Sacred Space

As of yesterday, this blog is three years old. Happy it.

Oh, sacred white square: I have feared visiting. See, there's so much to say. I've been thinking of shutting you down, packing you up in a hat box to display on the shelf in my bedroom closet. Here lies all the pretty things.

And yet, somehow, in all this public space, I have deluded myself into believing that we are safe.

I don't care. Hey, I can wear crew socks and search my cable listings for Baby Boom. This is now and I don't have to apologize to a stupid mute electronic square. There, I will drink beer from a wine glass. And nobody will say shit.

Three years deep. We're in the thick of it, you and me. Long as I'm learning I'll visit here.

And post.

And paint.

And squeal with delight at all the long shadows

we leave in our wake.

Humility is

a.) clocking in

b.) making change

c.) cashing out

d.) vacation request forms

e.) a break room

f.) receipts

g.) dinner at 11:00 p.m.

h.) a schedule

i.) a bathroom key

j.) hours and hours and hours

k.) being crap at something

l.) asking questions

m.) a locker

n.) a dress code

o.) overtime

p.) a new commute

q.) uncertainty

r.) uncertainty

s.) uncertainty

t.) probationary periods

u.) holiday hours

v.) retail shelves

w.) procedures

x.) discrepancies

y.) apologies

and...

z.) me, new at something, striving

Here's to five humbling weeks.

And to everything I still don't know.

Goodnight, Sweetheart

Oh, memory! You are so easy to manipulate. Proof: one might've enjoyed too many lychee martinis at last night's office cocktail mixer and gone home in a taxi feeling too sentimental about one's nearing departure. One might've too fondly recalled London in the spring, fall and summer and the pleasure of taking black cabs to QVC to sell lipstick to women in Dover. One might've too easily confused London in the spring, fall and summer with her actual work in New York, which mostly amounted to shuffling papers from one side of her desk to another and occasionally meeting clients for breakfast. In a moment of appetizer-induced abandon, one might've thought, I'll never have a good meal again. Shamefully, one might've also confessed to her mother over the phone that if it hadn't been for this job, she wouldn't have had a good meal for all of last year. Oh, if only appetizers and lychee martinis, black cabs in London, small plane rides to Halifax, occasional glasses of Veuve Cliquot and business-class hotel rooms could be the spoils of real work.

If only there hadn't also been days when one went home to one's husband and spent near hours coughing up blood-colored tirades. Or, mornings when one ambled down the hall to the office door in a state of total spiritual apathy, having surrendered to the limits of the ceiling one had hit years before. If only this job hadn't been the job that it actually was.

And after tomorrow, neither will it be again. Nor will I, my friends, nor will I.

I May (Or May Not) Miss These Things

One: Spooning chicken gravy over melting mashed potato disks at or around noon, depending.
Two: Knowing, in my soul, what's in the desert portion of every frozen diet meal on the market.
Three: Going downstairs sometimes to the snack closet for dark chocolate M & Ms.

One: The Bottega Veneta window on early September mornings.
Two: The marble border of the corporate lake at 375 Park Avenue, which sometimes makes a good seat.
Three: Choosing between Burger Heaven on 53rd and Madison and Burger Heaven on 53rd, between Madison and Fifth.

One: This broken chair.
Two: This broken desk.
Three: This broken pen and all its broken pen buddies.

One: Lipstick. Unending streams of lipstick.
Two: Three-stall bathrooms.
Three: Canadian business travel.

Four through five million: my bulletin board, my small desk calendar, my sticky pads, my shelf in the mini fridge, this highlighter pencil, my x-acto knife, all these little glass tchotchkes my co-workers brought back from their trips to China, Venice, Disneyland...Athens, even. I have a pen from Athens. I'm totally taking that.

I Just Ordered a $13.65 Lunch

and $13.65 of it came out of my scholarship money. In the first place, expensive lunches sneak up on you. And in my defense, it's not as though I'll be eating this piece of unmemorable chicken on a white linen tablecloth. No, I'll be eating blue collar style, on my broken frosted glass desk, under the lamp that bows to me often from its matte silver base. Also, this lunch involves soup. Oh, sneaky soup, you're just another add-on that I've upsold myself.

Soup is for closers
Closers and rich people

And here's another thing: I'm lunching at 11:28 a.m. How did I become a person who eats soup from an over-sized plastic spoon that cuts little slits into the corners of my mouth at 11:28 a.m.? As though I am independently wealthy? As though I receive monthly soup dividends from Schwab? As though I can pay for reconstructive surgery on my soup slits? I protest this lunchtime tyranny. When I leave here, I will banish public lunches. No longer will you be allowed to approach my desk as I feed myself and ask if I know when an invoice was paid. No longer will I take out a loan on myself so that I can order a tiny pressed sandwich in a tidy branded box. I will go back to what I know: peanut butter on wheat, wrapped in a newspaper sack. Down with this gold leaf stuck between my molars! I will pick it out with a blade of grass.

Ode to Structure

Courtesy of Manhattan User's Guide, who has been posting this every anniversary for more years than I can count (and also, Sexton, of course).

