too late, and I drink too much coffee, and I run through Starbucks for my coffee even though I'd rather brew a cup of something better at home or stand in Stumptown for awhile and enjoy the indie music and the company of people who care about their coffee, but I just can't make the time.
So, hence, therefore: the Starbucks cup on my desk.
What's the problem here? Is it laziness, is it my addiction to caffeine, is it this whole notion of living on a schedule and being "on time" to work. The answer, of course, is yes (why even pretend I could narrow it down to one problem?). There's my own laziness, especially when it comes to food and drink. Sometimes, when my life feels a little like it's being flipped over like a giant pancake, I take some of the attention I was directing toward my food and direct it toward being anxious, and revert to eating peanut butter and jelly or pickles and slices of cheese for dinner. Food is not at the top of the list of the things I naturally care about, though I know it's important and should be.
Also, there's this caffeine addiction, exacerbated by the classes I'm taking that end at 10:30 at night on Mondays and Wednesdays. I usually need an extra cup of coffee to remain more or less coherent throughout class.
And then there's time. Time, or standardized time, is a modern problem and, in some respects, a modern invention and one that I'm not completely reconciled with. Ironically, trains are the cause of standardized time and also the reason I can never seem to get to work "on time," (well, that and the sleeping in too late). Radiolab had a great show on time, check it out here, which explained that before people needed to catch the train there wasn't much of a need to have standardized time. But even though modern transportation taught us live by the clock, it also regularly messes with out schedules. The R, the subway route I take to work, is an unpredictable train, usually meandering under the East River then lurching from station to station, sometimes nearly empty, sometimes packed so full I can't hold my book in front of me without poking someone in the spine. I leave my house at 8:15 or I leave at 8:25 - doesn't seem to matter, I'm still just barely on time for work, and sometimes late.
I live by minutes, those glowing green numbers on my alarm clock that burn my nights away and the ticking, blinking timepieces that tell me when I can go home or when I'm late, again, and the clock in my own head berating me for all the seconds, minutes, and hours I've wasted. My life, chopped up this way, packed full between the hours, sometimes feels as artificial as the numbers on my digital clock.
And so I stay up too late, and I drink too much coffee, and I run through Starbucks for my coffee even though I'd rather brew a cup of something better at home or stand in Stumptown for awhile and enjoy the indie music and the company of people who care about their coffee, but I just can't make the time.
Tuesday
Notes
Who puts Chinese money in the donation box at an Episcopal Church? Chinese tourists, I guess. I have 10 Yuan to give you, if you want it.
Me: The nuns that sell us the altar breads are super nice. I guess they have to be nice, 'cause they're nuns.
Ross: Yeah. Also, they're salesnuns.
It's 48 degrees and sunny in New York. God is making up for subjecting us to the snowiest month in New York. Ever.
Have you been reading The Rumpus? You should start. It will make you happy and more literary.
Sometimes I wish I were a lion.
Me: The nuns that sell us the altar breads are super nice. I guess they have to be nice, 'cause they're nuns.
Ross: Yeah. Also, they're salesnuns.
It's 48 degrees and sunny in New York. God is making up for subjecting us to the snowiest month in New York. Ever.
Have you been reading The Rumpus? You should start. It will make you happy and more literary.
Sometimes I wish I were a lion.
Sunday
Microcosm: Laundry
There are seagulls flying around in Queens. They hover over the sidewalk between my apartment and the laundromat. Some lady has taken up five of the large washers, and she is taking her time filling them up and speaking in some other language to her granddaughter. Sorry, she says, when I ask her if she is using this last empty one. No one in the laundromat is speaking English: mostly Spanish and and something else that is mysterious to me. I stuff my pants into a small washer, and I am thinking about what I'm writing, something about GRACE and grace and Texas and the death penalty. I fill a dryer with wet t-shirts and underwear and socks and I am thinking about a girl. There are people folding laundry talking in Spanish on their cell phones, and children running around between the carts full of laundry.
I fold my pants and dress shirts and stuff everything into my mesh laundry bag. Outside piles of gray and white snow have been pushed to the edge of the sidewalk and puddles of slush have gathered at the ends of the driveways and pedestrian ramps and along the curb. It's cloudy but the sky opens a little above my head. Someone is moving out of my apartment building. I hope they leave a bookshelf on the sidwalk that I can carry back up the stairs.
