A day off in Winter

Love is like a street block in New York City. Each encounter is unique. Each one features cracks along the way. I've fallen in love with my share of blocks. I've learned how to stroll. I've lingered along the edges, dragging my shoes along the curbside and inhaling mulch or Jameson or popcorn or hundred thread count. I've looped around the corner, looking for an excuse to return. Inevitably, you realize that you can't stay on one block forever. The traffic light flits from maybe to green. You cross the street.


Slow down.

That's what they keep saying. You know who. The people who diagnose your condition of being.

It's what the doctors say when your heart stops working.
It's what mom says when you can't mask the strain in your voice over the phone anymore.
It's what your friends say when your visage borders on transparent.

Stop.

The pedestrian in me is pushing 80mph
I'm making up for the brevity of life by living in high gear.
It's not that I don't see life as an odd assortment of coincidental moments. It's more about making sure that I've collected enough moments before time runs out.
 
Breathe in.

Maybe, if you spin fast enough, you don't have to worry about anyone making your world stop.

Legally Drinking

About a month ago, I found a corner in the library where it felt like fewer people had drowned, and claimed it for 26 hours. I watched the sun trickle yellow into morning's grey and just as meekly trickle out again. I watched egg mcmuffins turn into sushi lunches turn into quesadillas and salsa. I consumed book after book, drew conclusion after conclusion, and eventually, watched a month flit by.

It's December now. I'm 21, and still the supporting character of my own life. This time around, though, I'm not drinking to forget. This time around it's just me and my own two feet and that's enough. I'm only keeping the good friends and I'm only keeping the parent who cared and for the first time, I feel wholly content. You see, there's this thing that I've discovered over the past month, at the center of all things, that makes me want to remember every moment that I'm living. Perhaps it's hope. Perhaps it's mortality. Perhaps it's understanding that every song has an inside joke and I don't want to wait until the end to get the point of it all.

As I was sitting on the subway the other day, the man next to me who was holding a giant bag of something green and prickly gleefully offered me a sprinkle of mistletoe. I, the wary, declined. Refusing to accept defeat, he prod at my hand and said "cheer up...this is the kiss that smiles are made out of". He didn't know how many kisses I had given that night. He didn't know that they didn't add up to a smile. I rubbed the needles between my thumb and index finger and inhaled the comforts of almost pine. Maybe I should stop seeing the boys who never love. I stretched out my arms towards an advertisement about human evolution. The train rocked. It tastes like winter.

I tell them not to fall in love with me. They listen. This isn't like the movies.

I watch my martini refill with petron, tangueray, jameson and sangria. I feel my blood bubble warmer than resentment can, and find that soothing. He didn't call this year. You know. The man I don't call father. But everyone else did.

This is my reality, and I'm happier than I've ever been.

Duplicity

How does one reconcile libertine skepticism with hopeless romanticism? Can the two exist in one person? It is like believing in God and being an avid New Yorker. It is being bipolar because you're bi-ethical. I wonder if they'll start medicating.

I grew up in proper New York fashion. I went to politically correct schools with equally vague value systems. The education was superior and the bias was the right one and I never stopped to question the loss of identity in the face of multiculturalism.

During the summer after my freshman year of college, my appendix ruptured and I spent 21 days in the hospital. As my family paced up and down the halls, doctors counseled them with unconvincing percentages. One evening, almost two weeks into a sojourn clouded by morphine, one of the NYU Rabbis came to visit me. He spoke about God and abstract things. He spoke about holding on. After he left, the percentages changed.

The 21 days that I spent in the hospital coincided with the 21 saddest days of the Jewish calendar, often referred to as the "three weeks". I had always been aware of my religion, but after that summer, I began to understand faith and spirituality.

But I am not faith alone. I am also defined by this city. I am the streets of New York. I am the fixture on the corner of Waverly and Broadway with exceptionally bleary eyes and a sign asking for kindness. I am the arch in Washington Square Park, watching 1950 bohemianize into hipster gentrified illusion and rebel against itself.  I am the march for peace and the protest for sovereignty. I am McCarthy vs. McCarthy. I am platforms vs. connotations. I am binary against binary.

