It's a Small World

I thought maybe moving to a huge city would mean that I wouldn't be able to use the phrase "small world" anymore. As in, someone knows someone who knows someone else and you all end up at a bar at the same time. "Crazy! What a small world!" I figured that New York is the place to lose yourself, be tortured and lonely, feel like a small fish in a big pond. (And, believe me, I have days or mornings or nights where this is absolutely true, and it seems like I don't know a soul, and I'm a sucky writer anyway, and what am I doing here, I'm such a poseur, etc etc.)

But I'm here to report that even NYC is small. Comfortingly so, sometimes. (Warning: there is a ridiculous amount of name-dropping to follow, but it's all names of normal people! So it doesn't really count as name-dropping!) Tonight, I went to Union Hall (a bar/music venue in Park Slope; think an upstairs with dark wood and library books and ironic comfort food like "basket o' corn dogs" and $3 PBR's....combined with a dark basement where cool local bands play). I brought along Julie, a wonderful painter who moved from Boulder in April—I met her through Christie, a wonderful friend from Cedaredge. Julie and I met up with Porter, a fiction and creative writer who used to work for Powder magazine and now contributes to great pubs like The Believer (check out this story). Julie knew Nancy, whose boyfriend is the drummer in a band called The Loom, would come by to hear the music. In walked Nancy. While Julie, Porter, and I were sitting at the bar, my classmate Lauren came in with her boyfriend, who's also in a band. Then another classmate of mine, Mary, walked in—her boyfriend just joined The Loom (banjo, mandolin, dobro). Attack of the groupies! Also: Porter worked on Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea and the artist Swoon, which I blogged about a couple weeks ago. Julie's roommate, Michael, also works for Swoon, collecting found materials for her art projects. And this is in New York! I thought it was anonymous here. Now I might have to go to Union Hall by myself sometime, sit at the corner seat, and see what familiar faces show themselves.

Got it? The takeaway: The world, thankfully, is still small...even in the midst of urban hugeness. Maybe like minds gravitate together more in places like this.

Now for one quick REAL name-drop. (This one's for you, Rach!)
Check out this clip of my classmate.
G'night!

Hot Bird

Something I saw over the last few days that I don't normally see:


Things I did over the past few days that I don't normally do:
• Run three times around Central Park with about 5,000 other people (18 miles, ugh) who are training for the NY marathon.
• Watch horse races in the rain at Belmont Park without placing a single bet.
• Sleep on a couch with a goldendoodle.
• Purchase a curtain at Ikea that actually requires assembly. Is anything there straightforward?
• Drink a cappuccino at a French cafe in the East Village with my writing workshop professor, Catherine Texier, and talk about my story for an hour.
• Read the business section of the Times.
• Eat a ridiculously good meal at Stone Park Cafe with Veronica and her dad. How can beets be so sublime? Thank you, Mr. Roberts!
• Buy something at Brooklyn Industries (in a pathetic attempt to feel hip).
• Go see music at Union Hall, around the corner from me. What a great bar!

Soggy

I love rainy days—what a perfect excuse to hunker down with a book, or go to a museum, or hang out in a bakery, or have dinner in with a good friend. So....I did all of those things yesterday! I spent part of the morning reading a book called The Melancholy of Anatomy by Shelley Jackson, which is a collection of short stories based around the four humors (sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholy, choleric). I don't know if I quite figured it out—might have to give it another read.

The NYT said: "The effect of Jackson's visceral, inventive details can be gorgeous, or utterly grotesque—as in 'Phlegm,' which presents a world wherein the disgusting stuff is used as a social lubricant." Yes, she spends a lot of time talking about phlegm (I mean, the stuff is everywhere), which seemed to lessen/numb the nastiness of it for me....the whole story turned into a metaphor. For what? I'm not yet sure. Some of the other stories are called "Blood," "Foetus," and "Egg."

I headed into Manhattan to check out a new exhibit at the Morgan Library called Drawing Babar: Early Drafts and Watercolors. It includes sketches of Jean DeBrunhoff's first ideas about Babar, and his son's continuation of the stories. Totally charming! I used to love the tales of the dignified elephant. There's an interesting piece in the New Yorker about the show, too: Adam Gopnik says Babar "...is not an unconscious expression of the French colonial imagination; it is a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination and its close relation to the French domestic imagination." Hmm. All I know is that the drawings brought back a lot of warm, fuzzy memories, colonialist or not.

