It's Not My Fault

     For the past year or so, I sometimes wake up with tears in my eyes. Sometimes the tears come from an obvious place, but usually the tears are from seemingly nowhere. 

    I often don't let the tears themselves leave the confines of my eyes. They swell and gather like a dam, distorting my vision. When I wake up, I look around at my room which is littered with sentimental objects; framed photographs, souvenirs, drawings, paintings, and lots of books. Books that have remained in the same arrangement for nearly 4 years. And for those 4 years it has been seemingly impossible  to finish a book. I look at my bookcase, overcrowded with the same old books and feel rather bored. Books that shaped me in my early twenties. 300 books almost all written by women - Joan Didion, Rachel Cusk, Elena Ferrante, Nora Ephron, Siri Hustvedt, Clarice Lispector, Zadie Smith, Mary Gaitskill, Annie Ernaux, Magda Szabo, to name a few. The only books by men I remember reading were by James Baldwin, Oliver Sacks, and Akira Kurosawa's autobiography. I should add that this is not some conscious decision, it was a trail I accidentally went down - a path I am neither proud nor ashamed of. It just happened.

    For nearly 6 years I read about one book a week, soaring through them at rapid speed. These mostly female authors became so apart of my learning process in my early twenties, they deeply shaped how I wrote, spoke, thought, and even made decisions. This is of course, no surprise, but it dawned on me the other morning that maybe I hadn't come to terms with a possible detachment I haven't yet been willing to accept. This lack of acknowledged detachment has led me to believe my inability to read had less to do with my interests and more to do with the rest of the world. At first it was the pandemic, then it became a boy, then it became my cellphone, and then another boy, and now...it's Joan Didion's fault.  

    The cellphone has made it impossible for almost everyone to read. I don't need to get into the attention span depletion we've all fallen victim to, that is obvious and ran through. I've always been boy crazy, long before I became an avid reader. While I was an avid reader I was boy crazy yet I still read through it all. In the peak of my obsession with reading, I met a boy who terrorized my mind yet my impressive reading habits remained unburdened despite our tumultuous affair.

    It was a frigid and sunny Friday in February some 7 years ago. I was paying for my coffee when out of the corner of my eye, I took note of a handsome boy with a broken pinky wrapped with gauze and strapped with a stint. Nothing major. Just another handsome man in Lower Manhattan baring a minor injury. About an hour later, sitting in the park, I looked up from my book to see the broken pinky and then the handsome stranger whose pinky it belonged to. He was also reading. Tall. Dark hair. Big nose, small lips. I could tell that once we had made direct and searingly flirtatious eye contact, we were now both pretending to read. Eventually, in my periphery, a body appeared to my left on my very bench, intimidatingly close. It was him. "What are you reading?" I don't recall what it was I was reading, but it didn't matter. That afternoon went on for hours. We talked about everything it seemed. We went to his apartment, not far from mine, both of us unwilling to terminate the cinematically stereotypical but realistically rare encounter. We probed one another, looking for overlaps in our worlds. We couldn't find any mutual friends, restaurants we both frequented, parties we had both been to etc. Our world's appeared to be completely unacquainted. 

    That night he made me dinner in his small apartment. We opened a bottle of wine and sat on his couch between his bed and his bookshelf. His books were all written by old men I refused to read in high school. Dickens, Hardy, Mann...There was nothing surprising about it, nothing to remark on. He had a projector on which we watched a short film on YouTube called Quick Billy. It was haunting yet boring, sending me into a deep sleep. At some point in the night, he carried my limp body to his bed. To think some stranger man I met in the park that day was now carrying me to his bed as if we'd known each other a lifetime. Thus began a 9 month's romp around emotional hell in which I grew to know someone who could not be more opposite of me in terms of taste. 

    We competitively tried to out-read each other. He had written his thesis on Moby Dick, and wouldn't shut up about it. I was devouring Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend series. He was going in more esoteric directions and frequenting the more intellectual bookstores, picking up theoretical essays on spheres and bubbles while I was at McNally Jackson experiencing severe decision fatigue on whether to buy yet another book on grief or a feminist essay collection on 9/11. We despised each other's tastes, and since we were unfamiliar with the other's, there was no chance we could even debate on the material of which we were consuming. We were just talking at each other, boring ourselves into a place of no teachings. Usually these boring conversations would result in what felt like a  shameful form of intimacy. 