Riding the Elevator into the Sky

By Anne Sexton (1975) As the fireman said: Don't book a room over the fifth floor in any hotel in New York. They have ladders that will reach further but no one will climb them. As the New York Times said: The elevator always seeks out the floor of the fire and automatically opens and won't shut. These are the warnings that you must forget if you're climbing out of yourself. If you're going to smash into the sky. Many times I've gone past the fifth floor, cranking upward, but only once have I gone all the way up. Sixtieth floor: small plants and swans bending into their grave. Floor two hundred: mountains with the patience of a cat, silence wearing its sneakers. Floor five hundred: messages and letters centuries old, birds to drink, a kitchen of clouds. Floor six thousand: the stars, skeletons on fire, their arms singing. And a key, a very large key, that opens something — some useful door — somewhere — up there.

On Finally Getting Out

Embrace it when it happens quickly.

Step one: Say yes.
Step two: Take the thing, even if you can't be sure it's the thing.
Step three: Get out of the air-conditioned east side. Just get out of the east.
Step four: Dye your own hair once and feel humbled by the smell of rubber gloves.
Step five: Remember windows.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Tuesday Morning

Tuesday morning, nine a.m.: the morning after going in about a job.
Crickets.
Halfway through $2.75 worth of iced dark roast. The shop owner picks the ice by hand
from a block in his dark supply closet.
That'll be the first to go...
Little luxuries. Hand-picked ice and shoes made from real fabric.
I'll never give up classic folk, though:

"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why

Oh, the aching is free!
And I'll always have diaphanous synth
even if I wear plastic shoes.
Tuesday morning and the leftover brussel sprouts have gone sour in my pleather handbag.
Are you traveling for Christmas?
Oh, fuck, I have no idea. We never have any idea bout anything, do we?
But I want to see the La Brea tar pits and eat fish tacos.
There'll still be fish tacos, right?
And concert tickets?

"Kathy," I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I've gone to look for America

I don't know why that song always makes me cry.
Tears are free!
So are ocean air, seasons
and pavement.
How about gummy bears?
Those aren't free but they'll do in a pinch.
Still, there will always be maps
scaffolds and
windows
and I will want nothing more than to sit and dream of La Brea with you.

You Take the Good, You Take the Bad

At this very moment --11:06 a.m., E.S.T. on Monday, the 23rd of August -- the most hotly searched topics on Good Morning America's website are:

• Egg Recall
• Iraq
• Jennifer Aniston

This brief, concise list further confirms my growing theory that key to mastering the art of being human is learning to measure accurate doses of experience. A dose of recall insanity can be tempered by small, powerful doses of Iraq (just Iraq, not Iraq war, Iraq conflict, Iraq veteran) and half a dose of Aniston for balance. Dosing: a new verb with which to combat the incessant pounding of sameness.

"I've overdosed on uncertainty so I'm taking half a dose of psychic prediction."
"I missed my morning dose of clarity. I'll double up on decisiveness."

Too much of one thing means too little of something else. Dose. Dose to drown. Dose to distract. Dose to intensify. Measure for measure, easy now, in doses.

I'm the Girl in Blue

I've never had one of those unhealthy long-term relationships...

But I get it now, I really do. I am to this desk, this chair, this file cabinet as Amy Winehouse is to Blake Fielder Civil. I might as well invest in a pair of toe shoes and get an anchor tattooed on my bicep. I am her.

I've stayed here too long and am past my expiration date. Every morning I lie in bed and think of the Thriller video. I picture heaving a heavy stone lid off my coffin and staggering into the gloom wearing a dirty Van Heusen business skirt. You're getting back out there! Gasp, I almost let them bury me.

Alas, I don't accept the funk of forty thousand years as my fate. I know I have to face my Blakey. And, lest you think I should die an early death from employment co-dependence, let me tell you this: we've been told the end is near. Time to replace my toe shoes with resume paper, it seems. I am, yes, getting back out there.

This Just In

Revelation: hope is not a plan.

Futility Ain't Just a Number

Today I am going into an office to defend something, to plead for and present possible scenarios on behalf of something that I don't even want. I've had this experience before. It reminds me of trying to convince the parents of twelve year old, tanned Colorado pygmies that their daughters needed $1200 modeling classes in order to hand out packets of granola at a stock show. I had that job, too. Not at the stock show, at the modeling school. Someone asked me this morning what my bottom line is. I can't say I've ever had one. What is a bottom line, anyway? Is it the same as a deal-breaker? Do you know it when you have one or is it more of a "winging it" kind of thing (whoops, I dropped my bottom line)? And how, precisely, does one unfurl a bottom line when one is already standing several floors below it? Okay, how's this for an ultimatum: "make me like this place more, or else"?

My Heart is Wearing This Shirt

I'm not a gangsta, but damn it would feel good to be one. Because everything's cool in the mind of a gangsta. Up three-sixty-five a year, twenty four seven (cuz gangsta biz is all there iz). Damn it'd feel good to be a gangsta, feedin' the poor and helping out with their bills (cuz benevolent gangstas get the best bitches). I'd sorta like to have the world swingin' from my nuts -- just to see if it'd still feel good to be a gangsta then (damn, I'll bet it would!)

