MY CHRYSALIS YEAR

Sacred Space

2010-12-30T20:17:00.003-05:00

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

2010-11-08T16:38:00.002-05:00

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

2010-09-29T10:59:00.004-04:00

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

2010-09-21T12:10:00.002-04:00

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

2010-09-14T11:19:00.003-04:00

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

2010-09-10T10:47:00.000-04:00

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

2010-09-09T13:23:00.001-04:00

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

2010-08-24T14:25:00.004-04:00

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

2010-08-23T10:35:00.004-04:00

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:

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

2010-08-17T11:30:00.008-04:00

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

2010-08-14T08:57:00.000-04:00

Revelation: hope is not a plan.

Futility Ain't Just a Number

2010-08-09T12:30:00.003-04:00

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

2010-08-06T11:00:00.003-04:00

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

2010-07-27T22:22:00.002-04:00

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

2010-07-26T11:44:00.003-04:00

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

2010-07-22T16:52:00.003-04:00

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.

2010-07-15T14:52:00.005-04:00

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

2010-07-12T12:04:00.004-04:00

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

2010-07-08T16:21:00.006-04:00

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

2010-07-07T11:25:00.002-04:00

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

2010-07-01T14:21:00.006-04:00

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

2010-06-29T11:02:00.005-04:00

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

2010-06-22T13:40:00.004-04:00

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

2010-06-15T14:09:00.000-04:00

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

2010-06-11T13:44:00.000-04:00

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

2010-06-08T09:14:00.001-04:00

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

2010-06-03T12:05:00.001-04:00

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?)

2010-05-13T13:31:00.002-04:00

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?

2010-04-21T11:49:00.001-04:00

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?

2010-03-22T15:30:00.001-04:00

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")

2010-02-25T11:26:00.000-05:00

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

2010-02-16T11:39:00.000-05:00

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.

2010-01-21T15:41:00.000-05:00

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

2010-01-02T19:10:00.000-05:00

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.

PROCESSing

2009-12-16T13:02:00.000-05:00

This time tomorrow I'll be in the desert.

Crazy part is, it'll actually be a real desert. It'll be the kind with dunes and dust and rolling shadows that trick your eyes. It won't be the desert of the soul, the parched graveyard of the mind, or the dark night of the spirit. Nah, it won't be any more of that existential shit. It'll be the kind of dry I can hold in my hands. If I can stumble through one more urban day, one more day skating on this glass and iron grid, I'll get on a plane and wake up in Vegas. And then I'm going to drive.

The idea is to pitch my tent in Death Valley, pour a bourbon, make a fire and think about this:

PRODUCT VERSUS PROCESS
or....

prOcess versus PRoducT
or...

OCESSP sveRUS prOCTDu

I finish my semester this evening. I want some kind of internal brass bell to ring. A button. A gong. I want Anthony Michael Hall to punch me in the shoulder. But what I've got instead is, well, creative process, which looks a lot more like a bunch of work halfway through its life cycle, some inspired, some shit and all of it only breathing if I fill it full of my helium. Somehow this feels anticlimactic.

Last semester, after reading the equivalent of the Library of Congress' bibliography section on international politics and the Middle East and acing a final and three major papers, my husband and I went out and drank a paycheck's worth of wine. The first toast was along the lines of, "here's to doing something tangible and easy to toast to!" This semester's toast will be something like, "here's to coming up with some solid concepts and then getting a little off track after workshopping them, but finally accepting that taking a bit of breathing space will inevitably restore buoyancy to your craft!" Salut!

This was a process semester. Scratch that, a process year. I'm seeing this whole school-slow-as-molasses thing as an exercise in forced process. It's like that scene from A Clockwork Orange where the guy's eyelids are forced open with those little metal prods so that he can bear witness to the atrocities of the world before him. I will be forced to surrender my need for a moment of conclusion. My consciousness will be scrubbed of words and phrases containing the likes of "content", "pages", "bang it out" and "nail it".

I will get comfortable with the following idea:

I AM NEVER FINISHED.

And if I can't get comfortable with it yet, I'll just get drunk and go hiking.

Happy Hollowdays

2009-12-01T12:58:00.000-05:00

Oh, Gawd, it's good to be back here, layin' down font in my tiny piece of e-real estate. It's like diving into a warm, electric swimming pool. This blog, my unrestricted voice, home of shit poetry and endless depressive job-hating, blonde strand-coveting exploits. It doesn't have to have a market or a point, page views or analytics. It doesn't have to be search engine-friendly. It can just be a little square of space and I can just show up, walk around, post, scream, yell, cry, pontificate, paint, shatter into a million pieces and glue myself back together sideways. And I don't have to care if it makes me any money or determines my future or gets me out of my job or gets me in any doors or buys me freedom or gets me sponsored or opens my days or makes me in any way better or more accomplished or successful...or stops...the...gerbil wheel...even.for.a.second.

November went down like a shot of vodka. I hardly remember it. It says here I last visited the ranch on October 23rd. Well, shit. Since then I've gone another year grayer (but you'll never see it), spent Thanksgiving in jammies drinking Moet, bought a near-eight foot tall Christmas tree and filled it full of sparkly things and am now staring down the final two weeks of my semester. I've written fiction, for God's sake. Real fiction. Well, fake stories about real people that I've imagined. I can't believe it. I'm halfway through the required manuscript, which is due in a week. I'm still not sure where it's going, but if that isn't this year's fuckin' t-shirt slogan, I sure can't think of a better one.

I think my Korean herbalist may have reset my internal hard drive. Since Halloween I've been drinking a vicious brew I named "the hell broth", a mahogany-colored liquid packed in cellophane bags printed with stags that I've been downing twice a day before meals. It's meant to strengthen my liver, which in Chinese medicine is responsible for a whole lotta goin's on, including anger, mood, headaches, muscle pain and imbalance. The instructions were strict: no alcohol, pork, fried foods, fats, sugar or raw vegetables while on the regimen. I did pretty well for most of the course of treatment, except for the Moet, which in my mind isn't really alcohol but is more of a tonic. I've noticed over the month an odd sort of sedation. In someone like me that's beyond obvious and more than welcome. It's hard to explain to people that you're taking something you don't understand the contents or the effects of. I guess it's also hard admitting that I don't understand the power of my mind over the health of my body.

This is always a dreaded time of year for me. The minute "Santa Baby" starts playing in Food World at the start of October, I'm pretty much ready to smash a pecan pie into the face of cheer. I used to find it sad that some people wanted to spend Christmas at the bottom of an Old Fashioned, thinking that being jaded during the holidays was a cliche. Well, it is. But so are fireplaces and holiday home makeover shows. What can I do? This season is an emotional minefield. I've come to accept that it's better if I have an escape plan. This year it's the desert. I can do trees and carols and family and the whole biz if I can just go see some southwestern sky and breathe some red dust. I believe in the cleansing powers of the desert. Get me to a place where I won't hear "White Christmas" for at least two days, and I'm good to go.

Death Valley, here I come.
Should be all clear out there.

I Will Not Think

2009-10-23T16:16:00.000-04:00

I've been told that if my pulse does not improve I'll be put on herbs. This is Chinese medicine for "get your shit together."

I've been meditating with a back full of quills on the long bed in the small sleeping closet at the acupuncture office for several weeks now. I'm trying to figure out a way to process my emotions so they don't make me sick. To learn, as I've been instructed, to imagine that emotions are like a picture frame and mentally drape a sheet over them when I don't want to feel them. To see emotions like food. To take them in, digest them and then pass them--never storing them as pain. There are apparently all these ways to picture emotions and do something about them. I've been picturing ways to picture picturing them. Or something like that.

As my doctor turned out the lights and left the room last night he asked, "Do you have any questions?"
"Yes," I replied, pleadingly. "What can I do? Can I cut anything else out, stop eating eggplant, use more fresh ginger in my diet, perhaps add a little light jiu-jitsu or something?"
"There's nothing else you can do. Except...worry less. Ponder less."

Now, to be fair, he said this with a small hint of the desired irony that one with a back full of hot needles would demand in a moment like that. And then he left me in the dark. And I thought. I thought about thinking less. I thought about pondering less. I thought about worrying less. I worried about worrying less. And then I made a small vow. For one week (let's not kid ourselves here), I'm going to imagine a sheet. And when the grinding machine begins to chink, chink, chink away, churning itself into nothingness, I'm going to put up that sheet and let those thoughts hit it.

I'm not going to worry.
I'm not going to worry.
I'm not going to worry.

Okay, let's revise.

I'm going to worry...less.
I'm going to worry...less.
I'm going to worry...less.

And after this one week, I'm going to see what worrying less has done.
Because hey, I sure know what worrying does.
(Insert blank space here).

Ill Wind

2009-10-12T13:41:00.000-04:00

Well, it's official. I won't be representing my country in the Ironman triathlon in June. For that matter, nor will I be able to continue my work as a fit model, UN Goodwill Ambassador and Dan Brown's ghostwriter. It's all become too much. I'm overextended, outwitted, undernourished and ornery as hell.

I've developed these cravings, see, for pickled foods. I'm waking up nights wanting gourmet doughnuts and grilled cheese. None of the usual fare satisfies. Don't want beer. Can't be bothered with caiphrinhas. Don't wanna feel altered. Just wanna feel hidden.

It all started when I heard about Muir drinkin' that pine needle tea to get more "sequoiacal". Purple juice, restoring color. I thought, 'I'm only drinkin' this here Kool-Aid. Somethin's wrong.'

I don't see sky. My roof is these fluorescent bars. I've gotta see something mightier than silver, more ancient than chrome.

I miss mountains.

The electric city is electrocuting me. Blue wire, red wire, motherboard. I'm plugged in at the fingernail. Muir said "overcivilized". That's too kind. Overdone, overzealous, overboard, overwhelmed. Over it.

I went to see my acupuncturist last week. I sensed the wind element, the presence of which had sent me to bed for days with migraines and a piercing pain that crawled along my spine like a spider wearing stilettos. He said my lungs were exhausted. In traditional Chinese medicine they govern growth and maturity. In his strangely stoic and well, "sequoiacal" style, he explained its root cause as "too much sitting on one problem for too long."

Did I say I miss mountains?

Busy Bee

2009-09-28T18:36:00.000-04:00

MUSE

Well, things have been hoppin' around here. Sho' nuff, after writing the post below I felt compelled to go and visit my aspirational arm ornament in person. Now, in fourteen years of New York City living I've never been inside a designer store. Not once. But I actually broke the fourth wall for the Gucci. She'd been replaced on the pedestal by a hot little purple number so I had to seek her out. This gave a sexy, black-clad store clerk the opportunity to ask what he could do for me. I described the bag in question and he led me right to her.

"This one's special. We don't have another one like her", he said. Of course not. "She's got a real unique edge. She's sophisticated without being dated. She's playful." 'My God, they get right inside of you', I thought. He put her in my hands and I ran my index finger over each of her weighted, pristine details. The gentleman behind the counter described the features that made her uniquely a Gucci. The zipper pull, lining and structure. The irridescent metallic fabric. I slipped her over my shoulder and strode to the mirror. I watched her dangle from every angle. I was wearing jeans and a pair of black Chuck Taylors, but I coulda been in a Mugler bandage dress and a pair of Fendi booties. She transformed me. I brought her back to the counter, traced the stitching on her underbelly and stepped back to take her in. She was mine.

And then I walked away.

I got myself a little gig this week. I'll be writing about beauty trends for Examiner.com , a culture site with readership in 109 cities. This means great exposure and maybe a little ca-ching, but mostly the opportunity to report publicly on my product fetish and tell you all about critically important things like how to wear the half-black, half-white manicure in real life. You know, world news and matters of national security. Hey, at least you'll be outfitted in the event of another financial crisis. Don't say I didn't warn you that the strong brow was back for fall!

I saw U2 at Giants Stadium with my husband, who is their fan. But before that, I saw Muse open for U2. Muse is my new muse. I can't stop listening to them now, despite having had them on my ipod for 3 years and being pretty into their huge, dramatic sound. Think Queen in a mash-up with Metallica and Radiohead. Throw in a frontman in a pair of really tiny red jeans and a huge white piano and you'll have Muse. Fist-pumping and showstopping. Made up entirely for the fact that a huge Jersey gorilla of a man asked me to move out of his way during the first song in U2's set, which froze me self-consciously in place and kept me from moving for the duration of their show. "Stuck in a moment and you can't get out of it"? Bono didn't know the half of it.

Better than all of that, I saw Fanfarlo at the Bowery. Beautiful and strange and Swedish. Trumpets and saws and fiddles and guitars. A small, buttoned-up frontman with a butterfly vocal that flew out and soared above all of our funky, stoic heads. Such romantic lyrics for such a young gent. I feel so lucky to live in New York, to be able to stand on two legs at midnight and listen to six strangers play me music I can sway to.

Life is good in the electric city.

From the Ridiculous to the Sublime

2009-09-14T16:56:00.001-04:00

All I can say is, never underestimate the power of a glossy patent handbag.

This slick sack? We've begun seeing each other. Well, it's not formal, actually. I see her and she just sorta stares back, invitingly. I haven't introduced myself yet. She's kind of a loner, actually. People tend to put her on a pedestal. She sits astride one just so in the gleaming Gucci ghetto on on Fifth Avenue and 54th Street. She's worth two paychecks at least, maybe three, and I usually find those kinda girls pretty intimidating.

I'm afraid that if I brought her home I'd have to stop wearing mom jeans. Girls like these usually demand a certain garment-related savoir faire, and bare minimum that you can at least stand in heels for longer than fifteen minutes without pulling out your pair of Chucks. There is a school of thought that these kinds of gals encourage your A game. But secretely I wonder if just like the awesome patent ankle boots from Bond Street that seemed so brilliant two years ago, she'd really just spend most of her time at home in curlers waiting for a "special occasion" at which to make an appearance.

Thing is, though, I want her. I know it's cliche but she just gets me. For one, we're both in touch with our dark sides. She loves metal, she's soft-bottomed with all the pinches and tucks you'd expect from a sophisticated woman of a certain season. And the best part? It looks as though after a long, late night she broke her heel and fell into a pool of gasoline. If things were to get too hot she could burst into flames in a second. That's just the way you'd want any good broad to be: nice and shiny but never precious.

Partie D'Août Deux

2009-08-31T20:58:00.000-04:00

Alright, August. This is it. We've come to the end. You've wrung me out. You've somehow managed to slip into Blogger and fuck with my font. Even my Georgia, August. Even my Georgia? My own familiar black typeface now looks foreign. And suddenly there's a tab here I've never seen, labeled "Monetize". What won't you monetize, oh sodden month? This lowly changeling blog too?

Most of you know I rarely post real-life photos. This isn't that blog. I usually feel a thousand words are worth a thousand words flat out, no arguments. But once in awhile a picture metaphor is just too damn honest and it is necessary in this blog. The above is from a corner of my office. Not "mine" per se, but the one I work in and among and inside, and around. I go to this corner often to retrieve paper for the copier and last week I finally stopped in front of that motivational poster on the floor, which has been there since January. This is a wall. This corner. This office. It is glass or steel or a magnetic field or a piece of cellophane or epoxy or nothing at all. But I am trapped inside it. I feel trapped inside it.

August is my credit limits slashed, company 401k closed, car in the driveway unwilling to start, doctor dropped by insurance, dental plan gone, $11oo in cell phone bills and a stack of mail unopened. This is a wall. These bills, this loss of security. It is glass or steel or a magnetic field or a piece of cellophane or epoxy or nothing at all. But I am trapped inside it. I feel trapped inside it.

I think I've come to understand something. I've been boxed in because I've got to learn how to become more resourceful. If all my outs have been well, stubbed out, then I'm gonna have to use my imagination. If I can't fly away because there's no more plastic, can't drive away because there's no more rubber, can't bail myself out using the mythic retirement fund and escape into temporary unemployment, then I'll have to figure some other way to get out of this job and get within the same country as the life I want. Basically, there are no more excuses and there's no easy way. It is glass or steel or a magnetic field or a piece of cellophane or nothing at all. What happens if I poke my finger through it?

Most of you also know I'm not into having my freedom encroached upon. I'm the girl who had it tattooed in Latin, festooned by laurels and anchors where the Kundalini don't shine (what's that saying about a good way to lose your freedom? Have it tattooed in Latin?) as my permanent middle finger to expectation, obligation, boundary. If only declarations were the same as decisions.

I start school tomorrow. I'm taking Beginning Fiction and I'm totally terrified. I'm trying to remember what the hell I was thinking in May when I signed up for it. I have no idea how to write stories. But as I type that last line I'm thinking perhaps this is part of the new emergency exit plan. Maybe I'm going to have to write myself a new story with a mad, unexpected ending. One that involves a fabulous escape plan.

August

2009-08-21T12:26:00.000-04:00

Morning's Inner Monologue
Rush hour,
heat index.
High-class cattle in column dresses.
Moo.

UV
My decolletage is freckled, I fear, permanently.
Micro calico remnants of two Adriatic weeks.
The final map charted by rising heat
from Diocletian's Wall
onto my chest in water bubbles.

It reminds me of the line
from that Ball play,
"freckles ruin shoulders", or
something like it.
Shit, I'm ruined.

Alright, enuffa that shite.
It appears that the soupy summer slosh has begun melting my heart, soul and most certainly cerebellum into a murky pool about to be splashed onto the side of a taxi. They don't make Pacino movies about August bank robberies for nothin'. I'm spending far too much time alone in this office while the rest of my "team" is off in one Hampton or another, or telecommuting or...whatever. I've taken to listening to endless streams of NPR for company, their steady tones floating off on the air conditioner's hum into the dark recesses of our computer closet. "Well, I began my career with a fellowship to do some work in Burundi..." Hisssssss.

It's so odd being stuck in Manhattan in August. Well, let me go back. I mean it's odd that an entire city empties for a month in the first place. But given that reality (the reality that nobody works in New York in the summer), it's strange to be someone who is, commuting into Midtown with the few sweaty blue shirt suckers who have to be present for their TD Waterhouse teambuilding exercises. Slosssshhhh.

I'm running out of ways to creatively clothe myself for the 75% humidity. When I'm alone on Thursdays and Fridays I wear flip flops and tank tops that don't conceal my wide, black bra straps. Today I'm wearing an acid washed gray hat with nautical metal stars on it. I added hoop earrings, hoping it might give my look an urban edge. It did that, alright. Now I look like I'm working at an Amoco station. I can tell when I've hit a homerun because our doormen actually make eye contact. But when I come into the office in on Fridays looking like I'm headed for a public beach near the Florida panhandle, they refuse to acknowledge me, even though I've been walking through those doors for over eight years. Ssssouuup.

