The End

"In my end is my beginning. In my beginning is my end." - T.S. Eliot

I have concluded that baking is a waste of time, but a nice thing to be be able to do.  It is also fattening.  Therefore, without even taking much of a stab at it to begin with, I failed in my pie-a-week quest.  I will work from time to time to master my mom's pie recipe, and I expect to be able to bake a decent cake when I have dinner guests.  But right now I'm just not going to carve out so much time for it.  Not when there are better things to do.

I have also concluded that a personal blog with limited reason for existence, that has an audience of 5 people tops, is another waste of time.  And this blog in particular feels more like a relic than where I really want to do some interesting writing.  I was energized to journal in a public way when I lived abroad briefly, with nothing to do but contemplate beauty and my little place in the world.  No wonder I haven't been able to keep writing along those lines: I have less space to contemplate beauty than to chronicle the minutiae of daily life, and who wants to write about that?

I prefer my offline observations, written away from judgment and harboring the potential to create something new, something more interesting than my day to day.  And other non-fiction projects beckon, including one project that speaks much more closely to my own experience, will be much more useful and interesting to write.

But still this open-ended blog is hard to close!  Do I delete it all, keeping the posts I like offline?  Do I just let it float out here forever?  As long as I've neglected this blog I've felt period guilt twinges, as if I've forgotten to write to a beloved cousin or lost touch with a friend.  But to be honest, I'd rather go hang out with my cousin and stay better in touch with my friends than talk to myself here.

So unequivocally, I come to a conclusion.  I'll leave these old pixels of mine to become my internet immortality, and move on to more productive projects.  It's hardly a goodbye.  Anyone who manages to find me here has at least a dozen other ways to track me down.  See you around.

Bulk

I shopped at Costco.  It seemed like a good idea at a time, and what drew me to it was that it was not a very New York thing to do, at least when it comes to groceries.  As a born penny-pincher, I cringe at the $6 a box for breakfast cereal and the $15 pound for salmon that you can spend.  I figured one trip to Costco, just to stock up on some long-lasting staples, would do me better than slowly buying the goods at my local rip-off grocery.

The first problem came from the fact you have to pay for parking. Yes, I could have tried to find parking on the street, but I do enough of that anyway.  But the $5 for two hours felt like an indulgence, like an eggnog latte for the car.  Costco in the city resembles Costco in the burbs: a hulking monolith, the way that going there means a trip to that store and nowhere else, the oddly long walk from the car, like the approach to a temple.

I picked up a great big cart.  I needed the variety of things that one would expect to find in Costco: rice, hand sanitizer, cheese, maybe an impulse buy like a flat screen or a Chinese baby, which I’m sure they now carry in bulk.  The trip, however, was largely disappointing.  Hand sanitizer came in packs of two gallons, enough to fill my kitchen sink.  The bags of rice looked like they could have come from the UN High Commission on Refugees.  I had my share of the copious food samples on offer, which I now view as part of their business plan.  Have a little taste, then buy the 8-pound package of barbecue chicken wings or herring.

Reality goes out the window at Costco.  Because you can only get things in large quantities, you suddenly think you only need them in bulk.  I could have bought some Cheerios, but I really didn’t need 4 boxes to try to cram into my closet.  Maybe non-perishables are less of  problem, but the piles of great big cuts of meat and box upon box of unloved vegetables make you suspect the vast quantities of waste that one store must produce, that all the customers put their share in too.

I say unloved vegetables because anything that is designed to sit in a refrigerated warehouse for weeks on end is bred to be durable and sort of flavorful.  Sure enough, the pillow-size bag of snap peas I bought fed us decently for 3 weeks, but it wasn’t exactly a flavor sensation.  I somehow thought that Costco would carry organic and farm-based fare in bulk too.  They did have an enormous box of ‘artisanal’ lettuces, grown out of season and in an elaborate plastic packaging that could have passed for modern art.

Still, my bill came to over $100.  I guess we’ll be set for crackers and yogurt for a while, but eating in bulk is much more boring than buying in bulk.  After days and days of the same turkey and provolone sandwich, my husband and I are sort of ready for something – anything – else. 

My one impulse buy was a big plastic box of boysenberries for about $5.  Boysenberries are really only summer fruit, and the best ones should be eaten right from the vine, or made into jam immediately.  Still, $5 doesn’t usually get you that many berries, and it made me think of a pie for the week.

So with my tough-bred out of season berries I made a little lattice-top pie.  Lattice top because I underestimated how much dough I would need!  In pie making, I see, it’s not the filling but the crust that takes some knowledgable hands.  Practice, practice….  I stupidly underbaked it, but it was still tasty!

Boysenberries in their cinnamon sugary goodness.

 Don't they look like a single organism?

My baking companion!

The sizzling finished product.

Bulk

I shopped at Costco.  It seemed like a good idea at a time, and what drew me to it was that it was not a very New York thing to do, at least when it comes to groceries.  As a born penny-pincher, I cringe at the $6 a box for breakfast cereal and the $15 pound for salmon that you can spend.  I figured one trip to Costco, just to stock up on some long-lasting staples, would do me better than slowly buying the goods at my local rip-off grocery.

The first problem came from the fact you have to pay for parking. Yes, I could have tried to find parking on the street, but I do enough of that anyway.  But the $5 for two hours felt like an indulgence, like an eggnog latte for the car.  Costco in the city resembles Costco in the burbs: a hulking monolith, the way that going there means a trip to that store and nowhere else, the oddly long walk from the car, like the approach to a temple.