I'm not a gangsta, but damn. Damn, it would feel good to be one.

On Coming Unstuck

First, go red. Next, wake at 3:00 a.m. and worry about what will become of someone like you. Take to short, shallow breaths. Ride the bus reading Julia Child. Worry. Try on various shades of lipstick: blue-pink, red-orange, abalone pearl. Worry. Worry. Worry. Decide you could possibly, someday, be fierce. If certain things would only fall into place. If only you could know more. Prop the pillows and sleep sitting up. Decide your dreams are trying to tell you something. Recite the lyrics to "My Generation" as if you wrote them. As if you understood them. See the orange cat sleeping on the floor. Understand that all things are still eventually. Accept there are some decisions you can't make now. Know just one thing in one moment in one small place in your soul. Know only one thing. Live on that.

Shopping for a Dream

Hello, may I help you?
No thanks, I'm just browsing.
Are you looking for anything in particular?
Well, dreams, if you must know.
Oh, we have many fine dreams. Have you ever owned one before?
Do you get repeat purchases?
First I'll need to know if you're interested in a complete dream or just some detail work.
A complete dream, I think. I mean, I guess, I'm not, I don't, I can't...
Let's see here, I have a sea dream in stock. Oh and here's a lovely family dream.
Those don't seem like me.
How about a nice, solid property dream? Very popular with people your age.
When you look at me, what do you see?
An escape dreamer?
A beleaguered dreamer?
Dream-repellent?
Let's say I buy one of these dreams.
THEN WHAT?
I'm sorry.
THEN WHAT?
I'm sorry.

Oh, Karen

This is the crown of an angel, surely; a fierce red-toned ghost who's wooed me away from my platinum dreams. What was it Philip K. Dick said of Sophia in Valis? That she was "touched by the finger of God". Naturally, I wondered what a celestial caress might really look like. Would it crack at your scalp and run down over your forehead like a butter blond egg yolk? Or shoot out from your skull in three wide stripes like bolts of electric pink lightning? Never mind, I tried both. I never looked touched. On Saturday I am going in for "statement hair" (see: "notice-me", "I'm still here" and "if it's really bright people won't look at anything else"). We'll just see if there's anything left to say about divine fingers after that.

People Don't Kill People. Offices Kill People.

As I type this I am nursing a plump pink gouge on the skin where my thumb meets my Mount of Venus. Right? The padded part of your palm. That's the Mount of Venus. I have no idea why they call it that. Moving on. Yesterday I was victimized by a manila folder. This isn't the first time I've gone to battle with those beige folios. They're sharp as blades. I had only wanted to file an invoice. A simple invoice. And forget about replacing the water cooler bottle. We're talking serious potential injury there. A dislocated shoulder, bare minimum. Sodden rayon slacks, guaranteed. Then there's paperclip puncture (tetanus, stat!), accidental packing tape hair removal, email ennui and (heads bow) the most devastating office injury of all: death from complications related to minutiae poisoning. We've lost so many, so very, very many.

This is Dedicated to the Me I Love

According to the July 2010 issue of Glamour, securing the #2 spot in their list of the Hardest Words for a Guy to Say is: "Can you save your yoga pants for, you know, yoga?" So that means "I think I prefer men" and "I haven't loved you since you went back to school" might come in after "I'm totally not down with cotton pants". Lo, the many mistakes I've made. Here, then a brief list of my other regrets:

• I regret having gratefully accepted a bag of hand-me-downs from a friend who'd lost forty pounds
• I regret pretending to understand the difference between "stupid fat" and "intelligent fat" as explained to me by a woman who was neither
  
• I regret allowing myself the cool, comforting embrace of a muumuu
• I regret ever having tasted Pinkberry

I am not a NO REGRETS gladiator. I don't see how you can leap toe-first into a pool of change if your diving board is free of barnacles. In the name of evolution, I declare:

I regret.

Onward?

I Am (Not) Awesome

Resolution: I will not Google myself. I will not Google myself. I will not Google myself. It can only cause internal bleeding, you know. There I am, nine pages in. That's a six-page downgrade from this time last year. I am quite behind myself. Realization: I appear second only to the American Horse Breeder's Association member, English quilt and chain mail designers who share my given name. Reconciliation: I have done nothing electronically indelible this year. I have no imprint.

Alas, there is good news. Shameful use of the word corpulent in reference to me has been downgraded to page twelve.

Progress, indeed.

Independence Day

Freedom is sliding the elastic waistband of these green palazzo beach pants over my pitted pockets of upper thigh skin, only to discover that no one is looking at me (and they never were). What, then, is the difference between emotional maturity and total apathy? Have I accepted my spider veins or do I just no longer care?

Anatomy of a Disappointment

Maxi dresses are completely over. I decide this as I stand sheathed in one. I decide this as two strips of double-stick fashion tape are securing its breast panels to my breastplate. Waiting on the corner of 55th and Park behind a woman whose lower torso is encased in her pencil skirt like tight snake muscle shimmering beneath its scales, I decide: maxi dresses are completely over. I decide maxi dresses are completely over because it is one decision I can make. I cannot make a disappointment into the body of a snake. I can only wear it taped to my skin and too long, sweeping the streets like a paintbrush.