Perhaps it's worse now that we have a new tenant in the office. She's a classic New York cosmetic professional: poised, sophisticated, and beautifully packaged. She wears a suit of sleek black armor every day that perfectly displays two enviably chiseled guns. And she's one of those heel types. One that can pull it off. She's got loads of spiky, spiny skins and leathers. Some are sharp points, some rounded, but all tall as hell. She's like a chic boutique tower, warming her leftover pasta in our dingy old microwave, chatting me up about this and that. It always feels as though I'm standing in my underwear when we're talking. Something about her makes me feel naked. Lately, it's been just the two of us in the office. She runs her business on the other side, but she's close enough that I can overhear her conducting conference calls. She's diplomatic and assertive. Sometimes I'll turn off the air conditioner and just sit and listen to her talk on the phone as the room warms up. When I came in this morning she said she loved my hat.

Heeeeeaaaatttt.

Coming Out of the Dark

2009-08-05T12:35:00.000-04:00

My husband has been subletting on the sunnier coast for just nearing six weeks now. I haven't written much about it because, frankly, I haven't known how the hell to talk about it. When he visited LA in March to explore his career options, our lives took a sharp turn toward what is commonly referred to by our actor friends as The Inevitable: the sometimes-hard-to-swallow reality that the big pool of work lies out west while the cultural and intellectual baby pool we really wanna congregate in floats smack dab on this lean and leggy east coast isle. That sharp turn was both unexpected and exciting, but we knew things were never gonna be the same and that eventually, some kind of really hard decision was gonna have to be made about place or career or both.

Shortly after the March trip, we decided to pool every financial and emotional resource we had to send him back there as an all-out immersion experiment...just to see what would happen if he...lived there, for a time, as an actor, undivided. You can read his blow-by-blow at CouldYouPleaseJustNot. Below is my east coast version of that all-out immersion experiment.

It's no secret that I've taken a pretty bumpy ride to Psycho Town this summer, visiting my relatives on the dark side often and with gusto, downing vodka sodas, even digging deep to dust off the old agoraphobia. I picked a fight with our creepy neighborhood cross-dresser after he tossed an empty cup into a flowering bush, audibly sobbed my way through a documentary about modern China's stranglehold on peasant farmers, spent an afternoon detailing the back panels of my bathroom door with a bleach wipe, spent all day in the dark watching Michael Jackson's funeral, and peeled, and peeled, and peeled hardboiled eggs. When my sister came for a visit she complained that I'd become too controlling about the way the bathroom hand towels were folded. I laughed at her reflection in the mirror as I picked away at a microscopic eyebrow hair with a pair of tweezers. Those goddamn things, they'll make you crazy.

After that battle royal with all my filth and fury reached its zenith, I sat stunned in the muted mustard hues of my psychopharmacologist's office, where she inquired in her usual cool, anonymously eastern European way, "what ees zees depression of which you write on zees intake questionnaire?" We made a subtle medical adjustment to my chemical makeup. But I know there's no kind of gel-coated cocktail for what truly ails me. Uncertainty.

I walked down Park Avenue after the appointment thinking that it isn't at all being alone that's been hardest about my husband being gone. In fact, it rather suits me in some ways. It creates a wide open internal space in which those pithy little obsessive demons can emerge and thrive inside me. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. They rear, they terrify and then I can purge them. But what's caused all this utter insanity is not that he's gone. It's that that there seems so much attached to his being gone: possibility, upendedness, alpha, omega, beginnings, and endings. It's so weighted, his absence. But rather than grounding me in anything I could hang onto and derive some meaning from, it instead sent me surging straight up into the stratosphere without a capsule. I've been Major Tom, looking down at the life I had, watching it get smaller and smaller, seeing nothing ahead but a big, black, starless sky.

Perhaps I've broken through the ozone or something. Or at least begun to. I'm feeling ready to harness all this intensity, all these feelings of directionlessness and kid fears and use them to, I dunno, make some discoveries. I don't wanna pick fights with the creepy cross-dresser anymore. I don't wanna peel eggs on my porch in the rain or be obsessively tidy. I don't even care about getting blonder (okay, that might be a stretch). I have no idea what we're going to do about LA. I have no idea where we're supposed to be or what the right decision is about anything. I think we did the right thing by forcing change where we could, by surging forward in spite of having no bona fide evidence we should, but I don't really know that we did. What I want most to do is just say that. I. Do. Not. Know. I don't know, I don't know, I don' t know. I'm thinking the more I hear it, the less like a life sentence it feels. The more like...a second skin. Something I can breathe in.

So, there it is. Some tiny little shred of it. As it is today but will not, in any way, ever shall be.

Amen.

"Are We Doing Klute?"

2009-07-20T19:49:00.000-04:00

This is one of my favorite things Stephen Colbert ever asked a guest on The Colbert Report. Jane Fonda was on and Colbert was attempting to steady his steely glare as she slithered all over him, trying to get him to drop his persona for a moment during their interview. He asked her, biting his lip, "are we doing Klute?"

I've been asking myself the same question ever since I visted Shaun, my new hair stylist, who I've finally decided is the man I'm going to cheat on my Russian blade-wielder with. I went to him for a second opinion on the "I'm not making you blonde!" opinion I've endlessly received from my longtime confidence cutter. I'm trying once again to force change from the outside in, hoping that by moving on from this silly power struggle which continually finds me unable to assert myself in the face of a woman holding a pair of thinning shears, I will not only be able to leave behind a head full of dated stripes, but will also reach in and wrap my hands around my mojo and pull it the hell out into the open again.

Shaun wants to give me a "loose, wavy, coulda-been-a-boy's-cut-in-the-Seventies-but-looks-like-a-less-structured-Fonda-Klute-cut" in a cool beige hue. I've been turning that one around in my mind's eye for a couple of days now. It could be the kind of thing where I'll look back on this post once I'm wearing a "loose, wavy" Joan Jett on my own ass-graced, curvy body and think, 'it sounded like such a good idea at the time', or it'll be just like the cut that was part of the evolution that created this blog in the first place: my "slick-severe-coulda-been-a-bowl-but-was-more-Bladerunner-dipped-in-chocolate-bob" that began a revolution of the soul. That's the one I'm wearing in the Facebook profile photo I recently had to remove after admitting to myself that I simply don't look like that anymore.

Nor do I feel like that.

I'm reading over these missives wondering how this became a melodramatic hair blog. When I first started writing OneKate posts, I was eating transformation for breakfast and making meatloaf outta the leftovers. I wanted to talk about reinvention, growth and potential. To be fair, I'm predisposed to the subject matter. I'm a Scorpio. I thrive on all that phoenix and flames shit. Ashes to ashes, funk to funky, folks. I love it. And at the time, I was running (hard, 5 days a week), rattling all kinds of bits and pieces loose, discovering edges and ledges on my body and in my mind I never knew existed. But that has slowed, yes, and now I'm softer in spirit and silhouette.

So too, has my momentum in other places. I've been replaced in my mediocre QVC job by a young woman who my boss refuses to stop referring to as "that pretty little girl". From mediocre to invisible. That's not exactly the transition I was working for. I'm so apathetic about my job, I can't even be bothered to surf the internet in my newly acquired spare time. Most days I keep busy by reading through our takeout menu folder. 'They have muenster! I'm keeping this one on file.'

I feel like I've become a person incapable of real, meaningful change. If I can't change the fact that there's a little girl hawking cheap cosmetics on TV in my place, my persistent feeling of directionlessness, our inability to pay for car repairs, this panicky cat at my feet, slow computer, these blasted permanent vertical frown lines, or the behavior of each and every person on earth except me, then I'll just change my goddamn hair. I continue to lighten my shade up top, hoping it'll eventually lead to a lightbulb. In essence, what I'm saying is, my scalp has become the only place I feel capable of making the kind of change I can actually see (there goes that melodrama again). But it's sorta true. Life feels like it's stalling. Has stalled.

So, I guess the answer is, YES, WE'RE DOING KLUTE.

Until we can do something else.

Life Is, In Fact, a Movie

2009-07-13T11:07:00.000-04:00

Things I Thought Only Happened In Movies, But Actually Happened This Week:

1.) Someone asked me to "sex up" a line about venture capitalists and private equity firms and see if I could make another about bank lending requirements sound more "embellished, provocative."

2.) I watched too many Dateline: Investigation and 48 Hours: Hard Evidence shows in a row, then went to bed and was terrified of a thunderstorm.

3.) I stumbled on a massive, stunning, original abstract oil painting at a Brooklyn "Break-Up Sale". The woman sold it to me for $20 because she just "couldn't be around it anymore" and needed to "move on". I am an accidental collector.

4.) I ran into a man I had a massive crush on in school as I was sporting the following ensemble: an ill-fitting green tank top featuring a between-the-tits coffee blot, an odd, sweat-matted Morrissey-inspired pompadour and a pair of denim capris refusing to hold their roll, which meant they came to an abrupt end roughly 5 inches above my ankles. On top of that, my dog wouldn't stop hassling his Papillon mix.

5.) I drove through Manhattan in a daze early Saturday morning. I was on my way to Brooklyn to move a friend to a new apartment. The windows were open, Billy Joel was singing about something blue collar, I turned onto Broadway. Out my passenger window I saw the tour groups pounding pavement, seizing sights and suddenly, I came to. When I looked past the dashboard, I was in Times Square. In my car. Alone. Me and the Jumbotron. I Was Legend.

If They Say Why, Why, Tell 'Em That It's Human Nature

2009-06-26T18:50:00.000-04:00

I really wanna write about Michael Jackson. Less in tribute, though I'm burning a candle in my mind's eye as I type this, remembering four solid heartsick adolescent years devoted to love of him above all others. No, I'm thinking more about time. I wanna talk about time.

It's curious the way the sudden, shocking death of a cultural icon both stops time in a breathless moment and seems to stretch it out before us as if it were a film reel or timeline of our own lives. Every memorial image we see flashed across a flat screen or find ourselves rubbing from newsprint-stained fingertips might as well be one from our own narrative.

When I heard the news yesterday I pulled the needle off the record. Time stopped. I sensed instantly, as millions did, that it was the end of an era for me. If the day I told a doctor about my own family plans, the last night I held my grandmother's hand, the first time I set foot in a developing nation, or the last time I did something just for the money wasn't the exact moment I knew my childhood was over forever, Michael Jackson's death was. Pale yellow cardigan-clad Michael and his come-hither stare on the front of my Meade notebook, teary screams from the general admission seats at the Thriller concert and hours spent decifering the meaning of the Liberian Girl lyrics are no longer part of a living, breathing person. They are stopped dead in time.

But in the same breath, I am fascinated by the way time moves, by the passing of it. It's astounding that life moves fast enough that it can be encapsulated into a consumable hour-long visi-byte. That we can watch a person grow, morph, change and that all along, we are doing the same. It all went so quickly. I was ten when I first saw him. In parachute pants (me). I'm 33 now. As I watched the progression of Michael Jackson's life in images last night (all night), I was watching my own in my mind, with a similar sort of fascination. I'm not an icon. But I have spanned time.

Houston, We Have a Problem

2009-06-17T13:11:00.000-04:00

Hello? Hello? Hello? Is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone home?

Oh, great big, knowing Blogosphere, I'm rubbing the sides of your truth-granting orb in search of insight. I've consulted family and friends, the profoundly indifferent school financial aid office, the bottom of my Prosecco glass. I'm at your feet now, Supreme e-Leader. Is there a path? Am I on it? Does the one I am on lead to a trash receptacle, deserted beach or twelve foot electrified fence? Are you busy with a crochet project? Should I come back later when you've finished your Sudoku?

Here's a brief update. Financial aid for next year came through. Well, when I say "came through" I sort of mean more that it exists out there on a piece of paper sorted into a bunch of columns said to "assist me in financing my education". I've spent the two weeks since I received the letter trying to figure out why they call it "financial aid" if it doesn't aid you financially. In any case, mine is not a story of true sob. I am not the first child in my family to attend college, offspring of first generation Americans or making minimum wage. I am merely a person trying to get a piece of paper, fulfill my potential, find some direction, change my life midstream. It's expensive, all that becoming something. And sadly, next semester, I can't afford to do it as I had originally laid out for myself on that steel-coated, infallible, never-say-die road map of mine. They gave me HALF. Half of what I got last year. Numerous phone calls to my 401k plan administrator to inquire about disbursement, countless humbling analyses of my credit card statements and several shameful attempts to derive an ounce of humanity from anyone working in financial aid later, it comes down to this: go part time in the fall, rack up some personal debt and stretch my supposed two-year plan out over four long years (until I'm nearly old enough to qualify for the social security degree program), or go full time in the fall as planned, rack up LARGE amounts of personal debt and finish the degree in two years. Though, that plan may have me taking online classes from inside a sanetarium, where I'll be serving time for trying to stab floating red credit card balances out from behind my eyes with a mechanical pencil.

Or that's how it all seems at the moment. When I write it out, it doesn't sound as catastrophic as it feels. But see, I had this plan. I was going to finish the degree that it took me so damned long to decide to pursue and then I was going to be off trying to...well, use it...somehow. I don't know why it always feels appropriate to quote When Harry Met Sally on this blog but in honor of Harry, I have to point out, when you decide what you'd like to spend the rest of your life doing, you'd like the rest of your life to begin as soon as possible. He was so right. But that's a shameful paraphrase. I would like the rest of my life to begin as soon as possible though truthfully, maybe this is happening because I'm still not exactly clear just what it is I'm supposed to be doing with said life. Oh, when will I learn that existence cannot be wrapped up by gifted writers of dialogue? Maybe there is some method here. Maybe I'm not meant to plow through the halls of academia so quickly that I finish with my little paper proof-of-purchase no more fleshed out (mentally) than I am now. Or maybe I just want so much to believe that I've made a choice that will translate into change that I have to see it that way.

In any case, I'm trying to imagine that this little blip appears on my electrfied life grid the way a slowing N train to Astoria would: momentarily stalled and perhaps off schedule but not yet retired to the big subway graveyard in Coney Island. It's hard to see these traffic jams as part of the larger infrastructure, as having any meaning to the greater flow of things. I think this is a lesson in priorities. I think so, anyway. I've vowed not to decide on which course of action to take for at least another week. I feel like there's something I'm supposed to get from the debt-to-emotional/professional/psychological investment ratio thing. Of course, it could also just be a good old fashioned lesson in patience, in which case I'll be really fucking pissed. I learned that one standing in line for gelato three weeks ago.

Return to the Land of the Not-So-Living

2009-06-08T11:58:00.000-04:00

I think I've finally slept off my five day jet-lag hangover. It's sad in a way. Getting up for days on end at 3:00 a.m. because my body still wants to believe I'm dreaming in a canopied, brocade-draped bed in Venice is sorta romantic. It's like straddling two worlds, holding on to what eventually becomes the mist of memory for a few days longer. But then, predictably, trudging up the Ditmars Boulevard subway station steps slams me concretely into focus. We ain't walking Dubrovnik's city walls no more, Dorothy.

I felt something akin to physical pain as I slogged through Bride Wars, Confessions of a Shopaholic and He's Just Not that Into You on the flight back to New York. Swimming in the Adriatic rendered me completely brain dead and zapped my attention span into a thin, flat line. I could hardly open my Atlantic Monthly, which I'd faithfully carried with me the whole of the trip, really, really meaning to complete that article on happiness. Instead of reading, I slammed plastic cup after plastic cup of Diet Pepsi with my traveling companion, who sat bolt upright in her seat, staring blankly into the endless sea of scalps in front of us.

At one point I wondered aloud why it is that I continue to subject myself to these extended bouts of travel when the return becomes more and more brutal as the years go on. Sitting on a Delta flight with my knees at one with my solar plexus, it felt impossible to understand. The more trips I take, the easier it is for me to detach from my own reality completely. But plugging myself back in, opening American newspapers, reactivating the data package on my Blackberry has become a heartbreaking routine, weighted with disappointment.

Travel is like crack for me. The planning, the executing, the experience, the rush of being out of my element--I seek it out and am willing to risk danger, debt and alienation for the fix. And I've discovered that the withdrawl part, which descends as I'm standing on line at security to return home is as intense as any kind of depression. The notion that I've run out of the drug, come to the end of the line, seen what there is to see, felt the breeze, climbed the stairs, tried the fish and that there can't be any more for now is something I'm unwilling to accept. Like a junkie, I'm strung out on my own wanderlust.

I was gonna tell you all about Croatia. Lemme give it to you in a mood-stimulating capsule. If instead of climbing a metal ladder into a cellophane blue swimming pool, you descended the same ladder over a cluster of rocks into the sea, you'd be in Croatia. If the width of your embrace were like an impenetrable medieval wall, you'd be standing above Dubrovnik in Croatia. If thin crust pizza and sardines were like currency, you'd be cashing in in Croatia. If you woke up every morning to espresso and azure, red rooftops and laundry lines, you'd be waking up in Croatia.

And Venice? Ah, it's mandatory. Miss it at your own peril. The memory of waking up to the sound of feral cats meandering its canals will stir inside me forever.

I guess this is the bargain. The more I see, the harder it is to reconcile it all with my New York life. If I wanna cash in on the experience, I gotta pay that price. For now, I'll be keeping my memories alive by watching Girls Next Door over a pot of Istrian white truffle mashed potatoes.

Forever forcing my two lives to come together.

Away Message

2009-05-20T13:05:00.000-04:00

Real Housewife of Atlanta to Depart for Croatia Friday.
This is the headline on the front page of the tabloid that is my life. I had a plan to perfect myself pre-Mediterranean vacation that included spray tans and a head full of sparkling blonde hair. As I write it I am able to see its inherent flaws. See, the reality is you can take the National Lampoon's outta the girl, but you can't take the girl outta the National Lampoon's. It doesn't matter where on earth I go, I'm always packin' Clark and Ellen.

The Real Housewife mention is in reference to the fact that I now more resemble a Buckhead property-purchasing cougar than a glittering Hollywood ingenue (not that I coulda passed for one prior, but I was hoping for the hair of one). I went in to go totally blonde on Saturday and came out with a head full of food-colored stripes and an anchorwomany haircut that has me looking like a Bravo reality show casting wet dream. Every time I look in the mirror I think of butterscotch pudding and those Archway lemon ice cookies my grandma used to love. In light of my new MILF porn star hair debacle I decided it was probably best to cancel the spray tan. Why add fuel to the fire?

I managed to finish my semester with straight As, of which I'm immensely proud. I sweated through a killer Twentieth Century International Politics final, a research paper and two presentations. In the end, I did the work I wanted to do. I recyled all the reading I did for the semester over the weekend and it filled an entire clear blue recylcling bag. I let it sit on the living room floor for a few hours, thinking that all that paper, what must've amounted to ten pounds' worth, is now inside my head. All those thousands of lines actually translate into something I own. I guess that's intellectual property. You can't foreclose on that shit.

Mercury's been in retrograde. My brother wrote asking if I was experiencing any difficulty with communications as a result. "What're you talking about?" I asked, right before spending five solid days on the phone with representatives in Bangalore trying to figure out where a slew of my frequent flier miles had gone and why I was suddenly locked out of my credit card websites. I keep picturing those kids in Slumdog Millionaire with headsets on. "Yes, Mrs. Cox, I can understand why you would want to know where your frequent flier miles have gone. But before I consult my manual, let me inform you of an exclusive offer for cardmembers."