    One day, he lamented to me that Mast Books didn't have the book he needed for his book club he and his Bard alumni were starting. He didn't want to order it online so together we went to every independent bookseller looking for it. It turned up nowhere until one day I was at McNally Jackson browsing the English Literature section when the book he needed appeared. Without an ounce of hesitation, I bought it for him. That night at dinner, I handed the thin book to him casually as one would pass a salt shaker across the dining table. It was nothing. He looked at me dumbfounded, "Where did you get this?" "McNally," I said, "it was on sale." He was upset I bought it at such a store. McNally Jackson was for idiots, so he returned it. 

   Our relationship did not end well, but since it's demise, I have browsed bookstores and am constantly reminded of his masculine bookshelf, seared into my mind from all those lucid mornings where I was to wake and he was still sleeping and there was nothing else to look at but his stupid ugly books. I loved him.

    Back to the other morning, when I was crying mysterious tears, looking at my bookshelf. Later on that day, I went to the bookstore and b-lined for my usual sections; memoir, essays, Eastern European Literature, Classical Music, food writing, etc. I was tired of the spines of the books that I've picked up and never bought over the course of nearly a decade. What was I doing? I don't want to be here. This isn't working anymore, Joan. It was like confronting a break-up I didn't know had happened years ago. A revelation! My body then went to the North American Literature section, the store's largest of fiction. "American fiction...?" I thought, "This could be interesting." I picked up a Henry Miller book. A book the stubborn man from the park probably had. I looked at it like there was something to hide.

    It has dawned on me now that maybe the every-other-day tears are not coming from a loss of self but from a fear of myself. The women who raised me are no longer of use. I've grown a bit and hadn't a clue. I thought I was lonely but I don't think I am. I've been neglecting my own interests for the sake of my early 20's identity and the ego I've carried with it. I would not say this is to abandon Elena and Magda, Joan and Rachel, but to take my little self-served diploma and move on. I don't know who or what will come of this, but this detachment has completely sublimated my own aimless and outdated interests in hopes of birthing a new little world for me to discover. This is not to say I will swing all the way over to the masculine circle jerk of essays on spheres and bubbles, but maybe somewhere closer. 

    It's a new year. This revelation, though tiny and possibly obvious, has lit a new candle in my mind browsing a bookshelf I didn't know was there. I have my reservations, but now more than ever am I willing to look and see and take a moment away from the self I've always known.

The Echoes of My Cage

     I've been imprisoned in my own apartment now for approximately 8 hours. It is proving to be an unbearable torture. The plumber said he'd be here between 11am and 5pm and now it is a quarter to 7.

    My friends often tell me I have a problem. A problem that is usually described as an issue of lacking the ability to be alone; that I need someone to be with me at all times in order to maintain a sense of ease, a sense of happiness. But that isn't true. "Oh you are never home, Meetka" they say, "Maybe you should try to spend more time alone and sit with your thoughts for once." I don't know who decided that everyone needs to be in total solitude regularly in order to think straight. I just prefer to be alone in a sea of people than to wither away in my apartment...I understand the homebody but I don't identify with them. I also know people who truly do have some sort of anxiety around alone-ness, and not loneliness. Two radically different things. I often find compelling quips from people who live in New York that go something like "In a city of 8 million people, I feel totally alone." I would never say that. I feel like I live with 8 million people and I don't want any of them to leave.

    Being trapped in my apartment all day is only strengthening my desire to go be outside. This is pure torture. I just had a cigarette in my stairwell, looking out the window that faces the backs of 4 buildings, so I couldn't see any signs of city life though I could hear them, only emboldening my sense of imprisonment.

I woke up knowing that my day was vulnerable in the hands of a plumber's schedule. I know how these windows of time work. When someone is to come within a window of time, they seldom come at all. I had my morning coffee before I had to turn myself in. It felt like the last morning of my life. I crossed paths with people I knew, smiling at them as though my day was just like any other. I got back to my apartment at 10am so I would have an hour to shower, shave, and do all my skincare things. I sat on the floor of my shower, planning my day forgetting that those plans were mere pipe-dreams. I was going to call Anya, a postcard distributor who I ran into yesterday. I wanted to see if she wanted to get a coffee in SoHo and talk about men. But 10 minutes went by before I remembered my pale demise. I got out of the shower and as I flossed my teeth, I began to crave a tuna panini and a lemon soda from this place in Little Italy I like. 

    After I finished all 6 steps of my beauty routine, and doing my hair, I thought maybe enough time had passed and the plumber would have called to say he was here. But he didn't. I was starved by hour 2 of my sentence. I ordered a bone broth and a cold salad from some chain restaurant. A ghastly mistake. I tried to watch a film but I couldn't for it reminded me too much of the outside world. 