Summer Days, Drifting Away

I remember my second summer in New York (the summer of '97) as though it were a hot moment in an endless fever dream. I remember it better than my first because I actually stayed here, all summer, and slowly lost my mind. During my first summer in New York (the summer of '96) I had gone home to the desert of Denver to get my navel pierced and smoke cigarettes in the back of my friend's art gallery. So it didn't really count.

During that summer of '97 I attended my first New York cattle call for Grease. That was back when I thought that just because I kinda sounded like Rizzo and sometimes wore my hair in those same rebellious adult waves, I could totally play her. I remember that day well not just because I wore a leotard and tights in front of a panel full of strangers for the first and only time in my life but also because it was hot. My first hot New York summer day. I was two months out of school and had one audition outfit: a long-sleeved, vintage blue velvet swing dress. I wore it with opaque black tights and three inch t-strap character shoes. It was 100 degrees at noon.

I remember the day like it's in my DNA. I remember sitting in my underwear on my roommate's lemon gingham sheets, curling my hair into a retro swoop as MTV ran the Spice Girls' cooing ballad on an every-half-hour rotation in the background. I remember getting a callback at the dance call and I remember meeting the director, who said he liked the darkness in my voice. Darkness. After the audition I returned to my fourth-floor walk-up to eat frozen Milano cookies in front of an open window and wait for his call.

I remember that day on every hot New York summer day. Like today. Like yesterday. New York heat tattoos itself onto your thin skin -- inner wrist, eyelid, earlobe. It sits in your spinal fluid and rises slowly to your brain, melting tissue into sense memory. It never changes. It is always that same day, in June of '97, when I was young and sweaty with ambition.

Adulthood

I have learned to accept the taste of bitterness and so now eat more kale. And brown rice. Watercress and artichoke leaves. I still don’t speak the language of letting go but I do finally understand the true meaning of the word autopilot.

I journal. About breakfast, lunch and dinner. How many cups of this and that? Four almonds and a piece of string cheese. See? Journaling.

I realize the term assets is relative and grows ever more irrelevant all at once. Yes, I see the big picture and the forest for the trees.

I avoid being attentive where I can.
I have decided passive aggression is mostly aggressive.
I do not yet see my desk as sacred space and so abide Subway bread crumbs on my legal pad.

I am confused by luck but search for meaning in everything.

Love/Hate

Love this: someone just said, "if there isn't a word for what you do, say you're a consultant." With that in mind, I am considering one of the following for business cards:

• Candy Consumption Consultant (This would appeal to niche consumers of those teeny gummy cola bottles I'm something of an expert on)
• Persona Development Consultant (Who do you need to be? Valuable office employee? Attentive friend/wife/sibling? Let me help you develop an alter ego to handle the demands. Again, I'm something of an expert here)
• Conversation Survival Consultant, Small Talk and Other (Need a few quips? A couple stock phrases? Accurate weather reports for elevator encounters? Let me be your guide through the wonderful world of all things conversationally meaningless)
  

Hate this: the word "bespoke". In the first place, it's of British origin. Tossing it around as though it belongs to us is like saying, "I'd like a spot of tea" when you really mean you want a Lipton, no sugar, to go. Here, a few translations:

Bespoke Tailoring: Don't you dare bring that in if it's not a peach-colored blazer.
Bespoke Wood Floors: Only for people whose feet are free of those gross flip-flop heel callouses.
Bespoke Lingerie: If you've got back fat, we can't help you.

Love/hate this: Yoga.

Love this: You can order beer served in 16, 24 and 32-ounce mugs at the Halifax airport. When you place your order the waitress asks if you want the "junior", "man" or "lady" size.

"I'll have a 32-ounce lady, please".

The Truth

This girl I know, she:

• Has no (secondary) hometown pride.
• Likes that one song -- what is it called?
• Prefers white tuna to spicy tuna to fatty tuna to hamachi to yellowtail to eel.
• Feels guilty when she leaves a penny lay.
• Doesn't send food back if the kitchen gets it wrong.
• Looks forward to self-medicating.
• Only pretends to know what elegiac means.
• Hates parties and always has.
• Wastes money.
• Wastes time.
• Wastes money all the time.
• Doesn't hold the elevator, even when she can.
• Is wearing the wrong shoes again.
• Wishes she had never loaned out her copy of The Player.
• Apologizes for shit she didn't do.
• Has no available credit.
• Makes kissy faces in the mirror.
• Once watched a man steal a hat.
• Is losing her edge.
  

Alas, she's just a girl. And so am I.
We are, in the end, only girls.

I'm Going Through Change-Eh-Heh-Hehs

Let's start with: this hair.

Okay, when I first started this blog a super, duper long time ago, it was about change. I don't know if it's my seasonal internal turnover or the fact that I've recently found myself staring for too long at other womens' skirts and sandals, but oh yes, something's gonna give. I can feel it.