It's time for me to be in a berth on a big, anonymous sea. I've reached maximum density. I'm gonna take my citrus cookie-colored hair and go get righted. I have got to remind myself there's a world beyond Megan Fox on the cover of Elle magazine sporting a shoulder tattoo that reads:
"WE WILL ALL LAUGH AT GILDED BUTTERFLIES".

A Minor Fall and a Major List

2009-04-29T12:50:00.001-04:00

The "Minor Obsessions" list is getting a full-page spread this week. My attention is divided into 16 slender slices of a fat, overloaded pie and I keep alternating between thoughts of long, delicate golden necklaces and former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri.

My semester ends in two weeks. I'm a third of the way through a phone book-sized study of the investigation of the aforementioned Prime Minister's assasination in 2005. It's horrifying, fascinating and frustrating. I've never written fifteen pages of anything more than a hate letter to my best friend in high school. And that was in pink pen, on wide-ruled notebook paper. I think it's safe to say that academic writing is not my, comment dites-vous ?, forte. To me it feels like writing from inside an ice cave behind a door with no knob. Walls, walls, walls. 'Let's see...I want to say that a massive revolution was the result of the assasination, whoops, lemme add a little teeny number up there after that date, whoops, gotta go down to the bottom of the page and cite that source, whoops, let's go back up there and, shit, where was I? Okay, yeah, so...a massive...whoops, that's a bit flowery...let's say large scale...yep, that'll work.' There are a thousand silky, delectable words slipping and sliding around inside my brain trying to ooze their way out on to the page: sybaritic..adulate...ambrosial...MELLIFLUOUS! When this semester ends I'm going to stab a valve into my scalp and let them all drain out, one by one, the sap of stunted prose.

Besides being able to speak again in my usual embellished patois, I intend to read. For the last four months I've felt like I was sleeping with my secretary every time I read a magazine article or a few pages of a novel. I found myself sneaking peeks at US Weekly in the magazine aisle at CVS, craving like carbs even a few meager lines of non-academic text. I bought myself a copy of Celebrity Hairstyles on Saturday and saved it all day, dangling it in front of myself like a chocolate carrot to be nibbled upon completion of five pages of my paper. When I met my self-imposed deadline at 9:00 p.m., I tucked myself into the couch cushions and skimmed through the photos of Blake Lively and Michelle Williams and drifted into and out of consciousness, just as the glossy pages of hair mags are designed to make one do.

When I do allow myself a freebie, I devour the "literary porn" on this website. Now, I'm not in any way hip to the shit. It's a nine year old site. But the editor came to speak to my class last week and rendered a room full of competent, edgy women completely senseless. Ever since then I've been fascinated by the notion of making a living writing about sex. Scratch that. By the notion of people who (read: men) make a living writing about sex. Go there. I guarantee you'll lose an hour immersed in descriptions like "milkweed excretions". Exquisite, elegant writing about things between legs and under arms and behind doors. Bonus: music and literature and fetishes. What else can I say?

I'm reinventing myself for summer. I think I've got it basically down. It'll be a cross between Rosie the Riveter and Nicole Richie. Sound doable? I'm thinking hippie headbands and red lipstick. Dangly, bangly, spangly necklaces and 1940s "can do" spirit. Stockings and flip flops. Bangs? Perhaps. In any case, I've been making a list of "must get" items and it includes roman sandals, self-tanner, plastic sunglasses, purple shampoo, and a gigantic hat. Don't worry, it'll totally come together.

Just in time to show off the above new look I've earned two delightful ruby red rings around my eyes. Courtesy of some bizarre reaction to the season's first application of gazillion SPF sunscreen I'm wearing alien spheres on my face that look like skin glasses. Bring on the warm weather styles!

This week, one of my professors actually said: "There are no dull stories, only dull writers."

Just let that one sink in a little.

Fluff

2009-04-16T12:30:00.000-04:00

Because not every day is a Chrysalis kinda day (despite efforts to the contrary), this blog has temporarily been renamed My Cotton Thoughts Day. I will now pull thin, wavy strands of airy brain candy from my skull and deposit them on this blank e-page where they will live to grow furry with inconsequential blog mold in the internet concsiousness for eternity.

Okay, so first things fuckin' last. What's the deal with my Facebook page being slammed by friend requests from platinum-haired LA starlets looking to add my name to their growing roll of F-lister friends like Criss Angel? They lure me in, see, and take advantage of the fact that in my old age names and faces are beginning to gel into one giant personality conglomerate making it now nearly impossible to catalog the gory details of everyone I've gotten drunk with in the last twenty years. So these Facebook marketing co-opters know I'll likely see the request, think I might know the person and perhaps peruse their profile to jog the old memory for an image of the two of us wearing sombreros at someone's birthday party in 1995. They hope, of course, that I'll be so impressed by the fact that this person's friend list includes the likes of Justine Bateman that I'll sign my fucking firstborn away to the Facebook promo devil so I can be overwhelmed for life with notices about this girl's every appearance on NCIS. Nice try, Facebook, if that's your real name.

I spent Good Friday wandering through the Union Square farmer's market. I bought a hand drawn rendering of the Chelsea Hotel silkscreened onto a canvas of hot pink satin. It is now my favorite thing ever. The side of the building sort of fades off the canvas into a fog of black ink. It looks like it was left out overnight on 23rd Street and corrupted by smog--the hotel straining to come through the haze into being. I met a man, "Joe", who had a little table set up near the subway entrance featuring a potted flower, a jar for donations and a professionally-lettered sign that read: "CREATIVE APPROACHES TO WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT". Feeling "in the flow", as my mother would put it, I asked him for a creative approach to the NY/LA conundrum. When I laid out the conflict that's pulling me apart like a Rolfing machine, he told me that I may love New York but I haven't been able to enjoy it. I'm still trying to figure out why that made sense to me at the time. He also suggested I begin thinking about what it means to let go of what I think I know about staying here. He illustrated the suggestion by having me hold a stack of paper in my hand until it became uncomfortable, asking me to note how I had made physical adjustments to accomodate and accept the pain (touche!). Then he asked me to drop it. When I let go, the papers scattered into an abstract arrangement on the ground. As he was picking them up, he said "See what happens? When you let go, it turns into something else." I got it. The conflict had taken a new shape. There was possibility in the burden when I let it go and it spread artfully across the pavement. But I couldn't see that as long as I kept holding on to it, accomodating its weight. As I was leaving I told him about the Chelsea satin. He said I was collecting memorabilia. I cried all the way through a cinnamon toast frozen yogurt.

I've registered for fall classes. I'm having trouble digesting the passing of time. Only a moment ago I was eating grilled cheese in January, awaiting a student loan refund. I've decided that each semester I'll take something terrifying. In the fall it'll be fiction. The last time I told a story on paper the lines on the page were an inch wide and we were writing about Halloween witches in crayon. Scary, indeed.

While I still have papers and finals to feast on, all thoughts lead to that, up there. That's Pula, Istria, Croatia, site of my first bona fide summer vacation since going to Indianapolis to visit my grandma in 1992. Now, given that the photo comes from Wikimedia, it could be a beach on the coast of Libya for all we know. But I'd go there too.

The West is the Best? The West is the Best?

2009-04-01T10:00:00.000-04:00

Alright, there's simply no point in putting this off any longer. I have to talk about it. There's, gulp, um, gasp (grips chest), see, kind of, maybe, well (falls to knees), there's this chance...that we may have to move to L.A. It's crazy even writing a thing like that. Now it's just out there: L.A. Two little letters to encompass incomprehensibly endless black ribbons of highway, sprawling white houses with red tile rooftops and people I don't know. Two little letters to explain what I'm not sure I can.

My husband is much clearer on all of this. A month ago he flew out to Angel-Town on something of a lark. An opportunity to scale the western face of the acting business popped up unexpectedly (in the way these things seem to do) and he decided to leap on it. We knew the minute he booked his ticket that he'd begun to shift the tectonic plates of our east coast life. The thing is, we've suspected for some time that he needs to be there. Blah, blah, the market here is so limited, there's so much more work out there, he fits in a few little type-y niches that might actually work in his favor on the sunnier side (multi-ethnic!, yay!). But more than all of that, in a way we couldn't quite articulate to each other before he left, we were somehow ignited by the idea of our lives being turned upside down. I didn't tell him at the time but I felt strangely amenable to the notion of an undeniable shift. Translation, if something happened, I might be up for it.

He was gone for two weeks. We didn't talk much about anything concrete while he was away. But I knew the day he drove the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu for the first time that he might be seeing L.A. as a real possibility. In honor of all the difficult conversations beating down our door I went right out, drank a night's worth of jumbo margaritas and went home sobbing in a cab at 3:00 a.m. The next morning I woke up resolved that he should go there and I should take some time to figure out what the hell I want to do.

I've never felt more sure that now is the time for him. It's partially cosmic, partially timing. Either way, he needs to be able to say he really went for it and I appreciate the value of that. It's more complicated for me. I haven't yet been able to romanticize L.A. to myself. Now, don't get me wrong. I can more than imagine Friday nights at Santa Monica pier and weekends hiking the hills. But my husband's got a hook, an angle, a reason to be there. I don't. Except for him. And while he's a big, important reason, he can't be my only reason or we'll be fucked. We just will.

So for the moment, we've decided he's gonna go. He'll spend the bulk of the summer there trying to rustle something up. We've also made a few other decisions. 1.) Nothing, nothing, NOTHING will ever be New York. We're accepting that and moving forward with the idea that everything we do will be in an effort to get back to our grubby, glittering gray goddess. 2.) The idea of never seeing what else is out there for us is way scarier than facing a world we don't understand.

I'm trying to be open to all the ways this could happen. If nothing else, my view of our current reality has begun to shift. I can't believe how immovable I've become. Thinking for a moment about living in a world where people wear shorts in March and meet each other through panes of car window glass, shop in shiny suburban grocery stores and eat avocados year round has gotten me pondering what is trash and treasure to me here. And that has to be a good thing.

So, onward and...westward? Well, at least I've started going blonde.

Away Message

2009-03-18T14:01:00.000-04:00

This post is an homage to my beloved London, which I will visit for the last time as my company's on-staff whipping girl next week.

My bizarre foray into the world of on-air spokesrepresentation at QVC has come to a close, which means the next time I wander through the gentle, perfect greenness of The Regents Park I will be a mere civilian.

Sadly this does not mean I am finished for good. I continue to drift along aimlessly at this job, which is by now my own personal version of the embarassing co-dependent relationship I've had countless friends try and explain to me. It's a sandpit I can't seem to extricate myself from--one that has made me bitter and ungrateful for even such a splendid thing as weeks at a time spent in the glory of London's company. Well, if I can't yet figure out how I'm going to make the transition that validates this blog's existence, I'll at least take London back from the oily grip of obligation and make it mine again.

See, my job has been sold off, along with anything and everything having to do with QVC, to another company. I've trained my replacement (a Midwestern-er Nora Dunn), and I'll actually be doing an official "hand off" to her on air, as if we were Couric and Viera. Naturally, I didn't plan for it to go at all this way. I'd planned a clean break, giving plenty of notice when I started school. But immediately after I began classes the company got a huge sales opportunity and, as the ink was not yet dry on the contract for the buyout, there was nobody else to do it but the ol' workhorse, the ol' lipstick queen, slinger of shellac, wheeler-dealer, buyout-broad...me. Translation, they kinda made me do it. I hemmed and hawed, I even went home and cried. It was one of the worst weeks of my life. Made worse by the fact that I utterly hated myself for agreeing to do it, for having so little backbone, for not liquidating that pathetic little 401k and walking the fuck out the door. But somehow I said yes. It's a complex web involving the fact that the people I work for are extremely maniupulative, I'm easily swayed when I feel obligated to something and, well, dammit I spent nearly three years building a molehill into a blessed mountain and wanted to see it through to the bitter end. Bitter, indeed.

Even writing out the minutiae of this situation makes me feel slick with that oily residue. I mean, who gives a shit about sales opportunities? The bottom line is I don't want to spend the rest of my life making other people money. Period. So, I'm doing this trip and then...I don't know what. There is nothing left of my job except me answering phones here. Oh, and making coffee. I forgot the making coffee part.

I haven't seen a street in London in the last three years. Not really. And lemme tell ya, I've been everywhere, man, I've been everywhere. But I have missed out on the delicate details: the shimmering green blades of grass in Hyde Park, the perfect edges of a box of Bond No. 9, the musty elegance of the Courtald collection, lacy spines of Parliament, coriander and chutney, Times at rush hour, clotted cream and brown sauce, all of it so rich with tradition and so hard to hold on to tightly because I was there on someone else's time.

I've decided to make a trip this summer that is just for me. When I arrive I will not immediately unpack my straightening iron and line up all of my high heeled boots. I will not make a taxi reservation to take me to the studio. I will not sit on the edge of my bed and practice my "sell" to my reflection in the darkened tv screen. I will not call the office, check email, or look at any numbers. I will instead pack a bag with nothing in it. I will buy a scotch egg from Paul Rothe and Sons on Marlyebone Lane and eat it as I walk to The Barrow Boy and Banker pub at the end of the London Bridge, where I will spend an entire day drinking Chiswick Brown and watching everything thing I've missed.

I Will Have This Hair

2009-03-10T11:57:00.000-04:00

Just as Germany wanted France in the first world war (I'm learning this!), I want this multi-dimensional, layered flaxen confection to be mine. I'm about to take a mid-term on the international levels of analysis for world conflict and instead of studying Paul Kennedy's "power perspective" I can't stop running my fingers over the mouse, urging it toward the Google icon to search for photos of Kate.

I've reached the part in the school year where I a.) think I am an ass-sucking dumb dumb who can't internalize concepts or structure a decent essay, b.) think all my professors think I am an ass-sucking dumb dumb who can't internalize concepts or structure a decent essay, and c.) fear that my academic pursuits will not be transformative but rather fruitless and (I can't think of a good word to go here. See? It's true!).

Since it's only noon and I'm sitting in an office in Midtown, I can't have a glass of wine. Even in this laissez-faire, ethics-free work environment a liquid lunch would be considered untoward. So, in times like these there is no better salve for the uncertain soul than perusing glossy photos of "newly curvy" models with my dream haircolor. I'm feeling like a decent grade might be elusive so instead I'll aspire to follicular light-headedness. I'll strive to be blonde.

I actually wrote an essay for class on this very subject last week: hair as a canvas, a place to make discoveries and declarations. It came back last night with the following comment: the piece was fun but the material uninspired. Well, shit. Back to Kate.

Uninspired, perhaps. Escapist, absolutely.

The endless reinvention continues.

What Recession?

2009-02-18T11:44:00.000-05:00

R.I.P.

Money Tree (June 2008-February 2009)

This is actually our second-generation money tree. The first one officially killed itself when we moved into our new apartment. Who could blame it? What with the major rent increase, it just couldn't self-motivate to promote prosperity any longer.

I bought this money tree immediately after because I'm totally superstitious and believe in shit like money trees. This one was lush and full, reaching and striving out if its little pot toward greatness. And then in January, as I was fretting my way through the Christmas holiday, preparing for school, obsessing over adult acne and downsizing, a little brown border slowly began to develop around its leaves. At first I came home to one, then two rigid crusty leaf remnants on the floor under the TV cabinet. I ignored it. I continued to play a relentless stream of morning NPR with its elevated recession talk and analysis. I poured more and more coffee. I applied more and more Retin-A. And then my face began to dry up too, peeling away, layer after layer, revealing a rippling map of arid wrinkles on either side of my brow. I eyed the money tree. Dry. Me. Dry. NPR. Dry.

With each passing day the money tree surrendered another leaf or two. I found one on top of my American Poetry Anthology and yet another in a little crystal bowl of seashells. And each morning I'd wake up and gaze in the mirror to see myself peering out from under an onion skin, recessing too. The money tree must've shed its last leaf the same morning I woke up to NPR as my alarm, declaring, "Good morning. Nissan lays off 20,000, posting a loss of $8billion." The radiator steamed and clanged, sucking moisture out of the air. As I rose in the dark and stumbled into the living room, I saw the tree's skeletal, spiny trunk and branches laid bare on top of my bookshelf. I felt a short wave of despair rise and wash over me. 'This is it', I thought. The vapors of the recession had finally made their way up through our vents and floorboards that morning. It was really true. We had another suicidal money tree.

I let it sit on top of the bookshelf for nearly a week, partly as a reminder of how dry we really were, partly because I hoped it could be revived. Finally, I stuffed the entire tree in its pot into the kitchen trashcan where it was kept company by Ramen wrappers and other evidence of the drought. In its place I now have a little rose plant featuring two delicate miniature red blooms. Its tag declares it a "love rose" plant. I've been nearly drowning it in water.

I can deal with two suicidal money trees. But a love plant with a death wish would finish me off.

Learning Curve

2009-02-03T13:00:00.000-05:00

Hola Chrysalis Comrades,

I've been thinking of you all over the last few weeks and missing my little blank Blogger box with all its fancy do-dads and formatting tricks. I've wanted nothing more than to fill the box full of bon mots in the small Georgia font I adore and tell you everything that occured to me as I sat in desks, in classrooms, in buildings, behind strangers.

But I've been filling notebooks instead.

I can't believe all the business involved in being a student. I have a packing list that now guides my morning preparations. Highlighter? Check. Student ID? Check. Homework? Homework? Did I actually ask myself that? Check. My husband has my class schedule and what nights he's responsible for dinner written out on a sticky note posted above the stove. We promised we'd never post those kinds of couple-y notes anywhere in our kitchen. Well, the days of verbal kitchen communication are over. Sticky notes and take-out abound.

I've made a couple of acquaintances. The sad news is that absolutely nothing about making friends is different at age thirty th...from the experience at age thirteen. You walk in, scan the room for empty chairs, try to make a minimal scene with your coat and its clanging belt buckle as you unload into your seat and...pull out your cellphone? This is an adjustment I haven't yet made. Getting used to a room full of students typing away on BlackBerrys before class will never seem normal to me. It's so isolationist. It keeps you from ever having to ask, "what was your name again?" or "did you do all the reading?", those crucial inquiries that bond strangers in a classroom to each other forever.

I'm looking for kindred spirits. I know for sure the VOGUE intern in my Writing for Women's Magazines class isn't gonna be my girl. She didn't respond when I asked if someone was sitting next to her and then sent text messages through the whole class. The young woman who walked with me to get books after my Writer as Traveler/Explorer class was another story. She lit a cigarette outside the building, asked where I was going and I liked her right away. I've spent the week deciding how I'll address her when I see her tonight. Mix this concern about social ineptitude with an obsession over learning the difference between Shi'a and Sunni Muslims and you'll pretty much be inside my head after two weeks of classes.

I've at least survived all of the "hi my name is__and I hope to get __out of this class" requirements. I now know what my professors look like and have turned in homework. It's all happening. I'm taking my cues from my fellow students. Oh, cool, yeah, I'll bring coffee to class. Everyone does that. Funky glasses are mandatory. Pea coats and combat boots, iphones, messenger bags--all part of the uniform. The learning experience is a broad one, no? And boy, I've got a lot of learning to do.

