Decisions

Sitting across from you on my twenty-fourth birthday, we order pappardelle with ossobucco ragu.  I remember making ragu every day in Florence – it is malleable, ragu, depending on the dish you’re preparing.  It is almost a blanket word to describe the base, the foundation of your dish.  I explain to you, for some reason I can’t remember, that pappardelle means “to rip or to tear” in Italian, but then I realize I’m wrong; that’s tagliatelle.  I don’t tell you this.

I ask you how your life is different today than you thought it would be.  Earnestly, you say you thought you’d be single and dating several women.  That you thought you’d have a job that paid “at least twice” what you are making now.  You didn’t say it, but of course you thought that you’d be happy.

How is my life different?

I’m here.  I’m in New York and I eat Lean Cuisines for lunch and make my own pot of rice and beans for dinner in an apartment that I was “invited” to live in with you.  I used to dream that I would live in an UES apartment, but it wasn’t this one.  No, I was going to live in Madrid and flirt with deliciously dark men who wore scarves and tailored slacks.  I was going to write in notepads and feed ducks in the park.  And smoke.  I was going to gracefully smoke a pack of cigarettes a day and wear black lingerie under my clothes and consume nothing more than coffee and the occasional marisco.

I don’t say this to you.  I can’t.  I just tell you I wanted to be in Europe.  In Spain.

We eat.  I ask if you’re sure ossobucco refers to bone marrow and you insist that it does, but I know it actually means veal.

You ask how I would feel, then, if I moved to Colorado.  I gnaw on an extra-chewy piece of veal in my mouth.  If I moved to Colorado, as if I wouldn’t be moving to Colorado to populate a house, which you’ll buy, with your kids.

I tell you, “then, I would feel like I’m moving in the opposite direction.”  Of what I want, I don’t say.  Of who I am, I don’t say. 

“Geographically?” you joke.

 I swallow. 

I look past you as you continue to eat, out the window and onto Church St where it is freezing and December and New York.  I feel heavy and the wine has given me a headache.  I remember, for a moment, my dream of Europe: of summers with strawberries and lemon trees and tablecloths and picking the last piece of chicken off of the plate.  Of children and laundry lines and nests of robin’s blue eggs in our trees.

This is not your dream.  But is it still mine?

Pigeon Wings

I’m the hero of this story, I don’t need to be saved.

Openings, closings; keys turning inside locks, echoing in the staircase.

Walking around Midtown in the evening is depressing.  Suit jackets and tight skirts, silk blouses and harried cell phone conversations.  Grabbing your dress tight around your thighs as you fall into a cab, running across town, uptown.  Who am I?  I am not this.

I’m so done with New York.  I feel it in my bones.

No one’s got it all.

I’m skinnier.  I’m unhealthy.  There are swollen bronchial tubes in my lungs and I fall asleep too easily.  The skin beneath my eyes are dry.  I’m lost.  I’m uninspired — well, that’s a lie.  I’m restless, but when aren’t I?  Where are my friends?  Where is my life?

I am blocking myself.  I think I know this, too.  Stop. Break free. Stop doing this to yourself.

Measures of Success

To be a good person; to do good, to make others feel loved, to help them.

To feel whole myself, to feel at peace, and one with nature, god, energy, life — whatever you want to call it.

To explore and meet characters and to not judge them off the bat — something I have trouble doing most of the time.  To explore other: places and people.

To inspire and to be inspired.

To love, deeply and purely.

To connect.

To know myself.

To grow.

New York is Not Enough

I have tried to write about this SO many times over the past two years, but I feel like I’ve never quite captured what I’ve really wanted to say.  Walking through Bally’s Wild Wild West casino in Atlantic City yesterday, I think I got closer to it than ever before.