    By being out in the city all day and all night, I am filled with a great sense of purpose. A sense of purpose I can't seem to find in my apartment. Music sounds better on the streets, the sounds of busses and and people and the gates being slammed opened or closed, great smells and bad odors emanating from all sorts of things, and all of the handsome men to make eyes at. All of the men to fear. The crazies, the rapists, the attackers, the exes, the lovers, the new friends, the gays...

    Just yesterday I saw many lovers new and old. at around 10:30AM, I walked by a sports bar on Rivington Street, where I made eyes with a dashing man adorned with a Roman nose, who seemed a bit taken by me. Sadly however, it was an evil firefighter I slept with once after a strange encounter by the fire station.  At around 6pm, an Irish man I stayed up all night kissing and talking with on Thursday came into my work to say hello. He's in some sort of punk band and ever since that night I keep having thoughts about him. He's just here on holiday though and I can't wait for him to go back to wherever he came from so I can stop wondering if he'll take me out again. The only thing protecting me from that fate is my house arrest. 

    It is also everyone else, not the just lovers. There is a girl who works at the coffee shop I go to every morning who I have been historically cordial with. Simple morning interactions, pointless small talk we all fall victim to. Occasionally a laugh or a shared complaint we could both revel in. However, since I returned from a trip to Tokyo, she has gone completely cold to me. I asked her coworker if it was personal, if I needed to apologize for something I was blind to. Her coworker said that she just didn't like me anymore. I was a bit pinched initially after hearing this, but now I am appreciative.

    I feel that being around people is a battery for me, not too dissimilar from those who say they need to spend time in the sun to feel charged. Being around other people, strangers and friends alike, is my sunbathing. I've never told someone who has a need for sunlight that they are going to get cancer and die or that they are afraid of the dark. I get it! We just need different things in order to feel the same sense of standardized internal order.

     So now my energy is terribly depleted today, having been trapped up here, 5 stories above where I'd rather be. I don't care how stubborn this whole spiel makes me sound, I have always needed to be around people because I love them. Without people...I'd be nothing! I'll just spend my 'alone time' in another life. 

    

    

A Place Inside the Pines

     I went to a wedding last weekend in my native Ohio. I hardly know the newly-weds (I don't even have either of their phone numbers) but I was invited because the bride and I were childhood friends and our parents have remained very close. 

    I never feel comfortable in Ohio. Overly self-aware. Mainly because anyone I happened to know at this wedding knew me before I was a woman. When I am chatting with people I imagine they think I'm mentally ill and then like magic, I feel mentally ill. I imagine that when our interaction ends and we continue on our millings about, eventually they leave and in the utter most privacy of their home, they talk about that girl-thing. I only think this happens because my family does it, too. It's all anyone in Ohio does anyhow. Gossip, gossip, gossip...and then have a cry. 

    I used to wonder if only my mom did this. But during the reception I ran out of the dance floor area and found a massive pine tree with a sort of low canopy I could hide in. It became my safe haven. I basically spent the entire reception under that tree as girls from childhood came to bum cigarettes and we'd talk about the past. "Does everyone here's mom talk so much shit?" They do. "And then she starts crying," said one of the girls, "and then all the kids have to console her till she falls asleep." "Yep, exactly, mine too." 

    All of the girls who joined me under the pine tree were girls that I always wanted to be when I was younger. Some them have brothers, like I do, but I always wanted to be with the girls and the moms. Dads scared me. I was too attracted to the brothers. Interestingly, having become a woman, being around these girls in adulthood is not what I thought it would feel like. They are all incredibly kind, but I can't help but feel like there's something I'm not in on. Our histories are shared but our projections of who we are and who we have become are totally skewed. A closeness that is almost unbearable even though I have to remind myself their names and where they live every 5 minutes, losing the ability to listen to what they have to say. It feels like an Olympic sport, remembering everything. 

    The girls always treated me nice when we were kids, but I was always other. I was a boy. They were girls. Then I became a girl and I still feel other. Some things really can't change, I guess.

    I did my best to be outgoing, to ask many questions. I nervously went up to the bride at a cocktail party the night before the wedding. Even though I've known her since birth, I felt a bit intimidated. I felt like maybe I shouldn't say anything at all to her, but I knew it was the polite thing to do. "You know what's crazy," I said, "I haven't even met your fiancé yet!" "Uhm, yes you have. You met him last Christmas. He was actually asking this morning if you were still coming. You should go say hi, he's over there." I fell apart inside. I remembered him again once she told me that. I told her I was just drunk. (I wasn't.) 

    On the small airplane to Ohio from New York, I reminded myself in my diary to try and not say a word about myself unless somebody asks. Even then I reminded myself to lie a little, to not give too much away like I always do. 