And I believe in a book.

moment

It's in all the old, familiar places. As my breath starts to make whisps of memory in the cooling air, I find it again. I find that part of myself that says "I'll give you everything", for sentimental reasons. Hand  meets hand. Eyes lock and dart away. Transfixed, we remember what it was like to be children and why we aren't anymore. We remember the sort of love that precedes knowledge. The kind that's written into the songs we sang together, graffitied onto the subway walls, and wished for on fallen eyelashes or plucked daisies. We remember that what might not be once in a lifetime still smells like lavendar and silk.

38 degrees in October

We lean on people. They move. We fall. We don't lean anymore. These are the lessons.

New York, what was the last thing that made you smile?

I think our society has a strange fascination with product. We are preoccupied with where we are going. The how is irrelevant. The why is forgotten. We close our eyes and dream in salary brackets. We trade liberty for lifestyle. We define liberty by lifestyle. We seal business deals in meaningless handshakes. We forgo integrity for ego and emotion for efficiency. I think it's something in the coffee.

There's a moment in Beethoven's Sonata in A flat, opus 110, if played just right, when you can feel 2,500 people in an audience stop breathing. They clench their fists and hang mid air, suspended over balconies and railings. And it's not because they are hearing keys click. And it's not because they're watching nimble fingers flit by. It's because, for a moment, they can hear a piano explain, in whispers, that its heart is breaking.

I think it's time to cut up my credit card. It's plastic. And that means too much.

La Fille Aux Cheveux de Lin

It's 3:45 in the morning again. It's 3:45 in the morning and her french vanilla coffee tastes like a gin and tonic without the fizz. It's 3:45 in the morning and Segovia is starting to pluck in slow motion left handed. It's 3:45 in the morning and she can't internalize political theory anymore, because in a few hours she's going to sit down at a breakfast table, drink a medium orange juice, no pulp, and define autonomy. In a few hours, with business handshakes and surgical formality, she will remove herself from her childhood of never being young. John Winthrop says that the end of authority is liberty. What is the end of indifference?

When does the world stop spinning? When does the cancer get cured, or the nuclear nonsense, or the child who aged too early, or the adult who never aged at all? I've started saying the Shema again. But it isn't because I want something to believe in. It's because I need to call out and shake someone.

Welcome to insomnia. I, the amenable, have been manipulated by clocks. It's still in C minor, but the time's cut and syncopated. My mind rattles away in diminished seconds. How long can we remain suspended? How long before the tension uproots us?

We resolve to a Jeremiad.

Diet Coke

"I'm a proud member of the rabble" - Benjamin Netanyahu

Last Thursday, I heard Elie Wiesel present Benjamin Netanyahu. The circumstance was politics. The topic was truth. And I listened. And I understood. I understood what it is that we are fighting for. It isn't a question of semantics. It's a question of gut and heart and veracity.

Last Friday, a woman revealed me. In one critically scanning glance, she knew who I was. With one sweep, I, the complacent, was rewired. I'm relearning how to walk.

And then, this past Monday, I repented. I read a list of faults and acknowledged them as my own. I think that as we grow older, we find that more faults truly are our own. And each year, we can assume more responsibility for righting them.

By October 1st, 2009, I'm supposed to sum up the past twenty years of my experience on a few 8.5 by 11 inch sheets of eggshell and submit them for judgment.

How much of your being can you fit in the palm of your hand? In the clench of your fist? How much trickles through the cracks?

It’s all really a story about life. It’s a story about journeying towards enlightened communication. I was born in New Jersey and upgraded to New York. I was born into a dysfunctional home of parental normality and upgraded to deeper understanding with a single mom. I was raised in a home of Russian immigrants and ended up learning not only two distinct languages, but also the languages of poetry, art, literature, and music. I grew up in a home of Jewish definition and learned the languages of Zionism and soul. However, as I grew and evolved, I didn’t understand that vocation could be as interdisciplinary as life, and upon my application to college, I forced myself to choose a language. I was going to be a singer. I was going to have one definition - one dimension - one tool with which to speak my mind. But tides roll in and tides roll out leaving the same shores behind, but eroded and reinterpreted. Music is not only performative. It is influential. It's the language of multifaceted possibility. I now choose music as the mother tongue of my universality.