City friends of mine (read: not lifelong Queens peeps) had had drinks at the Met Friday night.  It’s something that I have always vaguely wanted to do, but also something that I have always put off, something I can do “at some point in the future.”  Learning who had attended the event (Chicago-natives, Ohio-natives, California-natives, etc.), made me realize something.  I am not as enthusiastic about going out and living it up in the city because, 1. I’ll admit, I’m in a relationship, and I prefer cuddling in A/C to high heels and tight dresses on a humid-as-fuck July night, and 2. I’ve always lived here.  I’ve never felt that my time is finite here, that I need to squeeze out the magnificence of New York now, “while I’m here,” because I’ll eventually move back home to be closer to my family.

I never used to think that I’d ever leave New York.  I honestly imagined a long life lived on the Upper East Side; I’d grow rich from writing (ha!) and buy a townhouse, and yes, shock gasp, raise children in Manhattan that go to (!!!) public school.  Perhaps I’ll write about my escalating struggles with trying to prove to City Friends that the New York City Public School System is not for degenerates and gun-toting gangsters — I swear one person actually said once, “I guess I could send my kid to public school but… yecchh,” — though I digress.  My point here is that I’ve always believed New York would be there for me to enjoy.  It has been the backdrop of my entire life, and I believed it always would be.

I don’t particularly care about status, social circles, Saks, or the East Village.  Let me repeat, and this is going to sound pretentious: the East Village is to me, whatever the local college bar crawl was to you.  The East Village is underage drinking, puking, bad decisions, sugary cocktails, PBRs, lanky guys with floppy hair who think they are smarter than they are because they read The Week.  It’s where I spent several college (and high school) nights, barhopping as Amy Bernstein with my fake ID, and kissing manboys to get over whatever crush of mine was going unrequited at the moment.  As your adult selves, would you really want to spend every weekend hanging out in your hometown’s parking lot, drinking Natty Light till the cops chased you home?

That’s why I choose to live and play on the UES as an adult.  But here’s the thing, and I’ve never hit on it until now: I’m jealous of you newbs.  I’m jealous that this all gets to be exciting and new and exhilarating for you.  And while I am still able to capture that feeling sometimes, it’s almost not enough.  I’m beginning to feel a little restless.  On the heels of starting a new job at a welcoming and comforting new organization that I truly believe will help me discover a new level of understanding, maturity and, yeah, spirituality, I kind of also feel that this will be my last job in New York.  That I’m poised to leave after a couple of years to set up shop somewhere new.  I don’t know yet where that will be, and I don’t know what could possibly compete with New York, but that’s just it: New York has always been home to me.  And I’ve always been a girl that likes a challenge.

The Devil Is in the Cupcake

Cupcakes. Black Forest Cake. Chocolate frosting. Lady fingers. Twinkies. Chocolate chip cookies and brownies with cream cheese frosting.

I don’t usually crave many sweets; in fact, I don’t usually eat many at all in my regular diet of salty potato chips, salty french fries, and salty Italian breads (see where I’m going with this?). But I decided yesterday to begin a 3 (to 4, if I can manage)-week-long yeast-free diet, after at least a year of my immune system attacking me and/or simply shutting down. I’ve had bad allergies, bad eczema, and other ladygirl problems that have pretty much confirmed what everyone in my 5th grade class must have thought after I missed 57 days of school: I should really just be living inside a bubble.

This means I’m excommunicating bread, all fruit, most grains, and sugar, the biggest culprit, from my life for the next month. The interwebs tell me not to drink coffee either, but there isn’t a fat chance in hell I’m going to give up coffee, so I’m still drinking a full cup o’ my black and bitter bolt of energy.  The diet is essentially the (’04 Pre-Prom) Atkins diet. I successfully held out for quite a while on the Atkins diet back then, however the Atkins diet allowed — and encouraged — cheese. This doesn’t.

