Peace and Quiet

I've finally discovered how to get some personal space here in New York (other than holing up in my apartment, which is what I'm doing now, which is sometimes nice and sometimes feels pathetic). My secret? It's a simple recipe. Take one threat of a big, no, a crippling snowstorm. Wake up to three inches, with freezing rain coming down hard and ticking the ground and the windows. Add heavy gray skies—the kind that seem to press you gently back down onto your mattress. Layer up in running clothes; leave iPod at home. Head outside before 8 in the morning. (Yes, this is early. In general. In this city. Not early-to-bed, early-to-rise here, as was life in Colorado!) Slip and slide up to Prospect Park. And then?

You might find what I found this morning: Not much. On a 40-minute run, I only passed three other runners, who nodded in somewhat cheerful solidarity. In fact, the five snowplows, in scraping formation, which nearly plowed me, outnumbered the people who decided it was a good idea to pretend to be hardcore. The ice crunched under my shoes. The geese were settled in groups on the surface of the pond. I could even make new footprints.

Now, a caveat: I only passed three runners. That's not saying I only saw three people. There were a couple walkers, one very brave cyclist, and of course about a kazillion dogs and their owners doing the full-on frolic in Long Meadow.

But it was, I don't know, lovely.
And sufficiently invigorated, slightly self-satisfied, and flush with determination, this A-I-C [see earlier post] is putting her ass back in her chair!

Professor Spence

Man, do I like the sound of that. Official or not, warranted or not, it's what I was called today during the first meeting of English 2 at Brooklyn College. I'm teaching it with another instructor (well, technically he's teaching it and I'm copying him, as a good T.A. should, but I'll get to lead some of the classes later on in the semester). We have about 25 students. Today, we asked them in class to write a sort of informal academic autobiography—and, after reading the pile of them, I'm even more excited to work with everyone. They're a diverse group: from the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, China, Ecuador, Canada, and right here in Brooklyn. They're interested in being physician's assistants, nurses, businessmen, teachers, political activists, TV anchors, psychologists. (No one said, "I want to be a writer!" Hmmm....One of our jobs in the course is to make them more comfortable with words, to make the writing process actually pleasurable.) I spoke in front of the class for about 4 minutes. (Baby steps, right?) They were, on the whole, honest and endearing and serious and sometimes funny.

It's a nice place to be: I'm a student of writing and now a student of teaching, but at the same time I sort of get to be a writer and a teacher. Nothing like on-the-job training! My co-instructor is much more experienced than I am, but he's been totally up for letting me take on as much as I want. Even though it's a little bit intimidating, it's also so exciting. I hope I can help the kids learn (and love learning), help them become more comfortable with the whole writing thing. And maybe I'll get to head up my own class someday soon. It was one of my goals when I decided to go to grad school in the first place, so today was the first (baby) step.

In the meantime, I'm happy being Professor Spence. Whatever my qualifications, I'll take it!

Ass in Chair

In order to write, you have to sit down and write. Yes: I've uncovered my latest deep thought, and it's a simple one, you'd think. In most cases, anyway: When you call yourself a writer, you sit down and write. You sit down and write when you have a deadline. You sit down and write when it's your job. And when you're occasionally inspired, or driven, or compelled, you sit down and write because you love it. This raises a few questions: How do you write when it's easier not to write? How do you write when you constantly feel like you don't know what you're doing? And, most important, how do you write when you live in the City of Constant Distractions? Not that I've been struggling with these questions....

OK, I've been struggling with these questions. Maybe you can help.
Here's a little quiz. Choose A or B.

1.
a) Go see the Cripple of Inishmaan, the highly-regarded Martin McDonagh play at the Atlantic Theater, for free with my wonderful and generous roommate.
b) Sit down and write.

2.
a) Take the subway to the Whitney to catch Alexander Calder: The Paris Years with a good friend, then read a book at a coffee shop.
b) Sit down and write.

3.
a) Get free tickets to see the Colbert Report, then contemplate actually rearranging my spring semester classes just so I can make the show on a Tuesday night.
b) Sit down and...yes.

4.
a) Attend a Spanish-themed supper club and spend half a day taking the subway around the city for chorizo, manchego, almonds, and the perfect loaf of bread, all of which is part of another great friend's four-day visit, during which we're going to walk and eat our way through the five boroughs.
b) You know it.

If you answered mostly b's, you're exactly like me.

So you see my dilemma. Or, rather, you see that I completely lack the discipline and determination it takes to succeed as a fiction writer in this recessionary dog-eat-dog predatory unpredictable blockbuster-motivated publishing world. I moved to New York for school, yes, but I also moved to New York for New York, and I like to think of my many New York moments as educational moments, enriching ones. Call it an excuse. But, my friends: I'm growing as a person. And I don't know how long I'll be here. I can always write! And I won't always live in Brooklyn!

But I'm turning over a new leaf. As of yesterday (Saturday), which was supposed to be Wednesday, I'm going to write fiction every day. I know, wow, etc etc. It's not like it's an original idea. Christie has said, "You need to establish a routine and stick to it." My mom has said, "Suck it up." (I don't think she said it that way, but still.) Caleb has said, "You have to get your ass in the chair." So that's what I'm doing. They call the Editor-in-Chief the EIC, and I'm heretofore calling myself the AIC. Ass In Chair, every day.*

* I decided that blogging counts. Not that I've been consistent about that either.