I picked up a great big cart.  I needed the variety of things that one would expect to find in Costco: rice, hand sanitizer, cheese, maybe an impulse buy like a flat screen or a Chinese baby, which I’m sure they now carry in bulk.  The trip, however, was largely disappointing.  Hand sanitizer came in packs of two gallons, enough to fill my kitchen sink.  The bags of rice looked like they could have come from the UN High Commission on Refugees.  I had my share of the copious food samples on offer, which I now view as part of their business plan.  Have a little taste, then buy the 8-pound package of barbecue chicken wings or herring.

Reality goes out the window at Costco.  Because you can only get things in large quantities, you suddenly think you only need them in bulk.  I could have bought some Cheerios, but I really didn’t need 4 boxes to try to cram into my closet.  Maybe non-perishables are less of  problem, but the piles of great big cuts of meat and box upon box of unloved vegetables make you suspect the vast quantities of waste that one store must produce, that all the customers put their share in too.

I say unloved vegetables because anything that is designed to sit in a refrigerated warehouse for weeks on end is bred to be durable and sort of flavorful.  Sure enough, the pillow-size bag of snap peas I bought fed us decently for 3 weeks, but it wasn’t exactly a flavor sensation.  I somehow thought that Costco would carry organic and farm-based fare in bulk too.  They did have an enormous box of ‘artisanal’ lettuces, grown out of season and in an elaborate plastic packaging that could have passed for modern art.

Still, my bill came to over $100.  I guess we’ll be set for crackers and yogurt for a while, but eating in bulk is much more boring than buying in bulk.  After days and days of the same turkey and provolone sandwich, my husband and I are sort of ready for something – anything – else. 

My one impulse buy was a big plastic box of boysenberries for about $5.  Boysenberries are really only summer fruit, and the best ones should be eaten right from the vine, or made into jam immediately.  Still, $5 doesn’t usually get you that many berries, and it made me think of a pie for the week.

So with my tough-bred out of season berries I made a little lattice-top pie.  Lattice top because I underestimated how much dough I would need!  In pie making, I see, it’s not the filling but the crust that takes some knowledgable hands.  Practice, practice….  I stupidly underbaked it, but it was still tasty!

Boysenberries in their cinnamon sugary goodness.

 Don't they look like a single organism?

My baking companion!

Thanksgiving

Have a good Thanksgiving? Who doesn't. Even a good fight makes for a good Thanksgiving. I suppose it's a more meaningful holiday when you take the time to explain its significance to young children, or you think about it yourself. But if you find yourself at the table with extended family, wordlessly packing in the carbs, it's a bizarre exercise.

I do generally like the food at Thanksgiving though, and I suppose like everyone else I've gotten used to the way my family does it, and that's the way I like it best. Aunt Mimi's stuffed mushrooms, Aunt Nancy's yams with pears and ginger, mom's pies. The feast strongly resembles the Christmas dinner, with maybe a swapping out of the turkey for a ham or some other roast animal. I even like the turkey, the low-fat carob of meats, which I otherwise experience during the year as an inoffensive protein source in my sandwich. On Thanksgiving day the roast turkey is a time sensitive issue: the skin stays crispy for so long, the dark meat is only good while it's warm, and even the leftovers for sandwiches just have a couple of days before you have to give them to the dog.

But the past couple of years I have left my family manse to feast with my husband and his family (well, I guess it's my family too). Every trip to Virginia, holiday or otherwise, involves a plummeting of my intake of vegetables. While Korean cooking involves vegetables, they are usually mixed up with lots of meat. Fortunately I am one of the few white people around who likes kimchi, the smelly staple dish of cabbage fermented with ground shrimp and fish sauce. It's a side dish at nearly every meal, even the Thanksgiving one, where the table will also include a deep-fried bird and sweet potato casserole with marhsmallows.

This year the meal was not made by my mother-in-law but by another relative who is also a home-cook extraordinaire. I longed for food from my aunties. I think the issue is that while my new family likes to cook an American-style Thanksgiving dinner, they do not use recipes for their Korean cooking, so they stalwartly do not use recipes for anything else either. Mashed potatoes were just that, no butter, no cream, minimal seasoning. A salad was served for a vegetable, which was nice but functional, and I am no fan of bottled dressing. We did have a deep-fried turkey, are rare treat for us Yankees, but the gravy was forgotten, and the tougher parts of the bird cried out for moisture. No cranberries in sight.

Korean dessert is usually fruit, often the enormous Korean pears that manage to be very crunchy and sweet and juicy. To contribute to the meal I made a sweet potato pie with some Asian twists, thanks to a fortuitous new recipe from everyone's favorite Mark Bittman. The graham cracker crust calls for coconut flakes, and he adds coconut milk to the pie, along with the expected seasonings.

My mother-in-law and I went shopping for the ingredients she didn't have at home, the graham crackers - which I was surprised to find in an Asian market - and the coconut milk, which does not regularly fit into Korean cooking. (She does advise it for a soak for squid though.) We came home and were surprised to discover that she did not have ginger in the fridge, one of the three in the holy trinity of Asian cooking (garlic ginger and soy sauce). We luckily found some pieces floating around in her turnip pickle mix, which although it was fermented at least wasn't covered in hot sauce. We washed off a few probiotic slices and mashed them up for the pie. It was a hit, and no one knew the difference.

Hmm, maybe I could get cracking on a pie a week, just for practice....

Chicken Dinner

I was being rather productive last Monday morning when I had to hustle out of the house for my mid-day Feldenkrais class on the West Side.  Traversing this skinny island does not look like it would take much, but on the 79^th street bus it becomes a 45-minute passage.  I drop what I’m doing at 11:30 to run out the door to get there in time.  The night before I had put a frozen chicken in the fridge to defrost for the night’s dinner, and I left it out on the counter while I was home to speed up the process.  Somewhere on the bus, I couldn’t remember if I had put it back in the fridge before I left. 