    Nobody asked me anything about my life. I was relieved. People would ask me where I lived and then they'd move on or walk away entirely. I kept waiting for someone to ask me about my love life but nobody did, at least not till after midnight. By the time anyone asked me about my love life, I was gone. I was in another place. I was listening to music in my mind or something and thinking about him. 

    At one point, this small woman in a cheap dress came stumbling up to the tree. She must've been 35 or so. "Give me a cigarette." She was wasted. "You went to Oakwood right? I remember when you were like 2 years old I would babysit you." She went on and on. "My daughter goes to Oakwoood now. It's changed A LOT." Her drink kept teetering off the branch I was using to hold my cocktail and my belongings. "Do you have any weed? I want to get into this but I need weed." I don't smoke weed. "So, my daughter says that there are trans girls, teenagers, in the girls bathrooms. I got so mad so I called the principle and told him he was a little bitch for letting teenage boys dress up as girls so they can watch my daughter piss and shit." I was astonished but I let her keep going. "Oh! And then my daughter tells me the trans girl is going into the locker room and jacking off onto my daughter's clothes! Oakwood is so messed up now, man. You wouldn't understand it's crazy. Do not make the mistake of letting your kids go there. It's not the same as when we were there. It's awful."  

    The richest man in the world was at the wedding. He started dating someone at the wedding's mom recently. He danced. The small girl in the cheap dress tried to talk to him but she couldn't keep it together and I found her later on under my pine tree looking for cigarettes. 

    The only other real smoker at the wedding was Diane. She must've been 90. She would shuffle her way over to me, in her neon pink satin shaw and a voice as deep as the devil's. She went and found my mom to tell her that I was the only other smoker at the wedding and that she loved me. She became a safe face for me. Every time I felt shy I'd look for Diane across the dining area or from my pine tree. 

    There was a mom at the wedding who had a fixation with me. I noticed her at the ceremony. She was 4 rows ahead and she was rubbernecking every chance she could to look at me. It was a look of love and hatred. I couldn't tell. I avoided her the rest of the evening as best I could. During the first dance of the bride and groom, I snuck away up to the old cottage on the hill to use the bathroom. The scary mother was in there, fixing her makeup and texting someone. The tension was palpable, my palms instantly sweaty. In my memory I am looking at her through the mirror like in a movie but I think she turned around to look at me and didn't use the mirror. You could hear a pin drop. I don't know what it was. She was so stoic. The silence between lasted maybe 3 seconds but it felt like an eternity. I was face-to-face with my fear of the day. Suddenly, she smiled so fast. "I love your dress where's it from?" she asked. "Marc Jacobs. I got it on The RealReal for like $60." "Oh my god, I LOVE The RealReal. I need to get back on there." Then she walked out of the bathroom and I wanted to go wherever she went. I misinterpreted her stares. I went into a stall and sat down and smiled as I pissed.

    I got back to my pine tree and slowly all the girls from my childhood were approaching like a swarm. There were only 4 of them but it felt overwhelming because they were seemingly all coming from different directions, alone, at the same time, like I was being guerrilla'd. I gave everyone cigarettes one by one. I began to feel like a witch or something. Like they were all kids still and I somehow aged on to be this lady who hides in the tree and gives all the kids poisonous candies. Innocent yet scandalous at the same time.

    In the car on the way home, I felt very happy. I liked seeing those girls from my past. Being under a pine tree with them felt in many ways the same as when we were children, though this formation was not coherently organized. It was like this tree called for us to go in there and chit chat again. They were all very sweet, much more well-adjusted than I had suspected. I wanted to be friends with them again. Things didn't ever get very deep, we mainly talked about our parent's suffering and not our own. We talked about jobs and cities. Boyfriends. Boys boys boys. I met a girl named Crickett. She was a guest of one of my childhood friends. She would pop in and then leave the tree to go talk to the only single man at the reception. She deserves an entire blog entry of her own, but I'll get there later. 

    For the first time in my adult life, I felt a bit like maybe I wish I'd had an extra day or two to see all these kids from my childhood. I used to avoid them, I'd see them at the grocery store and I'd cover my face or turn around. I one time sprinted away in a parking lot and hid behind a car. They just wanted to say hi but I didn't have the stamina to withstand it because I am a coward when it comes to confronting my past. New York is my real life, I tell myself, and Ohio is a fictional, imagined, and completely hallucinatory part of my story, but that isn't true. It's all very real. Maybe New York is the fictional part. I can't really tell. Lala land. 