I'm thinking the first thing that's gotta go is this somber blog background. Butter yellow, perhaps? Something change-y and inspiring. If only one could "live" with a new blog color for a few days by painting little stripes of different hues on its walls as if it were a baby nursery or sun room...

Speaking of color, in my quest to be ever blonder, a new hairstyle has been whispering my name. I really want one of those platinum faux hawks. Now, before you say "but you just achieved The Kate Moss", here's my thinking: I need a shake-up. I need to find out if I have a single edge left in me or if it's time to start looking for a house on Long Island.

Besides, my Ipod is dying and I may have to dig out my old Walkman. In that case, I really have to have an ironic-cool hairstyle or I'll just look old and sad and broken.

Lloyd Dobler is My Career Counselor

Hello, fellow Chrysalians. Or Chrysali. Or, whatever. We need to come up with a good moniker for perpetual changelings. But that's not important now.

If I haven't lately, it's time once again for me to post my favorite movie monologue because, well, it's just so goddamn true. I've been chanting it like an all-out mantra because someone recently asked me what a day in my future perfect life would look like. While I still can't seem to encapsulate that elusive end-goal in John Hughes' tight, resonant language, I can damn well explain what I don't want to be doing in Cameron Crowe's shot-like-a-bullet-through-the-heart dialogue.

With that, I hereby invoke the spirit of the great Lloyd Dobler to assassinate the contract database builder who is currently revamping our office's inventory system (and blowing out my eardrums with pretentious minutiae). I call Lloyd forth to go to battle with this guy's words, because they are the absolute manifestation of everything I am categorically sure I never want to do. So, take that, "duplicative", "inventory" and "multi-platform menu". St. Lloyd has granted me protective status. I will never, never be that guy.

"I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that."

Maybe Lloyd was right. Kickboxing is the sport of the future.
I'm gonna have to look into that.

Ode to Jim (Or, What Do I Have to Do to Get a Decent Rock Star Around Here?)

I caught the Doors doc "When You Are Strange" on American Masters last night and went to bed dreaming of Pamela Courson's ironed red hair. I used to want to be her. In high school I had a thing for the arm candy of legends. Of course now I know it's not cool to idolize the dead junkie girlfriends of dead junkie rock stars. But still, I'd love to have her small nose.

This is a lament, really.

Man, they don't make 'em like they used to. Where are the self-styled rockers who can pull of a concho belt? I want spectacle, dammit. Bright stars who sizzle into burnouts. I love a deeply conflicted hero. Snarling, soulful screamer-poets? Yeah, those are my boys.

And the band, my God. When was the last time you went to a concert where 16 cops stood on stage keeping the peace? That's a show, my brothers and sisters, stamped with this warning: the frontman may or may not pull his dick out, but there are sure going to be decency rallies in response. Oh, how I want to live in that antagonistic world!

I know, I know, Jim's was a different time. There was actually a youth movement, a counterculture. Conservatism was worth bumping up against in your brown leather pants back then. I read somewhere that this is not a world a 60-something Jim Morrison could live in. True for Janis, too. And Jimi, for that matter. This time, our time--NOW--it's gone all tepid and complacent. We can't handle real rock stars anymore. We can't build 'em, either.

Sure, I've loved many. Stephen, Robert, Finn, Eugene. But I've never loved one who actually changed anything except the landscape of my heart. That's not enough, lads. I want it epic. The Doors still sell a million records a year. A million. Most of my sweethearts would be lucky to see a gold record in their dreams. And for a long time that's actually why I loved them. But watching that footage of Jim at the Hollywood Bowl again got me thinking, I'm witnessing a bona fide supernova. And I know, record volume's not the point. It's value.

But I want bigger bang.

'Tis a Quiet Thing, Ain't It?

I did a thing today -- a thing that's taken two, nearly three years to do. I put myself out there. In a big way. In the kind of big way where one risks crushing and crumbling of tender butterfly wings, etc, etc, etc, if it doesn't work out. We sent our pilot to LA, in a beautiful package, stuffed with enough airy popcorn dreams to fill an entire warehouse with wishing. There are times when every cliche on earth truly applies. Now would be one. I'll unleash a few:

"It's not the destination, it's the journey"
"80% of success is just showing up"
"Want it and it will be"
"Just do it" (whoops, where'd this one come from?)

And then there are parts of the journey where no pre-packaged, well-branded slogan applies. Today is a day when the act of breaking through a pane of glass to get to something I could see right in front of me all along is monumental in a way that no one will ever value as much as I do. It's a quiet thing, to borrow one of my favorite lyrics from the great Kander and Ebb. A very quiet thing.

It was supposed to happen in a big, loud way. We'd planned for 5 months to put that pilot package in the mail together with a big, ceremonial flourish and then rush off to Balthazar to drink a minimum of two bottles of champagne and eat shellfish. Celebratory, right? Hell yeah! And then, naturally, those good old best laid plans pulled themselves up and re-laid themselves elsewhere (isn't that the cliche?). For a virtual plethora of tech-heavy reasons, the pilot didn't go out on our big day. But we went out. We went out and swam to the bottom of a couple of bottles of this and that, trying to internalize that whole "ratio of expectation to reality" thingy.