It had been a happy chicken.  Before becoming my chicken it was at the farmer’s market, and before then – one presumes – at a farm.  Some big beautiful farm somewhere upstate. I spent the $15 on it not only with the hopes of a wholesome, locally-sourced, sustainably-harvested, lovingly-slaughtered meal for me and my mate, but the promise of a more chickeny chicken experience.  Something that would taste of bird and grain and grass and not Styrofoam or antibiotics. 

I mentally bargained with my chicken as I sat on the bus.  You can’t be defrosted yet, surely you’ll do just fine on my tile counter for an hour or two until I get home.  The more desperate I got, the more manageable my chicken’s situation seemed to be.  It was wrapped up in plastic, that will hold the cold.  My mother used to leave meat on the counter all day, surely I would be okay this time.  Though the chicken was squishy to the touch when I left, I assured myself that the 3 hours that my trip would take still could leave it with ice crystals on the inside.  Surely cooking it would kill any germs.  Surely I wouldn’t be poisoning my little family.  But I did put it back in the fridge, didn’t I?

I hurt my shoulders in Feldenkrais.  The method, a less-popular cousin to the Alexander technique, appears to be a sort of extremely gentle yoga for middle-aged women and the occasional young person, like me, who has managed to develop pain just from how they move doing day to day tasks.  Yet a class, which looks like a bunch of people rolling on the floor, can leave you feeling released, taller, more comfortable, and somehow more willing to believe in yourself.  But I spent the time thinking about my chicken, my inability to take care of such a simple task, how this must reveal many other character defects, and how I surely I would be a terrible mother someday.  I thought about my chicken, bloody at the joints, blue in the veins, turning into another pile of wasted American food.

Returning home at 3 pm, I raced up the stairs, hastily unlocked the door and rushed into the kitchen, where my gleaming white counter stared at me blankly, as if asking what the fuss was all about.

The chicken was snuggled in plastic on its customary shelf in the fridge, still with ice crystals inside.  It was a fast roast for a small bird, yielding a beautifully burnished skin.  The meat was lean and chewy, but very flavorful, and was a texture foil to the tender squash and onions we roasted along with it.  I put the bones in the freezer – I just double checked – to make stock.

If you can't beat 'em, blog 'em

As part of my wild and crazy New York life, I am sitting on a bus. A bus back to Boston for a concert with my band. It's pretty disproportionate, ten hours of travel and two overnights for an hour of music making.  I could whine forever about this, but I suppose this is always how it is. The funny thing being that during those few moments of performing, nothing else exists in the world, not even this excruciating trip on the bus.

Forget my numb butt for a moment.  Forget the dangers I'm putting myself in by typing without a comfortable set up. Let's talk about the boys in the back of the bus.

Or better, the boys right smack next to me. I've been listening to their loud, inane conversation for nearly three hours now, coming right through my ear plugs. I will chronicle the juicier bits of their discourse now, making up the rest of their life stories as best I can.

Their names are Judd and Dimitri, I bet, and they've been best friends since freshman year.  Both grew up in minor Massachusetts cities (are there any other kind?). Dmitri named by left-leaning parents who wanted him to lead the proletariat, Judd named by left-leaning elites who wanted him to seem more approachable to the proletariat. Judd is wearing a suit (on the bus?), has long hair in a pony tail and no neck, yet holds a neck pillow on his lap. Dimitri also has a pony tail, curly hair, and a pubic mustache.  Friendship doesn't describe it right.  Rivalry, kept in check by keeping each other close, as they would surely tear each other to pieces or perish from the sexual tension if they remained apart. They have each had sex exactly once (I can tell), neither of which were especially successful occasions. Their laughter and gasps get very excited

Judd: "Ice wine is amazing, so sweet, I love it.  Romania actually makes some amazing sweet wines."
Dmitri: "I like port, it's not really wine though."
Judd: "Neither is ice wine I guess."
Dimitri then discusses the port wine process, "The things you learn from reading Wikipedia!"
Judd then ponders who gets to be on Wikipedia, and how that would be such a "me-high."
Judd asserts that the measure of human achievement is when you "have scholars." As in, Bill Gates has scholars, Steve Jobs has scholars, Macintosh.  This seems to mean that there are scholarly people writing about them. "How about Chomsky?" "Yeah, he has scholars."

"Did you hear about the biggest pot bust ever?"
"What did they do with it? Burn it?"
"Yeah, it was the saddest thing I heard about. I bet the price of pot went up that day."
"Isn't it bad for the atmosphere?"
"They can do it in sustainable ways."

Judd and Dmitri are now fortifying themselves with an 8-piece box of Roy's chicken, yet still their mouths are running.  They drink gatorade, one blue and one orange.

"Why is there such a controversy around corn syrup?"
"There's a big maple syrup farm around here."
"For my 21st birthday I had a maple-sugaring contest, and my best friend at the time, a little tiny girl, won."

The subject of women keeps coming up, once when they mentioned some girl who "apparently very  smart, kind, and funny, and just happens to have enormous boobs." And when Dmitri offered to set up Judd with some girl, "she really is a scientist," but Judd declined, citing his contacts with all sorts of people all over the world.

"Braintree [?] was an absolute disaster and the reason why I didn't get into Harvard. I had a letter of rec from Marc Warner's campaign manager and [someone else] and I still didn't get in. Tufts and Brandeis actually called my mom to say that they weren't sure if he could pay for it and would need a bank statement certifying his funds."

"My plan was to kill myself for a while, but I went to Montreal instead to smoke and fuck my brains out. If I can't get smart I want to get dumb and happy."

