What Will You Be Doing With This Snowstorm?

It's snowtime in New York again, and I'm looking at the flakes falling fat, through the four-inch glass windows at work.

I had lots of fun things planned this weekend: a listening party with some music kids tonight, a weekend playdate with two different sets of friends that I never, ever get to see, and some sort of sitting around my fake fire snorefest with someone else. It was packed. It would have been fabulous.

Because of some freak circumstances, I suffered a terrific accident last night and my face looks like I was in a car accident. Fat lip, cuts all over the inside of my mouth, crazy bruising and lesions on my mouth and cheek. I look insane, and I feel even worse.

So, no fun things for me this weekend. Staying in, ordering tea, and watching a hundred movies in a row it is. I'm the girl without a face and I should not be seen by anyone unless it's a dramatic theater-less interpretation of The Phantom Of The Opera.

#sadface

Let this be a lesson to all of you, be safe out there! In your cars, public transport and beyond. When I come back, I hope to be on the mend. Because next weekend is Annabella's wedding, and then I go to Jamaica, and looking like bruised hell is apparently not allowed at either.

I am a Music Journalist, Not a Groupie

I am this close to giving up on music for good. Last night I was chilling with a really great band and their decent-enough manager and I left to check out another band downstairs.

I came back up, the guys who I had been talking to were off somewhere else, and someone in the entourage who has already been rude to me told me as soon as I sat down that I needed to go, that he and the other non-band members in the room wanted privacy. What was I supposed to do? Stand outside with the other girls hoping to catch a glimpse of the band as they came back in and sleep with them? I was there to GET A QUOTE. I am trying to sell an article on these people! And this dude who has nothing to do with them (or if he does, he's not doing his job right because he thinks I'm there to make out with them?!) unceremoniously kicked me out like I was going to stand in the hallway until they were done doing whatever it was they were doing. Until he DEIGNED to let me back in. Well screw that. I got my coat and split.

He said it really rudely. I skipped the afterparty that the band had invited me to and left without saying goodbye to the band or the manager because of this jerk.

And for a long time I thought this was just bunk, but now in music, I know it's true. This never, ever would have happened if I were a fat guy with a notepad instead of a girl in heels. I wasn't taken seriously for a minute. It really, really bummed me out, and I am really close to giving up on music, because this is the second time in as many months that I have been treated like a groupie instead of a journalist by PR people or band-handlers or DJs. And it really hurts my feelings, and it really hurts my articles and this kind of shit DOES NOT HAPPEN WHEN I WRITE ABOUT FOOD.

I hate music today, and maybe for a long time. Last night was a total bust and I went to the show without a friend in sight and left without a friend in sight and I really thought that I was okay with that, but some days, I don't think I'm okay at all.

I was just treated like a piece of meat. And it's starting to wear on me that I have to put on a happy face and act like it's okay, and that I have to bow down to have the opportunity to hang out with a band. They have the opportunity to talk to me! I'm the one writing about them. Sheesh. I have to tee hee and xo my way through yet another email thanking everyone for letting me even meet them. As if I'm going to finish the article now! As if I'm going to spend one more minute pitching them to magazines who don't really care. Why should I put my neck on the line for any of these people when they can't even be cordial? When they act like they are doing me a favor by letting me fawn over them and make them poetic?!

Makes me wish I'd written their manager something nasty. But then you know, I'd be the dumb bitch who couldn't handle it! It's really driving me crazy right now. Really, really crazy.

Uh Oh, planning my next great escape

When trauma happens...I leave.

Am anxiously awaiting hearing positive word from agents and schools (don't worry, I'll tell you when I hear anything good and won't tell you if I hear anything bad) and the waiting is K-I-L-L-I-N-G me. Doesn't help that I'm bearing this burden alone this time as the boy, well...that's a very tricky situation. There's just a girl. Me. And I am crawling the walls.

I think I want to go away on another epic adventure. One where I write a lot, one where I meet a lot of people, one where I come away having a lot to say. Right now I'm silenced by the silence. Best friends have moved away, boys have broken down because of the economy, big beautiful apartment all to myself. Which would be great if I were the kind of person who liked to be still. I'll be plenty still when I'm dead.

Must. Stop. Looking. At. Southeast. Asian. Airfare.

And instead look at an empty email inbox? No, that can't be the answer either.

Le sigh.

New York is a Playground

Where else can you stay up until 7 in the morning on a Sunday? Walk through Brooklyn and see jaunty, quintessential fashion plates who truly believe what they are wearing is street-appropriate and--surprising of all--new? Order delivery of drugs and Thai food twenty four hours a day? Date someone 20 years your senior or junior and not have anyone bat an eye? Have a party celebrating an "idea" for a gallery that has not even truly been conceptualized yet?

