Goodnight, Sweetheart

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

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

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

I May (Or May Not) Miss These Things

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

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

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

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

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

I Just Ordered a $13.65 Lunch

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

Soup is for closers
Closers and rich people

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

Ode to Structure

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

Riding the Elevator into the Sky

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

On Finally Getting Out

Embrace it when it happens quickly.

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

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Tuesday Morning

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

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

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

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

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

You Take the Good, You Take the Bad

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

• Egg Recall
• Iraq
• Jennifer Aniston

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

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

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