Yours,
OneKate

Orienterror

2009-01-13T13:44:00.000-05:00

Tonight marks the beginning of my new life as a student. I'm totally terrified.

I'll be attending orientation at Wollman Hall. It just sounds like an orientation hall, doesn't it? Wollman. Wollman Hall. Scholarship practically bounces off of its sturdy syllables. I've officially changed my preferred method of carting items to and fro from patent chic to utilitarian Jansport. I loaded up a chunky black two-strapper last night with an apple (yes), sandwich and pretzels. This morning I slipped in my brand new spiral notebook, an ice blue Meade beauty with a textured matte cover eagerly awaiting my class notes. When I hoisted the padded straps over my shoulders the awkward new weight tested my balance, pulling back as I pitched forward--two different agendas in conflict. On my way to the train I caught a glimpse of myself in a store window: a studious-looking Quasimoto.

Choosing a first-night-at-school outfit posed another challenge. I wanted to look young and Village-y, to somehow pull off magenta tights and an extra long scarf. I thought I'd even anchor a French twist with a pencil. Casual student-next-door meets foreign supermodel. In the end, the best I could come up with was a wide satin headband, some black glitter hoop earrings and a pair of lace-upVans. A David-Lynch-re-imagines-Lily-Allen-with-an-office-job kind of costume. The only salvation was my ipod and the Beasties circa the last time I was actually in a classroom. Hopefully nobody remembers Ill Communication's release date.

Talking with my sister, who begins her master's program tonight, we realized we have no idea how to be students in 2009. "Should I bring a laptop to my first class?", I asked. "That's kind of Harvard-y", she replied. Right. I'm nobody's Elle Woods. Except for the fuzzy pencil topper part. "Don't we just need Pee Chees and Trapper Keepers?", she squeaked. Golly, I thought so. The last time I was in an academic classroom we used computers to play The Oregon Trail. This is gonna be bananas.

My biggest fear is that I'll become a shrinking violet, somehow defaulting to my high school self--alienated and silent. Or that I'll find I'm out of touch, bringing my Bics to a Blackberry convention. Or that it won't change my life. Or that it will.

I suppose no matter what happens it's too late to turn back now. Every day will be an exercise in avoiding a self-imposed complex about my age, status, accomplishments. I've spent much of my life running from the way I felt in high school but maybe there was more to learn from that time.

I can only hope that nobody will be egging my car in the parking lot this time around.

Fingers crossed,
OneKate

The ChrysaLIST

2008-12-29T19:58:00.000-05:00

I can't stop looking at this image. After a lengthy search, it's the one I finally selected to represent the close of the first Chrysalis Year. I'm just thrilled with it. It's so perfectly demonstrative. Except, as I was living it it seemed a whole lot messier. This photo makes the evolution process appear so clear cut and defined. But what's a true evolution without a little oozing from pod to gluey pod, thinking you've broken free from one, only to find you've gotta spend yet more time incubating in the same oppressive embrace you were positive you'd outgrown? I'm still trying to identify which of the five stages I'm at. I'm pretty sure I'm no longer opaque and green, but neither am I touching the tips of razor-thin wings to my four walls, plotting an escape. In time, right?

I've just re-read my launch post where I promised to chronicle the good, bad and ugly bits of my massive overhaul while peppering it all with a little cultural commentary and a few witty asides. What sort of amazes me is that while I was on board for a year of change, I had no idea which massive icebergs would actually shift and how quickly the river would rush in as soon as I'd made enough space. Some things are forever altered, some remain agonizingly unchanged, but this is for certain, one Chrysalis Year after my initial post I'm still walking upright...in a country I've never visited.

In honor of end-of-year list cliches, I will raise my glass of chompers and offer mine, a simple ChrysaLIST of hard-earned truths at the end of this year of change. After all, I love champagne...and I am not above cliches. Not at all.

1.) It's just a simple truth that finding a New York apartment will nearly kill you. And when you find a good one, you won't leave it until a.) you're married, b.) a baby runs you out or c.) all of your pictures have left 8' x 10', permanent smoky indentations on the wall you painted gray...or peach...or sage...

2.) It's just a simple truth that every piece of journalism and commentary you see, hear or read will tell you that getting student loans will now be much harder the year you decide to go back to school. The same will be true the year you finally decide to buy a house or car.

3.) It's just a simple truth that the word "change" is as powerful as the force of high tide. It draws you in, thrusts you forward and scatters you in pieces at the shore. It's hard to remember when you're caught in the undertow that that's the point. Even the tender utterance is considered action. The only condition? You gotta take change on its terms, not on yours. Yeah, that's a hard one to swallow.

4.) It's just a simple truth that leaving the country is the only antidote to our poisoned, sleepy urban blood. This funky Vermont mom I met in Honduras told me over Cuba Libres that travel "rights" her. God, I love that. A good trip is like burning sage inside our heads, restoring us to factory condition.

5.) It's just a simple truth that drinking apple vodka sangria, wearing a furry hat and Russian military jacket in a "subzero" drinking room while dancing to all manner of gypsy stars will make it so that you no longer feel "in your thirties". It's a moral imperative that this is done every few months while wearing that de rigeur Pepto pink lipstick that makes you feel really self conscious.

And perhaps the greatest Chrysalis truth of all? No matter how profound the feat, sacred the moment, or solid the win, the devil's advocate, flip friend and self-involved boss will just never get you. Hey, enigmatic is good--you don't have to share. So, my new answer to the disinterest of the oppressive, frivolous masses? In the words of my immortal beloved, Gogol Bordello, "Well, fuck them! We don't give up."

The fact is, I believe in the power of reinvention. The Chrysalis Year began as a tiny aspiration I was almost too afraid to nurture and unfolded into a story about letting go so that I had room to receive. Nah, I'm still not out of my job and I'm definintely out of my skinny jeans but hey, if I'd done it all in one year this would be a goodbye post.

Thanks for taking the walk with me. If you stick around for more I promise I won't stay the same for long. Please keep me posted on your own Chrysalis experiments. Rest assured, I'll be right there with ya.

Now, let's go finish that champagne.
Happy New Year,
OneKate

Next Year All Our Troubles Will Be Miles Away

2008-12-23T13:36:00.000-05:00

So, this is Christmas.

If I hear it again I will move to Yemen. They can't possibly be playing it there. And yet, it is. It is Christmas. We've known it since the day after Thanksgiving. The relentless holiday carol battering ram beating on my mental door has weakened me. This morning I was rattled into consciousness by a rousing, world-music version of "Oh Chanukah" blaring from my indie music station. I'm slip-sliding through the streets on sheets of broken ice, bags in hand, wet mittens straining over raw knuckles.

So, this is Christmas.

I keep thinking of Christmas the year my mother left my father. I flew home for the holiday as I'd always done. The day after I arrived my father drove into the Colorado mountains to cut down a Christmas tree and dragged it through our front door to hoist it into its old metal stand by the fireplace. It was a handsome, fragrant piney beast--a blank canvas awaiting our traditional adornments. But nobody felt like making the effort. So instead of pulling out the endless strands of nearly antique colored glass bulbs and handpainted pine cones from the fourth grade, we just let the boxes of ornaments sit under the tree like gifts of apathy to our Christmas greenery. And so it went for days, a week even, the stoic empty tree a symbol of our family's sudden blankness. Finally on Christmas Eve my sister and I, drunk on too much mulled wine from the neighbor's gift basket, decided it was time to break the tree's silence. We opened a single box of ornaments and hung them without precision from its front branches, finishing with a flourish of the bright glass bulbs we'd had since childhood. The final result was uneven and full of holes, which was exactly how we felt that year. But in the dark with the lights plugged in it looked as though each glistening star and miniature sleigh was a single shiny band-aid over a hollow place and I suppose in a way, that's what they were for us too.

So, this is Christmas.

I can't stop eating the shortbread cookies that one of our vendors sent to the office. A five pound tin of the same exact cookie, row after row, stacked on top of eachother. This is the worst year yet for office gifts. I was praying for the chocolate-covered almonds from our air conditioning repair people. But they didn't show this year. Nor did the hand-dipped yogurt-covered pretzels with the Christmas colored dots and sprinkles from our packaging manufacturer. They must be pissed about the lip gloss bottle recall we did earlier in the year. Oh, the office gift. Such a pithy traditional effort at aknowledging that we're all tied up in the same "sucker" boat together. At least we got the PLINKO-esque jelly bean dispenser. A turn of the knob releases a single pink bean that bobs to and fro through a variety of little mazes until finally, it reaches your hand. That oughta keep me busy for the entire month of January.

So, this is Christmas.

I'm thinking of raiding my 401k so I can quit my job. I just can't see how the coming two weeks off will make it in any way easier to face another year of this continued identity stripping when I return on January 5th. I wanted to do this last year when my 401k had way more money in it but no, I waited for a more ideal time. Right smack in the middle of a global financial crisis? Yeah, I'd say that's pretty much ideal.

So...this...is...Christmas. Well, I will say this: I'm starting to relish the notion that my Christmas tradition is to pretty much have a different tradition every year. My non-linear Christmas heritage is evidence of the fact that life never ceases to surprise and amaze, even as it sometimes crushes. This year I'm going to look at my own Christmas tree with nothing short of astonishment. We got one up, felt like decorating and even slid a few beautifully wrapped boxes under it. The effort is its own little miracle. Here's to not doing the same thing next year, or the year after that, or the year after that.

Screened-In

2008-12-12T13:24:00.000-05:00

It's official: I'm depressed. I spent all day on my loveseat in the dark yesterday trying to confirm this suspicion. And even though the episode of Top Twenty Five Unsolved Crimes I watched couldn't have helped matters, it's true, I'm under a bona fide cloud.

We screened Off the Radar for an audience two nights ago. It brought phase one of this project to a close. Phase two will be harder in a way because we have to figure out just what the hell we're gonna do with it. But now I've landed in a weird sort of limbo. I know I have to take a few weeks off to come down from the freefall of the last year. My brain has gone dull and mealy like cold oatmeal. I'm useless. I can't multi-task or self-motivate or any other hyphenated word combo. I've forgotten how to have a decent meal at home. Instead I'm piling up points at local restaurants while my beautiful new black stove sits untouched except for cat paw prints. And my closet smells like smoke--a telltale sign of too many late nights standing outside too many bars trying to shake off the days.

I have to wonder how long I'll last before I start itching to tick my way back up the roller coaster and descend down into another rush of late nights and limit-testing days. The fact is, I'm addicted to the mayhem of my double life. I have been for over a decade. And when I'm in these "interim" periods, this in-between, I don't know how to be me. I've built an identity around overextending myself. Who am I if all I have to do for awhile is make dinner at home?

And yet I don't feel ready to enter phase two and read the audience response forms we handed out. They're sitting in an envelope next to our hard drive, a hundred potentially heart and mind changing sentences peering through the seal. So, I've decided to let them sit for a week (or maybe more) until I can regain my footing. I can't stop thinking of what it looked like to see Honduras up there on the screen, in some ways just as I remembered it and in some ways even sharper and more alive. I want so much to feel that moment and let it sink in before I leave the audience and go back behind the scenes again.

I both need and don't know how to use this time off. The screening was a blur of names and faces, handshakes, shrugs, cringes and comrades. There's no way I could have prepared for how it'd feel to be there and no way to prepare for how it'd feel to be past it. So here I am, December 10th no longer looming and a crater of uncertainty lodged at the base of my spine.

I think Sam Shephard said that right smack in the middle of contradiction is where you want to be--that's where the action is. I think I'm there. Maybe that means something good is gonna happen.

Aging Disgracefully

2008-11-21T12:40:00.000-05:00

Many of you know that I've just marked another year's passing. I bid it farewell from a Bulgarian bar and watched it ooze down into the horizon like a melting sun, all gooey and shiny and eventually gone, leaving only a slight blaze behind. It's a good thing I was nice and lubed up on Astika beer and apple vodka sangria because I didn't feel any sting. But that was a couple of days prior to my actual natal day when I was still in the early part of my particular decade, lightheartedly referencing When Harry Met Sally dialogue:

Sally: ...And I'm gonna be forty.
Harry: When?
Sally: Someday.
Harry: In eight years.
Sally: But it's there. It's just sitting there, like this big dead end. And it's not the same for men. Charlie Chaplin had babies when he was 73.
Harry: Yeah, but he was too old to pick them up.

I never thought I'd be such a disgraceful ager. I had a good model. My mother is so well adjusted about her age. She's let her hair go entirely gray, colored it, then let it seep back in, strand by strand, with great sophistication. And my grandmother faced her eighties like a Viking warrior wearing a steel breatstplate and studded armbands. She was a beast, grabbing age by the proverbial turkey neck and sending any "visible signs" of it whimpering to the sidelines to lick their wounds.

But here I am, a year older now. And why does it feel so catastrophic? I've always celebrated surviving another harried twelve months, feeling grateful to have more years in which to make an effort at thriving, "finding my bliss", knowing what I want to be when I grow up. But this birthday felt different somehow. I couldn't get out of bed. It hit me like a windstorm, blowing in hard and swallowing me up. Suddenly I couldn't breathe thinking about another year dissolved into the distance. I suppose it's a glass empty thing. I see aging as loss of years instead of gaining perspective, years in the can instead of years ahead.

Now, naturally I know that this is an issue loaded with conflict and symbolism. And I feel of two minds about it. On the one hand, why the hell should I accept the war of time on my face, body and spirit? Why wouldn't I do anything I could to defend myself against its attacks? On the other hand, why shouldn't I ease into my earned wisdom and battle scars and stop defining myself by yet another specific aspect of who I am? I'm certainly not the number I see on a scale or the number of zeros (or lack thereof) in my bank account or even the number of years I've worked at my job. Why then would I be simply...gasp...I can't hear myself say it...thirty....t...oh, fuck it.

There are some things I'm just not gonna accept. Or rather, some things I'm not gonna accept without railing about the injustice. Adult acne, aching knees, cynicism (okay, I already had that), and thinning eyelid skin (it's a concern, okay?). I do not accept these things. I know, I know, it doesn't make them go away. The eighties being twenty, almost thirty years ago? I do not accept that. But marriage, death, birth, loss, change? I can work with those. I'll take those marks of the passing of time as the acceptable part of aging. Not gonna stop me from considering Botox. Not gonna stop me from coloring my hair. Not gonna stop me from donning my own version of the Viking breastplate so I can snatch up more minutes and carry them off in my chariot.

In the end (no pun intended) I hope I can be a gladiator. I hope I can juggle the demands of age with a little bit of the pizzaz my grandmother had. She always told me aging is not for pussies. God, please don't let me be a pussy.

Please Mr. Postman

2008-11-13T15:52:00.000-05:00

On Thursday, news of my future career as a student arrived in the telltale plain, white envelope.

I held its contents in my heart as I walked down the hallway toward our building's mail table. The rigid corner was sticking out from under a pile of coupon circulars and I could just make out "The New" in partial view on the return address label. Before I even pulled it out from under the stack of junk mail I felt the burn of tears in my throat. I brought it into the apartment and slid it gently onto the butcher block in my kitchen where it sat next to my vitamins and spatulas for close to an hour before I opened it. The ceremony felt so necessary. It was as though every word inside that mailer had the power to baptize me in a bottomless sea and thrust me forward, scrubbed clean.

I used a butter knife to slice through the fold in the envelope and, slowly, the stack of papers clipped tightly between my thumb and forefinger, I pulled them into the light. My eyes scanned for the one word I'd promised myself would be there if it were an answer in the affirmative: "pleased." They'd be pleased, I'd be pleased, we'd all be pleased. But it wasn't there. Black type on a white page, saying nothing. Then further in, deep into line five, simply, the word "pleasure." I'd so planned to see "pleased" that it almost didn't register at first. But of course! Of course it's their pleasure. Modern language, naturally. "It is our pleasure to welcome you." And there it was. A simple "yes" to so many feared "no"s.

I wanted to share this news with you first. Walking down the spiral staircase of uncertanties on this blog is how I have come to some very concrete truths about what it really means to change. So thank you for plumbing the depths with me. I promise plenty more risk and rationalization ahead.

We can start with financial aid.

SWAK,

OneKate

Stress Management

2008-10-27T14:52:00.000-04:00

Our CFO has three CDs which he likes to alternate bi-weekly and which have become a form of mid-level office torture that feels pretty extreme these days. It's one thing to not like your job. It's another thing entirely to not like it, find out that it's possibly going to become obsolete at the hands of the same machete-wielding employment Grim Reaper who's cutting his way through all Manhattan office buildings and then be thrown into a weird sort of needing it/hating it/questioning why you even care about something that has given you acne, a drinking problem and anger issues in the first place conflict--all accompanied by the easy melodies of a.) Barbra Streisand in concert b.) Lionel Richie or c.) Genesis' Greatest Hits. The things is, he doesn't even switch them out. He'll just play one, all day long, over and over, for weeks at a time. Working across from him feels like being trapped in a retirement community's elevator with a ringing phone and a coffee maker.

As my personal hero Ellen Griswald would say, "under the circumstances", I have chosen to manage my stress in the following ways:

1.) By eating two bags of spicy Asian cracker mix, which is guaranteed to produce at least three canker sores before I'm outta here at 5:00.
2.) By using a paperclip to pick away at my perfect manicure, freshly painted yesterday with OPI Moscow Nights, a dusky, chocolate shimmer that, when chipped, makes my fingertips look as though I've dug them into someone's skin and begun to rip past the muscle. Freudian desire, perhaps.
3.) By reading the lengthy and pretentious accounts of visits to my dream Punta Cana resort on tripadvisor.com. Travel research is my weapon. The minute I see "10:00 a.m. conference call" in my email inbox, I go right to Google Maps and pick a destination. It's faster than morphine--a mantra that slips right into my veins and up to my brain: 'you are not trapped.'
4.) By trying on and wiping off every lip gloss in my desk drawer and then analyzing the color in my little gold antique mirror. Frost makes me look old. Pink makes me look cheap. It's decided, then. I pretty much can't wear lip gloss.

What I'm coming to realize is there's a sort of freedom in the intolerable. The absurdity of functioning too far beyond your limits feels like breathing inside a snakeskin right before it falls to the ground. But the unbearable itch of shedding a life that's too small does eventually give way to a brand new skin. Keeping this truth in my pocket as things begin to unravel is money in the bank. And yes, I think things are gonna have to unravel and possibly even break into a million little shards at my feet before I can build myself a bigger glass palace. But it's gonna be okay. If I get a slick new snakeskin me outta the deal, then I'm in.

Happenings

2008-10-17T13:34:00.001-04:00

I thought today would be a good day to post some updates since I left you all hanging after my last post, wondering if I'd secure myself a proper rack and become an eastern medicine convert.