I stayed up way too late last night and this post is barely formed, but something, it's something enough to start. It's Disney-esque around here. It's Never-Never Land, and we don't exactly have any adults telling us we've got to grow up. And then someone says we're the adults, we're supposed to be telling each other or at least ourselves on this very fact, but that someone is a little voice in our head which we are able to quash with another cocktail and glittering party, and all of a sudden you wake up and you're 25, 35, and you don't understand what anyone around you is saying because they're speaking in pwning and apparently there are bands that are hugely popular wearing shirts of times you actually remember the first time they were in style and you shake your head and go, this is the fountain of youth in many respects. But to what end?

New York is the fountain of youth. We can bathe in it, drink it (and I bet it tastes like chocolate milk, right?) and splash each other with it, as another summer comes to pass, and the grind is what it is, and those bar, flesh, name-dropping distractions from the grind turn into the bigger grind itself, I wonder, why do we want to stay young and in a playground? I am too big for the monkey bars, I can fly by them way faster than the other kids, but that's because I'm not a kid, not like that any more. Of course it's easy for me, it's not challenging, and therefore it's boring. I don't want to wait for the other kids to figure out that you have to pump and swing to get across. You can tell them all that you have to offer, but they have to fall off and tear their skinny jeans and their palms to understand it for themselves first.

I remember because my older friends tried to tell me. But no, I knew it all, I was the smartest person in the world, I was deep, man, and I could handle it. Right. Only after a few scars did I really get it.

I want a roller coaster where you have to be "this tall" to ride, "this age" to ride.

That's what I want, not Disneyland, I want Universal Studios, please.

Something to think about...

"It's possible to think of culture as art, literature and music - it's more realistic to think of culture as the commercial messages that surround us. It's more accurate to think of culture as the machinery hidden behind the gleaming facade of commerce. It's more honest to think of culture as the process that makes you desire things. The culture industry is, simply put, every commercial message you've ever received, whether it's an ad, an alligator on a polo shirt or a signature on a pair of jeans. And until you recognize its symptoms - such as people buying a t-shirt with a logo on it, effectively paying to become an advertisement - you can't get out of it."

Scott Pucket, "How Much Did You Pay For Your Identity?: The Big Business of Selling Individuality to Kids."

I'm very thoughtful today. Though this article asserts something about one of my employers that I don't think is entirely true, the rest is pretty interesting...

Wish for the negative...

My dad, at this moment, is sitting to hear in Philadelphia, if his most recent biopsy is negative or positive.

Please send your positive vibes again to there, so that he can be negative...

The Transparency of Jellyfish

Today, I am a jellyfish. My insides are electric, glowing visible.

My feelers are out, I am stretched, transparent and floating and there is nothing else I can do except wait patiently and hope for waves to push to me what’s best and what I need.

Though the water I’m under can only provide external acceptance or tangible ideas, any sort of inner strength and wellbeing and even oxygen to breathe is all on me. I haven’t yet figured out how to convert the external accomplishments into the internal, and until I do, they will need to be infinite just to sustain me.

It’s a burden to ration out my own reserves, unsure of when they can be replenished, and there’s no way around it. I can’t have anything outward unless I am complete inside.

Dang.

The people we love who don’t love us back, the homes we covet and squeeze our eyes tight that we will receive, the breaks we deserve, the illnesses that strike us down before they don’t cannot impact us good or bad unless we are an open, waiting net. As large as we can possibly be.

There are no guarantees for anything and yet knowing this does not make anything one iota easier…

So for now, I wait. And see.

Sick, looking for an apartment, sick of looking for an apartment

I’ve been MIA lately and I’m sorry. Transitions have kept me from the page. I’ve been nursing a bad cold (or allergies? Which is worse? A cold in spring or the thought that I am actually allergic to spring itself? How nerdy of me!) and have been scouring this city for apartments far too early.

You and I both know I have an obsessive personality and though I am not moving until August, I feel as though this compulsion must be tended to now! Now! Now! Now!

Silly me, obviously nothing is open now for then. I know this and yet don’t. It kills me, I am a planner by nature, with the option to float spontaneous only between charted events, and to leave my fate up to fate is just not something quite comfortable to me.

I try to breathe deeply and then I wheeze through a rainbowed “productive cough”. I don’t take vitamins. I don't drink enough water. I don't sleep enough hours. I am stressed because my brain works in mysterious ways incongruent to my body. I slow down in action and speed up in anxiety. I could use a nap, some Tussin, a million dollars as usual.

I have a book to finish, a life to start, a year left to glean what I haven’t in four…now if only I could stop popping Tylenol like Pez...

Positively Negative

Positive is supposed to mean a good thing.

In this case, it doesn’t.

One lymph node is positive (abnormal pathology, positive for cancer cells). There’s a question about the second one, a blip on the report that contradicts. My dad’s life hangs in that blip. My mom and brother and me, our lives too. They have to retest.

They sent him home without an answer.

If the other node is also positive, that’s the negative, bad outcome. That means a very tough course of radiation with a lower chance of getting through this intact. We won’t know until later this week.

So if ever you wanted to think thoughts that negate what could be positive, please think them now. We need your good negative thoughts and good negative prayers.

