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

Let's start with: this hair.

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

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

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

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

Lloyd Dobler is My Career Counselor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a lament, really.

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

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

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

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

But I want bigger bang.

'Tis a Quiet Thing, Ain't It?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Color is Your Bulletin Board?

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

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

Moving on...

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

Today I removed from my bulletin board:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Got it?

Love and Taxes

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

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

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

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

I was thinking,

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

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