I fold my pants and dress shirts and stuff everything into my mesh laundry bag. Outside piles of gray and white snow have been pushed to the edge of the sidewalk and puddles of slush have gathered at the ends of the driveways and pedestrian ramps and along the curb. It's cloudy but the sky opens a little above my head. Someone is moving out of my apartment building. I hope they leave a bookshelf on the sidwalk that I can carry back up the stairs.
Friday
Read This Now
Maybe things got out of hand, what with that one girl nearly bursting into tears and the professor's head pretty much popping right off her shoulders. I mean, there it was rolling around on the table snapping at people. Her head, I mean. This girl said something pretty harsh about George Orwell's essay, Shooting an Elephant, but she was nervous and so did not say it particularly well, and then the wheels, or the professor's head, came off, and there was all this tense "discussion" and even some interrogation and several painful moments. Maybe it elicits such strong feelings because it's just a brilliant essay.
So, all that is to say that today, instead of reading my blog, you should read Shooting and Elephant here. It's not too long, so go read it, and don't come back until you do.
Also, even better but not available online is Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin. Pretty much the perfect example of what an essay, or any literature, can be. It's fantastic and I almost can't describe it without swearing. So go read it. Immediately.
So, all that is to say that today, instead of reading my blog, you should read Shooting and Elephant here. It's not too long, so go read it, and don't come back until you do.
Also, even better but not available online is Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin. Pretty much the perfect example of what an essay, or any literature, can be. It's fantastic and I almost can't describe it without swearing. So go read it. Immediately.
Thursday
When You Have A Little Heartache
Start with coffee. Coffee gives you a good kick, the way you need right now: a little adrenaline and dopamine. And, of course, you're addicted, so coffee always makes you feel better anyway.
Don't spend too much time on the internet. The internet is a big black whole of information, a place of creativity and genius, and sometimes a big sucking void of loneliness. Nothing you find there will make you happy.
Build a city out of the coins on you've found on your floor, write letters, draw a picture of your heart, even if it's bruised. Stack the furniture: bookcases on top of desks, end tables teetering at the top. Then rearrange it, something completely new. Put your desk in the kitchen and your bed in the dining room. Clean up your mess, sweep the floor, wash the dishes.
Make dinner. An omelette maybe, with vegetables from the stand down the street, and the heavy cast iron skillet from the thrift store. It's delicious, because you made it.
Read or watch a movie, don't watch much television. Good books are whole things, works of art. So are lots of movies. Television always leaves you hanging. Characters that seem like friends for a moment, and then leave you unsatisfied, like your empty apartment after a party, where all the guests hardly knew who you were.
Don't spend too much time alone, though. Spend time with all those people who love you. You can't be whole without your heart, so when that occasional heartbreak comes along you have to hold on to whatever it is that you love and that loves you back. Maybe the future is nothing like you hoped it might be, maybe you completely misunderstood yourself, maybe you said things you shouldn't have, maybe you can't get a handle on it all. Forget it. Go out. Get real drunk. Fall in love again and again and again.
Don't spend too much time on the internet. The internet is a big black whole of information, a place of creativity and genius, and sometimes a big sucking void of loneliness. Nothing you find there will make you happy.
Build a city out of the coins on you've found on your floor, write letters, draw a picture of your heart, even if it's bruised. Stack the furniture: bookcases on top of desks, end tables teetering at the top. Then rearrange it, something completely new. Put your desk in the kitchen and your bed in the dining room. Clean up your mess, sweep the floor, wash the dishes.
Make dinner. An omelette maybe, with vegetables from the stand down the street, and the heavy cast iron skillet from the thrift store. It's delicious, because you made it.
Read or watch a movie, don't watch much television. Good books are whole things, works of art. So are lots of movies. Television always leaves you hanging. Characters that seem like friends for a moment, and then leave you unsatisfied, like your empty apartment after a party, where all the guests hardly knew who you were.
Don't spend too much time alone, though. Spend time with all those people who love you. You can't be whole without your heart, so when that occasional heartbreak comes along you have to hold on to whatever it is that you love and that loves you back. Maybe the future is nothing like you hoped it might be, maybe you completely misunderstood yourself, maybe you said things you shouldn't have, maybe you can't get a handle on it all. Forget it. Go out. Get real drunk. Fall in love again and again and again.
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