Dmitri: "One of the easiest ways to get money from a company is to have a party. You buy a bunch of foodstuffs, get reimbursed for that, then throw a small party, then at least you have some free food."

Now they are discussing recreational use of prescription and other kinds of drugs. "I'll take some amphetamines to help me stay awake. I was pulling out beard hairs and stressing out about this paper. I went out into the hallway, lit some candles, and just sat their shaking. I got an extension."

"I think he didn't like me because I wouldn't sleep with him. Oh my god, that was a perfect 3-way thing: She was making out with him to get to me, he was making out with her to get to me, and I was making out with him to get to her."

OK, I'm done. Is this really my writing for the day? This trip is always a dip in a cesspool- the wasted hours of my life mixed with those of strangers. (Judd is now blowing his nose.) Funny though, all these trips combine into one memory when I've reached where I wanted to go: either to make music, or to be home with my dear one.

Shabbat

It happens four times a week in New York.  Right smack in the most productive part of the day, by law New Yorkers must rest.  Some sit idly, some read.  Now with laptops and a little stolen wifi, we can surf.  Like little islands of calm in the work around us, we pause, until we return, refreshed, with a new perspective to our busy lives.

I’m referring of course to alternate side of the street parking. I had my first experience with it last week, coming to the lovely little space I had found for myself first thing in the morning to dutifully clear out for the street sweeper. I was pulling out the car at 8:58 AM, when I noticed something funny.  No one else on the block was moving their cars.  Hardly anyone was even in their cars.  What do they know that I don’t?

My plan was to feed the meter for an hour or so, maybe going to a café for breakfast.  As a back up, I brought some work with me and a pear.  So I started circling the ‘hood.  There were no meters.  It seemed that most everyone had already moved their car, or planted themselves close by and double parked.  I kept circling, my stomach growling.  Eventually I came to another spot where the sweeper had just left, and I sat and waited quietly, the world whizzing by just to my back, until I was ready to join it.

I can see how this can get old, and I can only imagine what the winter will be like…  Today, for example, I went to a main street with a meter and I am now sitting happily in a café.  But the meter machine refused my 2 credit cards, forcing me to use my precious quarters, which are urgently needed for washing today.  And – only in New York – my breakfast of a flat bagel and a juice cost $9.  Come to think of it, why do flat bagels cost more than regular?  They are just smushed regular bagels – do they really need my extra 40 cents for the trouble?

So this Shabbat might not be a luxury I can afford too often.  Still, after a week of being sick, it’s just a treat to leave the house. 

Postscript: As I was writing that really deep observation about flat bagels, I was getting a $65 ticket.  I did feed my meter, but I carelessly stuck the ticket face-side down on the dashboard.  Really?  Forget Shabbat.  The hunt for parking, the observance of byzantine parking rules is no moment of zen.  This is why they call it a jungle, this is why this is a tough town.  Will I never know peace unless I pay for a garage?

Space

As a drama teacher this summer, I taught – and learned – how everything around us affects the character of the space we occupy.  A basic theater game involves mirroring a partner’s hands, working in tandem to agree without words on how to shape the space.  Is it thick? Heavy?  Slippery?  Only after mastering this can an actor move on to shaping the space around them in a way that communicates emotions.  If two people are having a fight, how can we tell that just by looking at them?  They use their bodies to change the shape around them, giving it hard edges, electricity, and violence.  The study of acting includes not just how you twist your face or deliver your words, but your awareness of the entire space around you.

Designers of sets, cars, clothes, and most anything else keep these ideas in mind.  Angular is masculine, tough, and ominous.  Curvy is feminine, kind, and comforting.  That’s why the inside of an SUV is as inviting as your mother’s lap, and women’s suits in the 80s conveyed a bulky strength that women didn’t have before.

Since we arrived in New York in early September, hurricane season filling the space with humidity you could slice, I’ve been very aware of how the space has been carved by us, and how we shape it as well.  All these angular buildings and endless flat stretches of pavement – how strange it is to be an animal in this sort of space!  In most cities you have a sense of the features of the land.  Not just a hill or two, but more trees, grass that’s been there for a while, a guess at how water comes in and goes out on its own.  It’s hard to imagine that this town has ever been natural, hard to even guess what it might have looked like as an untouched island, with a soft shoreline and marshes.  When the space is hard around us, it is no longer part of who we are, receptive to our movements and our soft bodies.  The square buildings cut the space into hard-edged blocks that move as we move around them, cutting into us sometimes.  I think this is why we feel either exhausted by being here or energized, as we rally ourselves against the unnatural.

In addition to a constant awareness of the quality of space in New York one can’t help but notice the lack of it.  Parking is difficult, sidewalks are crowded, subways are packed, the job market is competitive, and you can’t get a reservation in a restaurant.  I am delighted to come home and close myself in a room, feeling my own space at last, even if it’s just a rental.  And parking depressed me so much on my first try, as I searched for half an hour, always just missing an opening, endlessly hunting for my spot in the world, or at least on the block.  But oh the thrill of finding your very own space, safe and sound and just right, even if it’s out in the public where everyone can see.

New Project

Well hi. Nice to see you remember me, old blog. Thought you might not recognize my password there, that you'd vanished into my memory, taking with you our good times and my best intentions. I'm sneaking up on you in the middle of the night, hoping that my post-performance energy might carry over to this most personal performance, the act of writing, for an audience of one, the toughest crowd I'll ever play to.

I am a writer who does not write. Recently, I practiced being a singer who does not sing. These are ways of being I cannot stand for very long. However vain, however ignoble, I have devoted myself to music, and that is what I simply have to do. Even if my talents have their limits (but doesn't everybody's?), or even if what I have to offer only appeals to a few. We all have our lights to shine. If this isn't mine, what is?