Then it was off to the Upper East Side to pick up a number and t-shirt for a training run I'm doing in Central Park on Sunday, followed by a stop at Two Little Red Hens—an impossibly cute little bakery filled with red velvet cupcakes, Brooklyn Blackout chocolate cupcakes, pies, birthday cakes, pecan bars, and, of course, chicken paraphernalia.

I picked up a big ol' cupcake and headed out to Bushwick, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, to have dinner with Julie—soup, made from veggies she picked up at a community garden, along with crusty bread and wine. She shares an enormous old house with a few other people and has enough space in her bedroom to paint huge canvasses. Can't say that about my room! We watched the debates, and had birthday cake for her roommate's b-day. We decided a good drinking game would be to do a shot every time McCain says "Ronald Reagan." Ugh....

Then it was back to Park Slope for the night.

"Those Who Write, Teach"

That's the title of a story in this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine. It resonated with me because I'm currently taking a class called Theories of College-Level Composition, which is meant to give newbies like me some background before we're dropped into a classroom next semester and have to teach 25 freshman how to become better writers. The author, David Gessner, is talking about being a creative writing professor, which is slightly different than what I'll (hopefully) be doing—teaching freshman comp. How to write a logical, persuasive essay. That sort of thing. Gessner tries to answer this question: If you're a writer, what does all the teaching actually do to your writing? Can you give 100 percent to both?

A few things he said made me laugh. Because they were so true. And frightening.
• "A great writer, after all, must travel daily to a mental subcontinent, must rip into the work, experiencing the exertion of it, the anxiety of it and, once in a blue moon, the glory of it....the creation of literature requires a degree of monomania, and it is, at least in part, an irrational enterprise." [Having just completed my first story for workshop, which is to be critiqued the day after tomorrow, the words "exertion," "anxiety," and "irrational" rang particularly true. The trip to my mental subcontinent was full of hiccups, and said subcontinent seems to be populated by a lot of latent depressing thoughts about relationships. Aren't all short stories depressing, though? Seems like all the ones I've read lately are!]
• "Well, we can't all go live by ponds or write books about whales." [He's talking about Walden and Moby-Dick. Even if I had a pond to go to, and a whale to write about, I still can't imagine completing an actual book.]
• "Young writers think all they need is time, but give them that time and watch them implode. After all, there's something basically insane about sitting at a desk and talking to yourself all day...." [I suppose I'm one of those "young writers," if not in actual age, then in experience. Luckily, I have yet to implode. When I feel an impending implosion, I immediately decide it's time for lunch, or decide it's time to go into Manhattan and see a museum, or it's time to blather on and on using this blog as my mouthpiece.]
• "Yet no matter how much support you have....there remains the basic irrationality of the task: you are sitting by yourself trying to make something out of nothing, and you rarely know where you're going next." [Shit, there's that word again: irrational. I get the feeling that what I'm doing for the next two years—writing, and fiction, no less—makes no sense. And there's this whole "sitting" theme. Did I pick the wrong career (or did it pick me)?]
• "Energy is finite while college students seemingly are not, and after teaching for a while you begin to feel like you're in a 'Star Trek' episode, lost on a strange planet made up of a thousand pods of need, all of them beaming out at you, sucking your energy, and all of them, invariably, asking you to read something." [Don't know what to say about this, other than....why do I want to teach again? Oh right. To give back, make a difference, etc etc. But....pods of need? I didn't sign up for pods of need....]

Gessner writes that the demands of being a college writing professor "often crash up against the necessary fanaticism of the writer's life." I might have to get back to you on this, since I have yet to create a fanatic writing life or have such teaching demands placed on me. Someday, I hope to have this dilemma. Do I work on my prize-winning novel, or tend to my highly motivated students at a charming liberal arts school? If only....

Brooklyn Exploration

Last night, I wandered around Bklyn with my friend Julie—she moved to New York from Boulder in April, so we're coming from the same place in more ways than one. We walked from Park Slope to Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill, then stopped into Sahadi's, a Middle Eastern grocery store on Atlantic. It's full of olives, nuts, cheese, stuffed grape leaves, baklava, coffee, and amazing spices.