Brooklyn to Boulder to Brooklyn

This morning, I woke up to 18-degree temps in Brooklyn—the heating pipe near my head hissing in insistence, the steam billowing out the roof of Key Food, the sidewalks slick with frozen slush. I started the micro-mini dishwasher and watered my one plant and tripped over the books next to my bed. I listened to the beep-beep-beep of a truck backing up below my window. All of which is perfectly normal for January, for me, for now. The weird thing is, yesterday morning at 6:20 a.m., I was in Boulder, waiting for a bus to the airport. The night before that, I went for a run on the South Boulder Creek Path. Before that, it was Steamboat and Mazzola's and bottles of 90 Schilling chilled in the trunk of the car, Dish and the Kitchen and Chautauqua in 6 inches of snow, Table 6 (tater tots—where have you been all these years?), Vail and potlucks and I-70 gridlock, Salto and the Spine and coffees and lunches and more coffees. Great friends.

Boulder, waiting for a bus. Not that weird, really. The weird thing is how it felt to wait for that bus: Boulder is so familiar to me, it's as if I was more at home at the place I visited than the place I was going home to. OK, so I lived in Colorado for seven years and it's only been five months in Brooklyn. But I'm still finding my way here (exhilarating, surprising, challenging, personal-growth-inducing)...while there (comfortable, friend-full, wholesome) is like a part of me. Right: Here being Brooklyn, and there being Boulder.

How, then, can I now be here, when there feels more like here than here does? If I lost you, well, I can't say I'm not a little bit lost myself. (I don't even know if that sentence says what I want it to!) Sense of place: what is home, anyway?

Boulder, going for a run. The sun was setting behind the Flatirons. The gravel path edged a huge field of dry grass where a couple horses were wandering around. It was warm for January—60-something and near-summery. It was strange and right on so many levels: I've run here (there?) countless times, but never as a visitor. It was quiet and empty—a silence and peace it's pretty hard to find in NY. It was foreign (creeks? Indian Peaks vistas?) and commonplace (creeks, Indian Peaks, whatever, I've seen these thousands of times). I ran away from and back to something, someone, some kind of sense.

Not to diss here. Last night, I carried my skis through Penn Station during rush hour, surrounded by thousands of commuters. I listened to people talk about Obama's inaugural address on the subway. I saw the sun go down behind skyscrapers. I walked past browstones covered in snow. As soon as I set foot here, I was energized.

Time gets messed up sometimes. Place, too. I was just in Colorado, for a blip, for 10 days and forever. It's like what Navin Johnson said: "I know we've only known each other four weeks and three days, but to me it seems like nine weeks and five days. The first day seemed like a week and the second day seemed like five days. And the third day seemed like a week again and the fourth day seemed like eight days. And the fifth day you went to see your mother and that seemed just like a day, and then you came back and later on the sixth day, in the evening, when we saw each other, that started seeming like two days, so in the evening it seemed like two days spilling over into the next day and that started seeming like four days, so at the end of the sixth day on into the seventh day, it seemed like a total of five days. And the sixth day seemed like a week and a half. I have it written down, but I can show it to you tomorrow if you want to see it." Love The Jerk.

Brooklyn to Boulder to Brooklyn. Back to Boulder, back to Brooklyn. Maybe the more times you hop from world to world, the more the line between them blurs. Maybe, someday, they'll come together.

Me + the MTA

I think I'm a subway geek. In fact, I know I am—even back when I lived in London in college, I had a crush on the Tube. I never get tired of looking at the MTA map. I check it twice. I never actually get tired of riding the train (except maybe at 3 a.m. on New Year's Eve, all alone with no one to be drunk with. Not that I know how that feels). I love getting off at stops I've never been to before, even if they're dripping with stalactites of dirty street runoff and swirling with discarded coupons and used-up MetroCards. The rats? You can look at them as vermin, right, or look at them as part of the charm. I'm not sure why a bunch of underground tubes are so fascinating and why a bunch of icons (a black Q in a yellow circle, a white B in an orange circle) are so interesting. You know how little kids get obsessed with steam engines and bulldozers and buses? I must be the same way, only I try not to giggle when the 2 train blows into Grand Army Plaza.

So I decided to make a pilgrimage to the New York Transit Museum here in Brooklyn—which, appropriately, is in an old subway station. They have a bunch of photos and explanations about how the system was built (starting in 1900), plus about 15 old subway cars from different eras. The older ones had some great ads:






And some of the older cars were done up in pretty colors:


Because I know you care as much about the underground as I do, here are a couple NYC subway facts!
• In 2007, 1.6 billion people rode the subway here. (We're fourth in line behind Tokyo's 3.01 billion, Moscow's 2.5, and Seoul's 1.7.)
• The newer trains have recorded announcements ("Stand clear of the closing doors, please!"). In 2006, MTA spokesperson Gene Sansone said, "Most of the orders are given by a male voice, while informational messages come from females. Even though this happened by accident, it is a lucky thing because a lot of psychologists agree that people are more receptive to orders from men and information from women."
• There are 26 subway lines and 486 stations (that's only 35 stations fewer than the rest of the country combined—which is actually kind of sad).
• If laid end-to-end, the tracks (842 miles of 'em) would reach from here to Chicago.
• Want to go for a ride—a long ride? Take the A from 207th in Manhattan to Far Rockaway in Queens—31 miles. I have no idea how long it takes. It's an adventure I'm not sure I'm willing to take.
• The busiest station, of course, is Times Square—58.5 million people elbow through there every year.

Believe me (I'm sure you do!), I could go on. I bet there will come a time when the subway is just the subway—never quite fast enough, clean enough, or relaxing enough. A hassle. A necessary evil. A screeching pain in the ass. For now, I'll just enjoy riding through underground tubes and giggling—on the inside, of course!—about stations like Hoyt-Schermerhorn, Ozone Park, Kosciuszko, and Moshulu...and the white 4 in the green circle.