But then there's writing. Why on earth pursue another non-paying artistic passion? In my case, it's a way to confront fears. Fear of failure every time I try to write something new, or making a story as perfect as it's going to be. Fear of failing right this very minute to bring a sentence to a fullfilling close. Sitting down to write, without quite knowing what will happen, is a glimpse into the work of a sculptor, revealing the figure within a stone. It's another way to perform. Earning smiles of excitement in a writing class or feeling the energy of a page bring something new out of me is as exhilirating as anything I'll do in public. And if I don't write, I only confirm that my fears were right all along, that I'm better off failing before I even try. But surely, anything is better than making your fears your reality.

So here's a new idea. In the year or so since I last dropped a post on this blog I've built up my courage to create fiction, I've published one and written several satisfying personal essays, and even became something of a regular contributor to a music magazine. But I'm a dabbler. I hereby make a new plan: I will publish one post a week about my yearlong stay in New York. I am happily returning to my home city for my new husband's new job, which is giving me the chance to try some new career moves, take a new perspective on what I can offer the world, and generally think and act about what I want to be when I grow up. I will write charming accounts of life in our cozy neighborhood. I will share the stresses and joys of big city life.

But I also will write about where art figures into it all, here in the digital age. This past year, I have returned to regular reading, and I've been so happy getting to know fictional characters that I've nearly neglected the real one's in my own life. But what a joy. As I read I will share my favorite - and least favorite - moments as I come across them, and keep track of my progress through literary history. I might also throw in tantalizing bits about the second year of my marriage.

But first, time for bed. I'm not even in New York right now. Not even in Boston, the town I left. I'm in cold and sunny Maine, singing concerts and feeling like royalty. I'm not a superstar, I never will be. But I shared beautiful music with a few people tonight. I was happier for it, and I think they were too.

Why this page is blank

I haven't written here in a long time. Even doing this now makes me feel a little uncomfortable. Writing is precious, esteemed, difficult. And no matter what, no one should see my first drafts.

You can't have that attitude and blog. Moreover, lately I've been less and less interested in reading my own thoughts, and blogging is nothing if not an unblinking navel gaze. I've been trying write, you see, really write. Not just record my day or my observations in pretty sentences but create something new. But right now I'm in the neither-nor phase: I have neither succeeded in creating something every day nor have I quit before I started. Blogging is a good thing to do in this stage. It does qualify as writing, I suppose, but it is not something that is creative. I've bagged this blog for a while because I'm more interested in looking inward, spending time with ideas that could become stories and people, but that need more time offline. I'm doing more of that writing, I am, but I don't want to share it with anyone at all for quite a while.

Am I being too precious? Is what I'm doing right now worth holding it close, finessing draft after draft so that I couldn't throw something up on the old blog? Maybe I will from time to time, or just photos and comments, or things I've cooked up in the past that are ready enough for the light of day. But now, the work has to happen for my eyes only. As a new fiction writer, I'm living in an unfinished house with people I feel I ought to know better, people with indistinct features and muddled lives, muttering to me that the roof leaks and the heat doesn't work and how are we all supposed to get on here if I'm never going to do anything about it?

Insanity or genius? Only one way to find out. Check in every so often to see how I'm doing.

Mews

When your dad says "please, write again," when your husband no longer has your blog bookmarked, when your browser - yes, even your dear, loyal browser - has forgotten your URL, it's time to throw a little post up on the old bloggy-poo.

It's not like I haven't been writing. It's just been an inward time, not a worldwide time. My last real bit of writing here was back on April 13, two days before a relatively minor life-changing bump in the road came my way, making me turn inward. I think I've come out the other side of it though, with a better sense of what my life could look like, and a clue or two about how to get there. And meanwhile, there has been art and joy. Music-making. Merry-making. I've taken a step I've felt meant to take since childhood awakenings, though at the same time I feel more childlike than ever, at the beginning of a young, new journey.

Though in some ways my April 15 sadness has only been replaced by a new sadness. (That seems to be my m.o., I need at least one major gripe at any given time.) Time will tell if the self-inflicted sacrifice my bridegroom and I are making will result in better careers, but for now, and more acutely than before, it only means loneliness.

Because the catch is that although I enjoy my new roommate-free space and after months of distraction I feel energized to take on a new chapter in my working life, I'm so over self-development. I feel I've figured myself out by now, and I don't need this much space to keep navel gazing. I want to figure out my new, one and only roommate. I want to figure out our routine, and our ups and downs. In the back of my head I also wonder if I'm developing a mental block to cohabiting, that when the option to live together is no longer an option, I'll be so accustomed to my own space and pace, that I will flip.

È follia. I just need something new to worry about.

If nothing else I am learning to write. In fact, instead of using this space for self-exploration, maybe I'll practice the kinds of personal essays David Sedaris has mastered to such acclaim, the kind that are deeply personal, yet flout the boundary between fact and fiction....

But really, I've gotten paid to write a few times, and I'm seeing how I could do more with this. I'm not looking to sell a novel anytime soon, and for a long time I will be happy to keep my fiction to myself, but I can see grantwriting go somewhere, and music journalism, and maybe even other kinds of journalism. And why not see what works? Four days a week I only have myself to amuse, and I've got lots of time for it.....

idealist.org - Writing Associate, Public Interest GRFX

Dead blog? Failed writer? Never!! What do you make of this, or how about this? I've gravitated happily to offline writing, I'm doing more of it, and I'm considering focusing my efforts on pursuing profit-making writing, if such a thing exists. Blogging is fun, but so is finding my voice without the "pressures" of instant publication. I will post some more here, but probably less frequently than before.