Alas, I have (and I did). I'm now taking all manner of herbal detox tinctures and monitoring the activity of my spleen. See, evidently (and according to my acupuncturist, who is fantastic) I have "Spleen Qi Deficiency". Apparently this is a malady quite common among New Yorkers. I've now had three sessions with this brilliant practioner and in that time I have to honestly say, I've begun to feel a bit buzzed. I would assume this energized, fluid feeling of buoyancy is Qi, which is finally becoming unblocked. So far I've had needles in my jaw, neck, the space between my first and second toe, my wrist and up and down my calves. What amazes me most is that everything is diagnosed by simply looking at my tongue and feeling my pulse. Then somehow this wicked maze of pointy sharp objects winding its way along my acupressure points drains out pain, anxiety and toxicity, all the while stimulating my muscles and stoking this internal Qi engine . It's bizarre and I'm totally willing to submit to it. I feel oddly centered and calm-- a feeling so foreign to me it almost seems like a new disease.

I'm still waiting to hear from school. I realize it's ridiculous to get anxious (which I am). Three weeks is not long at all. I just feel like everything hinges on this one possible turn of events. I need to make some major changes if I get accepted and I'd like as much time to totally upend myself as is possible. When I'm bored I like to keep busy by angsting over whether or not my essays were pedestrian.

On the fluffier side, I did in fact get the professional bra fitting. I won't go into lurid detail but suffice to say that perhaps the biggest lesson of this year is that making changes, however minor, creates emotional momentum and emotional momentum creates external progress. Even if it's progress in the form of something frilly. The whole femme fatale experience of the fitting started me thinking about overhauling my autumnal image. It's definitely gonna involve something purple and patent leather. Perhaps this is the year I'll finally try to pull off that sleek and age-defying Blade Runner look. On second thought, that would have to involve bangs. Back to square one.

The Off the Radar pilot is nearing its New York City debut. We plan to fully honor it with bells, whistles and wine. Every time I watch the footage I thank Honduras. I can't remember a time when I heard my own voice more clearly than on its silky shores.

So, all in all, more balls in the air, more balls in general and absolutely nothing certain except uncertainty. Time for another dandelion tea.
Cheers.

Celebrate Good Times

2008-10-03T12:08:00.000-04:00

Well, at least I'm really good at waiting.

It's official. I applied for school. The notion that came to me in a dream as I slept in an island bungalow in Honduras now sits in an envelope on the desk of an admissions counselor at The New School--a mass of GPAs, demographic information, essay responses and course plans. Me, in matte, flat black and white, hoping to leap off the page into appealing relief. Truth be told, I'm so deep into this "living the life you wanna have" kick that I'm not even allowing for a plan b. It took me too damn long to figure out plan a. It's gotta work. I have no idea how long it'll be until I hear something. At least I've got Facebook to keep me company.

My mom told me once that if I can't learn to celebrate small victories, I'll never learn to celebrate the really huge ones. I can't believe how many things she's right about. This particular one, though, is so dead on. The morning that I walked into that school, transcripts in hand, and stepped onto the elevator with the leggings- and-scarves set was so...anticlimactic. I'd imagined the moment of handing my paperwork to the young woman behind the desk in Admissions and racing out to throw my hat in the air millions of times. 'I'll buy myself a fancy five dollar latte immediately after', I thought. 'I'll mark the milestone with that cement-colored nail polish I've wanted since May.' 'The treasured bottle of Moet I've been saving will finally be uncorked and I'll drink it straight outta the bottle.'

What I actually did was spend twenty minutes on the MTA and grab a shitty cup of Maxwell House at the office. God forbid I really have something to celebrate. I might just get excited enough to make a bowl of tuna salad and watch a rerun of Matlock.

So with this little lesson in mind and thinking ahead now, I'm gonna have two mini celebrations this week. That way when there's something really big to leap for joy over (i.e., getting IN) I won't have to ask how high. I'm gonna do two things I've always wanted to do that I hope will be like the milestone submitting my application was. One, I'm finally gonna get acupuncture. The list of reasons is too long to list here and anyway, who really wants to talk about indigestion and difficulty sleeping? I'm hoping it'll be a centering experience and that I'll get hooked and wanna go back. Two, I'm gonna get a professional bra fitting. Oh yes I did say that in this blog. I've always wanted to do it--actually see what they look like molded and sculpted by professionals into two shining orbs of glory. So, I've made an appointment at a little Upper East Side boutique to surrender my rack to a woman with a measuring tape and a handful of possibilities.

Bring on the celebrating, big, small, poked and perky.

Start Living the Life You Want To Have

2008-09-25T11:07:00.001-04:00

Most of you know I'm completely at the feet of the impeccable
Mad Men. Every week I take away some juicy bit of writing to gnaw on and savor as I while away the day at an office that shares an address with its fictional counterpart but only dreams of its edgy, smoky productivity.

And then there are the gals. Oh, those are my kinda broads. Kept, some of them, burdened by gender politics, all of them, but each desperate to define herself and fighting like hell with perfect, red oval fingernails to scratch through the surface of Brill Cream, bourbon and boy's clubs.

A couple of episodes ago, one of my Mad babes, Bobbi Barrett, wife of an obnoxious, of-the-time comedian who'd been carrying on with with the leading man (Creative Director at the ad agency where her husband was under contract), had a scene that will stay with me forever. She'd been in a drunken car accident with aforementioned lead and was in pretty bad shape. She couldn't go home with a black eye and explain how it'd happened, so to her rescue came Peggy, the homely young copywriter from the office. Peggy put Bobbi up in her modest Brooklyn apartment for a few days while she healed. Naturally, as storylines like this go, the women had a few things to learn from each other. Peggy's discretion was foreign to Bobbi, who lounged for days and smoked cigarettes on her couch in a lacy black slip. But to Peggy, Bobbi was what she seemed to me: sultry, fragile, calculating and absolutely magnetic. At the end of her stay, as Bobbi patched up her face so she could go home and slide comfortably back into her role as domestic femme fatale, she told Peggy that you decide who you're going to be and that to get where you want to end up you just simply "start living the life you want to have".

I don't know why, but that line got inside me. And it was still banging around in my mind days later when I had a martini with a friend (going for style points) and we talked about how much has changed in the last year. I've moved, decided that I'm applying to school, finished the pilot. But I still can't cut myself loose from this job. It's my last anchor to the life I'm so ready to move on from.

So, what would happen if I just started living the life I wanted to have? My friend suggested that I urge things along by cleaning out my desk at the office. Hey, okay. Since I'll be leaving soon anyway, right? Why not start packing up? See what happens. I actually gave my email address to our IT guy the other day and said "hey, don't think I'll be around long. Here's this for when I'm gone. We'll grab a drink." I'm living the life I want to have. I plan to submit my application to The New School this weekend. I have no idea how I'll pay for school, or how I could continue working this job and be in classes. Oh well, I can't worry about all that now. I'm busy living the life I want to have. Right?

I'm gonna try on Bobbi Barrett's lace slip for awhile and see how it suits me. I've already tried the other method--living the life I don't want to have--and that hasn't worked for years. So, let's just see how this goes. I'm taking my desk plant home tonight.

Running WOman

2008-09-16T13:49:00.000-04:00

Before I left for the desert, I had a formal running shoe fitting. I'd never done anything like that before, preferring instead to fit myself in a corner at DSW, hidden behind the bargain shoe rack and the fall boots display. I'd always be wearing my coat, sweating, carrying a purse or a Stop & Shop sack, walking no more than five or ten steps in the prospective pair to test them and then heading to the counter to drop some ungodly sum and get the hell outta there.

Now, I have to admit I've been off the sweat sauce for some time. My daily runs slowed at the beginning of the summer when we moved and slagged off completely when life became a daily grind of unpacking boxes, editing the show, crawling to the dreadful office and finally burying myself in all manner of frozen alcoholic concoctions to dull the noise. And through it all, I was desperate for an outlet, a hiding place, the old familiar knowing that comes from pushing myself really hard and getting past it. But as has been my pattern since conception, instead of balling up my anxiety and letting it explode somewhere outside of my body, I sent it further inward where it could get good and filthy and wash over me like a swollen, dirty river. That was the summer: me as still life. Necessary, yes, in order for other things to be in motion. But the pavement's been calling me back and besides that, my my jeans don't fucking fit right.

I felt totally sheepish going into a formal sporting goods store to buy running shoes. I've never seen running as a sport. For me, it's more primitive than that. It's like I'm tapping into some inner Clan of the Cave Bear tribeswoman, as evidenced by my threadbare leggings and cotton t-shirt running costume. Maybe I don't see myself as an athlete when I'm out there. But I think that's starting to change. It's not just about surviving a run. I can be faster, more efficient, work harder if I give myself the right tools.

I walked around for fifteen minutes, trying to avoid the "sign up sheet". See, the deal was, you couldn't buy shoes at this store unless you were professionally fitted. No standing in a corner, juggling a Sephora bag on one arm and a mini backpack on another. It's serious shit. You go in, they put you on a treadmill, they film your stride and they fit you. And every one of them is a version of the super hot cross country running captain you kinda dug in high school--lithe, willowy, lean. It takes major nuts to get your Hefewizen-ridden ass on a treadmill and let some clipboard-abbed, natural beauty analyze your stride imperfections. It takes absolute cojones of titanium to let a similar lovely help you find the right sportsbra after wearing the same uni-tit ace bandage of a bra through every run for a year. But I did both. And I ended up with a steel trap for my rack and the most gorgeous pair of silver and chartreuse Sauconys I've ever seen in my life.

I put them on for the first time this morning. They were gleaming new, awaiting a name. Gogol Bordello blaring, I got my ass outta bed at 5:00 a.m., laced 'em up and started running. It was everything I remembered: too hard to think of anything else and exhilirating as hell. I've set a few small goals to start. No marathons, just some consistency. I sorta see myself as running toward the close of the first installment of the Chrysalis Year. I've got some serious miles to put in before I get there.

I'm kinda feeling "Flash" and "Gordon" for my shoes. I think it fits.

These are the Only Words That Have Ever Made Sense To Me On September 11th

2008-09-09T16:36:00.000-04:00

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 pants 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.

Away Message

2008-08-26T22:14:00.000-04:00

Greetings Chrysalis Crowd,
Here I sit, awaiting my beloved Hillary Clinton and her vote-for-him speech. It's late, I'm bleary-eyed, I've got backpacks and trekking poles in the corner, ready to get dusty in the desert on my back. I'm watching the "Sound on the Floor" meter on CNN's overburdened DNC coverage screen slide up and down with the rise and fall of the voices of this or that speaker. I'm gonna take Hillary and the pundits with me in my heart as I leave. Perhaps I'll finally be able to meditate on all that's at stake.

I'm headed to Eugene tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn, where I'll celebrate the wedding of a dear old friend to a lovely woman. After the festivities, I'm on my way to the desert to hike the Grand Canyon, North Rim to South Rim, with a group of my favorite people in the world.

The canyon is my sanctuary. It's a cleansing place--a place of tremendous desolation and hope, humility, silence and grace. I go there to be quieted and beat down. The effort is a battle with absolute nothingness and total abundance all at once. Mostly, the silence of the space between the canyon walls is bigger than the sound of New York and it's bigger than me.

We finished the Off the Radar rough cut this week. Over five months watching every detail of that one astounding adventure flash across my view in HD has me full up. I need to empty my mental hard drive, compress some emotional files, make more space. The night we wrapped, I drove home feeling a tidal wave of despair approaching, ridiculously in tears over Pink Floyd's Breathe. It's taken days to figure out that creating this show has been a beautiful and necessary distraction for me and that without it, my devil's mind gets busy conspiring against my reasonable self. Me in Honduras--me anywhere else, for that matter, is me, boundless. Editing the show has been like having dinner with another self three nights a week. Talk about inferiority complex.

So, with that, I'm gonna go dive into the red dust and merge all my selves into one. I'm gonna get filthy, get blistered and burned and get right again.

Onward and upward,
Onekate

This Chrysalis Week

2008-08-17T13:01:00.001-04:00

This is going to be a frivolous blog post but this was a frivolous, shit week. Frivolous. Shit. Well, except for getting within one paragraph and a single sequence of the end of the Off the Radar script and rough cut, which is a milestone that puts other milestones to shame. But besides that, did I say frivolous shit?

In honor of a week that actually had me in a pathetic, cliche pile of 9 to 5-style tears at my keyboard on Thursday night, I hereby relenquish the following dribble:

1.) I want Kim Kardashian's ass. On mine. Like, as an ass-transplant kind of scenario. Where hers goes over mine and I no longer have mine.

2.) "I'm ready for my bikini but at the same time I don't really focus on those things." Thank you, Emmy Rossum. Only people who are ready for their bikinis have the fuckin' nerve to say that they don't really focus on those things.

3.) I've officially been a Facebook member for a week now. I'll admit that I joined to look up my high school best friend, whose typed letter to me on my 17th birthday telling me she could no longer be my friend because I'd gotten too "funky" wrecked my world for at least a year. Naturally, she wasn't listed because she's now a fancy corporate lawyer in London (information courtesy of Google) and doesn't bother with things like Facebook, I'm sure. But in just a short week I've started feeling like I'm a lowly Facebook "add"--a number in certain people's social tickers, helping them achieve some abstract total that indicates they've got a network as wide as the Sargasso Sea. I'm a hole in a social belt-notch, a face with a button attached. Never mind that I've got a profile listing all my little interests, that I'm a fan of dogs, I like travel and really love old art-rock. That navy blue "add" button next to my name is all they're after--like little social Pac Men and Women, eating up add buttons for breakfast. It's all about the "add", isn't it? It's just another type of consumption. It's fine. I'm glad I joined just to hear about the lives of two great women I used to know. But someone told me it's a slippery slope. She couldn't have been more right. I'm currently skiing down a few too many of those, so I'm gonna go easy.

4.) I dreamed that I was fired by Hunter S. Thompson, who screamed at me for not sorting things into the correct types of piles. "You know I don't use computers!", he seethed. I remember thinking in the dream that with the firing and all, the upkeep on these dramatic blonde highlights was gonna become a problem. Hunter S. Thompson. Firings. Translation: work. It all comes down to that. It's where I go during the day and apparently at night as well. Even in dreams.

If it weren't for the dream of seeing Off the Radar run straight through on a television screen and the idea of leaning over the edge of the railing at the North Rim lodge in the Grand Canyon in two weeks, I'd still be toiling away in that Hunter S. Thompson fantasy, dreaming of a gonzo boss' bullshit idiosyncrasies.

I can tell I'm prepping to go off the grid. I'm sorting through my mental wasteland and it's pretty much just fluff: a filthy marsh of asses, history, margaritas, and office space, all jumbled up together, accomplishing nothing. Time to go away and clean house.

Don't Call Us...

2008-08-07T13:08:00.000-04:00

Alright, an update is long overdue.

I went in to be seen for the beauty job. They didn't go for me. And while it was exactly the type of brand I want (I think) to work for: upscale, modern, fresh -- it was also kind of high-intensity. It appeared to be staffed largely by a gaggle of fluttering under-25s and there was a distinct Hills-y vibe to the environment: everyone in high-end flip flops and those ubiquitous shirtdresses that I'm starting to loathe. Every time I'm in a scenario like that I just feel so...dated. Yes, I was wearing my standard-issue wrap dress but it was far more Van Heusen than Von Furstenburg and I knew it. My husband always tells me if I'm apologizing for myself on the inside, I'm apologizing on the outside. So, I basically walked in wearing a nametag that said "Hello, My Name is Sorry".

I think I presented well on paper but it was one of the most intrusive applications I've ever filled out. They wanted to know my monthly rent, the make, model and year of my car, whether I was in debt and if I had ever indulged in alcohol on the job (clearly they see the two as related). I was absolutely quaking when they sat me down next to the other funky flower applying for the job on a worn, artsy-looking velvet couch. Prior to going in, I'd carefully placed a single precious, pristine white Xanax in the coin purse of my wallet in case of a panic emergency. This is something I sometimes do to stem the anxiety tide as a sort of insurance plan. I pretty rarely actually take them because they're long-acting and that's a big 12 hour committment to feeling soft around the edges. But knowing it's nestled in there alongside my dimes and quarters is sometimes enough to get me through an episode of tight chest and racing thoughts.

As I filled in the date at the top of the application my hands started shaking. It occured to me that I hadn't filled out a job application in ten years. And it was down the slippery slope from there. I lost my grip on the pen, feeling unable to correctly spell the word "July". I was certain the girl next to me in the gold Roman sandals was way ahead on her essay question about her accomplishments and disappointments and that I'd be left behind, stuck in the mire of reasons for leaving past jobs and professional strengths and weaknesses. Then I remembered the perfect white disk in my wallet. Somehow, in the ferocity of the moment, it occured to me to take it. Right there on the burgundy velvet couch. Next to Roman sandals girl.

And then I came down for a landing. 'You can't take fucking drugs right here, in front of a prospective employer who just demanded on their job application that you list the prescription drugs you're taking!' 'You can't take drugs when you go in to be seen for a job, period, even if they don't ask you what drugs you're taking!', I silently screamed at myself.

Wow, the whole process got me in a tizzy. I spent a day wondering whether they didn't call me back because I don't have a bachelors degree from FIT or they didn't like my answer to the "do you think everyone is basically honest?" question (yes). And then I talked to my mom, who reminded me that I'm interviewing them just as much as they're interviewing me. Yeah! With that in mind, maybe I didn't like the absence of low-end sandals in their office so much.

Seriously, I'm 32. I'm not applying for a part-time summer job at Sam Goody. I'm looking for the right thing. And I'm getting this internal message that that "thing" is probably much different from what I think I can do and where I think I belong. The entire point of this year has been that everything I've thought was one way is badly in need of a monumental shift. It's time to be open to possibility. I'm so feeling that. Whatever direction this bird is flying, I'm hitching a ride.

I wanna know what's out there.

Take This Job

2008-07-15T11:26:00.001-04:00

Well, here I am nearly a week after my last post. I'm blonder, for sure. I told a friend that I feel like Amy Winehouse in reverse. If there was rehab for bottled hair color addiction, I'd be there, smoking cigarettes, wearing cutoff jean shorts and a trucker hat. The desire to be blonde was a good instinct. I've ended up with Aniston stripes on a Von Teese base--my for-the-moment homage to Anne Bancroft in The Graduate. The cliche is no bullshit--I do feel like I'm having more fun.

I'm taking my retro stripes abroad for 10 days where I'll once again be hawking lipstick to the masses. I leave tonight and nothing's done. I can't seem to get motivated. I'm reading email newsletters, slamming coffee, trying to G-chat my tech-poor father. I never do this. Usually, my suitcase is sitting by the door a day ahead of time, neatly packed, plane outfit folded into tidy squares on top. It's currently in the closet, screaming at me to fill it full of proper on-air wear, shiny baubles and shoes, "pocketbooks" and all manner of scrubs and sprays which I'll use to fluff myself into a presence.

Fact is, my head is elsewhere.