We grabbed some spinach-and-feta pockets for a snack, then wandered down Smith Street (a really cool strip with lots of shops and bars and restaurants) to a Thai joint. Wrapped up the night with a drink at Brooklyn Social and took the subway our separate ways home. It was so fun to poke around the city with a fellow Colorado transplant—we could joke about feeling like villagers and reminisce about the Mountain Sun and the Indian Peaks! Even though she's been here longer, it—New York—is still a novelty to both of us. We plan to soak up the buildings, the crowds, the side streets, the food, the art, and the energy here for however long we end up staying. Still way too soon to know how long that might be.

The Hardest Miles

That's the title of a story I have in the latest issue of Backpacker—it's about the Bataan Memorial Death March, a 26.2-mile walk through the New Mexico desert, and it just hit the newsstands. It was my last big project before I left BP to move to NY. I tried to weave in a bunch of different ideas (the history of the original Bataan Death March in World War II; what survivors learned, in their own words; some survival psychology and science; and the big question of whether I have what it takes, mentally and physically, to survive a true epic). Check it out if you're interested!

By the way, not sure I figured out whether I have "what it takes." But one expert said that after completing the BMDM, I'm more resilient. Tougher. I know I can now survive a crowded subway ride at rush hour....

Here are a few snapshots I took from the experience. The real photos, taken by Jen Judge, capture it a hundred times better.


Abel Ortega, a survivor of the original march and the subsequent POW camps:


The White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, where the reenactment was held:


John Mims and Ben Steele, two more survivors who told me their stories:



Where I slept for a few days:


Beautiful day for a Death March:


The crowd I marched with:


The photo at the top of this post shows a scale outside the Community Building where people in the "heavy" category—who had to carry 35-plus pounds over the 26.2-miles course—could measure their packs to make sure they were heavy enough. To weigh myself down, I filled my pack with kitty litter, rice, and beans. 38 pounds' worth. Ouch.

A Whirlwind Trip to Philly

Charlie, Jen, me, Steph, and Ellie in a blur after the Philadelphia Distance Run! ("Distance Run," in this case, was a half-marathon.) We—Steph, her hubby and my good college friend Jon, Ellie the goldendoodle, and I—drove down from NYC on Saturday afternoon, got our numbers, ate at a really yummy Italian place, crashed into bed, woke up, and ran from the Philadelphia Museum of Art past City Hall and Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell and lots of cool old houses then out along the Schuylkill River and then back to the museum. There were a bunch of cheesy bands along the way; one of them, at Mile 11, played "Eye of the Tiger" right when I ran by. It provided a momentary surge of energy. I didn't really have a certain finishing time in mind, but managed to get a PR—who the hell knows how. Must be the urban air. Or a few remaining red blood cells from Colorado's elevation. But I'll take it! Maybe there's hope for the Big Daddy on November 2.



On the way back, we got stuck in a bit of a jam going into the Lincoln Tunnel, so being the tourist I still am, I took a quick snapshot out of the window. The strange thing is that seeing the skyline almost made me feel like I was coming home. It's returning to a sort of home, at least, one that I'm getting more and more used to and really excited to be in.

When I *stop* taking photos like these, I'll be a true New Yorker.


Risin' up, back on the street

Did my time, took my chances

Went the distance, now I'm back on my feet

Just a man and his will to survive

The 200-Pound Orchid

Thanks to my friend Jenn, who sent me a story from the New York Times, I had the perfect excuse to procrastinate today: There's an enormous orchid at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, which is just a short walk from my place. Even better: It last bloomed five years ago, and it's blooming again, and it's only blooming for a few more days. The thing is 12 feet in diameter. My mission was urgent, much more urgent than the story I have to finish by the end of the weekend.

I love this quote from David Horak, curator of the garden's orchid collection: "The last time we potted it, it took five people and a rope and pulley to lower it into the current basket. They resent being repotted, and for some time after we repotted it, it kind of sulked. It didn’t grow very well for a couple years."

I don't know if this "Queen of Orchidaceous Plants,” Grammatophyllum speciosum (or simply "the beast" as Horak calls it), was in a pissy mood when I went to visit it. She was, though, magnificent.