The first day of this diet was relatively fine, considering I decided to start after I’d already had a bowl of (multi-grain!) Cheerios for breakfast. But this morning has been brutal. After a breakfast of 3 scrambled eggs and tomatoes (I’m not trying to lose weight, I’m trying to eradicate my health problems), and a lunch of leftover sausage, peppers, and more tomatoes, I am literally CRAVING sweets. Craving – not a light, fleeting thought about how a cookie might be nice to tie me over until dinner, or the quiet consideration of a few vanilla wafers with some tea.

I am desiring all sweets I can think of. The red velvet cupcakes from Two Little Red Hens that Bethenny Frankel keeps talking about, the melt-in-your-mouth freshly baked donuts that Christina and I used to eat on the way upstate to go apple picking, pumpkin muffins and almond biscotti from my favorite Sleepy Hollow coffee shop, even the fucking LivingSocial.com cupcake that appears in EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEIR ADS with the dollop of pink frosting… and I don’t even LIKE frosting!

It is obvious to me that these cravings are due to my dramatically cutting sugar out of my diet. And to be honest, I feel much better having just written about all the desserts that I’m craving. It has momentarily subsided. I think the intensity of the cravings should subside after about 3 days; I hope so, at least. Until then, I’ll take great comfort in the fact that I’ve allowed myself to continue eating the Most Delicious Chips in the World, as I’ve just recently realized how healthy they are (for however healthy a potato chip can be):

Having long been obsessed with all things salt, and more importantly, all things potato, I have loved a great many different brand of chip over my years: Ridges, then Lays, and now, this beauty.  After eating it almost every single day for the past 9 months (I should be embarrassed by that, but I’m not), I have just now realized that it has no trans-fat, or hydrogenated fat, is cooked in sunflower oil, and is, uh, Natural.  Yeah, I see that it’s written on the bag, but I usually just look for the blue on the bag and buy it in a salt-induced craze only to scarf it down so quickly that I don’t stop to think about how they were made!

In any case, I highly recommend that everyone try these if they haven’t.  As a self-proclaimed potato aficionado, these are the best potato chips out there by a mile.

Remember Me as a Time of Day

We giggle uncontrollably about how
Nervous we are when we enter the building, and how hard my heart beats and how my hands shake when they knock at the door with their guards asking for Laura Martinez. Because she’s late on rent, and so am I, trying to hustle to pay my bills and my $4000 debt of traveling to Spanish-speaking countries. And because I love you so much and I straddle this line of propriety and impropriety and property and appropriate conversations and what’s not; beer is not. Stop it.

Scared. Scared for the next few months and how I will survive, who I am. Why can’t I balance being a good friend to all friends at the same time? Because I’m afraid I’m being judged. Because I would judge. Because I have. Because I want to be with those who truly love me. Because I’m scared. Because I’m chicken shit. Because I want a cigarette, just to calm my nervous hands, but I won’t because of how sore and raw my throat is from sneaking one in, and holding it all back. I miss poetry and I miss Puerto Ricans who make it. I miss believing. I miss truth, oh god, I miss the unadulterated beauty of truth in word.

Scared of going to Europe for weeks without you, or anyone but my overanxious mind creating stories about you and other girls and tricking myself into fucking this up because I’m scared. Scared that I’m not ready for nannies and registries and do you know how much a RING costs? Where do people get it? I just want to live. I want sand and sunset and mussels and to figure out what the fuck fucked my Dad up so much on the Adriatic coast. I guess this is the last piece of the puzzle. Spain, Italy, Puerto Rico, Croatia. I want to drink viles of olive oil, I want to sleep under the sun, I want to swim– oh to SWIM in the water, and be one.

I wanted something else; I never wanted a nine to five, I never wanted a cookie-cutter house, I never wanted to settle down and be dependent. I didn’t. I’m resisting. I still have some life to live, some freedom to use. And why do strawberries and lemon trees need to be retirement activities? Why can’t we have what we want now?