I'm starting a list of things I don't know. Like why I like Rubinstein's Bach more than Gould's. Or why I can't do homework with Joni Mitchell anymore. Or where passion comes from.

I'm waiting for answers in a snapple cap.

Listening

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.  
~Berthold Auerbach

Because when everyday life becomes everynight life becomes everymoment life, you're spinning so quickly that no one can talk you down. Because when minutes and hours and days become blurs and indistinct suggestions, you shut your eyes and cover your ears and try not to tip over. Because when the list of books for you to memorize reads from Haraway to Kafka to anthropological obscurity,  you don't have time for 'who broke up with how'. 

But music doesn't ask for the permission to cut in. It's raw and rude and barges in at the most inopportune moments. It flips you over and turns you inside out until you can't ignore it. It demands autonomy over the instant of its inception. And then it heals you.

I submit. 

Waking Up

Dear New York City, 

I think I've mastered the art of objectively experiencing self. I watched adrenaline pump into my hearstrings until they throbbed. I watched myself fall deaf and mute, and then learn to work again. I watched myself walk down a long corridor with my contemporary reality waiting in front of me and my desired history lagging behind. I watched my feet stutter in confusion  - do I pitter, patter, or saunter in heel-clicks? I watched myself decided to take the subway solo.

You see, there was this man the other day who made me rethink things. He was clad in an oversized sweater, the drabby grey kind, and hadn't seen a bed or comb in quite some time. He looked hungry and distraught, but confident in his right to walk down my block and envelop himself in warm New York City soot. I watched him sit down on the stoop across from my apartment building and pull out a scrap of something white and folded. Slowly, he bent corner away from corner until a circular plate materialized in his hands. He smoothed out the edges with care and set it beside his empty can of soda. He didn't have any food. He didn't have any money. He didn't have any prospects for the impending night. But I watched him look up at the sky and grin.  He did have a plate.

That's when I began to think about human dignity.

Because we, the young 20 year olds, with our abounding entitlement and limited responsibility, have over indulged in the notion of 'self'. How many of us pause to help the elderly lady living on the third floor bring up her groceries? How many of us talk to the man with the newspaper on the park bench? Or realize that his arm isn't around that lady anymore? And that he was missing for seven days? And that he could have used a visit? And that because you sit across from him every week you are no longer a stranger - that the intersection of your lives makes your responsible?

How many of us notice that other people's worlds change too?

This isn't about getting older or wiser or anything. It's about being aware.

The Start of Things

Good Evening, New York City. 

I've decided to start my venture into conscious reality by sending my thoughts into the endless void of cyberspace. From now on it will be you and me. The unidentifiable, intangible "you" without bounds, and me, the twenty year old almost college graduate with big hopes and definable limits. 

Yes, that's who I am, a girl living in a fourth floor walk-up apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with a colorful Matisse dancing on my walls and a dramatic firescape clinging to my window. If I close my eyes and dim the lights to just above rosy, I can travel back in time and taste the evening seeping from behind speak easy doors. I can pretend that bobs are in style, and that I smoke long cigarettes, and that the latest craze is something classier than hiphop and ripped jeans. I can play Daisy, but smarter, and yearn for Gatsby, but deeper, and know that all the books on my shelves have been read twice. 

But even without pretense and illusion, you never fail me, New York. Your streets are the same, and your parks are the same.  Your trees whisper to me as I pour over papers in Washington Square Park, and you let me love you just like Henry James and Bob Dylan loved you. 

And, in turn, you teach me about humanity.

So good evening, New York. I extend my hand to you in friendship. I open myself to your possibilities.