The flower spike:

The "monster" (another nickname for her—she's feisty!):

I also wandered around the gardens and took a couple photos. The neighborhood is actually really green, even outside the walls of places that charge admission. Apparently a block close to me, 8th Street between 8th Avenue and the park, was named the "greenest in Brooklyn." I can't say that about my own street, 7th Avenue, unless you count the obnoxious color of the Key Food sign across from my bedroom window.



A few pics from my excursion....




I am a shrub, introduced in 1993!






Now that my mission is accomplished, I have to get back to that other (larger, more intimidating mission): writing a story that feels like a story.

Normal Life

So here's some news: Not every moment in Brooklyn is bursting with interesting encounters, brushes with diversity, intellectual gatherings, stupidly long runs, excursions to neighborhoods completely dedicated to other countries (Italy, China), drop-ins by world-class museums, etc etc!

Yes: Life, even in New York, can be mundane.
Yes: I've only been telling you about the exciting stuff.
No: I haven't stayed out all night painting the town. Yet.
No: I don't have a new wardrobe (beret, stilettos, power suit, camel hair coat, "It's OK I'm a Ninja" t-shirt, Jimmy Choos, Birkin bag). I will cling to my Boulder roots, as long as possible, by wearing soft shells and Smith sunglasses.
Case in point: today.

• Got up. Put on jeans and t-shirt and flip-flops.
• Was tired. Didn't have enough time to make coffee.
• Went to my monthly 8–10:45 a.m. shift at the Park Slope Co-op, where I trained to be a cashier. Important lessons learned: how to void an item (like when I scanned four frozen salmon fillets instead of one). How to type in the numbers on the little fruits. What a monstera deliciosa is. How to scan member cards. How stressful it is when people watch you search the computer for the price of tomatoes and whether they're organic, heirloom mix, plum, cherry pint, local, or regular-old.
• Wrote about being wronged. (OK, maybe this doesn't happen every day, but I'm trying to make writing happen every day.) Debated whether to subject the few readers of this blog to what I came up with. (Melodrama, mostly.)
• Went to class and talked about rhetoric, Marxism, expressivists, rubrics, CPE's, ACT's, and what all of them have to do with teaching in an actual classroom.
• Put together a bed, which took embarrassingly long, especially because they (Ikea, damn them!) forgot to drill a couple key holes. I hope the whole thing doesn't fall down when I hit the sack in a couple minutes!


• In between screwing the headboard together, saw this out my window:


• Now I want to sink my exhausted body into this:


Tomorrow, my plan is to write a story. I have to e-mail my first thingy (short story, part of a novel, attempt at gravity/humor, beginning of epic) to my workshop classmates on Sunday night so they have a few days to read it, critique it, and give me feedback next week. I'm not sure what I'm going to write about yet. My problem, still, is that I wait for inspiration to strike before I start writing—and, in the meantime, spend embarrassingly long evenings putting Ikea beds together rather than facing my fiction. I'm hoping that an MFA, with its hard deadlines, will knock some discipline into me!

But first things first.
Bed, sweet bed.

The Run Around, Take II

In my somewhat lame attempt to train for the New York Marathon (see The Run Around), I've been thwarted by tropical storms, lack of bedding, exercise-induced hives (no shit!), moving, moving more, shlepping, shlepping more, driving to and from Boston multiple times, and generally feeling like I'd rather stay up late and share a bottle of wine with Veronica/assemble bookshelves/do the NYT crossword/watch bad TV/read and write for class/eat a pint of ice cream than go to bed early so I can wake up and feel somewhat psyched for a run.

But the nice thing about having a marathon looming—and there's no better word than loom, with its enormity and slight connotations of dread—is that it's damn good motivation. To wit: This morning I got up at 6:45, took the 2 train into Manhattan, got off at Chambers Street, ran out to the West Side, and then headed up Hudson River Park to Riverside Park to 110th to Central Park, then did a loop and a half around the thing. (I think it was about 16–17 miles, but it felt like a marathon in itself. What's up with all the hills? I thought this city was supposed to be flat!) Ended up at Columbus Circle, where I staggered past tourists and bought a Gatorade from a street cart. Desperate chugging. Vigorous stretching. Gazing at the Trump Tower. Wondering what that statue was. Wondering why there's a part of me that thinks this marathon endeavor is fun. Questioning the whole enterprise. Feeling self-satisfied. Wanting to fall over. Feeling like a sweaty schlub among the suits and ties and pumps. General wooziness.