Send them this way, and hope that the power of positive thinking can not produce a positive result, but instead a positive outcome for him...

The Flowers

There is decaying grandeur at my desk in the form of an outrageously large floral arrangement, courtesy of my mother.

The once lovely bells of Ireland, Calla lilies and long fingers of orchids are drooping, yellowing, and drying out their once-sturdy green.

The water grows murkier by the minute, the stems fray out in smushy bits, and they permeate that smell, you know the one, that smell of mildewed shower which flowers expel as they die.

The leaves of formerly supple buds curl brownish on their edges because on the weekend, while no one was here to tend to them or prevent it, they crossed the line of beautiful vibrancy. Instead they stranglehold their sadsack grip on a memory that is no longer worth recalling.

*Sigh*

Metaphor? Maybe…

Chin Up

Welcome to K’s pity party!

No, no. Don’t leave your shoes at the door. You’ll need them to come in and smear mud on the floor boards, and what would a pity party be if you didn’t end by walking them all over me? (*uncomfortable silence*)

Don’t be shy!

How do you like my decorations? Voodoo dolls are back I’m telling you. No, it’s not a Halloween theme. But great idea, I should use them for that in a few weeks.

You like the music, right? Our soundtrack is uncontrollable sobbing interspersed with mumbles of inappropriate, manic giggling at the ridiculousness of it all. You don’t like it? Fine, I’ll put on Emo. As if there’s any difference. Zing!

Are you hungry? Don’t fret, we’ve got snacks at this party. And seriously, when was the last time you had snacks at a party? No, fancy cocktail hours and wine and cheese pairings don’t count. No, there’s no baked brie, but how about a nice big slice of humble pie? It goes really well if you wash it down with an icy cold glass of bitter desperation.

So, yeah. Uh. How’ve you been? Grrrrreaaaaaaat. No really, that's great.

Hmmm.

You’re right. This party blows. Let’s get out of here.

This is what they make massages, chocolate, and down comforters for. Corral pain into poignant moments in the novel, and move the hell on…

And The Lonely Blows In...

Being alone is fun, until it’s not your choice.

This weekend I was forced alone, and I spent it glued to the couch and dragging myself outside for sludgy coffee and impractical purchases. I saw “Little Miss Sunshine”, alone. I bought suede boots that I have no idea how to wear, alone. I wandered the crowded streets, alone, and the worst part was, there was a stretch of several hours where I called no one and no one called me and I was struck hard by how I could have been snatched in that timeframe, quartered and thrown in a dumpster, and yet, no one would have known and no one would have cared.

I’m mourning the death of my former life now, and I don’t deal well with grief. Everything is exhausting and pointless; I found myself 100 pages in to reading “The Corrections” before I realized I had already read it. Every action I take is a step back. My novel is stagnant at page 125 as of this second.

Being a tortured artist is overrated. I’m not finding comfort in the aesthetic of pain. I can’t slash angry lyrics on a page, or even be lyrical at that. I can only create when I’m happy, not shivering on a corner of the bed, face hot, paralyzed by fear. Of the unknown. Of the thought that things that do not make you who you are, and even if they do, they are wasted, you could have done it some other way, known a slice instead of a wave of sadness and you could have learned it just from that…

Feelings mock. Things that control my life that I have no say in. Or worse, I do, and it’s my fault that things have unfolded as they are, and of course, whose fault would it be otherwise? structures crumbling in my hands, and the thought of the reason why is something that could keep me sick at night, because I really do not know. I do not know how much of me is supposed to be, and why it’s here.

Every action tastes like a mistake these days. Fingernails get dirty faster and sleepiness crowds my eyes, something is wrong, and while there must be a remedy, someone else holds it today, not me.

The Blahs

You know the feeling right? The one in which you're sitting at your desk or on your couch and as you look at that paper/script/homework to read for the tenth time or as you flip through the channels or look at your empty wallet/purse/online bank statement and sigh, you suddenly just shout out, "BOOOOOOOOOOOORIIIING!"

I'm feeling that. So much lately. And of course, for no good reason. When I am overcome with thoughts of blah, I like to plan. So below, my course of action.

The fabulous things I will do to combat tedium, boredom, and a rare form of cabin fever that involves my cube, a view of the next building, the interior of the same restaurants, clubs, and classrooms:

-Take a trapeze lesson on the Hudson River. I just signed up.

-Have lunch at the Mermaid Inn in the middle of a weekday. Because it’s right next door to my apartment and I’ve always wanted to blow off a Thursday just to putt around my neighborhood.

-Go to Miami with my girlfriends for the weekend. I want/need/have to have a girl’s vacation full of shoes, tanning oil, and white wine by the pool.

-Blow any extra money this month on perishables and temporaries: avocados, champagne, pedicures, meditation techniques, martinis with blue cheese stuffed olives, plays, indie concerts, art exhibits, flicks at the Sunshine theater.

That’s what I’ve got so far, but I could really use some more. What do you do to make life interesting every day?