Five furious days later, today, I took it to the post office myself. I filled out the forms and addressed the labels and held it to my chest and surrendered it and waited until I walked outside the building to exhale. And that was that. Me and it. It and me. In my hands and then gone.

A very quiet thing, indeed.
And maybe, in the spirit of all things Chrysalis, the very best thing.

What Color is Your Bulletin Board?

My office is moving. Yes, yes, I'm moving with it but we'll get back to that.

I've been here for seven years, in this exact space. Before that I was in another office in the same building for two years. All told that's nine years of my life. Half of my twenties and nearly half of my thirties. Packing an office you've been in for almost a decade is revelatory, to say the least. It's also depressing and humbling. I've spent two weeks packing my desk, which is one of those executive-y, cherry colored beasts that's so heavy the management has decided to just leave it behind. In the new office I will be facing a wall, but hey, I'll be sitting at a fancy-shmancy glass drafting table. So practical!

Moving on...

I've had a large cork bulletin board above my desk since the day I started working here, back in 2001. I never look at it except when I need the number off a Rolodex card I've got pinned up there or to confirm the time zones in Japan (I'll be taking that handy chart with me). But when I removed the tacks from its pocked surface today I saw what's really been three inches from my face for nine years. Archives.

Today I removed from my bulletin board:

1.) Two postcards: one my brother sent me when he lived in Nantes and one my sister sent me from her honeymoon in Belize. When I look at the backs of them I see their handwriting and wonder what they would think of themselves if they were to read them now.

2.) Four photos: one of me standing on the Peak to Peak Highway in Colorado in a pair of hot pink flip flops. It was taken the summer before my wedding when I still had a head of long, chocolate colored hair. That summer was the last before I started thinking about Botox. I also found a self-portrait from my father with a ridge of blue-veined mountains behind him, one of me and my siblings at the only Thanksgiving we've celebrated together since I moved to New York in '95, and a shot of my husband and I on a Portland ferry before we were married. He's been asking me to take it down since I started the job because he thinks it makes him look like my pregnant lesbian partner. It's down to stay. I think I finally see it now.

3.) A mass card from a funeral I attended just after September 11th. He was only 26.

4.) A fortune cookie fortune that reads: "A new voyage will fill your life with untold memories." It had no idea.

5.) A clipping from the Indianapolis Star that my grandma sent me in 2001. It's that photo of the men at the World Trade Center site raising that famous cross-shaped metal beam from the wreckage. On the top of it she wrote in lower case letters: "oh yes". I havent' seen her handwriting in more than three years.

6.) My own handwriting on a yellow sticky note, which was buried under two address cards and the directions for how to print a Quicken report. It 's Freud, imagine that. "When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it." Obviously not true. However, I do remember pinning that up during the 2006 winter Olympics. The American skater Sasha Cohen quoted him in an interview (weird). At the time, I must've thought it would be as easy as pinning up a sticky note to remind myself.

When I look at the remains of the bulletin board in my box I hear my own voice calling out to me. I see life and death and souvenirs. I think about how much I've seen and how much there is still to see. And I realize that everything changes, in spite of us. Everything changes. Always.

Let's Get Fired Up (Or, "New York, I Love You, But You're Bringin' Me Down")

As I write this, Manhattan is expecting three to five inches, then rain, then five to twelve inches (in that order) of the white shit, Congress will spend six solid hours arguing over what they think I want but can't ever seem to arrange for me and I shot a little truth serum on my way to the office, so I've confidently devised a list of concretes, which I hereby unfurl with wretched, indignant determination. Now, what to call it...

TOP FIVE THINGS WE CAN NOW CALL TRUTHS BECAUSE I'VE SAID 'EM AND REALLY, I JUST KNOW, SO DON'T ARGUE

Uno.) Snow in New York City is only snowtastic and snowglobular if you work in Manhattan and take a taxi to your office. Those tidy Manhattanites who stroll into your place of business wearing decorative scarves and declare, "this is pretty!" have never had to drape their sodden cotton tennis socks over an office space heater.
Don't let them fool you--there's no way in hell they commute.

Dos.) The absolute best way to blow off some steamy breath is to send Time Out New York a hate email for their two-tunneled and ridiculous Brooklyn vs. Manhattan cover story. As if we're not sick to death enough of the comparisons, now we're subjected to pie charts and in-depth resident "types" analysis where our actual insights used to be. Oh, Time Out, you shoulda never done the Jonas Brothers cover. There's just no going back from that. Guess I'll just keep hangin' out in Queens. Remember that borough? It's part of NEW YORK CITY.

Tres.) Umbrellas don't work in snow. I can't possibly be the first person to declare this a "truth" but in case I am, let me repeat it: umbrellas don't work in snow. For your own good, if you are still toting, you've got to let it go. There's nothing more pathetic than a thimble-sized, wool-clad human, tossed like a salad in a snowacane while she holds on for dear life to a sopping cocktail umbrella. Plug in that IPod and get your ass on out there. It ain't pretty but it's all we've got.