Then I hopped on the B train and rode it back to Park Slope. An urban run: I had with me my key ring (5 keys on it, which is what is required to get into my apartment), Metro Card, 20 bucks, a Gu, and a water bottle.

Here's a look:



Now I need to get down to some schoolwork: reading some theory about how to teach composition. Reading some Raymond Carver. Reading a couple stories from classmates for workshop. And working on this prompt: Write a few pages about a situation in which you wronged someone. Then write the same situation from the other person's point of view.

The hard thing about wronging someone is that you often think you're right, so when you're asked to think of a situation like this, you can't seem to come up with one. My question for myself this morning: Who in my life have I really pissed off?

I think I need a nap.

"Books You Don't Need In a Place You Can't Find"

That's the motto of the Montague Bookmill in Montague, MA. My brother and I were passing through the Pioneer Valley (Northampton, Amherst, Holyoke, American flags, Colonial houses, red barns buffed by time, endless greenery, general charming New Englandness) on the way from Boston to New York, and I stopped by (or, rather, detoured to) this place. It was heaven for a book lover, therefore heaven for me: creaky floors, little nooks with comfy mismatched chairs, low-ceilinged attics, steep back stairways, a cafe with strong coffee....pretty much the perfect way to wile away a couple hours.


They like to tell you: If we can’t find the book you’re looking for, we’ll find you a better one you didn’t know you wanted. I was looking for Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (I have to give a presentation about it on Thursday!), and ended up with Mary Robison's Why Did I Ever. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but it's a collection of 536 fragments chronicling the life of Money Breton, a failing Hollywood script doctor, three-time divorcee, and mother of two grown children. (Maybe a case where fiction is stranger than truth? I'll find out. Or at least I'll find out what it means to write a novel in 536 fragments.)


The Bookmill is actually an 1842 grist mill on the banks of the Sawmill River. As you're browsing the shelves, you can hear water rushing over rocks right outside open windows.


It turned out to be a weekend of books for me—I also went to the Brooklyn Book Festival for a few hours, where I got to hear Jonathan Franzen and Russell Banks read and talk, where I got to wander around dozens of booths of small publishers that were arranged outside Borough Hall, and where I ran into a few classmates from Brooklyn College. Guess we MFA students think alike!


My brother, *bless* him, drove from Boston with me and helped me carry a Subaru-load of stuff up to my fourth-floor walkup in the steaming heat. Now I have a dresser and a lamp—and some photos of good friends. Amazing how a few images can make us feel so much more at home, wherever we are. Doug and I celebrated my next step toward settled-ness with a couple beers at Freddy's, a dive on Dean Street (think peeling lampshades, plastic marlins, looping video art, wink-wink restroom signs, graffiti) last night. This morning we had brunch at Applewood (brioche French toast, organic eggs, mug after mug of joe) before going into the city to see the Frick. What a New York day.

That Will to Divest

A few weeks ago, I wrote about getting my first assignment. I thought I'd post my response here. My classmates wrote about losing, getting rid of, and giving away so many different things: wallets, movie coupons, roommates, innocence, judgment, parents, anger, houses, friends, books, bookshelves, pets, umbrellas, lifestyles, habits, dishes, suitcases, opinions.

Now that some time has past, some of the things I've lost—and the way I miss them—have softened around the edges a bit. Strange how things so vibrantly real and in-your-face can slowly turn dreamlike as they slip back into the past.

There are other things, of course, that still remain pretty raw.

Response to Kay Ryan

A half-used bar of soap. Three pieces of bamboo. A birdhouse. A life.

I gave away a set of dishes—four plates, four bowls, four cups. They were white, with concentric ribs around the outside, cheap and chipped. But they served a purpose: keeping flowerpots from leaking, ferrying strong Sunday morning coffee, holding boring things like plain yoghurt and canned soup, bearing weeknight dinners for people I liked and loved, and people I’d just met, and people I’d just met but felt I already liked. Or loved.

