i don't usually do this sort of thing

but I was just reading, and I quite liked this poem.

Japan
Billy Collins
From Picnic, Lightning


Today I pass the time,
reading a favorite haiku,
saying the few words over and over.

It feels like eating
the same small, perfect grape
again and again.

I walk through the house reciting it
and leave its letters falling
through the air of every room.

I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.
I say it in front of a painting of the sea.
I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.

I listen to myself saying it,
then I say it without listening,
then I hear it without saying it.

And when the dog looks up at me,
I kneel down on the floor
and whisper it into each of his long white ears.

It's the one about the one-ton
temple bell
with the moth sleeping on its surface,

and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating
pressure of the moth
on the surface of the iron bell.

When I say it at the window,
the bell is the world
and I am the moth resting there.

When I say it into the mirror,
I am the heavy bell
and the moth is life with its papery wings.

And later, when I say it to you in the dark,
you are the bell,
and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,

and the moth has flown
from its line
and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.

urban real estate, a primer

Vintage: musty

Charming: comically small and/or inconveniently old

Pre-War: pre-Bush, the second one

Cats accepted: everyone in the building has to hide their dog

Board approval required: brush off the filth, peasant

See this beautiful street of beautiful buildings?  Yours is the shittiest one there.

Students welcome: the bedrooms are only big enough for futons and desks, the dining room can only fit a foosball table, the shower only works at certain angles, and we couldn't attract salaried adults into this hovel if we tried.

Sub-floor: dungeon

Retro: broken

Modern bath: standing shower

Studio/1 bedroom: the bedroom has no walls

I sense that I'll keep updating this. . .

this is about nothing. act surprised.

I think New York is telling me to leave.  Perhaps it's noticed that I've been spending my days on real estate websites, trying to wade through the sea of poorly lit photos and board approvals and find a place to live.  Maybe the idleness that has sunk into my bones has made me a welcome target.  Who knows, reader.  Either way, my fair city is giving me the old heave-ho.

Why, you ask?  (You totally did, by the way.)  Well, I was on the subway a few weeks ago and witnessed my very second mugging.  It was rather awful, and rather quick, and rather loud.  Fine.  I'm a city dweller, this should be second nature.  Then, last Friday I was on the ride home (in the wee hours, admittedly), and heard "Get the fuck up!"  Yup.  That's generally one's cue to leave.  It was a man yelling at his girlfriend, not the crazed, raving lunatic ax murderer that I had thought.  That's a comfort, I suppose.  Well, it was, until he actually hit his girlfriend.  My ride buddy grabbed me by the coat, pushed me towards the door, and propelled me into the next car, as I would have Said Something (capital-S, capital-S).

I've been doing all of the stuff that you do when you know you're leaving somewhere.  Really long walks have played a role.  As has trying every new restaurant Grub Street pitches at me.  Having drinks with old friends, and spending less time holed up in offices and bedrooms, and more in the out of doors and company of people I like.  It's funny how much you love someplace you know you're about leave.  I've always loved New York, but now we're in a dark, twisty, ambivalent love kind of place.  Odd.

Unrelatedly!  There have been many adorable children in my life.  When faced with little boys in bow ties, old man babies (all of my friends have them, they're the new Birkin), wee Darth Vaders and feminist crusaders, I need only go to a certain coffee shop or folder in my reader to be cured.  Thank God.

Also!  I probably shouldn't say this, but every time I'm in a room, I'm in the habit of counting the women.  This started in school when I'd be one of a handful of women in the advanced [blah blah blah] class with the hard-assed professor, and often the only one left standing.  It's been making me a lot sadder lately.  It kind of has been weighing on my heart.  I can't think of a less nauseating way of saying it.  I don't know what to think about it.  On so many levels.  Which I can't talk about here, obviously, but still.  Heart, it aches.  This may or may not relate to (a) point(s) due north on this page.