    

Prelude: An Introduction to 9 Essays on Mahler's Symphonies

    I have always been obsessive. Since I was little, I have always found things to fall in love with and then have torn them apart to bits and pieces with obsession. I've never loved something only slightly. I don't think my DNA would allow for only slightly loving something.

   I did not grow up in a musical household. My parents liked bands and things, but it wasn't the sort of household where there were instruments and records laying about. My mom was always very proud of her taste in music but it never felt put on to me in the way I read about other musicians or enthusiasts growing up "listening to music on Sunday mornings." Our family listened to the same bands and songs for years and years and years. The playlist never really changed. It was mainly acoustic guitar/singer-songwriter-type music. The only curveball was my dad's bizarre interest with Deee-Lite. But for the most part it was Norah Jones, The Dave Matthews Band, and Ella Fitzgerald over dinner. Music was pleasant noise. 

    When I find something to get obsessed with it's simultaneously exciting and yet also at times nauseating. It can start to feel kind of crazy. If I find a musician I really like, I just about lose my mind going through everything they have to offer. This can last for many years sometimes. The same goes for other things such as authors. From 2018-2020, I could really only read anything written by Siri Hustvedt. I read one good thing she wrote and down the Siri slide I went. I even began to write her letters and attended a book signing of her husband, Paul Auster, in hopes she'd be there. She wasn't. I get obsessed with restaurants and certain cuisines. The only reason I won't eat at the same place 3 times a day is to spare my friend's appetites or the restaurant just simply isn't open. I could eat sashimi for every meal, I think. I got obsessed with the bus recently. Still am. Sometimes when I feel extremely depressed I ride the bus. I ride the bus as much as I can and a lot of my dreams take place there. I talk about the bus so much sometimes I can see my friend's eyes glaze over and they temporarily go somewhere else while I talk about riding the bus. That's where the nauseating aspect of it all comes in. 

    The first time I noticed I liked classical music I was in my mom's brand new car that had all these fancy features such as showing on a dashboard what song was playing on the radio. Her dad had just died and she got a new car because when she was driving to his house as he was dying in his living room she had been t-boned by a drunk driver and her car was totaled. We were listening to the classical station in the new car cause that's what my grandfather would have listened to and my mom was missing him. Erik Satie's Gymnopedies were playing and it was early Spring. I made note of the title and downloaded it. I would listen to it on my iPod all of that Spring from then on. I would listen to it on repeat in the hallways between classes and ride my bike around and I would listen to it in the bathtub and in bed and I would listen to it at the grocery store and in my headphones around the house but I never told anyone. I listened to it till I couldn't anymore and yet I still have a hard time listening to it without feeling bothered. 

    3 years later I am 16 years old and living in a village in Hungary feeling terribly lonely. Every day after school I'd walk home and listen to some piece of music I had found that I thought was titled, Adagietto by some guy named Gustav Mahler (the 4th movement from his 5th symphony, but I didn't know that at the time). The word 'adagietto' just means for the music to be performed "slightly slow". I thought it was somebody's name or meant something deep in Italian. I didn't give a rats ass who made it I just thought it sounded romantic and pretty and lonely. I didn't talk to anyone at school because I didn't speak Hungarian and most people didn't like me or try to speak English with me. I'd just read books my mom had sent me in care packages and listen to this song called Adagietto by some old European guy named Mahler. His name mattered nothing to me. It was just the sound of the music I was interested in. But just that one movement, nothing else. The fastest 11 minutes of my life! I wanted it to be longer. I wanted it to go on forever. I'd go to the bar after school with my friend Diana and I'd go into the bathroom and listen to it and hide from her.

    Years went by and when I moved to New York at 18 I listened to pop, techno, shoe gaze, Joanna Newsom, Björk, Fiona Apple, Chairlift, etc. I liked all kinds of music and classical was more of an ambiance than it was an interest. I'd play it at the cafe sometimes as a way of setting a tone on a rainy morning but I didn't give a damn what was playing on the radio. Then something switched. 

    Classical music became this ray of light in my mind that just sort of lit everything up. All of the dark corners and shadows were suddenly in the light. It was like this bright flash of a camera that still has not gone away. What I thought was just a corner is now a very long hallway. It's like those videos you see online of someone finding a staircase behind drywall that leads to somewhere they didn't know about upon purchasing their home. I can recall many things with clarity in my life but that light turning on is not one of them. 

    So one day that Adagietto by that guy Gustav Mahler came back around in my orbit. I fell back into it and thought "Wow I've been listening to this for 9 years! I wonder what else this Mahler guy has to show me". It was all gibberish noise of what I found in his oeuvre. It was just more classical music but nothing really struck a chord like that Adagietto I was so in love with in high school did. It sounded like all the other classical music. I wondered how anyone could distinguish all of it. It just sounded like a genre and not an artist.