People.

Other things that used to serve a purpose: a doormat (for stomping off snow from clunky bootsoles). A piano (for making me feel, momentarily, sophisticated). A vacuum cleaner. Fourteen cans of paint. A table and chairs, upholstered in brown plaid, 40 bucks at a garage sale seven years ago. A bookshelf—to gaze at and wonder, How did all those pages get misplaced in my brain? Who’s to say how much knowledge, how many mundane and brilliant thoughts, I’ve lost? You have an insight, make an observation, and—swoosh—it disappears. One book in particular, called Home Buying for Dummies. A home. A mortgage. A title. Stilted proof of maturity. Blah blah. Now it’s all gone—signed and initialed. On the curb, picked up by a stranger with a big truck sometime before morning. In Rachel’s cupboard next to the olive oil and the honey bear. For sale, at a store I might never enter again.

I still have House Selling for Dummies, because (actually) the house isn’t quite sold, and I’m a true idiot when it comes to things like amortization, and you never know. Sometimes it’s easy to get rid of things, and sometimes it’s nearly impossible.

I got rid of a job and its fridge jabber and happy hours and free tea. I packed boxes at my office and put them in my car. I drove the car to a storage unit, a big hot metal room. I stored the boxes for a while, then ended up heaving most of them into the Dumpster behind my building. Notes from interviews, notes from meetings, notes from stories about places I’ve been.

No need to hang on to old conversations.

I gave a Ronald Reagan calendar to a coworker as a joke. It had captions like, “President Reagan gathered strength from the rigors of hard work at the Western White House even late into his 70’s.” There were photos of him in riding boots, driving a Jeep, paddling a canoe named TruLuv.

I left Ronald Reagan behind. Jesus. I remember the name of his canoe, and not how many steps it takes to climb Mt. Sanitas or what that wine was called at Radda—the one I always used to order—or what made me laugh so hard in the tent at Mirror Lake when it was raining like bedlam. Must be misplaced in my brain.

The sky. The Divide. The way the storms gathered over the mountains, the way the snow gleamed from the Flatirons, the particular warm way the Indian Peaks looked at 5 a.m. when every granite face blushed with sunrise and our insides pulsed with caffeine and adrenaline. Putting one foot in front of the other, climbing things slowly, being quiet save for the lovely and painful breath of exertion. Scrambling up to 14,000 feet, hand over hand, and not really ever wanting to come back down. Smoking cigars in the Great Sand Dunes. Drinking whiskey in the Cascades. Believing that the best of the universe begins and ends with an infinite view and tall trees.

Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Massachusetts. They’re all behind me, rolled under the balding tires of my car like so many already-vague memories. Even if I return to them someday, they’ll be a different color.

I’d like to think I jettisoned complacency, stagnancy, comfort, routine, boredom, contentment.

I’d like to think I retained adventure. Connection. Happiness. And a sense of who the hell I really am—if that ever stays the same, anyway. I kept a few things: a blender and a mixer and 10 years of snapshots. Letters. You can get rid of letters from exes, ex-friends, ex-crushes, ex-unrequited-wannabe-couldabeen soul mates, but those exes never really go away. They reappear in the strangest places. The corners of your dreams.

Quiet. Ease. Open spaces. Knowns. Time. Responsibility. Simplicity, maybe—though isn’t everything simple once it’s not in your life anymore? I got rid of—but deeply hope didn’t lose—all of these, and you, and you, and you.

Ah, Academia

No photos today. Not because I didn't take any. I did: I left school after listening to a reading (Jhumpa Lahiri, who shared part of “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine”) and the skies were gray. Nothing special. By the time I came up to the surface after my subway ride, it was pouring. Pour. Ing. After running, in flip-flops, for a few blocks, I ducked under the awning of a Thai restaurant and snapped a pic of the street and all its roiling rain. I waited for the weather to ease up, but it was only getting worse, so I ran the rest of the way. Soaked. Dripping. I guess someone needs to learn how to carry an umbrella with her! I decided that although getting soaked in New York was a new experience for me (there's a first time for everything, hence most of what I write on this blog), everyone knows what rain hitting a sidewalk looks like. If anyone really wants to see what New York rain hitting a New York sidewalk looks like, let me know.

