Totally late on the uptake, but isn’t the Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack mindblowing? These computer speakers do it no justice; I anticipate it will work best in brain-engulfing headphones, and if I could find a local wooded grove to romp through, that would be perfect.
Or in amazing car speakers, but that makes me think about how much I miss car speakers, and it’s too sunny out to complain.
I found it everyone, I found it, I figured it the fuck out.
Monday nights.
Where Mondays exist only to draw & quarter the 9-to-5ers, it puts me back in a sense of sanity. It’s the bookstore that does it. When I think about leaving work and heading behind the register at Housing Works, my insides melt a little? Like when you think about Christmas? Like that.
Everyone I’ve met – or meet – is new. No connection to any of the million things that wring my insides on a daily basis, just there for books and charity and true, genuine interaction with a few true, genuine people. It feels severely & sincerely New York, the New York I always wanted to live in. Indie bookstores that play Elvis Costello, and I can ring someone up and turn small talk into a discussion of Death Cab for Cutie’s discography, all while eating fresh-baked cookies and digging through freshly donated books.
When I started at Bonaventure, I didn’t know one person on campus, but I knew those grounds were where I needed to be. And the hundreds of people who felt the same way, we all gravitated to each other, we all formed these bonds out of nothing – and everything. And this, this feels the same. So organically grown. That smile? That’s seriously, really Tanya. That is a conversation I don’t have to force, an interest I don’t need to fake.
Every time I leave the store, I can do anything. Write a book, knit a sweater, run a marathon, because no one has notions to preconceive. I haven’t a mold I try to fit. Perhaps that’s why I look forward to even the train ride home, alone, and the rest of the evening in my bedroom, alone, because in these few small hours I’m grasping who I can be when no one knows me. And I either sound like an aspiring drama queen or a closeted murderer, I realize, and I’m probably totally blowing my cover, but man, Monday nights.
::Abrupt ending::
A little jog, a little Jimi, a little isolated balcony on my little bedroom in Queens. Back to Autumn In New York.
Currently living as the antithesis of Winnie the Pooh, I’ve found nothing but blue skies and crisp, clean sunshine the past week. Of course, I jetted far from the East Coast when I heard about the snow hitting upstate New York, but my good weather luck still counts.
From the moment I descended the stairs of the miniature charter plane at Yampa Valley Airport, I found myself breathing uncharacteristically deeply. No worries, everyone, just smelling Colorado. I felt my lungs high-five each other and hug me from the inside, grateful for a break from the air-dwelling particles of the city.
Strange how anticlimactic the moment is when you see a best friend again after a long, long time. It all feels normal, like you could have just as easily been meeting for lunch after a morning of classes. Hi, Jenny, we don’t even need to hug, really, didn’t I just see you at the Richter Center/Hickey/Plassmann steps/Bain’s living room?
Waking up Thursday morning, still on Eastern time, I sat up on my fold-out bed and saw sky. So much sky. Trees had turned actually colors, not this green-to-dead pattern they like to follow in Central Park (“nature,” everyone), and I saw the clouds as if they were at eye level, because…um, they were.
My camera didn’t get much human play, mostly landscapes (and a snake!) from our travels. A day hike through Mad Creek, a drive through Vail, Breck, the Continental Divide. One stop to search through dust and rocks for fossils, and not two hours later a stop to stand in the snow at the summit of a mountain that tore a hole in the tropopause. Then down to Boulder for ice cream and to hate on Kansas, mainly for the traffic and not so much for the college football.
Denver’s a weird city. And I say that not as a New Yorker, because that’s not fair, but as a kid from the general coastal area, where I can drive a few hours in any direction and hit a major city. Not here, man. I can drive for hours and hit treacherous peaks, bleak and windy deserts or plains, plains, plains, but densely packed homo sapiens are not to be found. Makes me start to wonder about that weird fantasy of mine to go to a Nowheresville for a while, work in some local diner, write about the people. Sometimes real people in these places are better than any I could ever create. Just a thought I sometimes have.
Since I’ve never been a skier, my winters in Colorado would be for creating elaborate meals while my friends shred, and then feeding all the frozen athletes before we all imbibe heavily in front of a large fire. All night. Every night. I’m such a romantic. #thingsiconsiderwhenivisitanewcity
Back to the sky. The lack of ambient light didn’t just mean more stars, it meant the sky was the farthest from blue I can ever remember seeing. Black, endless, cloudless night sky, and no matter what the temperature was during the day, it was guaranteed to be frigid when I stayed outside to look for too long. Beyond worth it.
Leaving out details of course, because what good are words or photographs to remember the real scenery? The plummeting valleys between giant crags, rolling hills rife with neon green aspen, rivers so unlike the ones I’m used to; wide, rushing things that I’d be nervous to even cast a lure into, lest a rapid choose to take me with it. And the mind-numbing, blinding, endless sky. All this with one of the most special & unique humans I’ve been so blessed to know. It was only four days, but I wasn’t sick once, not gasping for air or clutching my stomach, no routine anxiety.
I do a yoga breathing exercise every now and then (mostly after a long night of drinking) to cleanse my mind & body of whatever toxins are still hanging out. Next time, I might just try a flight* to the Rockies.
*Just not a 1:59 a.m. – 6:31 a.m. flight, because that was probably the worst idea I ever had.