Cuatro.) Puffy coats aren't just for chicken-legged teenagers. They're for adults with office jobs, who sometimes like to go to wine bars. This is something I've come to accept about the out-and-out gear one needs to live in the urban outback. One should also be armed with skull, heart or cherry-adorned rain boots and a hair-smashing hat that someone from Brooklyn knitted for you.

Cinco.) The mannequins in the Bloomingdales window, who are currently draped in apricot-colored appetizer napkins and toothpick sandals, are placed there to make you feel a.) fat b.) wet c.) like you will never, ever again wear anything drapey or feather light and d.) like you've never been invited to a really good summer party in Long Island and you sure wish you knew someone who lived there so that once, just once in your life you could arrive on a beach deck in the late August sun wearing gold fan earrings and a charmeuse shin-skimmmer and say to someone (it really doesn't matter who), "I love the Sound at this time of year".

Got it?

Love and Taxes

My husband and I have always had a relatively pragmatic view of Valentine's Day. After twelve years together valentines are more like notes we pass to each other in the halls of an ordinary day than that one beaming roman candle that you light on a Valentine's Day early in your relationship and silently hope doesn't explode in your hands.

This year, we celebrated all things red and pink by having our taxes done. Oddly, it seemed a perfect way to honor our married 2009. No year is really over until the fat, Federal lady has sung, so we celebrated a New Year's Eve and Valentine's Day hybrid while sitting in our accountant's cubicle at H&R Block.

Fifteen minutes into itemizing it was apparent that 2009's pursuits had already begun to melt into memory. When my husband pulled out the L.A. back-up documentation folder I felt a strange, sorry sensation, as if I'd forgotten the lines of my favorite poem. There it was: the evidence of all we'd tried to do -- his rental car and hotel receipts, plane tickets, and credit card bills from the western sojourn to see what else was out there. In another folder was my own paper trail of first year tuition tax forms and textbook sales slips. Added together, could our paper pile amount to something more tangible than the year itself?

I watched our accountant tally up the deductions thinking that in its own way, each w-2, 9, form C, 1040-E and 1098 was like a kind of valentine we were sending to each other. They were more than just statements of account or interest paid, they were small proofs-of-purchase from the down payment we had made on our dreams. As each form was stapled into our 2009 tax portfolio I imagined them dusted with tiny mylar cupids and adorned with lipstick kisses. I pictured signing on the dotted lines with a neon pink pen, replacing each "i" in my name with a totem pole of bubble hearts.

I was thinking,

'Valentine in black and white.
A solid, stapled
paper replacement
for time and trial.
And yet, and yet,
it warms
when I hold it
thinking of you.'

I was dreaming of before and after, of everything we did and want to do. That's pretty good for two gray chairs in a gray room, on a gray day in February. Pretty good, pragmatic valentine.

Who's Counting? Age is Just a Number. Literally.

I had the strangest interaction with my Agephobia (yes, it's a condition) this week. Some days I forget I have it. In certain moments I feel ageless or even young, and sometimes I'm just distracted enough by shiny things like debt calculations or meetings with internet marketers at least a decade my junior that it slips my mind -- my spiny, ceaseless age-panic.

I've made no secret of the fact that I'm consumed with thoughts of time, or more accurately, with thoughts of how little I fear I have left of it. I wonder endlessly about the origin of this obsession. Could it be my harried urban lifestyle? My checkered, thrill-seeking past? Is it because our friends are having second babies? Or perhaps it's because I spend so little time doing what I want to be doing that each precious second is fried up like onion skin in hot oil and made dehydrated and lifeless. In my rear view mirror I can see a billion dead seconds I'll never have the time to rehydrate.

I wasn't thinking about all this on a recent business trip with a colleague. We were unwrapping turkey sandwiches in a Jersey train station's bar and I was thinking about whether it was inappropriate to have a Midori sour in front of her. It was one of those blessed ageless moments.

'I'm not in the office' I thought. 'I'm free.'
I could have been retired or just out of college.

I didn't order the drink but it would've helped to be lubed for the next part of the conversation. Eventually we came around to age, what we'd like to be doing after the inevitable demise of the company we work for, and what is next for both of us. She said she'd like to go back to school, work in health and help people. I encouraged her to think about it, saying hey, she's only thirty-six, it's still doable to go to class at night, now's the time. I went on to describe the immeasurable sense of empowerment I get from attending classes, how they feel like a weapon against inertia...
and, blah
blah
blah
blahhhhh....
Her eyes were on the liquor selection lining the mirrored bar. I noticed she had gone internal, wasn't making eye contact and seemed to, well, not care. It was fine, I thought, she wasn't ready to really think about next steps. We were silent for a moment.

And then she said, quietly, almost so I couldn't hear,
"I'm forty."
"What?" I asked.
"I'm forty."
"What are you talking about? You're thirty-six, we're two years apart, and we've been two years apart for the nine years I've worked for the company."
"You don't understand. I'm forty. I'm just realizing it."
"Wait, wait, wait" I said. "How can this be? How can you just be realizing you're forty?"
"Well" she said softly "I was born in 1969. I guess I stopped counting. I stopped counting at thirty-six."

I thought I detected a shiny horizon of tears forming on the edge of her lower lids. She looked shell shocked.