But rain has nothing to do with what I wanted to share this fine Tuesday afternoon. I wanted to share this sentence: "It is true that some rhetorics have denied their imbrication in ideology, doing so in the name of a disinterested scientism—as seen, for example, in various manifestations of current-traditional rhetoric." I'm supposed to write a response paper to an essay in which this sentence appears, along with other terms such as:
• discursive structure
• social-epistemic
• task environment
• heuristics
• linguistically circumscribed interaction
• object-subject switch

I have one thing to say: I'm out of practice with this shit. It's hard to say if the words I'm reading are jargon—with all its perjorative, insidery implications—or whether I just don't understand it yet. There seems to be a certain density with academic writing that just doesn't exist in consumer magazines—a density which, right now, is leaving me feeling like I'm stumbling around in a different universe. It's as if I've been invited to the universe, yes, yes, but it's a bit foggy and effortful right now.

Am I going to start talking like this? Depends on the dialectical collaboration of the interdisciplinary framework, I guess.

Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea

Last night, Veronica and I took a little adventure to Long Island City to check out a party for Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea at Deitch Studios—it (the Swimming Cities, not Deitch) is a flotilla of craft designed by the Brooklyn street artist Swoon that started in Troy and floated down the Hudson. Along the way, the whole gaggle stopped for performances and music (the ships were manned by playwrights, circus composers, cello players, poets, and the like). The "boats" were made of salvaged materials and scrap wood; inside, more of her art—made of paper cutouts, ropes, ladders, bottles, old doors, and other found objects—filled a bit warehouse space. Along with lots of people.

It was a beautiful night: warm, clear, with views across the river to the Manhattan skyline. A few photos of the excursion....

Waiting for the train:

Sunset, with (miniscule) Statue of Liberty:

Our ride:

Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, with Manhattan in the background:

Attempt to capture the lights of the Chrysler Building (my favorite in the city!):

The scene:
Bottles and other scraps:

From another exhibition in Dietch:

After an unsucessful search for beer and/or food at the party (we were starving; see previous entry re: what's in our fridge these days), V and I headed to the West Village and grabbed a late dinner at one of her fave spots, the Grey Dog. Then had birthday macaroons, biscotti, ladyfingers, and lemon cookies at Rocco's.

A pretty nice New York night, I have to say.

Catching Up

It's been a crazy few days. But my life has felt crazy and unsettled for about six weeks, so it's actually starting to feel normal. I keep telling people, Next week. Next week will be routine. Next week will be sane. The response: laughs. My consolation: I'll be comfortable soon enough. I said to Caleb, "I'm sure that, a few months from now, I'll look back on this and think, It wasn't so bad." He said, "Or you'll look back and wonder, How in the hell I do it?" Either way, it'll be looking back, which means the chaos of now will be behind me. Amen, hallelujah, etc etc!

THURSDAY

• Supervised movers as they shlepped (literally—the company is called Shlepper's) Veronica's stuff to our new place. It was 90 degrees. As muggy as a steam room. Our new place is on the 4th floor. I started sweating just watching the movers carry her couch, and went to get a lemonade.

• Went to first writing workshop. Amazing discussion, heated debate, lots of perceptive people.

• Ate dinner at 10:30 p.m. This is not something I ever did in Boulder. Felt, momentarily, very cosmopolitan.

• Slept in my own bed. Listened to garbage truck hydraulics all night. Sweated.

FRIDAY

• Took the 2 train to the corner of 34th and 8th. Brought coffee along, during rush hour. Mistake. Rode bus to Boston. Thought deeply about how, just two weeks ago, on the same route, in the opposite direction, things were completely different. Then: Mostly unknowns. Now: Many more knowns. Then: fright, butterflies, dread (of the unknowns), eagerness, impatience, giddiness. Now: confidence, contentment, dread (of more packing), impatience, giddiness. Then: Couldn't picture anything about what my life might look like. Now: It is around me, everywhere.

• Packed brother's Subaru full of crap.

• Helped bro install new emergency brake cable into my Honda. ("Help" = "holding flashlight")

• Ate matzo-ball-soup-to-die-for at Zaftigs.

SATURDAY

• Went for a 10-mile run up to the Arnold Arboretum. The muggiest run ever. I swear.