Scared of you coming home and wishing I was another self. One that wore heels and led meetings and made calls to Mexico. One that came home long after you had already rolled a J and unbuttoned your shirt on the couch with a Scotch. I’m not that girl, though she had a promising future. I am congested, and dry-lipped, and wearing the same shirt from yesterday, and hiding from the guards who just knocked on the door asking for Laura Martinez to pay her rent. I am not afraid, though, to share my thoughts with people, to chide them; to raise my own children; to get dirty; to love a messy, uncontrolled love; to write myself onto a page or a screen and share it with strangers; to make myself available; to travel through Germany on my own.

Wait a minute. I’m afraid, I say, to end up someone I know I’m not, but the fear is because I believe it’s uncontrollable. Everything is in my control. I control who I am. If I want something other than a soul-killing job, if I need something unique to my own existence, then create it. Create. We cannot forget the awe-inspiring power we possess.

“If there’s a story you want to read that hasn’t been written, write it yourself.”

Like a Rat in a Cage

Last night I went out for a few drinks at Blue Ribbon Brasserie with 3 others, all of whom are not native to these New York parts. At some point during the conversation, in which I felt unintelligent and uninformed (I had to explain what the company I am temping for does, which my drinkmates think is amazingly cool, and I think is painful and confusing), college came up. I hate when this happens. Everyone talks longingly with a gleam in their eye for the days of yesteryear when they drank beer upside down and slept in dorms of various stages of renovation. I don’t. College was purely education and 3 hour subway commutes. So I always dread the college conversation every time it comes up with transplants.

This time, however, when I tell the Boy in the bar where I went to college, his eyes open wide and he says, “So you’ve never lived anywhere else besides NEW YORK?” Yeah, Condescension. New York City — it’s not like I’ve been living in Greenbow, Alabama my whole life.

But it still brought up old ideas that I should be taking this show on the road. My New York is not the New York of my peers. And how do you explain this to the kids of the East Village? That we grew up with families that required us to stay close, and that we went to high schools that probably gave up on us long before we ever enrolled, and that financial aid was our only passport to college, and choosing to go to schools in other states, let alone other coasts, was not even really an option. I’m not trying to say that we were disadvantaged, and I’m not asking for pity. It’s just striking to me to see this difference. Maybe we are an anomaly?

American Pie

“Edin explains that poor and working-class couples, after seeing the ravages of divorce on their parents or within their communities, have become more hesitant to marry; they believe deeply in marriage’s sanctity, and try to guard against the possibility that theirs will end in divorce. Studies have shown that even small changes in income have significant effects on marriage rates among the poor and the lower-middle class. “It’s simply not respectable to get married if you don’t have a job—some way of illustrating to your neighbors that you have at least some grasp on some piece of the American pie,” Edin says. Increasingly, people in these communities see marriage not as a way to build savings and stability, but as “a symbol that you’ve arrived.”

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/how-a-new-jobless-era-will-transform-america/7919/3/

Guilty Conscience

This isn’t really relaxing.

Because my neighbors have wisened up and have begun locking their Wi-Fi networks, I’m currently sitting inside The Coffee Pot on 9th avenue, paying $3.00 an hour to write a blog in my black velour sweatpants and… and my Taking Back Sunday hoodie.  Yeah.  What up, Betty?

Nick called me “Maria” this morning because I discussed the possibility of my boyfriend joining us on a trip to a Mexican resort.  I think that’s uncalled for, and it makes me resentful.  People are supposed to grow, relationships are supposed to grow.  I support the plan that we all get together for a trip each year, but Spain was different.  Spain was a trip of culture and dancing and rainy nights and 3 layers of clothing and wet socks.  There is certainly a difference between seeking a collective connection to the Motherland and… well, a 5-night vacation at a beach resort in bikinis. 

Let’s think about this objectively.  How would it look on the other side, if, to outsiders, M’s girlfriend was going to Cancun for 5 days with a girlfriend and 4 other men, one of whom she has hooked up with in the past– and without M.  Sorry, ladies and gentleman, but that shit just doesn’t fly when you’re in a relationship. If the script were flipped, and M was going on a sexy beach vacation with 4 girls, one of whom he’s hooked up with in the past, you best believe the earrings would come off, and some serious shit would go down.