Last one: I started writing this two weeks ago, and in that time just about everyone in my life has landed in the hospital, I had a bed bug scare (just a scare, don't step away from your screen), lost my keys and best umbrella, fell down stuff, and have been having a generally crappy go at it.  Get it together, life!

sentences and neural connections and slacking off

I abuse the Internet when I'm sick, reader.  I recently come to the startling realization that I move this year.  Not next year, this year.  Like, 95% sure.  Of course, now that I've told you, I'll probably end up having to stay in New York by some freak accident, but still!  That and the whole "crushing illness" business has led me to Pinterest where I am trying to figure out where the heck I'll live.  For some strange reason I think I'll have to live in some sort of shackhole (totally a word) with no electricity and a friendly family of roaming scamps who build bonfires in my kitchen and wear fingerless gloves.  What?  This doesn't happen at your shackhole?

Back on track: I've been abusing Pinterest as a personal bookmarking thing (a bit better than Evernote, for my purposes, but maybe I've been doing EverNote wrong).  Also,  I'm working a forty-hour week this week, as I did last week, and the week before.  This may sound normal to you, but I just don't do that.  I'm either off or seventy-plus hour on.  I have no idea what to do with myself.  I've had free time.  I've stayed in bed.  (Oh, bed!)  I've volunteered.  I've done my laundry (washing machines genuinely confound me).  I've gotten sick (twice!).  I'm sitting here, in bed, eating Honey Nut O's, after having caught up with old friends and begrudgingly pecking away at my email stack, just pinning recipes and fabric for sewing and contemplating a spin class.  There's this whole glut of stuff I should be doing, but I am never really efficient when I have a less-than-full plate.

So, instead of teaching small children about tolerance in Brooklyn, I am home sniffling and just barely giving my work any attention.  I'm also trying to suss out what exactly my wee shackhole will require (pot rack, storage solutions, just tons of riveting stuff).  Muy boring, no?  Here's the kicker: I am officially getting cats when I move.  I don't know, reader.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  I've also recently started using candles regularly.  Basically, all I require are a few Lean Cuisines and I'll be in right spinster territory.  Yay!  And yes, I am totally writing this so that I don't fall into the 'not writing' rhythm.  I have to go write emails and do actual, you know, work now.

Randomness

1. I'm thoroughly convinced that if I buy enough statement necklaces I will turn into Diane Lockhart.  This really isn't a time to argue with me, reader.

2. I am sick, and am writing this until the person I sent to get me some Cantonese wonton soup and steamed Chinese broccoli returns.  I am usually assholishly self-sufficient when ill, but haven't the energy to leave bed and only want to eat one thing.  Also, I am using you.  Aren't you comforted by the fact that I am spreading it around?

3. "It" being the usingness not my disease.

4. I have made up two words thus far in the post, and we're still in the single digits.  I am pretending that you're charmed.

5. I have a light workload for the next few months (regretfully).  I wish we could talk about that, and work generally, and work within the context of feminism and all the business that is currently going on, but we can't.  I want to, reader! 

6. I just remembered that I have grapes in the icebox.  I went to get them.  It took me fifteen minutes and I needed to sit on the floor for a break.  Woe is me.

7.  I now kind of get where people who don't want to raise their children in the city are coming from.  I grew up the city.  The city of cities, if you ask me.  It was amazing.  Granted, there was a period in my middle years after far too many episodes of Blossom and Clarissa where I longed to live in the 'burbs, hang out at the mall, and have those angsty, hoppy-stomached feelings about some football-playing demigod.  Then I got older, and realized that Orange Julius paled in comparison to New York.

I've had a lot of extra time on my hands lately.  Instead of walking through places on a mission, with little attention to spare, I've actually been taking notice.  Things are so different, reader.  I was ambling around the lower Upper West Side and I scarcely recognized it.  I was with a friend who grew up upstate, and kept finding myself saying, "This used to be x, that used to be y."  It's so sad.  It started when I was in high school and my favorite Korean deli turned into a Starbucks and a Duane Reade.  Now, the place where I used to go for lunch in high school to inhale greasy noodles and half-off sushi is all boarded up.  The wee, cute newsstand next to it is only Jesus knows what.  The Tower Records where I used to slog off after school to flip through vinyl records and angst over Simon and Garfunkel now holds a Raymour and Flanigan's.  I don't even remember what was next to Ollie's before that gigantic Apple cube took over.  Oh, wait, it was a Victoria's Secret.  No charming stories there.