"You're the first person in four years to ask about my age" she said. "Do you think about your age much?"
"Every second of every moment in every hour of every day" I replied.

I tried to imagine waking up halfway through forty. Maybe it'd be better to have it land on your head like an anvil and stun you into accepting it. Maybe it was better to realize it at a Jersey train station bar, over a cello-wrapped turkey sandwich, with someone you only know professionally. She seemed as shocked that I spent all my time thinking about aging as I was that she never did. And suddenly I felt self-consciously young and foolish; idiotically worried about things I have plenty of time to sort out. What if I had somehow stopped counting and one day woke up years older, wondering how on earth I'd forgotten to mark four years of my life?

"Huh", she chuckled. "My husband's gonna love this. Guess it makes him forty four."
"What now?" I asked.
"Well, I'm wondering if I should have a birthday."

Just for that night I didn't pull at the pair of vertical ski-shaped wrinkles cutting their way into the space between my eyebrows.

I Hold These Truths to be (Pretty) Self-Evident

Salt Creek, Death Valley, California
December, 2009
Photo: Cox

'Fa-la-la-la-la, another end-of-year wrap-up.'

I'm not going to hide it. I've been avoiding this post. We're two, me and this bedeviled blog, and the occasion seems to merit a generic birthday candle photo, top-ten list or resolution of epic proportions ("Fifty Pounds in Fifty Days!"). At the very least I should post a group of folkloric-themed lessons born of the year's experiences. Yes, I've been anticipating this moment for weeks: the convergence of MCY's second anniversary with our decade's close and the end of my monumentally shadowy year.

I had hoped to rustle up some mustard seeds to bury alongside 2009, but the truth is that I dug really deep this year, all the way down to what I thought was the bottom of the well, and well, I found no truth. In fact, I found no bottom. So, in 2010 I'm going to have to keep mining.

It's three days past this blog's birthday, a day into the New Year, and I'm halfway through a Wendy's Chicken Club and a champagne flute full of Sauvignon Blanc. I'm writing by the light of my weeping, dehydrated Christmas tree's tiny colored bulbs. Everything new could be old again. I could be Alice and the Rabbit having tea with yesterday's OneKate. The point is, time is irrelevant. The New Year is whenever I say it is. I've heaved this beloved blog over the 2009 finish line so that it can land smack dab in 2010, diapered and dapper as a fledgling bunch of font instead of the haggard old man it would have been if I'd left it lingering in last year's time zone. Today is going to be its birthday.

I walked along the trail pictured above in Death Valley three weeks ago. It's the trail one finds at the end of the trail near the park's only body of water, a thin stream called Salt Creek. The trail has no end. I followed it until I became too conscious of being alone and when I stopped I christened it "My Road". If only I could have known this path existed in all the years I wanted to walk one just like it. I found it on a naked, solitary desert salt flat. At least now I can conjure a line when I need one. After I got back to camp, I wrote the thoughts below. I think I came closer to finding a grain of truth in that chilly evening's musings than I was able to touch in my whole, heavy year of reaching for one. Now, onward.

12/I Don't Know/09
Death Valley
Furnace Creek Campground, Site 83

I don't like to find things from home tucked into this notebook -- horoscopes, letterhead with my notes on it: "to do", "to get", and the like. I'm tucking them into a back page somewhere to be discovered later. I'm writing by headlamp (pause). Excuse me, I had to tend the fire. I'm the fire-keeper here. I'm by myself. There's no one else to tend the fire. I'm horrible at it, actually. Earlier I burned my finger, thinking (well, not thinking) that a stone wouldn't be hot. I moved it to accommodate a log. Still, my fire's been burning for a least an hour and I consider that progress.

What did I see today? Did I think? Yes, I thought about what I saw. I thought about thinking. I thought about the long shadows on the cool dunes. I thought about my husband. I had periods of intensely missing him. Then I felt empty. Not in the way I always do at home--empty of direction in a panic-stricken way. I felt empty of care. Empty of judgment and opinion. Empty of need to decide. Anything. Pleased to be. Pleased to watch bodies tiny as pinpricks climb smooth, sculpted dunes while I did whiskey shooters in the sun. Pleased to drive long, empty stretches of road that looked as good in my rearview as they did out my windshield, thinking of nothing but how strange it is that salt flats look wet in the low sun. Pleased at how easy it was to let go.

Pleased to be west. Pleased to see red walls and washes, cairns and drainage. Pleased to move. To be cold in a tent at 3:00 a.m. To be alone and not feel scared. To be alone, feel scared and get past it. To run along a trail for fear of rattlesnakes. To realize the sound that I fear is rattlesnakes is really my Prana Yoga pants rubbing between my thighs. To hear the small voices of everyone I know come poking through and to ignore them. To truly understand that silence is a sound. To believe for a moment that rocks make noise.

To understand that I've learned a lot and to be okay not saying what any of it is. To feel centered, apart, calm, at peace, apathetic, relaxed, awestruck, alone, indignant, joyous, bemused, and grateful to the benevolent provider...and to not even care that I just wrote that sentence or what it means.