On Friday, I started submitting my resume. When I opened it up to print I saw that I'd last revised it in February. It's been ready to float out of my computer and onto the desks of eager employers for five months. And the funny thing is, the decision to finally get out there and start looking was so unceremonious. It wasn't a final straw situation or the dream of a Mary Tyler Moore hat-in-air moment that sent me to the fax machine at Kinkos. It was just. Simply. Time. I sent two resumes on the first day. That effort alone was enough for me to justify two agave nectar margaritas and a Modelo's worth of celebration to myself later that night. Just the doing of it--the breaking through the fear that there's nothing out there, that the search will be fruitless, that I still don't know what I want and won't be able to project it...the fear that someone might call me and I might have to go in and tell them who I am and what I want and represent myself was so drink-worthy, so "hell yeah, power to the people"-ish, that I felt satisfied.

And then one of them called me last night.

It's super early stages. A pre-screen. A you-tell-us-who-you-are-and-we'll-tell-you-if-we're-even-remotely-into-that kind of meet and greet. But after I took the call a billion little futures exploded in my mind: the submitting of notice, my first week on the job, buying a professional wardrobe. I'm going to let myself go there because I think it's good. I haven't been able to for 7 years at my current job and I'm pretty sure that's why I've been there for 7 years. Gotta be able to see it if you're gonna be it.

So, who knows? If it's not this one, it'll be another one. But there's no use doing what I usually do: immediately trying to bring myself down to earth, telling myself not to get excited, minimizing it, making it seem small so that if it doesn't happen I won't be disappointed. That just doesn't work. And if nothing else, it sure doesn't save me any difficult feelings. I'd rather feel potential disappointment on the other end than miss out on the great feeling of possibility now.

So, fuck it. I'm gonna get excited. There's light at the end of the tunnel...somewhere.
And if nothing else, there's light on top of my head.

Ciao, OneKate

Lighten Up

2008-07-09T13:50:00.000-04:00

I've just been in California. I don't get there nearly enough and every time I visit I wonder why I don't just go ahead and vacation there. Why do I always feel I have to go abroad instead of packing up a Dodge Neon from Hertz and heading down the coast to sample tangerine olive oil and ride a bicycle barefoot in some funky yet upscale beach town?

Sadly, this was a work trip and I was stationed in the positively standard Hilton in Oakland. I found myself taking breakfast at that absurd business travel hour of the morning along with all the casual businessmen wearing cotton golf shirts, forced to listen to them talk about Body for Life over grapefruit.

I had some time to kill in the afternoon so I walked to Wal-Mart in hopes of finding beer to take back to my room. All I found was Red Bull and some diet tea with creatine that made me super edgy during an episode of Locked Up Abroad that I watched later from my flowered bedspread. If I were a real business traveler I'd be an alcoholic.

After a few hours trapped in depressive Hilton anonymity, I decided it was time to head for San Francisco. I arrived just as the sun was melting over the tops of the palms. I felt the familiar feeling I always have in California--slightly starstruck, oohhing and aahhing inside over the way the sun reflects off a particular window or a piece of fruit sits high in a tree.

From the moment the taxi picked me up at the airport and I scoffed at the driver's suggestion that I wait for the Hilton shuttle, I felt my east coast cliches slicing through that quality Cali air like a million little X-Acto knives. Hurry, hurry, gotta get to my supremely lonely hotel room so I can sit and watch crime television in the dark. As I walked up and down the gorgeous San Francisco streets carrying my unnecessarily large platinum patent purse I suddenly felt so...sullen. There I was, wearing all black in the middle of a shimmering San Francisco street. No light reflecting off of me, that's for sure. Proof of the sullen suspicion came when I reached Fisherman's Wharf and a "tourist sheriff" tried to arrest me for not smiling.

Since I've been back in the gritty city I've had this urge to shake off the darkness. It was pretty shocking to go somewhere else and act as wound up as people always say New Yorkers are. I do love me some edgy urban intensity, I do. But lately I'm finding myself fantasizing about Cate Blanchett's hair in The Talented Mr. Ripley--California crystal blonde. What if I just lightened up a bit?

(P.S. I got that little raise I asked for. It was little. And way more than a little late. But it might pay for a bleach job)

And Then We Came To...

2008-06-19T10:55:00.000-04:00

So, I'm reading this novel, Then We Came To the End, by Joshua Ferris. A friend lent it to me about a month ago and I took to it immediately. To say it's about office culture wouldn't really do it justice, but it does embrace the intricacies of the office microcosm and explores them in squirm-worthy, knowing, lurid detail, all the while hinting at some sort of ending of magnitude. I'm not there yet, but I'm indulging in its many nods to the way functioning in an environment of unmemorable carpet and pressboard shelving can feel like a sort of robbery. Its cover is adorned, edge to edge, in blank yellow Post-It notes--a perfect homage to the empty confinement of spending our days sharing strange space with stranger people, and the surprising blankness of outrage.

I was engrossed last Tuesday night, as usual, when the following passage flew off the page and stopped my heart:

"There was so much unpleasantness in the workaday world. The last thing you ever wanted to do at night was go home and do the dishes. And just the idea that part of the weekend had to be dedicated to getting the oil changed and doing the laundry was enough to make any of us still full from lunch want to lie down and insist that all those who remained committed walk around us. It might not be so bad. They could drop food down to us, or if that was not possible, crumbs from their power bars and bags of microwave popcorn would surely end up within an arm's length sooner or later. The cleaning crews, needing to vacuum, would inevitably turn us on our sides, preventing bedsores, and we could make little toys out of any runs in the carpet, which, in moments of extreme regression, we might suck on for comfort. But enough daydreaming. Our desks were waiting, we had work to do. And work was everything. We liked to think it was family, it was God, it was following football on Sundays, it was shopping with the girls or a strong drink on Saturday night, that it was love, that it was sex, that it was keeping our eye on retirement. But at two in the afternoon with bills to pay and layoffs hovering over us, it was all about the work."

I read and re-read that chunk of text three times before closing the book and nodding off. As I slept it rattled around in my brain like a loose screw I could hear but couldn't locate--irritating, tinkling, eventually banging and demanding I notice it. It was still with me when I woke up. The bit about microwave popcorn (someone's always making that), the reference to runs in the carpet, the way Ferris reminds me how it's really the tiny details that become our undoing in an office rather than the major committments of sin by management against underling. In the end, it's never really the lack of recognition, the passing us over for a better position, the eternal underpaying and overworking. No, it's more the cumulative nothings, like the the fact that The Company didn't invite us to dinner with the huge client even though we scored her in the first place, the sudden end of summer Fridays, insistance that we not eat Chinese food in our offices because they don't like the way it smells, and interrupting our meetings to ask for their messages (of which there are none). It's those idiocies, minor in nature and major in number, that have combined in my work life to numb me nearly to death.

Wednesday morning after reading the above passage, I woke up. I sat in another meeting listening to another spiel about another "opportunity to be seized" and thought, 'I will no longer be someone's opportunity-seizer without real financial compensation for it.' There's just simply a limit to how much work I'll do for The Company for free. And we're way over capacity. Way, way over capacity. So in the afternoon, I walked into management's office and told them that we needed to re-examine my "compensation to contribution" ratio. I have no idea where I got that phrase, but I think the looming fear of falling asleep on a floor covered in microwave popcorn and carpet runs was beginning to unzip me. In response, The Company offered the requisite passive-aggressive reminder of what they've done for me, reminded me of how underpaid everyone in our office is (that's supposed to make it fine??) and ultimately said they'd do something.

The deal is this: I'm building myself a bridge over which to walk into a different life. This job has its term limit, and we're nearing it. It's the next big makeover on the Chrysalis plan and is perhaps the biggest steel anchor of all, weighting me to my old life. It's a place where I regularly allow myself to be undervalued, understimulated, unchallenged and undefined. I've got to insist, no, fucking demand that I save myself from suckling for safety on shreds of blue carpet.

I don't know what'll come of my request for better compensation. In the end, I think it's most important that I asked for it. That I knew to ask for it. I felt it the minute I left The Office--the deep sense that I'd set off a chain of events that couldn't be undone. I guess that was the point.

This Is Me

2008-06-10T12:43:00.000-04:00

-"Your self-effacing charms are shot/

-Wake up now to what you are and what you're not/

-You can run, run, run/

-But you can't escape"

-- The Helio Sequence, You can Come to Me

I got dressed to these lyrics today in my empty bedroom. How appropriate. This whole experience of preparing to move has been like having one of those police highbeams shot straight into my center, forcing it to be exposed. I feel like my insides are a maze of closets. Every time I open one up and dust off the bag of postcards or box of shoes at the bottom, another door opens revealing more dust and denial. I've got a deeper closet than I thought--both in spirit and reality. But I'm emptying it slowly, learning a few things along the way and dammit, I can finally see the floor in there.

Cleaning out seven years' worth of me from the inside of our apartment has been one revelation after another. I've reaped the mini rewards of what I call "closet shopping"--browsing the racks in the back of your closet for items you haven't seen in years. In my case, I moved in in 2001 with items I hadn't seen since 1997. A single visit to the stacking cubes in the back of mine yielded the baddest-ass purse ever, featuring a comically huge zipper on the front, 2 pairs of jeans that actually fit, some strappy faux-snakeskin sandals, and a sexy granite colored Calivin Klein v-neck. I thought, 'whose clothes are these? She has really excellent taste. Score.' Lesson: I am in fact capable of picking out "timeless pieces". Nobody will know that purse is over a decade old.

On the very same closet-diving trip, however, I found another me lurking beneath the boxes of socks. Hiding in the racks was a girl who once went to high school in the suburbs and wasn't afraid to show it. I trashed the following: a pair of white overall shorts, a Gap cardigan from...wait...1994 (I know it's that old because I stumbled across a picture from my sister's junior high graduation in 1994 where I was wearing the hideous green button-up with a pair of plaid shorts), and a t-shirt displaying the following identifier: "bad attitude", in splashy type. Gone, all of it! I was ruthless, brutal. That entire section of my life is now at the bottom of a Staten Island landfill. Lesson: it's okay to let go--especially if "letting go" involves overalls of any kind.

Closet also being timeline, I spent awhile browsing the the mid-late '90s. Those were my moving-to-New-York years and they're really fun to revisit. I unearthed: one pair of steel blue vinyl platform heels from Halloween 1997 (relics from my Pamela Anderson costume), my three inch t-strap character shoes (the most elegant dance shoes ever made), and the real jackpot: a box of letters and postcards dated from the day I moved to New York, all through my two years in school and into life after. I took a couple of hours and re-read every one. Pulled from the wreckage were: my mother's written explanation for leaving my father, a greeting card from my grandmother for every single holiday (she was so good), letters of love and adoration of the kind you can only write when you're 20 and single, and postcards from my friends who all took show tours right after graduation through Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska. They saw the entire country while I was busy figuring out how to install my first air conditioner in the summer of '97. Lesson: People have made my New York life what it is.

I'm starting to feel emptied out, liberated. I've held on to many things way past their reasonable expiration dates. Some of them need to be burned on a big, 'ol ceremonial pyre (hello, leather pants), some need to be dusted off and reshaped so they can be part of my life again, and some things need to go with me into the next dot on the timeline. Moving is exactly like those lyrics: waking up to what you are and what you are not. I'm definitely not my suburban high school shorts but I might still be a little bit steel blue vinyl. Whatever I am, I'm emptying out so I can make room for more life.

Well We're Movin' On Up

2008-05-30T11:34:00.000-04:00

...to a deluxe apartment on the gro-ow-0wnd floor. Mo-oo-vin' on u-up...I don't know any more of that song. But I can finally write my own lyrics. We've found our new home. In Astoria. At last. Phase one of The Chrysalis Year Extreme Makeover Home Edition is officially in effect. Details will follow but first, a few props:

Thanks to the cosmic apartment Gods--those heavenly, lawnmowing, benevolent beings responsible for the assignment of empty spaces to empty people. They finally put us in our place (literally and figuratively). Thanks to George, our celadon-Jag-driving broker, and his negotiation skills. Never before have I seen such an honest attempt at wheelin' and dealin' on behalf of owner and future hopeful tenants. For three days he believed our shtick, we believed his, and that was all anyone needed to know. He: honest purveyor of fine vacated apartments. Us: honest couple in search of an upgrade. He did his job. He broked. We did ours too. We signed our first lease in a decade. It's a milestone of milestones in so many ways. Thanks to our three-legged dog and her pink bandana for being the picture of low maintenance gentility so that the new owner would consider allowing her to prance around on newly refurbished hardwood floors. Thanks also to our current landlord for taking her foot off the insanity pedal for a day so we could plead our case about pro-rating June's rent. And now, to our friends and family: thank you for tolerating endless philosophizing on how much the rental market has changed (duh) in the last decade, being patient while we mused on notions of gentrification versus renovation and borough identity, and helping us (me) locate Prospect Heights on a map. If we hadn't been able to hold in our hearts the vision of breaking bread with you at a table that doesn't have screw-in legs, in a kitchen with a floor that actually touches the walls, I'm not sure we woulda survived signing that two-page, single-spaced lease.

I reserve my final thanks for 35-08 33rd Street. Thank you, beloved chicken shack, for being my first home in a house-shaped home in New York. Thank you for having the kitchen we called all our friends from at 3:30 a.m. the night we got engaged. Thank you for hosting our rehearsal dinner after-party, a crazy drunken holiday cookie exchange, and countless intimate Thanksgiving feasts. Thank you for having just enough space in your living room for a beautiful Christmas tree filled with hand painted wooden ornaments. Thank you for being a private house--a private forum for the noise of living. You were (are) the home I walked out of as a single woman and back into as a married woman. You were (are) my shelter during one of the most significant periods of my life.

Of all the changes I've pushed to introduce in MCY, it stands to reason that this needed to come first. A lovely conversation I had last weekend reminded me of something: outside is in. Inside is out. I talk a lot on this blog about changing the exterior to yield results on the interior. I don't think I ever could've realized how much of a metaphor our living space was becoming. The darkness of living on top of one another was starting to feel like every empty space inside of me was really just a small, dusty hall closet. I have these applications for school sitting in a bag on the living room floor. I haven't been able to touch them. It's because I've needed a clear, new, open space on the outside so that I can make that same space on the inside and actually create something.

It's funny sometimes when things finally shift. It seems like they happen all at once. To me it's a sign that needing to move was some sort of a block. Once it opened opportunities could finally push through. In the same week that we signed the lease, all my remaining transcripts came through so that I can formally apply for school, we started editing Off the Radar and I got my first freelance writing job.

So, I've officially sworn off Craigslist and its hotbed of apartment huting deception and am now knee-deep in modern furniture catalogs instead. I'm in the market for saffron-hued dining room chairs because orange is the color of gratitude.

Me? Me?

2008-05-13T17:50:00.000-04:00

Omigosh, it's finally happened. I've been tagged for a Meme (the blogosphere's lengthy answer to the "truth" part of a truth or dare). I'm kinda psyched, actually. I love reading these on other blogs. They're sorta like those "getting to know you" emails where you're asked if you've ever been to Africa and if you prefer hugs or kisses and you roll your eyes but secretely love typing that your favorite food is Mexican. Thanks to the gamely Frantic Puppy I have the opportunity to honestly purge myself of the following wishes, pleasures and regrets. Feels good. Watch out, you're next.

I can't believe I have never...
Gotten on board with Obama. What's wrong with me? It seems such a good fit: the progressive values, eloquence, pro-green-women-gay platform, the saying-all-the-right-things schtick. The celebrity endorsements. The youth vote. The polish and shine. The magazine analyses. The hype. The opinions of so many people I respect. If I'd thought for one second in 2004 when I saw "the speech" that I'd be standing dry outside the big, ol' Obama swimming hole in 2008, I'da been shocked. But honestly, it's just not happening. He's not my guy. There, it's done. I've said it.

I wish I'd...when I had the chance...
This rates second only to wishing I'd gotten an academic education, which I really wish I'd done and I'm really gonna try to do. But that said, I wouldn't take back the education I did get and I'm not sorry I made the choices I made when I did. So, after that, I only wish I'd gone to visit the Liberian refugee camp in Ghana, West Africa when I was there in 2001. The group we traveled with had an opportunity to see firsthand how people at the camp were living after the civil war. Some folks went and some stayed behind. I stayed behind. I've regretted it for 7 years. I guess I was on overload. We were maybe a week or more into the trip and I'd reached maximum density. It was my first experience with the poverty of a developing nation and I was afraid of what I'd see and how I'd feel and I felt myself sort of going numb and no longer taking in the experience. So I didn't go. I missed an opportunity to see for myself the failures of the UN and the lives of people who were living in conditions beyond anything I could fathom. It would've given me an even greater perspective than I'd already been granted on that trip as well as a deeper connection to the people in the region, and I'm really, really sorry I missed it.

I've never felt so out of place as when I...
Last stood in a room full of actors at an audition about six years ago. Self-producing kept me nice and comfortable in the roles I cast myself in so on a lark I felt it was time to "get out there" and fire off an audition to keep the muscle exercised. The sides were on little slips of paper like the ones you write the name of your secret santa on and all the actors were standing around in a hallway prepping with these tiny strips in their hands. The breakdown called for "Freaks, pimps, glamour girls and Eurotrash". Now, don't ask me why but at the time I felt I could play Eurotrash. It must've been the "trash" that I connected to. And for some odd reason I wore silver satin pants. I guess I sorta felt they were Euro in a way. Flashy. I had some seriously contrasting blonde highlights at the time and I can still see myself walking up to the building in my disco pants, wearing a scarf (actorly!) and a pair of cheap pleather platforms ready to blow them away with my faux-Berlin persona. I knew immediately it wasn't my crowd. This was a room full of young, ingenue-y, waifish girls pulling off that wispy, tight-jeaned vulnerability with ease. And there I was, sparkling and cheap (but not Eurocheap) standing akwardly in plastic shoes. Insecure but not delicately vulnerable. I felt sorta like an Elvis impersonator in a performance of Swan Lake. I selected my sides (a poem about how my ass looked in jeans--another mistake) and tried to prep, at that point more as an exercise in pain tolerance than a genuine desire to play Eurotrash. When I went in to audition, I got about 2 lines in, uttered the word "orbs" in reference to my ass cheeks and from the dark came "thanks so much". I'm absolutely positive it was the pants.

My guilty pleasure is...
Oh, The Hills. I love it. It thrills with its urban Cali setting, jetting off to Crested Butte, drone-y boys and foolish control battles. I love its voiceovers and personal revelations. I love its megabitch and super-sweet, the flip flops, baby doll dresses, fashion internships and product endorsements. I love Heidi's fake tits storyline and her faux relationship with Spencer and Lauren's work trip to Paris. I love Audrina's ridiculous name. Audrina Patridge. Mostly I just love to put it on and listen to the monotonous voices of the young and lovely hash out the business of being beautiful and burdened with bad boyfriends. De-lish.