    It is now I can remember what really started this all. I became obsessed with buying my ex-boyfriend gifts because I was making lots of money working as a consultant for a branding office and it was a new found freedom for me to buy things. I was really bad at the consulting job but they paid me $1000 a week anyhow. I shopped all the time. I was swimming in money. I went to the fancy poster store and found a pretty poster for some Godard movie called, Hail Mary. I hadn't seen it and neither had my boyfriend. But the poster was really pretty and in great condition and extremely large so I thought it would fill the empty walls of his new apartment quite nicely. I gave it to him for Christmas that year and he hung it up all crooked (he never leveled it and it still is crooked). It was only about one month after I gave him that poster I thought "What even is this movie I got him a poster of? Why did I buy that for him? Neither of us have even seen it yet whenever someone comes over they think we are big Godard fans. The least I could do is watch the trailer" The trailer features a piece of music I fell in love with. It's the 4th movement of Mahler's 9th Symphony. This changed my life. That movement was the fuse of firework that has now completely altered my life. I listened to that movement over and over for about 6 months straight. Ever since that movement came into my life everything is different and I am so happy for it. 

    Mahler's impact on my life over the past couple of years has been undeniably transformative and inspiring. His music has opened doors to many passageways and corners of the classical music world but his music alone has been the centerpiece of my intrigue and obsession to classical music. It feels genuine. It has been such a joy getting to have his music soar through my life and there doesn't seem to be an end to this intrigue. It still feels new. As I write this I am listening to Mahler's 5th Symphony. The 4th movement just began some 29 seconds ago. This is the same movement I found one day in high school over a decade ago. This is the same movement that just 7 months ago I found myself in Berlin hearing live for the first time next to a man who became the center of my world for a brief yet beautiful little period. It was then and there in Berlin, amongst the still and focused audience, that I decided I'd write about this all. I decided then and there that I will see all of Mahler's 9 symphonies live, with no intention of order. The only rule was that I'd only see it if it felt right in that time. For example if the 8th Symphony was playing tomorrow, I wouldn't have it in me to see it because the 8th Symphony is not something I am interested in right now. The concert would have to happen in line with my interest in that particular symphony. 

    I don't know how long this whole project will take but the first piece will be published here on May 18th. I am very excited about it, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoy talking about it. I don't know who it is for but I trust it will find its right audience the way most anything does. 

xx 

      

so fine

   I've always been very fine. So fine. So fine so fine so fine. I often make do with what has been dealt. I try not to resent, or lament, or wish. I just try to try. But ever so often am I so thrown off by my own complacency with life that I can only wish for an alternative. I cry. 

    

    

taking a shot

Every morning when I sit in the park, I plan out my day in my head. Sometimes the day is full of errands, I route them out. I take into account if and when I'll become hungry and what neighborhood I will be in when that hunger comes about. When I do everything in my mental checklist, the day leaves me feeling satisfied and with a purpose no matter how mundane the tasks of that day were.

Lately however, I sit in the park and I can't think of anything I ought to do. There's nothing I 'need' nor anything I would want. I dig and dig and dig for things. I scroll on my phone and look at cleaning supplies I might want to try. I try and think of what I might want to write. I think maybe I'll want to write at a coffee shop but all of the coffee shops I usually like to write at have begun to bother me. Should I start writing at a bar at 1 in the afternoon somewhere far uptown? I talk myself out of it because I don't want to take the train downtown at rush hour. I tell myself I'll try a new restaurant but I always talk myself out of that too because I worry I won't like it. 

I thought for a moment that this weird phase I am in is because I'm losing my spirit in daily living. Not in a way that a doctor would prescribe as depression but that maybe it's all simply getting old to me. As a creature of habit this is a startling place to come to. I tell myself over and over again that change is good, that transitions in life are some of the most poignant times for growth but I always lose sight of that ladder. I want to stay right where I am! But I hate where I am. 

Of course I don't hate where I am in my life, in fact I am rather satisfied with my work life, my home, and my social life. I've spent hours wondering where this nameless and invisible void came from and when. 

Around a year ago, my camera broke. I wasn't too torn about it. These things happen. Film cameras are especially fragile and like a everything, they may die without any warning. I saw that death as a great time to try something new. I bought a camera on Ebay that broke within a week and I hated the way the photos looked despite it being $600 and every photographer told me they loved it. Now I had no money and no camera. I was mad! Fast forward to July, a friend sold me his $2,500 camera for $500! What a steal I thought! But that camera hasn't felt like mine and I don't think it ever will. The photos just aren't me.