And St. Marks!  I was wandering around St. Marks after volunteering yesterday and it's so terribly different.  It used to be where my friends and I snuck down to get tattoos and where we'd layer on the eyeliner and try (unsuccessfully) to drink at bars that were rumored to not check ID.  (I chickened out on the tattoo, if you must know.  I'm rather thankful that I don't have the now-ubiquitious star outline on the inside of my wrist.)  It used to be less shiny.  I remember the grit, and hanging out in the wee underground restaurants pretending to be one of the ever so cool and ever so chic NYU grad students I so desperately envied.  The very same NYU students who now seem like pretentious nits.  Sunrise, sunset.

I suppose kids growing up today will find their own magic, and their own special places.   I do wonder if I were to have children and stay in New York if they'd do any of the stuff that I did/do.  I reckon I'd only stay if I thought they would pore over the dollar racks at Strand, and hop the fence of Sheep Meadow or Heckscher Ball Fields after a big blizzard to make snow angels, or curl up for fries and milkshakes at Big Nick's or get humongous Levain chocolate chip cookies to ease their finals jitters.  It'll be different, I guess.  I just hope it's not as charmless as it feels to me, right now.

8.  That was a long one.

9. Do you read The Paris Review, reader?  It's great.  I was all nestled up with the winter issue yesterday and loved Adam Wilson's story.  I thought it was rather amazing.  His voice gives me the happy.  Find his blog entries here.

10.  My food still isn't here.  Wonder if they died.

11. Oh, it's here!  It's here.  Later, reader.  Time for soup.

Reader! Reader! Reader!

So frickin' awesome, no?

friends are my favorite

All of my friends are really obscenely attractive.  Yes, Internet friends, I am including all of you in the bunch.  Pretty pretties, the lot of you.  I often wonder if this is actually true.  I think all of my friends are 10/10 attractive and am always shocked and horrified when they think otherwise.  I was talking to someone the other day about how I caught of glimpse of arm cellulite and am convinced that this is a) a Charlotte-specific phenomenon and b) going to join forces with my graying hair and murder me.  Whichever.  In any event, then, said person tried to tell me about their arm cellulite, which does not exist.  This is someone for whom my arm cellulite does not exist.  Maybe it is a grand scheme, yes?  Maybe arm cellulite is only a myth that exists to either a) encourage humility or b) eat away at our collective self-esteem so that the establishment can keep us down.  The un-flabby arm establishment.

With that said, most of my lady friends are in the look-good-for-a-living business.  (I am. . .not.  In fact, I think I get more respect when I look like wild-eyed crazy shit.)  Even with all the makeup scrubbed off and dirty hair, they look amazing.  My male friends are just excellence embodied.  I wonder if it's true, or true for me.  I suppose it being true for me makes it a truth, but not necessarily the truth.

I suppose this is all sort of like how I always think the man I'm happily with is the most attractive, fantastic, spectacular specimen ever on the face of the planet, and how dare anyone think otherwise.  I mean, I don't know if I could be with someone and think something else.  Likewise, if you're my friend I think you're pretty swell.  You're smart and funny and crazy in the good way and I don't really care how you look.  When I do notice, I basically find you stunning stunning stunning.  Is this a thing?

So I apparently have a type.  (Way to segue, Charlotte!)  I went to dinner with a friend tonight (last night, really) and she leaned over and whispered "Don't look now, but there's a guy behind you wearing plaid and I think you two [facial expression]."  I was absolutely certain that I would turn around and find something all right, but I wanted to jump his lovely bones.  There was tailoring and plaid, floppy hair and glasses, this weird Dead Poets all-grown-up-but-can-likely-quote-The-Pharcyde air.  Basically, ring a ding ding.  I'm still salivating.  Yes, I am a lady.

Moral of the story: You really know someone when you know which stranger in a restaurant they would happily schtup in front of the other patrons.  If this were O Magazine, I'd totally file this as my "This I Know for Sure."