• Helped bro finish installing new emergency brake. ("Help" = "crawling under car to try and push stupid-ass rubber seal around exhaust pipe shit")

• Drove from Boston to New York City. Missed key turnoff while talking on phone; somehow ended up near Poughkeepsie. Debated whether to admit this. Figured out a way to get on the right track without losing too much time; felt proud of self.  Encountered Tropical Storm Hannah. Managed to navigate my way via various memorial parkways and byways to Park Slope in middle of deluge.

• Celebrated Veronica's 32nd birthday (woot woot!) at Flatbush Farm, a great restaurant in our neighborhood. Reminisced about The Kitchen.

• Someone brought cupcakes from Magnolia. Wow. There's something to this cupcake trend.

SUNDAY

• Jogged around Prospect Park. Narrowly avoided a half-dozen collisions with cyclists, thousands of which were participating in some sort of NYC-bike-tour-extravaganza.

• Discussed the impossible with V: How can we fit all our kitchen stuff into the kitchen?? 

• Struggled through a few pages of Teaching Composition: Background Readings. Wondered how I will ever learn how to teach.

And now I'm at the Tea Lounge, thinking that it might be time to go grocery shopping—because our fridge currently holds: half-used container of hummus (1), half-full french press of iced coffee (1), jars of chutney (2), jar of apricot heaven from Christie (1), jar of strawberry jam from cmb sweets (1)(a Williams classmate).

As I said, exciting times!

Out in the Open

Yesterday, I headed out to Queens and caught a couple matches at the US Open tennis tournament—Jelena Jankovic in a quarterfinal, Andy Roddick in the fourth round. My friend Steph invited me; she and I met way back in 1995 when I led her outdoor orientation trip at Williams. She's lived in Manhattan for years, and treated me to a night under the lights! It was a beautiful evening:




It takes a while to get back to Park Slope from Arthur Ashe Stadium (the 7 train....Grand Central...the 6 train....the F train....), but even in the middle of the night, there were tons of people out and about. It made it hard to get up this morning, but I managed to put together a run down to Carroll Gardens and around the park before getting to my schoolwork.

Schoolwork! Still a crazy concept.

One of my tasks for today: track down five sentences I love. Since all of my books are in a container somewhere between Boulder and Boston, I spent some time in a bookstore on my block, browsing some of my favorite novels and short stories. By the way, this is an impossible assignment! Great stories have great sentence after great sentence. How can you pick just one?

Here's a try: "I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark." (Raymond Carver, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love")

And another: "Then, shaking with cold, Donny folded his arms around himself and yelled out, Hey, and we heard back, Hey, hey, hey, and then I yelled out, Hey, and even Mr. Cheetam joined in, and we kept hearing back, Hey, hey, hey, like there were millions of us everywhere." (Charles D'Ambrosio, "The High Divide")

One more: "Stella, cold, cold, the coldness of hell." (Cynthia Ozick, "The Shawl")

I wonder what people will choose?

West Indian American Day Carnival Association Labor Day Parade

This afternoon, I walked through Prospect Park to Grand Army Plaza, then along the Eastern Parkway, and took in everything that's the annual WIADCA parade. This year was the 41st edition, and they say that up to 4 million people watch it every year. Four million. Guess what the population of Colorado is? 4.3 million or so, as of 2000. 

For a Boulder girl, all I can say is wow. Curried goat, red velvet cake, mojitos, cleavage, feathers, wings, wheels, semis mounted with stacks of speakers, floats carrying bands and DJs, smoke filling the air, heat, jostling, sparkles, flags (Trinidad and Tobago, Bahamas, Guyana, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Barbados, Jamaica), joints, judges, dreads, stilts, sequins, asses, ices, roasted corn, fried chicken, jerk chicken, curried chicken, chicken roti, popsicles, strange men saying, "Girl, cheer up!" (I think I was concentrating on not stepping on anyone), grinding, shaking, pushing, dancing, yelling, chanting, humping, jumping. Did I mention the red velvet cake?

Wings:

Dancing:

Jerk:

Flags:

Feathers:

Ices:

Here's a little clip, taken with my little digital camera.

It was almost as crazy as our trip to Ikea. :)