I hope...knows how grateful I am...
I think my husband knows how grateful I am that he's my cosmic twin. But he may not know how grateful I am that he's a hopeful person with great compassion. He might be unaware that I'm grateful he's profoundly dark and funny and imaginative. He probably has no idea how grateful I am that he eats my food, listens to Edie Brickell with me when I'm on a tear and calls me "ma'am" when I'm being naggy. What a man, what a man, what a mighty good man.

In my darkest hour I secretly blame...
God. Myself. We compete for first place. Though, I do thank God that I don't blame my parents anymore.

...changed my life forever...
In chronological order: The Michael Jackson Thriller concert, Prince, The Cure, Siouxsee Sioux, drugs, dropping out of high school, black hair dye, Morrissey, moving to New York, sleeping at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, Africa, This Woman's Work, getting married, losing my grandparents, finding our perfect dog, Gogol Bordello.

Every time I think about...I still cringe...
The first time I went on air on QVC in the U.S. I'm cringing so hard I can barely type. This also gets second place for the "I've never felt so out of place as when I" paragraph. I was replacing a former platinum blonde Mrs. America who'd repped our brand for a fucking decade, I had a severe updo and looked like the mistress at an orphanage circa 1935, I was under pressure to save our company financially in this one four minute spot and I was presenting cosmetics in a home show. I came just after the "mini aquarium" and just before the "car wash in a bottle". We sold 137 of 7200 items in stock. When I came off air there was no one to greet me. It's a "coffee is for closers" kinda environment. You only get an escort out of the studio if you sell mega product. I walked myself off the set and was greeted by a curt and hurried PA who pulled my mic quipment off in silence. Cringe.

So, now I gotta tag and keep the honesty comin'. Whatagoodguy, you're SO it.
Yours, OneKate

Dear Brooklyn

2008-05-13T12:30:00.000-04:00

The following is a long time coming and I know it. Before I move either out of Astoria or to Astoria...again, it's necessary. It's a love letter of sorts and also a formal acknowlegment that I'm a stupid-ass and need to eat a Thanksgiving dinner's full of words. So, with that:

Dear Brooklyn,
I'm full of shit. You are really are a great borough.

See, I've been passing judgments based on those kids who look like Carol Brady infiltrating my little Queens nabe for the last two years. The fact is, I'm intimidated by white belts, spray denim and vintage glasses. I can't find those things at Target and that makes me anxious. And, I dunno, I just feel like those kids aren't coming to Queens for our great spanakopita. They want our cheap(ish) apartments. Nothing wrong with that, but they're the ones who made their own borough too expensive in the first place.

Really, though, I think I'm just jealous that sweater cardigans don't suit me and I can't rock that easy, edgy urban style. And maybe I feel like our borough lacks the kind of identity I wish it had. But the truth is, I never really knew you. I only knew your slopes and expressways and that's just not enough to sum a borough up. Besides, every borough has a "haircut". Boy, do I know that. I live in Queens.

While shopping for apartments, we've also shopped for neighborhoods. We've tried on Bed-Stuy (too up-and-coming), Bay Ridge (lush and bustling), and our dreamy Greenpoint. Oh, Greenpoint. You're so us. Just edgy enough. We'll never stop dreaming about living in you, you sweet little artsy, northernmost 'hood. We've scoped Brooklyn College's antique-y campus (charming) and enjoyed a sunny brunch in Ft. Greene (we know, not a chance in hell). And everywhere we've been, we've indulged in the color of Brooklyn, its hospitable variety and sense of self.

Brooklyn, you're glorious, you absolute destination. I was wrong, I was wrong. You are a wonder of grit and gray and gutters, a loud and luxurious urban paradise. I've spent the last month frolicking in all of your offerings and you're...ahem...um...twelve years in...a find.

Mine is a tale of isolation. New York has a way of making one insular in the most un-insular place in the world. But the shackles have come off, Brooklyn. My New York territory has gotten a whole lot bigger. I can't wait to crawl further inside you and see what else I've been missing.

I'm at the foot of your magnificent bridge.
I humbly admit defeat.
SWAK,
OneKate

Reality, Chrysalis Style

2008-05-06T12:00:00.000-04:00

Hiya Chrysalis Camp,
There comes a day in every chrysalis journey when one must examine the full breadth of the tasks at hand (as well as the relative progress) and make some sort of big generalization about just what is being achieved, exactly. In other words, I need a reality check.

I think today is an excellent day for this. I'm sorta losing my nut. I've got my cell phone no further than six inches from my right wrist as I type, awaiting a call--any call--from a broker--any broker--regarding an apartment--any apartment. I've got two separate email accounts open in addition to my Blogger screen in the event that any one of fifty landlords/brokers/building owners I've contacted in the last few hours should happen to take a five minute break from walking people through empty, painted-over, poorly-lit, slightly aging apartments to sit down at a computer and compose a return email. I jump every time I hear the "new mail" alert and race to the little yellow envelope with my mouse only to find it's yet another "keep this flame going" email from a woman I worked with five years ago.

I've got each and every communication from Federal Application For Student Aid sitting in my email box acknowleding receipt of my application for the $3.50 they'll likely qualify me for but can't tell me about until after I've been accepted at a school I haven't decided on yet. Better than that, I have the auto-response from New York state's Tuition Assistance Program, which tells me its contribution is based solely on FAFSA's. Right on.

On the subway escalator this morning I was thinking about what all of this year's hanging about, flailing, faltering, hoping, sucking it up, letting go, accepting, resisting and resolving has amounted to thus far. And I decided that the measure of movement, however resembling of an iceberg, is the answer you get when you ask yourself where you are in comparison with this time last year. Asking myself that question is like dropping a big hit of Xanax (or binge drinking at a bar crawl--but that's another post). It slows me way down.

Last year there was no chrysalis. It wasn't even a concept. There were no empty apartments, financial aid forms, dream schools or polished up resumes. There was only the desire to be different in spirit and form and me, frozen solid under a lake of complacency.

So, five months in, what's my big generalization? The truth about change is that it's all relative. Timelines are abstract. Nothing ever takes as long as I think it will. Nobody else's timeline is the same as mine. Phone calls get returned at will, opportunities come and go more frequently than I have time to notice, my urgency is not necessarily anyone else's, and life is just simply not linear. If absolutely nothing else, the chrysalis concept has given me that big reality check.

I'm trying to learn that getting insane over stupid shit isn't necessarily the mark of regression but rather, growing pains. Part of the expansion process. Waiting for broker phone calls is a weird sort of blessing. Because, I suppose, they mean something is happening.

Away Message

2008-04-26T11:58:00.000-04:00

Hiya Chrysalis Crew,
I'm writing a few hours before I depart for London to hawk red lipstick on television. Many of you know of my deep, abiding love for those creamy, crimson crayons. I've been wearing the stuff since I was just old enough not to look like a Denver version of Jodi Foster in Taxi Driver. I used to wear it with dance tights and sweat pants when I first moved to New York. Now I wear it in the daytime with flip flops and hoop earrings. I leave it, like a signature, on the rims of glasses, on linen napkins and smeared at the bottom of cheap purses. All I have to do is convince fifty thousand British women that they, too, can experience the surge of confidence and perplexing blend of retro and modern glamour that comes from leaving your lip print on the rim of a coffee cup. Easy. easy. easy.

Before I go I want to honor the month of April 2008 (the official anniversary of the best music year of my life) with a few links 'n' notes about what I'm taking with me and looking forward to upon my return. Now, I'm nobody's music blogger. I'm not a cutting-edge insider, music geek or go-to trendwatcher. But in April of last year I was in a dank apartment in Nantes with my brother doing one of those music-share marathons ("okay, now you go", "oh my God, I HAVE to play you this!", "where can I find that?") and it shaped my entire year. As I finish packing today I'm thinking of that gray, salty Nantes afternoon and am feeling a similar excitment about the coming summer of music and all the memories waiting to be made to its soundtrack. This post is my 2008 music-share. Some new, some older. From my dank New York apartment to you, with love.

Lest you should think there is any formality to this list, see disclaimers below:

1.) I totally know that some of these selections are not from 2008.
2.) I totally know that some of these albums have been out for awhile.
3.) I totally know that many of these bands have like, 3-5 albums out and that this is not their "pivotal" album nor have I "discovered" anything.

Alright, with all that business out of the way, let's delve.

The following accompanies me over the Atlantic:
-Elvis Perkins, Ash Wednesday
*a stunningly heartfelt, lyrical gem with some of the most complex singer-songwriter melodies I've heard.
**Standouts: All the Night Without Love, While You Were Sleeping, Sleep Sandwich, Good Friday.

-Blue Scholars, Bayani
*rich, intelligent Seattle-based indie-hop with memorable hooks and everyman quality.
**Standouts: Opening Salvo, North by Northwest, Still Got Love.

-Balkan Beat Box, Balkan Beat Box :
*sweet world dance with gypsy vibe and sexy, trippy vocals accompanied by mindblowing horns.
**Standouts: Bulgarian Chicks, Shushan, Hassan, 9/4 Ladies.

-Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago:
*heartachingly gentle falsetto vocals layered over acoustic and percussion with lyrics of love and loss.
**Standouts: Skinny Love, Flume, The Wolves (Act I and II).

-M.I.A., Kala
*bracing, ass-kicking Sri Lankan (via London) lady-rap with insane production.
**Standouts: Bamboo Banga, Paper Planes, XR2.

What Sends Me Back Home:
-Gogol Bordello, live, McCarren Pool, June 20. If you haven't seen them live, you're missing a piece of the human experience.
-Elbow releases The Seldom Seen Kid, April 22nd. How can they get better?
-Firewater (the best travel music ever) releases The Golden Hour in April and plays The Bowery May 26.
-The Black Keys have released Attack and Release. Just good. Just period.
-The Raconteurs have released Consolers of the Lonely. Richer, deeper, more complex.
-Ghostland Observatory has released Robotique Majestique. Insane techno-glam-rock with a frontman to rival Mick Jagger.

Okay, now you go...

Size 142

2008-04-16T12:55:00.000-04:00

It's beautiful in New York today. It's finally the April we've been yearning for: crystalline, warm and glistening with spring's familiar clarity of purpose.

As the weather shifts I launch into my quarterly practice of trying to make seasonally inappropriate clothing thrive out of their element. In that weird post-winter, pre-spring transition period for instance, I often try to make flip flops work as regular shoes even though the chill April wind cuts across my bare toes like swift swipes with a shard of glass. I'm also guilty of wearing slinky summer dresses with a pair of tights in mid-winter, justifying them sheepishly with a scarf and blazer in hopes no one will remember they saw me in the same dress at a barbeque in July.

Today I'm especially uncomfortable. I walked out of the house in my cheap Target chain link print summer dress made smarter (I thought, at 7:30 a.m.) topped by a velvet blazer. But the dress is flimsy and too big on top and I made it work with a mini safety pin covered in cat hair that I found in a jewelry bowl on my dresser. As I walked to the subway holding the bottom part of the dress closed against the wind, my mother's words came at me from the recesses of a Penney's fitting room when I was 10: "ill-fitting", "unbecoming", "pulling around your middle". I've spent the morning tugging the front of the chain link dress closed, pulling at my boot tops to meet its hem, buttoning and unbuttoning my blazer. And the simple truth is it doesn't fit. It doesn't matter how expertly I hid my mini pin, my bra is still nearly in full view when I sit at my desk, which further confirms my image as part-time office worker/summer intern at a brothel.

It's all got me thinking about trying to make things fit when they don't. I'm doing that outside my closet too.

As part of the "chrysalis curriculum", we've decided it's time to move. Now, I'm not going to bore you with tales of rental woe, broker shenanigans or apartment atrocities. It's pretty obvious that moving in New York is no joke. The entire cosmos has to be in line (as does your bank statement, w-2, employment history and at least 6 months' worth of pay stubs) in order to even begin the search. But I'm finding that the desperate need I feel to keep my hot summer moments in heart and hand by walking around in a sundress in December is similar to the desperation that has me trying to make our perfect apartment out of what is very often just a mini bar with a bathroom. It's a stick of dynamite created by two polar opposites: needing to move forward and wanting to hold on.

The clawing insanity that accompanies hours spent on Craigslist browsing listings intensifies, hour by hour, making each and every little ridiculous blue link look more and more possible. "One bedroom studio". Okay, what is that? If it has a room, it sounds like it could work. A "one bedroom studio". Sounds painterly. Sounds artistic. Done. It's our apartment. "New walk-in apartment". You can walk in it? Well, thank God. That's what we want! To be able to walk in it. Done. It's our apartment.

And on I go, just like that, trying to make things fit. Pulling, tugging, hiking. Convertible 2 room? Junior 1 bedroom but on the Upper East Side? Bushwick? Flatbush? Give it to me, lemme see it, wrap it around me, try to fit us inside it, inside the neighborhood, bedroom, bathroom. Make us, it. Pretty soon, I think, I'm gonna realize I can put it on and zip it up but I might not be able to breathe in it. And that's not progress, that's just a filmsy chain link dress on a chilly April day.

So there's this little red building at 142 Franklin Street in Greenpoint. We're kinda hoping for it. We don't know enough about it yet. It might be a chain link dress, it might be a fuckin' Versace. Either way, this post is my vow not to pull and tug so hard but to instead a.) wear seasonally appropriate shoes and b.) shop around, look for the best fit, then move ahead.

Look Out, You Rock-n-Rollers

2008-04-03T14:48:00.000-04:00

Oh, Ziggy Stardust, inhabit me! I need a new persona. I need a rock and roll genie, a lean and lanky British God with jagged teeth and two mismatched marbles for eyes to sweep me up in a twisted tulle tornado and ch-ch-ch-ch-change me. In my fantasy, I'll rocket past dusk in a polished, hollow, shining bullet loaded with gleaming pastel potions, be made over by a drunk transvestite in platforms and return to Madison Avenue at sunrise to wander the streets in a vinyl raincoat -- a newer, more certain version of myself.

When one reaches a particular level of gerbil-wheel-turning madness, regardless of effort toward personal evolution, career progress or just plain forward movement without desired result, one must do something to push change from concept into reality. And at this point, I'm no longer referring to the kind of change that comes from an hour spent wandering the "Self Help" section of Borders, a pilates session, two pieces of expensive dark chocolate or three hours binge drinking at a place called Crime Scene Pub. No, I'm talking like, transformative change. The kind of change rock and roll genies write songs about. The thing is, sometimes all the "change" talk just becomes overwhelming in the abstract. It needs a physical manifestation. It needs a model.

Enter David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust. Ziggy's my pilot. Periodically, I have to pull him out, dust him off and slip into his blazing, manic-tron glory for a moment. He's the perfect icon for right this minute; for all this stagnant dust I need to blow off and turn into glitter. He's gonna represent my new philosophy: if you don't feel it, fucking paint it on.

I'm now working from the outside, in. Spackle up the exterior, put a brave face on, make myself look like the change I want to feel. I'm gonna airbrush every bit of doubt out of the creases of my face and polish up my platforms. Time to step it up a bit and build a beautiful beast who can go out there and do all my singing.

In honor of Ziggy, we'll start with the hair. I'm gonna make myself a redhead tonight. Well, really, Lana, my militant Russian hairdresser is going to make me a redhead. Let's see if a little fire on the head sparks a little fire in the heart. I need to see some change. I'll begin outside, head blazing, and see if I can start a wildfire.

"Just gonna have to be a different (wo)man". -- DB/ZS

I (Don't) Have a Dream

2008-03-24T12:59:00.000-04:00

Lately, I'm finding the treadmill and its running-to-nowhere metaphor a little too close to home.

For two weeks now I've stepped onto the belt, located Inside Edition, TMZ or another high-quality celebrity news show, increased the speed to my new target, dialed up On-the-Go playlist 10 (a choice blend of hardcore, classic rap, thrash metal and Brit rock) and attempted to hit the shit out of it. And every night, the same thing happens. About fifteen minutes in I decrease the speed and start walking. It happens before my mind even begins to waiver and the usual emotional walls pile up, brick on brick, burying me beneath them. Body trumps mind. Suddenly, I'm just walking. To nowhere.

I spent a lot of last week in a self-loathing stupor. After each workout I'd go a few rounds with my inner dominatrix and her humiliation stick, trying to figure out why I'm such an unaccomplished candy-ass. Emotional S & M always seems to work for me. After a bit of thrashing and trashing, I actually dug up a notion of value down there in the self-flaggelation swamp: I don't have any reason to run. Not really. Now, don't get me wrong, running feels good. In a bad way. And my secret Mistress Midnight loves that. Its payoff is so concrete -- the hurt to reward ratio a fine, exquisite line I'm constantly walking across on tiptoe. And for a time, its reliable drone and incessant pounding was good enough to keep me fighting the throb and ache. But I needed a carrot to chase. In November I found and trained for a race and that effort, the idea of finishing something in motion, became bigger than me. Seeing it loom there in distance made me want it in my hands to hold and feel the weight of and pocket forever. That image, the finish line, got me into running pants in the middle of a hoarde of healthy runners headed to the end.

I had a thing. A dream. I had a dream. Now I don't and I'm running to run. Well, really, I'm walking. And I'm not getting anywhere.

I think this might be what's happening in my off-the-belt life too. I haven't been able to figure out why I feel so plagued by sameness. There's plenty of change afoot but I can't shake the weight of routine. My mom asked me recently what my dream was. It feels cheeseball just writing a thing like that. But truthfully? I couldn't really answer with any authority. I told her I just wanted to eek out a living doing something I like, maybe raise a few kids and that's it.

What has happened that I don't have a dream? That's a disaster. Everyone wants to make a living doing something they like. That's not a dream. That's lowballing it because I a.) think I can't ask for more b.) don't think I'm up to it or c.) don't think it'll really happen so what's the fucking point? A dream is way bigger than making a living doing something I like. That's why it's called a dream instead of a potential outcome. A dream is what got me out of bed every day while I was washing dishes at Taco Bell in 1994. I saw New York City ablaze in my mind every minute of every day and I dreamed of being here. Hard.

I want to go one step further, though. I think it's important to posess a dream but a dream in and of itself is not enough. I think we should all be dreaming extravagantly. Otherwise, what's the incentive, really? Why fight for a potential outcome? Fights, like running, are only worth the throb and ache if the payoff is sensational. Even just the idea of extravagant dreaming teems with life and intensity. An extravagant dream is something you can adorn yourself with, touch and smell and hold like the estate jewel it is.

I'm not sure what my extravagant dream is yet because I've become too good at undoing dreams before they begin to float. But I'm sure when it starts to well up inside me it'll be ruby encrusted, fluid in organza and silk, shimmering like sunlight on rippling waves. Extravagant. And you can bet when I finally know it, I'll run my ass off to grab it.