But I couldn't resist this little bit I found while searching for jobs:

idealist.org - Writing Associate, Public Interest GRFX: "You’ll tell that story across a variety of online and print projects, including e-mail alerts, newsletters, fundraising appeals, posters, brochures and Web sties."

Yup, they sure do need an editor.

;-)

Save This Quilt!

Hello Freecycle Folks! Here's the worst of the damage on my Guatemalan patchwork, but it is otherwise in good shape....

more on Easter

I guess I do like Easter. Maybe it's the sort of thing you discover as an adult, when your Easter hay days are long gone, or maybe it's because I haven't been able to see my family on Easter for the past four years. So between the church gig and the rehearsals, I cobbled together what I had and had myself a merry little Easter.....

Easter dinner in 20 minutes! I mashed exactly one new potato, seared some lamb steaks with rosemary and garlic and braised them in wine, and wilted spinach in the same pan. I don't quite know where lamb steaks come from off the animal, but they are tender and tasty, if a bit gristly. And it all cooked up in a flash!

And for dessert.... I finally finished off the last of the cake flour with the chocolate cake recipe from the back of the box, but the real treat of the afternoon was the lovely presence of my pal Paula. A good bit of cake is still in my freezer, but Paula, sadly, will be heading back to England soon.

You know you like Easter when.... It occurred to me only when I was dying these eggs (and my thumbs and my sweater) vivid colors that it might not be too healthy to eat these artificial colors. But don't they just make you think of the holy spirit?

And when Paula left I was alone but for the companionship of Sunny the Bunny.

But things soon turned ugly...

My Baptism

Today is a red-letter day in my life, the day I was finally baptized, baptized in the name of our Lord the father, the son, and the holy spirit (although I did not state that I believe in that part just yet because I don't know what it is.) And on Easter Vigil no less!

This morning I woke up believing it to be just another ordinary day. I had agreed to sing the service tonight at the Wellesley Congregational Church, right there on the Wellesley Common near the Ann Taylor. My only motivation was 30 pieces of silver - and maybe a corn muffin between tomorrow's services - but I left with so much more.

Tonight, between the baptism of children and the shoutings of Alleluia! a pair of tweens came around to all the congregants with bowls of water and short evergreen branches and flicked us all with the sacramental mist. There was no room for a good, unbaptized Quaker girl to run, so I endured what so many of my brethren have before me. The music director suggested we put away our music and glasses. As I was reaching for my face, a drop of water hit one single spot on my skin: the back of my curse finger on my left hand. Alleluia! Is it now my blessed finger? Will it be the one part of me that glimpses heaven, while the rest of me bobbles in purgatory?

The festivities due to such an occasion proceeded apace. There was an interpretive dance with a song from the "contemporary" service. An adult dancer in a black dress and barefoot, a blue scarf tied around her waist as she moved about the flowers and the communion table, now facing us, now lifting her arms heavenward, now turning away, teasing like a dance of the seven veils. Her trunk and arms were held with such cruciform rigidity that she nearly toppled over twice.

But wait, judge not, right? I'm new to the chosen, you see. Bread was offered to the saved, pitas or gluten free. And wine, although they serve grape juice now. Could I partake? Were my sins washed away with the twitch of that awful tree? I did not risk God's fury to find out. The evening concluded (delightfully) with a piece for chorus and baritone solo, with instructions to sing caldamente.....

Permeability

I am going to marry the former roommate of a colleague of a friend of a friend. The connection is bizarre to begin with, but it reflects the unique kind of links that can happen in a small city. With fewer variables, fewer 'actors,' and smaller geography, all sorts of connections are possible, and people are more open to them. Would that friend of a friend (who I had barely known) come to my birthday party in an unfamiliar part of town with the roommate of her collegaue (who she had just met) in a bigger city known for odd characters and occasional violence?


That's not the only story. I have a longtime collaboration with a musician I met through the kindness of another stranger, who passed his name on to me after I introduced myself. I contact others I barely know to arrange gigs, and they often come on board with enthusiasm and professionalism. I was hired to fundraise for an organization through a person that had somehow found my business card, but had never met me. While the ice is thick here in social matters, at least in professional contacts, it hardly exists.


The smallness of the city and the physical setups of some institutions also fosters connections in serendipitous and productive ways. With few inhabitants and relatively lull street traffic, you are certain to make eye contact with people on the street, and to encounter people more than once. Coming out of a door of a music school downtown, I locked eyes with a trombonist I knew from undergrad days, and a joyful reunion followed. Attending an afternoon writing class, I sat directly in front of another friend from college, and we've since stayed in touch. Smallness can also bite you in the ass, with its sharp little fangs. You meet people you'd rather not see again, like your rival or that guy you had a couple of awkward dates with. Not that I've had that experience. Twice.


I work in the Longwood Medical Area, likely one of the few places in the world where medical researchers can collaborate and learn from each other across numerous institutions and disciplines. The hospitals and institutes found in Longwood are often affiliated with Harvard in some way, which extends its long arms to muscle up its medical school. But before that, I'm not sure how so many hospitals founded by different groups grew up in just a few square miles of each other.

And although New York stories team with strangers merrily interacting with each other, they are interesting only in that they seem so incongruous in a city where you most likely will never see your neaighbors and shop clerks rarely look you in the eye. Within my first few hours of living in Boston I had a harmless conversation on a park bench with someone new. Last fall, while shopping for wedding books, the clerk in Borders volunteered that his sister had gone nuts during her wedding planning, affecting their relationship years later. He advised me not to do the same, and a man in the next aisle concurred. A few weeks ago, I walked past an unusual sidewalk sale, where I stopped for a moment and bought a plastic purple necklace and a little toucan doll that lights up its beak when you pull a handle. I chatted with the proprietress. After 20 years in Boston, she said, she was moving out for a change. Maybe San Fran, maybe Europe, maybe Central America. Boston had been a good place for her, she went on, but she felt a need for a new chapter.