I realize that the Old Christine (who no longer has New Adventures) would totally disagree with that, and would claim to be open, and trusting, and not care who wanted to go where with who when.  But this is just my reality in this new relationship; it would be disrespectful and almost immature to not bring my boyfriend with me on a tropical vacation.

Now, were the trip to be to Prague, or Vancouver, or Buenos Aires even, I could justify it in my mind.  It would be a trip of cultivation and friendship and connection.  Let’s be real about Cabo San Lucas, or wherever it’s supposed to be: renting a timeshare on the beach would be all about sex, naked bodies, clubs, and drinking ourselves into oblivion.  And it would be irresponsible of me to do that without my boyfriend.  I’m sorry, it just would.  And I hope that doesn’t make me a horrible “Smug Married,” but I really feel that the rules of the game have changed now.  I’m no longer single, and my decisions affect more than just me.

Brunch

For a change of pace, this Sunday morning I decided I’d be the one to go out and scavenge for food to bring back to our fifth floor cave.  And when I say “for a change of pace,” I mean “since I fell asleep at 9pm on a Saturday night, I don’t know what else to do with my time so early on a Sunday, but to take a stroll.”

In any case, it’s a nice day, and it turns out the Upper East Side is quite sleepy this early on the weekend.  Hell’s Kitchen always seems abuzz with, what I presume to be, Jersey people brunching in my 9th ave restaurants.  By the time I’d gotten my recently lusted after Espresso Truffle from Starbucks and picked up a couple of bagels on 67th, more and more Upper East Siders had stirred from their slumber and were walking around with a familiar case of the leggings-clad morning afters.  (Editor’s note: I too was wearing leggings, so I really can’t judge.)

Most of them appeared to be wearing college T-shirts and cozy hoodies, laughing hoarsely about that “cute girl last night” or what time they should pick up the bus at Port Authority.  I imagined that a lot of them were on their way to breakfasts or brunches with their collective group of friends to gossip about the adventures of last night and I was jealous.  A little.

I miss our own Queens version of this; of having house parties and rounding everyone up the Sunday morning after to go to Mark Twain Diner and dish about what lead to Kathleen taking off her shirt or piecing together the night’s events to determine if Antonio had slept with Raggedy Anne in the bathroom or not.  I found myself missing the laughter with everyone in Mark Twain’s big round booth in the back, or in the annoyingly odd-shaped corner tables at Georgia.

But then I turned the corner off of 1st and onto 64th street, and wondered if maybe those were meant to be just that now– fond memories.  All of our lives are drastically different these days, and not just due to geography; we’re all dealing with serious life issues and events, and not really in a position to do the parties and the group brunches anymore.  We have jobs, families, relationships.  Is it really possible that we have outgrown partying for the most part, after just 22 years of existence?  Is it really possible that growing up where we have has made us more mature and allowed us to have these life experiences earlier on in life?  I don’t know.  I am trying not to sound pretentious, but I don’t know how else to put it.  We’re not 18 anymore.

So instead of lamenting for how things used to be, I am going to be grateful (in this month of thanks) for what my life does have: compassionate and supportive friends, travel, a fulfilling and affirming job that despite what I may think or complain to others, has given me more confidence at 22 than I ever thought possible.  A courtship with Manhattan, in its many different neighborhoods… and delis.  A smart, caring, loving man who has cared for me when I was sick, and made me laugh when I was sad.  I am thankful for love in my heart after so many years of being bitter and angry.  I was so angry for so long.

Of course there are some rough nights, rough days, but somewhere deep down I know it’s just a phase.  A trial.  We are the strongest, most genuine, and overall most fucking fantastic people I know.   We’ll all come out of this on the other end even stronger, and then find ourselves on our way to Sunday brunches again, except this time for weddings and babies and anniversaries.  And book launches, if I have my way.