Tiffany Blue Nail Polish Sparks Massive Internal Age Controversy

2008-03-14T13:19:00.001-04:00

I hereby admit to an absurd nail polish color addiction. I love the milky, opaque Laffy Taffy purple on shelf 3 at the manicure salon. I'm insane for glinting, swirling green pearls and shimmering yellow liquid in square bottles. Gunmetal? Slap it on me. Black? Did it 20 years ago and did it again last year. 1985 Pontiac purple? A signature color. But blue? Blue's my weakness. If blue were a girl she'd be the one I smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey with in the backseats of cars after I dropped out of high school. That color's like a haze of everything dreamy, sexy and wistful to me and it screams rock and roll. So when I walked into a nail salon last night and spotted my crown jewel -- a bottle of genteel, sophisticated, starkly contemporary Tiffany blue polish awaiting my ragged square fingertips -- little tattoo swallows took flight above my head.

And there ends the fairytale. Even though the cosmo I sipped was delightful and my celebrity trash magazine appropriately devoid of humanity, I still ended up flat on my ass.

My nail technician raved about the color all through the pedicure. We shared fits of flighty laughter over its flirty hue. I let the therapeutic vibe carry me all the way to the manicure chair and then...she said it.

"Beautiful color. Younger girl." And there it was. Of course she meant for a younger girl. And naturally I did what I always do when people embarass me in public. I pretended she hadn't. I even took the time to craft a good humored reply: "I am a younger girl. In my heart." There I went again, overcompensating for my own discomfort by accomodating someone else's faux pas.

'And so,' I thought, 'here we are. I've arrived now at a time when people are going to talk about my age. In front of other people. Like it's something I'm fine with and everybody's in on. Like back in the day when everyone wanted to talk about my body as if we all shared the same fucking feelings about it.' I think I knew we were headed for this day last year when my boss reminded me that I'm just "not that young, you know." Or even four years ago when a dermatologist told me that "twenty eight is absolutely not too young for Botox."

So, I'm curious, do people say this kind of stuff to men? I mean, when my husband went to buy his skull and crossbones socks at H&M did the clerk say "funky cool socks, man...for a younger boy." Absolutely. Fucking. Not.

All the usual cliches have come surging forward. "You're only as old as you feel." "Age is just a number." And then I think of what my grandmother always said and I like it best: "growing old is not for sissies."

I really love the concept of aging with grace and a sense of humor. And I find that with each passing year I certainly grow into myself with greater ease. But I'll admit I'm shocked to find that I'm doing a fair bit more thrashing about than I expected to. I'm apparently not fine with a number of the things that accompany "getting on in years."

But let me be abundantly clear about one thing: that is not why I wear blue nail polish. For that matter, it's not why I wear red lipstick, red glasses, silver eyeshadow or an ever-changing array of hair colors. I'm not longing for my younger self or trying to capture a feeling I used to have. Nope. I wouldn't go back there. I wouldn't want the feelings I used to have ever again. My life is about now.

I'm looking at the color this afternoon thinking its a pretty righteous badge of the current me. It's not the angry blue black of my past or the hopeful, billowy blue my granddaughter might ask to borrow. It's just what I wear. Without apology. For the girl I was, the girl I am, and the girl I'll always be.

I'm in a New York State of Being/Honduras State of Mind

2008-03-06T10:18:00.000-05:00

I remember a dream I had shortly before leaving for Honduras. I'd arrived in a desertscape version of Tegucigalpa with an empty backpack and no money. I'd instantly connected to the place, knowing I belonged there but feeling the sharp panic of having no resources. The dream seemed to have no end but was instead a sort of long personal narrative involving me searching the city for supplies. At the time I passed it off as an anxiety dream -- pre-trip preparedness paranoia. But now that I'm back in the land of Blackberrys and ballet flats, I see it for what is was: a dream about feeling spiritually broke; trying endlessly to draw on an empty emotional bank account.

I couldn't sleep the night we were departing. I was absolutely frantic imagining Tegus. It rose up in my mind, filthy, jagged, smelling of rubber and sweat and shrouded in industry smoke. I kept thinking to myself, 'This is the tradeoff. You have to suffer some to get the payoff. It has to be a little bit brutal and you have to be terrified or there won't be the afterlife of bus rides and beaches to transform you.' I guess I sort of realized in that tormented darkness that travel is about leaving a piece of yourself behind so that you can go out and fill that empty space with the richness of the world. I resolved to leave the terrified, emotionally bankrupt piece of me at home to go out and make a deposit of memory in its place.

I'm floating on top of my days now, not really in them but just slightly above them, my feet still (as my friend Kate says) in two places. I traded in my remaining Lempiras at the American Express office on Monday. Looking at the worn, crumpled pile of bills and their foreign president sitting in a stack on the clerk's desk, I felt the urge to cry. They seemed my last concrete connection to Honduras. As she sorted through each bill and placed them into an envelope I imagined my grip on little Eddie, our ten year old tour guide in Comayagua, and his angel wing eyelashes and fragile hands slowly dissolving.

I stared at the lifeless stack and thought of every bill as a snapshot: mountains of banana trees out the schoolbus window, bare feet and jungle vines, warm corn tortillas and Imperial beer on a picnic bench, the stone wink of a Mayan king, a hammock's imprint on sunburned shoulders, little hands and big cowboy hats, straw-colored dust and unpaved roads, backpacks, hundred degree afternoons shopping for jewelry, German Shepherd in the back of a pick-up, the cellophane sea, orange mud in a dripping green cloud forest, the camera's eye seeing something I missed, Mitch's dirty pant legs, Vicky's Mary Janes, and color, thriving, throbbing, living color everywhere. It's not a fair exchange: my American dollars for Lempiras, Lempiras for my experience in Honduras. Each of those worn bills is worth a million moments to me.

Honduras is rugged, gentle, hospitable, and raw. Travel there can feel isolating. Sometimes that's a feeling to be treasured and sometimes it's alienating. The country is extremely undeveloped and the environment lush but the cities are brutally urban. It's a place of enormous contrast. Still, the culture is clever and determined and we met wonderful people, Honduran and foreigners.

It's a country that got inside me, way down deep, and is now snaking its way through all my empty places and filling me with sound and scent and scenery.

We went and saw and captured our moments (22 plus hour's worth, to be exact) and Honduras captured us. I think it actually kept a piece too. That's the tradeoff, right? Leave half empty, go fill up, yes. But it's a bit like stealing if you don't leave some of you behind in return. I think I can speak for all of us when I say we'd be glad to go back and visit the Kate, Vicky and Mitch monument to Honduras anytime. Anytime.

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." -- Anais Nin

2008-02-16T11:56:00.000-05:00

Hola Soldados Prójimos de Chrsyalis,
I had to use my my mini Berlitz translator for that. I only know how to say "airport", "where is the jukebox?" and "what did I just drink?" in Spanish. The rest is gonna be a language free-for-all. Good thing I'm traveling with the veritable Spanish dictionary Vicky Cavaliere for when I also need to ask "why would you say something like that?" or say "these pants looked really good when I tried them on at Target." Vicky's my friend of many years from Denver. She works here for NBC. We share a shameful, historic thread in the form of a few years spent at Cherry Creek High School back in the gay nineties. She's also my co-Producer on the project that is Honduras.

Back in May, Vicky and I spent a summer afteroon at an Astoria Italian joint talking about the longer, stronger thread that we share as adults: wanderlust. Vicky's been all over the world and travel's had the same effect on her that it's had on me. It's created a fierce hunger to be shaped by where she's been and what she's discovered. She's just like me. Seeing some of the world has only made her want to see more.

One of the things I love most about New York is that it's such a fertile junkyard. So many cool people with cool ideas thrown on top of each other, once in awhile you're bound to find a treasure. Over pizza and wine, Vicky and I polished up one of those treasures for ourselves. We'd both talked about how much we longed to make travel and writing into work. I've certainly uncovered a truth over the twelve-plus years I've lived here. If you say how much you wish something was a certain way long enough, at some point it occurs to you that you should just fucking make it so for yourself.

Ouila, Honduras. We decided we'd create a travel show for people who travel like we do. We'd give it a spirited, personal revelation feel mixed with a tradtional guidebook style and we'd target an audience of people who want to see what else is out there. We chose Honduras because we've never been there, it's an eco/indie travel gem loaded with great things to do and it's in a region that's getting a lot of press but remains undervisited. We thought we'd go see why and then share it with our viewers.

As I write, I've received word that our multi-faceted Director/DP/Associate Producer Mitch Dickman of Listen Productions in Denver is at the airport and on his way to New York to join us on this adventure. He'll be with us for the entire two weeks, helping us chronicle the sights, sounds, smells, textures, foibles, risks and rewards that Honduras has in store for us. When we return, the skilled Chris Guido will edit our first episode. As we edit, we'll be posting web-exclusive footage and travel diaries onto our website as well as information about the premiere episode, which we hope to have ready to debut in May.

Come see us at Off The Radar Productions and say hello.

I'm taking you all along in my heart so that I can share beer and sunsets with you.

I know it's cheeseball as hell, but every time I leave, I hear this in my head:
"Goodbye to all my friends at home/goodbye to people I've trusted.
I've got to go out and make my way/I might get rich, you know I might get busted.
But my heart keeps calling me backwards/as I get on the 707.
Ridin high, I got tears in my eyes/You know you got to go through hell
before you get to heaven."

God bless Steve Miller. Anais Nin is damn good but sometimes you gotta keep it simple.

Vicky, that one's for you.
Nick, you are a true Doctor/Scientist.
And to all of you, fellow Chrysalis soldiers,
Las vivas y Gracias para leer!

No Camera Can Capture What Your Heart Can Hold

2008-02-12T14:48:00.001-05:00

Damn, that's good.

I wish it were mine. It's a slogan I saw last week on a "Visit Costa Rica" ad. I'm holding onto it like a tiny, polished rock in my pocket as I make my way through this final week before my departure to Honduras.

As I write this, it's eleven degrees in New York. Our local sensationalist weatherpeople are pulling out the fancy descriptive words, dusting 'em off and throwing 'em at our tv screens. "Snap", "bitter", "frigid". The ancient "feels like it's" wind-chill hymn floats and winds its way through the barren branches of the few trees that line Park Avenue. I was going to say the weather is all anyone fucking talks about but I've just realized it's all I fucking talked about for an entire paragraph.

I left my backpack on the floor this morning, bursting from every seam with OFF DEET and little packets of oatmeal. I've got Advil, Cipro, Pepto, all the one-word remedies. I'm loaded up with mini bottles of every conceivable necessity. Packing up this weekend had its usual haunting familiarity. The routine of it, the sort of odd, jaded feeling that washes over me as I stare at a pyramid of rolled up underwear on the couch. It just always strikes me sort of hard in the chest that I can make a home out of something I carry on my back. It feels somber and empowering all at once.

I watched a travel show last week where the host described the Greek culture as having intense wanderlust tempered by a deep need to be home. Pow! Another hard strike in the chest. That's me--that duality. Wanderlust slowly tattoos itself onto my psyche, making itself permanent, ingrained, undeniable. A living, colorful scar. And then there's home with its comfortable magnetic pull. I'm Christina in the Wyeth painting: always crawling through the grass to get back. That's gotta be the strange, jaded cloud that hangs over my packing for a big trip. I need to go fill up my heart's camera but...well, I'll be leaving home at the top of the hill.

About the camera, for a moment. I am going to find home in a backpack for two weeks, indeed. But before I go, I promise to let you all in on what exactly it is we're doing in fair Honduras. Look for one more post from me before I go with a few precious details. Let's say we're hoping that this post's title is true only on other trips.

If all goes as planned, when we return on March 1st heart and camera will be equal.

Ice, Ice Baby

2008-01-29T11:25:00.000-05:00

Hola, Chrysalis Cronies,
After my last post reflecting on change and why it can't just do its whole change business a little faster, I tried to send it into high gear myself. This is something I have a history of: being frozen, acting like that's a choice (worse, even saying it is) and suddenly trying to blast out of my own atmosphere in a little one-man pod on a mission to some new frontier. Blam! There goes five inches of my hair! Blaz! I really wanna be a travel show host! Blowie! I gotta quit my job! In like, eight months! Okay, that one's gonna be a process. But it's all proof positive, I guess, that I'm still trying to move under the ice.

Some of you know that one of the thought-amoebas I've been swimming around with under the ice is this notion of going back to school. I've been so busy trying to decide if it's a real idea that I've gone ahead and done absolutely nothing about it. As has happened before ('I'm gonna run in a race. On my 32nd birthday!'), a serendipitous moment involving Time Out got me off my mental ass. I saw an ad for a seminar on courses at NYU. The last of the series was on their writing program and I went.

Now, back to the ice for a moment. I've been thinking a lot about being frozen. Winter's a great time to think about that kind of shit. This glacier-thick sheet of ice I slip under and pretend is some important phase of development is self-imposed in every way. Duh. Moving on to the real revelation now...

I've been trying to figure out what it is. The ice. I think it symbolizes this big legitimacy issue I have. Are you asking yourself if you somehow wandered onto a Dr. Phil thread? I promise I'll avoid the pop-psycho language if you promise to stay with me.

When I walked into the seminar classroom in Cooper Square last Thursday my hands were shaking. I'd worked myself into a frenzy of anxiety about whether I should be there. See, I was wearing this sparkly shirt. I'd bought it before the holidays and hadn't found a proper occasion for it during all the mistletoe insanity. Still, it's somewhat fashionable and has its place with a pair of dark jeans. So I wore it that morning thinking I should be a bit fancy for the seminar. But it felt too disco-y, too lady of the evening, and I figured that out too late. When I stepped into the stark, fluorescent room to find a combo desk/chair, I swore I heard some sorta Sister Sledge or something playing underneath me. The point is, I didn't feel like a student. Which is ridiculous. I struggled the entire length of the seminar, shoulders up to my ears, feeling out of place--even in a room with several other adults who'd walked in late, carrying all their belongings in plastic grocery bags. Afterward I went to an advisor to ask a question and thought I felt his eyes widen and zone in on my shimmying shirt, instantly identifying me as illegitimate. 'Not a writer', he noted. 'A cocktail waitress.' Why do I do that? Freeze myself under the ice like that?

I had a great chat with a lovely person the other night. We agreed that this struggle for legitimacy might partially come from the duality of being an artist and simultaneously trying to make a living at a day job we don't connect with. For years I found myself apologizing for one entire aspect of my life, as if it wasn't the one that really sustained me: "well, I am an actor on the side", "well, occasionally, I may have to step out for an audition", "well, I do a bit of writing here and there." I've gotten so used to apologizing for what I love to do that it's become second nature to think I can't do it.

I'm really considering going back to school. But I'm gonna have to start thawing out. I can't go on believing my own bullshit about myself or I'm gonna turn into a fossil.

The Only Constant Is Change

2008-01-22T21:12:00.000-05:00

When I started running four months ago there was no agenda. It was just a dare: "See if you can do this". I was slow and labored. But somehow the intensity of my feet pounding on the belt, the gasping for breath, the beading sweat gradually became an even pace. The drone became hypnosis. I did it: I adapted. I grew. At first, I simply wanted to be stronger. I wanted to feel faster, sleeker, more reliable; like the silky lines of a new car, hard and shiny and built for speed. But slowly, clawing to move the red decimals as they ascended on the treadmill screen in front of me, I moved forward and yes, eventually began to change in spirit and shape.

I just watched a magnificent PBS documentary, Savage Earth, about volcanoes--Mt. St. Helens specifically--and how they change their surrounding landscape in a fraction of an instant. But that's just the explosion part. The shift, the stupefying destruction and eventual overhaul of a spectacular bang is really the result of an agonizingly slow effort at growth. The split in the earth's crust where volcanoes form is visible, actually visible right now, in the shape of a giant chasm-like faultline somewhere in Iceland. It's separating Iceland from the rest of North America at a rate of one inch per year. It's taking forever, but it's expanding. That sounds more like the change I know: contract, swell, widen. Inch by inch. Slowly, slowly...slowly.

When I decided things had to change I thought it might be like a blitz. Lights out, head between knees, everything into sudden oblivion and then all quiet. I've got the all quiet part down pat. But there's a big faultline between deciding to change and changing. It's taking my version of millenia. I'm scared to leave my job. Not because it's a good job. Not because it makes me stronger or better in any way. I'm scared because I've been one dormant hill on a map for awhile and I'm not sure what I'll do if I become a glowing, ingnited volcano ready to crack and split and become something else.

Running's wonderful because change feels tangible with each forward step. Time is measured in seconds and minutes, not aeons. I need to see those little red decimal numbers ticking along to the beat of my stride. They remind me that I'm going somewhere. I'm closer to the exlposion than I think.

It'll be okay to contract, swell and break apart.

Who Am I Anyway?

2008-01-13T12:59:00.000-05:00

God, I love that song from A Chorus Line: Who am I anyway/Am I my resume?/That is a picture of a person I don't know.

I've just wrapped up one of those office-heavy weeks that had me playing "phone-tag", commuting "off-peak" and performing any number of hyphenated professional cartwheels. On Wednesday I found myself in my fifth major identity crisis of the year when I received a solicitation, addressed to me personally, for a subscription to Office Professional magazine. Seriously. How general is that? It's not even as though it's a magazine for people who go to a certain kind of office. It's just for people who go to any office. Any Office Professional magazine. My left brain screamed "YOU ARE NOT YOUR JOB!". My right brain screamed "THIS MEANS EVERYTHING. LITTLE PIECES OF YOU ARE SLIPPING INTO THE STRATOSPHERE AND YOU'RE BECOMING ANOTHER EMPTY BLUE SHIRT!"

I don't have a resume. I haven't had one, professional or creative, for many years. I've built my own work artistically, which means I've never really had to detail my every accomplishment for anyone on paper. And I've worked the same day job for seven years, so there hasn't been anything to update anyway. Yet, I've been thinking maybe it's time to put myself into black and white, get these last seven or eight years down into those tidy little resume paragraphs. Me, concise and easy to understand. But, shit. The resume. Professional or artistic, it's just a mere cinebyte of what I've done--fragments, flashes. I feel like a Picasso painting: abstract lines and skewed blocks of color trying to be a work of art.

So, if I'm not an office professional or a fading commuter, then who the hell am I? I'm thinking about all the "me"s I've been just this week...

Am I the woman on the cover of Scizophrenia Digest on the Scandanavian coffee table in my psychopharmacologist's office? Am I one of the detached, whimsical crazies who walk into her office in a fog and a baseball hat mid-morning on a Thursday?

Am I the woman I see in the reflection of the 5:30 a.m. Amtrak to Philly? Am I one of those commuter zombies staring back at me in the train window across the tracks? A single speck of beige and navy blue in one of two glass stacks on a steel train, surging forward.

Am I the woman thrashing about to Bulgarian dance music at midnight on a Friday, drunk on Astika and freedom and wanting it never to end?

Or am I the woman who just bought plane tickets to Honduras, mental bags already packed, about to embark on a new journey into the world of travel television? Producer, writer, traveler....am I her?

I've been all of these women just this week. I've been so hungry for direction, purpose; for some concrete identity for so long that I've felt panicked, desperate. I want to know who I'm going to be. Abstract painting? Empty shirt? Glossy magazine cover? Or can I just finally come down for a landing somewhere (urban jungle or Honduran jungle--I'll take either) and feel like myself?

The song goes on...