Maybe that summarizes what this place is most of all. For those of us coming in from elsewhere, it is where we can safely find our way and meet our people, and leverage these experiences for the next step. But in any case, Boston inspires a peculiar breed of pride found in few other places, apparent both in the locals in the occasional outsider....

Housecleaning

It's spring, so I am cleaning out my draft folder. Below are pictures I snapped when I last visited my friend Andie Andrews, a work colleague from New York I lost touch with up here. The first shot is of a mystical-looking a store window in Brooklyn, then Andie with her new baby, Linden, then a shot of Linden's giant baby foot.

Insideness

The high walls of Harvard Yard. The land embrace of Boston Harbor. No street signs on main roads. It’s difficult to get inside here, whether you are simply trying to make your way in a new part of town or looking to Boston as your top pick for your education. Outsiders are viewed with suspicion, and those on the inside see no reason for getting out.

From the city’s Puritan founding in 1630, inhabitants have tried at all costs to keep their City on a Hill free from unwanted elements of society, which over the years has included merriment, alcohol, taxation without representation, Quakers, and black people outside of their designated parts of town. The spurn of outsiders is still evident today: the wary pity that greets me when I tell a local that I come from New York; the vast employers in education and health care that fill their jobs largely from their own ranks; the numerous well-educated young men who do not even own a passport; the local accent that announces locals’ roots, the absence of which identifies a newcomer.

By and large, this is not a city you come to. How many people the world over dream of someday moving to New York or LA or Paris or even Lagos? The same cannot be said for Boston. Yes, students come here to study at the dozens of colleges and universities in town. But they usually return home. Boston must have a transient population comparable to a seasonal farming town: in addition to students, visiting academics, scientists, doctors, and the occasional artistic type come and go after a few years tops. Friendships can grow during a six year PhD program, for example, but before you know it your new friends are off to their new jobs far away, but maybe you didn’t let yourself get all that close to begin with.

And perhaps that’s a motto for all Massachusetts or even New England citizens: Don’t get too close. It’s cold and I’m bundled in my warmest winter woolies. To get close would be to surrender my armor, to make myself vulnerable. The weather and the odd challenges to physically navigating the city are all part of the barricades surrounding people here. We embrace them for lack of alternatives, and turn inward to our home lives and solitude. The inward-looking tendency is practically institutionalized: in a city of world-class hospitals and universities, you come to examine the inner workings of the mind or the body, but not to interact with your environment.

This feature is especially manifest in the difficulty one encounters when trying to explore much further than one’s own neighborhood. In New York, a Queens girl can have dinner on the Upper West Side and still get home in time for Grey’s. In Boston, a trip of less than a mile can take over an hour, on intermittent bus routes and slow trains. Car travel is just as tiresome. Try parking- anywhere at anytime. Or the frustrating habit of many municipalities of not posting road signs. People throughout the region give directions by landmarks that are not visible where you actually are. As in, “Turn onto Weston Road toward the direction of Wellesley.” Would that be a right or a left?

So without being able to comfortably explore the city, we stay home. And here—at last—I’ll say something nice about insideness. When you can cultivate friendships, that tends to happen in the comfort of home, or of dorm, for the younger set. As opposed to in cramped New York, Sunday suppers and summer cookouts are a reality here, where apartments tend to be spacious enough for small gatherings. But neighborliness is difficult to achieve. Perhaps because of the transient quality of many lives here, neighbors are not quick to befriend each other. With fewer people to connect to than in a larger city, you might think the connections would be deeper. But it can feel twice as lonely here, where there is no cosmopolitan buzz to keep you company.

So we head inside, warming our hands and thoughts over the flames of our deepest ambitions, with which we become achingly familiar as we dream through the winter months. If we are lucky—or local with long routes—we have a loved-one or two to keep us company. For affection can be found and cultivated here, despite the built-in isolation. The smallness and insideness also foster familiarity, and newcomers find ways to weaken the boundaries. A certain permeability exists here that leads to unique stories of connection that would be hard to imagine elsewhere....

Boston analysis

Although the winter sun has long since turned warm and the ice on the Charles has largely thawed, the rainy snow outside today testifies that it is still deep winter in Boston. The cold is one of the elements that gives Boston its character. It keeps you inside – probably affecting the city’s civic life – and where is the New Englander who does not speak with gleeful pride about braving the snowiest winters? On the other hand, it promotes a certain, selective coziness.

To indulge my stunted inner academic, I posit that the coldness of Boston accounts for its three, broadly summarizing characteristics:
1) Insideness,
2) Permeability,
3) Pride.

This week, as we dig our hands deeper into our pockets and bury our faces behind layers of wool, I will take a look at these three elements and discuss how I imagine they came to be, and how they define life in the "Athens on the Charles."

How to lose touch

I'm hell at it. I've come to look at friendship and connecting with people as just another element of our disposable culture. Friends are like shoes. You get them because they're appealing and then you try them out for a while. Some last for ages. Some just don't seem as nice as they did at first. Still others fall apart before you expect them to.

It's terrible, really, to be so cavalier about people. But in a mobile society, where upbringing is in one place, college another, early adult life somewhere else, followed by another move or two, it almost doesn't pay to get too emotionally attached. Your cast of characters will change when your situation changes. If you were able to find an acquintance or two to have for dinner or see a movie with, you'll find them again. And in between, you just have solitude.