Jetting off to Colorado today to spend a long weekend hiking the Front Range, sampling some brewerys, playing with some dogs, and maybe making a quick trip to Moab, UT to see the arches.
If sleeping on the Colorado River and the company of my college roommate don’t shake me free, nothing will.
I promise to return and write. Like I do. Not like I don’t.
I’m feeling incredibly misguided. And trapped, and lost, and unseen, and no wonder I constantly think I’m going to vomit or have a heart attack. Where am i?
Who the hell am i?
Just one of those weeks. I need to find a flow. She says, as she decides instead to tap a box of wine and watch 5 hours of Boy Meets World. Hey, Day Waster, the world’s going to end, and what have you done?
YES! The blog is still alive. I am too, just barely.
It’s been a long month of moving in to an apartment, moving up at work, still living out of boxes, stomach (swine?) flu, Xanax, vampire romance and one too many waiting games.
I’ll return soon.
Just got home from a semi-decent movie that told a beautiful love story. It’s difficult for me to talk about love. Maybe I’m so far removed from anything like it that I’ve forgotten to care. Or I’ve resigned myself into acceptance that I’m not entirely — or at all — dateable. And that’s all right. But when I’m on the subway, pretending I’m in some Chicago movie, listening to the Beta Band, I wonder what it feels like.
And this was one idea I had, after listening excessively to Ingrid Michaelson’s “Far Away.” I think this is exactly what she’s singing. (I told you, I have this awful fisherman-at-sea fantasy.) Read the rest of this entry »
I had just finished seventh grade when the Chili Peppers’ Californication album reinforced the band’s position as a killer ’90s rock staple.
How would the seventh grade me (unfortunately awkward, self-conscious, hopelessly weird) look at the 23-year-old me (still the same), washing dishes in a Queens apartment while the local rock station plays “Scar Tissue.” I still know every word. The song annoyed the piss out of me when it was popular, so I have no nostalgia for it. Maybe that’s why it’s one of the first songs to strike me as just a song that’s in my past, not a song that is my past.
Thirteen-year-old Tanya hears the song and cringes, changes the station. Twenty-three-year-old Tanya lets the lyrics wash over her more easily than the soapy water on that plate, letting adult contemporary rock shack up in that lost part of the brain that seems perpetually reserved for adult contemporary rock. That’s where all those Three Doors Down and Matchbox 20 lyrics live. You never meant to remember, it just happens.
And then you remember nothing for a minute, and keep scrubbing the dishes, and you switch to NPR for the Writer’s Almanac, because it’s always fresh old news.
Do I think I would disappoint a great number of people if I announced that all I ever want to do with my life is live recreationally on a body of water with a husband who does manual labor, preferably fishing? Yes, yes I do. As the subject of nearly every poem, short story, or pretend novel chapter I’ve written in the past few months, this fantasy is crowding my brain.
So on days when I wake up to dismal clouds and gusty winds between skyscrapers and blaring taxis, not coastal cottages and salt-rusted pickups, it’s only fair that I listen to songs having to do with living by the sea.
These include, but are not limited to:
“The Ocean” by Dar Williams (preferably featuring John Prine, since he makes everything better)
“Fish & Whistle” by John Prine
“Far Away” by Ingrid Michaelson
“For My Own True Love (Lost at Sea)” by the Decemberists
Not to mention any of the drillion songs that remind me of the river or New England coasts.
Just something I wanted to say.
Curses, New York City. A pox upon you!
(But not really, whoever is in charge of poxing, because I’m a hypochondriac and can’t handle a few spider bites let alone a pox.)
Ambient light eats up the hours of my first summer in years without the Perseids. My time is not over, just taking a break.
Speaking of breaking, remember when you started a blog when you were 12 and it was still alive (in a different capacity — I’m sure no one wants to read about my 8th grade obsession with, well, everything and my knack for TyPiNg LiKe ThIs) when I was 23? I can’t take breaks for reasons like this.
Though I still write. Oh, OH! gods of writing how you love to smack me upside the head midway through my fourth It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia DVD and ask me what the hell I’m thinking! And then I realize I’m thinking about all the times I caught a toad, it began to pee on me, and I threw it at my sister. So I write about it.
My dreams lately most always involve my sister and I in an angry altercation, which I then have to remedy with a 9 a.m. phone call to be sure we’re still on good terms.
The summer heat suffocates me every time I step out of my office. It makes my throat close and drives homeless men to dry-hump the sidewalks. This is not a joke; I saw it today.
I’ve been conversing with people I probably shouldn’t and coloring in my cookbooks in hopes to fill a hot, summery void. I finished another book last night, this one a complete work of fiction that had me falling in love with real Catholicism, real Jesus-loves-the-little-children crap that I haven’t felt in some time. I wanted to cry and dance at the same time, and I grabbed onto my chest to keep my heart from coming out. This isn’t a joke, I’m a drama queen even when I’m alone. This was all after I read the Sermon on the Mount which, as a Catholic school veteran of, oh, 18 years, I’ve been over once or twice before. All I could think, is this how Father Dan feels all the time? And my void was voided for a minute.
If I stop comparing my friends now to my friends then….well, I don’t know what. But the next two weeks promise reunions and excessive Bonaventure love, and you can’t top that, can you?
That’s my phone. It’s a dear Bonaventurian. Goodnight.