So on it's way from Japan as I write is the camera that I hope will bring me closer to normalcy. The camera that died about a year ago, not the same one but one that it's now previous owner claims was only used a few times. Just thinking about it being on it's way is making me smile. It's the perfect camera for me. I have missed it so much and I wonder if I'm putting too much weight on the thing but I am getting fidgety just thinking about it.   

dusted

 The other day I decided it was finally time to go through my things and either dust them or ditch them. 

I began with my junk drawer, which in the beginning was difficult. To throw out something innately referred to as 'junk' is hard to justify throwing out at all. Why would one keep something they would call 'junk' in the first place? And if one would keep it why throw it out at all? In my junk drawer I found old ID's, lighters without any fuel, pens from Croatia, perfume samples, someone else's adderall, and empty envelopes with my name on them. I told myself to just throw it all away. I went into my kitchen and grabbed a trash bag and tore the drawer out of my dresser and turned it upside down across my bed. I sifted through everything with haste and kept only the old ID's and any lighters I got on vacation. There were some spare keys I threw into a Gucci bag along with an expensive perfume I was gifted last Christmas. 

I dusted some books. I can't throw away or get rid of any books. There doesn't seem to be a reason to. I am always perplexed when I see on Instagram that people are selling their copy of Bluets by Maggie Nelson. Just give it away! Books like that are meant to live in charity. There are expensive books that I could sell but I am too broke to sell them. I will only sell my expensive books when I have children and they can't eat. 

In my underwear drawer I went through about 15 bras that I have never worn. Two of them were bras that didn't fit and I only kept them for so long because they were once Bella Hadid's. It was clear the whole time that she had never in fact worn them and they were just donation. I threw those out with the lighters and empty envelopes. 

In my drawer of sweaters I had a particularly difficult time. For every sweater there is a perfect moment. I looked at all 30 of them and really looked hard. Most of them I was never going to wear so they went in the garbage with Bella Hadid's bras and the lighters and the empty envelopes.

After all was said and done, I vacuumed my carpet and fluffed my comforter. My room felt lighter. I took the three trash bags out and smoked a cigarette at my desk as I looked at all my hard work. I turned on NPR and Brian Lehrer was talking to those calling in about costume ideas for Halloween. There were only a few minutes left to call in. I was about to call and tell him about my chainmail when a woman called in and said "The best way to make a costume is to take all of the clothes you're about to throw out and really get creative with it! It's a win-win and its great for environment and your wallet!" 

hellppppppp!

 I feel as though I have lost things to say, though I know that isn't true.

Going through my old journals the other morning, I would write pages and pages about everybody's problems. Moira's dying mother, the way I loved walking by hospitals, how much I hated walking down certain avenues, avenues that reminded me of people I had big crushes on. 

Now when I write in my journal, I haven't a clue what to write. I sit down and think maybe I will document what happened last night, or this morning. But there isn't anything I want to say. It bothers me and makes my skin crawl. 

So then I try to read. I read a page and suddenly find a way to convince myself that there is no point in reading. 

Then I go for a walk and think too hard about what I want to write about. Everything I want to say feels weightless and meaningless. The second my mind goes elsewhere I start talking to myself about all of the things I've been trying to say and so I go find a place to write it all down and it all disappears by the time I pull my pen out. 

I am so bored of reading and writing but maybe it will come back. 

a weekend in the smallest world: 2 ballets

I've seen 3 ballets in my adult life. The first time was maybe 4 years ago at the Lincoln Center, and the other 2 times were this past weekend. 

    I'm not a connoisseur of ballet, nor am I a regular though by the second evening I felt like I was. The first evening was 4 short ballets with an intermission right in the middle, and I was only somewhat into the performances themselves. They were contemporary, experimental, and at times dull. The most exciting of the 4 acts was the final one. My friend having done the set design stage piece holds no weight in my bias, but the music did. Caroline Shaw's Partita, which won the Pulitzer Prize some years ago, has always snuck into my life in odd ways and finding something recognizable in a setting you don't find yourself in often is always a good way to be swayed. 

    The second evening was a much more classical lineup, also in 4 parts though this time with 2 intermissions. Debussy, Tchaikovsky, and some other heavy hitters that I can't recall off the top of my head. To be entirely honest I was not dreading the second evening but I felt a bit 'ballet-ed out'. I was hoping it would be quick but when we sat down in the Orchestra left seats, I noticed in the Playbill that it was going to be a long evening. The orchestra tuned and the curtain rose to unveil a large blue screen, facing the audience. It was a mystifyingly deep shade of royal blue, illuminated at just the most comfortable level for the human eyes. The second act had me crying, a riveting duet by two of the company's biggest stars, the stage set to look like a dance studio made of linens, with the blue screen still behind it. The two dancers were in love and for some reason that made me cry. Debussy blaring. It was pure magic! I was moved, you could say. 