I could be better about this. And surely, I've met some lovely people over the years whose friendship I still value, even if it's faded, and who I wish I had back in my life. But I suppose I want my people to be in touch with me more than I bother to be in touch with them. I also can think of numerous examples of people who seemed to want to be my friend, but who then were willing to move on from me.

My first and finest example is a girl named Shannon, who was my daily companion during my first summer of sleep away camp. She was from North (or was it South?) Carolina and made even rainy days bright with her fresh peach lilt. We walked to meals together and hung out in our bunks, even though she lived in a different room. I remember a 'lovers' quarrel once, which we resolved when I decided to stop being a grump. After camp she sent me a lovely letter about her family and life back home. It didn't occur to me to write back.

I've always been lazy. Why put off today what you can put off tomorrow? At the heart of things, I think I secretly enjoy the suffering I cause: both to myself and to others. I want nothing more than to be loved and approved of by everyone I've ever met in my life. And if I can't have that - and who can? - oh the poetry that comes from longing for it. So why not make more?

And nowadays, of course, staying in touch can be an entirely one-sided affair. I'm updating my blog, does that count as staying in touch with you? I'm on Facebook, I have a website, you can find various snippets about me (and my doppelgangers) all over the web. There's the content you need without dealing with pesky human contact. In many ways, it's simply more practical. At the time I knew Shannon, the only way I could ever know anything about her again would be to stay in touch by writing letters. Now, if I could only remember her last name, I could google her and surmise the same details she might write to tell me. I could write her an email and ask for those details, and I could write an email right now to nearly anyone I've ever known. But why? You can't stay in touch with everyone, and sometimes, it's not as worthwhile as you might think. Sometimes I feel people re-establish contact with someone as an excuse to brag about themselves. And if you are motivated to simply rebuild an old bond, you might end up awkwardly trying to revive an acquaintanceship - so where do you work now? and where do you live? - when you could be learning comparable information in the more exciting context of a new friendship that doesn't have any odd historical baggage.

At the same time, I'm a creature who likes closure. If I'm not going to stay in touch with you, I want a good reason why, like a spectacular falling out. In truth, I've rarely ended a friendship on bad terms. They've usually died natural deaths because they were too weak to survive the change of geography, change of routines, or my lack of writing back in a timely way. Though my hat goes off to a few nice "break-ups."

A few years ago, someone re-established contact with me with such nostalgia and youthful fervor I even blogged about it. But his interest faded, his mind changed or something, and he decided he had to get out. After a summer of barely speaking to each other, I gave him a call, basically because I wanted to stay in touch for the sake of staying in touch, . We spoke for 90 seconds before he said that his phone was rapidly running out of juice, and that he couldn't even fix it by plugging it in while we talked. "Bye, Amanda," he said emphatically. Both of us knew never to call back again.

What does mystify me are the good friendships that fizzle, or never even get off the ground. The line is especially blurry with musicians, who I want to befriend for companionship's sake as much as for networking and name competition building. But what of those two singers I invited over who I genuinely want to befriend, who never returned the favor? Or the people I've invited to my wedding who I don't hear from - one old friend didn't even respond to give me her address, so I'm afraid she's off the list. Or that girl who I met randomly who has so much in common with me and was a regular companion for a couple of years, who vanished and won't return phone calls? Did I offend? Did they tire of me? I suppose I enjoy the imagining of those stories, the impossible search for closure. I may not have those friendships for countless reasons, but at least I can feed my imagination by writing their stories myself. I think people just don't have the interest ain investing in relationships that are likely to fade away for one reason or another.

But what I love most of all about losing touch is the romantic notion that the loving energy of a friendship never fully disappears, and may even be healthy and thriving in a parallel universe, or when we see each other again at the celestial get-together, or in our heart's most secret desires. Or in believing that we would always - always - welcome each other into our lives again.

O du Entrißne mir und meinem Kusse,
Sei mir gegrüßt, sei mir geküßt!
Erreichbar nur meinem Sehnsuchtgruße,
Sei mir gegrüßt, sei mir geküßt!

Du von der Hand der Liebe diesem Herzen
Gegebne, Du von dieser Brust
Genommne mir! Mit diesem Tränengusse
Sei mir gegrüßt, sei mir geküßt.

Zum Trotz der Ferne, die sich feindlich trennend
Hat zwischen mich und dich gestellt;
Dem Neid der Schicksalmächte zum Verdrusse
Sei mir gegrüßt, sei mir geküßt!

Wie du mir je im schönsten Lenz der Liebe
Mit Gruß und Kuß entgegenkamst,
Mit meiner Seele glühendstem Ergusse,
Sei mir gegrüßt, sei mir geküßt!

Ein Hauch der Liebe tilget Raum und Zeiten,
Ich bin bei dir, du bist bei mir,
Ich halte dich in dieses Arms Umschlusse,
Sei mir gegrüßt, sei mir geküßt!

--Rueckert

Listen to the Schubert song here!

O you, who have been snatched from me and my kiss,
I greet you, I kiss you!
Reached only by my yearning greetings,
you I greet, you I kiss!

You, given by the hand of love to this heart,
you, who from my breast
have been taken! With these flooding tears
I greet you, I kiss you.

Defying the distance that fiendishly separates us
and lies between you and me -
to spite the envious powers of fate,
I greet you, I kiss you!

Just as you always did in the fairest spring-time of love,
coming to greet me with a kiss,
so now, with my soul a glowing flood,
I greet you, I kiss you!

A breath of love erases space and time;
I am with you, you are with me,
I hold you in these arms, embracing you;
I greet you, I kiss you!