    I got to the Whiskey Tavern down by the jail just 30 minutes after the performances had ended. It was a startling change of scenery after 3 hours of classical hypnosis. I ordered a gin and tonic that was served in a tall heavy pint glass. The Whiskey Tavern wasn't nice at all but somehow they have nicer glassware than The Met. I used to order champagne at intermission when I would go to opera with my best friend but the plastic champagne flute was too bruising to my vision of a glamorous night uptown. 

    I don't remember the first opera I saw at The Met but me and the man I loved most at the time left at intermission to have a drink somewhere else. On the way down the winding red steps, we saw Joan Didion inching her frail way down heading towards the ladies room.

    In December of 2019 me and my friend saw the final matinée performance of Phillip Glass' Akhnaten. It was horribly boring and tediously long, so we left at the 2nd intermission and got drunk at the diner behind Juilliard. We ate burgers and cursed that opera like it had personally done something deplorable to us. Later that week, on Christmas Eve, we ended up meeting the actor who played Akhnaten (the lead and pretty much only person in the 4 hour slo-motion string heavy bore). Ethan had told him we watched the whole thing and later on I told him we left at intermission and that it was boring, but that was an accident. 

    This past weekend though, on Friday, I did see Mikhail Baryshnikov in the lobby. He was stunningly old. I couldn't believe it! Most people know him as "the Russian" Carrie Bradshaw, of Sex and the City, dates in the series' final seasons. Weirdly, I met his ex-wife's daughter a month ago at a bar somewhere upstate. The world is so small. 

    As I sat through these performances, I was thinking so many things. I always drift off mentally at operas, symphonies, and ballets! It's a wonderful way to go about things. I always think about how lucky I am to not be anxious at a ballet, opera, or symphony. Nicole Kidman in Johnathan Glazer's Birth, cries in one scene while attending the symphony. Her character is so terribly anxious. Her dead husband is in the body of a 10 year old boy and she just came to terms with the fact that she wants to fuck him. It's crazy. 

Anywho, hope you all have a wonderful weekend and make sure to go to the ballet, but only if you are not anxious. 

sent from my desktop

 It is almost 7pm and I am at home. I don't know the last time I was home between the hours of 4-7pm. I am typing this on my brand new desktop. I got it at the apple store in soho 3 hours ago and I am incredibly obsessed with it. Everyone said to get a laptop so I can write at a coffee shop or something if need be but I can assure you I had a laptop for 6 years and it seldom left my apartment. its so cool to have a computer tethered to my desk which is tethered to my home. This man I know who is currently in Paris is going to give to me his MacBook Air so so I can write out of my home if I there is an emergency, or say, a job I have to do.

I've been hungover all day and buying this computer in such state was not the most sobering. I was out till 7 am and woke up at my friends house about 20 doors down from mine at around 11 am. I took a long shower and shaved my legs and remembered that today I had to buy a computer. So I went and I walked my broken self to soho and said "I'm buying that computer." I thought this would be easy but it wasn't. I paid with my phone and the transaction took roughly 15 minutes but I had to lie a whole lot. The guy selling me this beautiful piece of technology asked me if I'm a student. I lied and said I was. Then he asked "What are you studying?" I lied and told him I was an aspiring news journalist, studying political journalism. He asked me where I studied and I didn't know what to say, so we moved on and he told me about his brother's dream of making music for museum lobbies. I lied a third time and said that I would love to hear it one day. I told the guy I was really hungover. I told him about how I was at a bar till 7am. I told him about how I was going to faint if I don't get fresh air soon. I walked across the street with my huge box, scared I'd get murdered, jumped, robbed, and raped on my way to Fanelli. Aaron and Lucas were drinking beers and eating onion rings. I had a Coca Cola because I was still suffering. I hailed a cab on Broadway like a rockstar, with my giant desktop for everyone too see. I only had to pay $130.00! Now I will pay that every month for a year. 

Anywho, I hope that having this desktop will allow me to write more, as it is in front of my bed (my bed is my chair) unlike my laptop which lived under my couch or under a giant stack of photo albums. I forgot to mention that this computer is also for making music. So more writing and more music! This is great. I love this thing. I'ts so beautiful. 

Sincerely, 

Meetka. 

Sent from my iMac.