Post, New Year's Eve Style

The last day of an incredible year, filled with one completely unexpected event after another. Gratitude is too modest a word for what I feel at its conclusion. Many questions come to mind.

How do I make the most of its richness? Is it possible to celebrate all its goodness in just one night? And what's next? What happens tomorrow?

It's exciting that this New Year's Eve it doesn't seem as though anything is coming to an end. As a friend said to me recently--a friend who tends to make sweeping statements about the condition of the universe--"2010 is the year of the new everything." I began and will end this year in the most wonderful New York City, but I now know that life as we know it does not start and end here (who knew?)--this is something new. It (life) will take place (for me) in a brand new city for most of my 2010.

I think, upon reflection, that the best way to use this newness is to let it energize me and inspire me to use the last year for the production of good and beauty. So to the someones (or the no ones) who have ever read, will ever read, or will never read this little blog, I promise you that I will use this year to fulfill a dream I have up to this point been too scaredy cat to pursue: I will write. I will write bad things and good things and things that are not important. I will write and write and write, when I'm tired, when I don't want to, when I have nothing to write. So I promise you, dear invisible, possibly/probably nonexistant readers that I will write to you. And I hope you like what I write.

Happy New Year!

Bye Bye New York

Well, after said walks around the city, after sitting in some new cafes in Brooklyn, after a week visiting family in LA, I know it to be true: I must leave New York City. True: there are people who manage to carve out lovely lives for themselves here, and I'm not exactly sure why I'm not one of them. I just find myself thinking again and again: what is the rush for? I like to have conversations with strangers but the context I find myself having them in New York becomes strange and warped more often than not. Strangers either tend to cling to you after a few minutes of conversation, or I begin to cling to them, and one of us inevitably pulls away.

A few years ago I was sitting directly across from a guy on the 1 train. Neither of us had headphones in, we were just waiting for our stop. He kept smiling to himself, just a very sweet smile and his mind seemed his home, filled with fantasy and anticipation. The train was almost empty, which made the space and quiet for him to indulge this very simple, pure side, which normally, I imagine would have been concealed and protected from the noise and push of the masses. I can't see a smile like that crammed sardine-like into the 1 train around 9am on a Tuesday.

Across from him, I felt like a voyeur, but he was right there, in front of me, doing something you never see in public in Manhattan except maybe sometimes from children. I sat there batting around the idea of talking to him, but I also didn't want to take him away from wherever he was. So I hoped, by some miracle, that he would get off when I did. And he did. And by now intention of my own, we went up the same stair well and he looked in my direction. So I couldn't wait anymore, and I asked him, "What were you smiling about?"

"I was thinking about a trip I'm going on in a couple of months." It was February. "I'm going to ride my bike across the country."

"Wow," I said. "That sounds amazing."

"Yeah..." and then he went into some technical details I can't recall that we're boring, but were the kind of things you would say when you've been thinking about something a lot. "I'm really looking forward to it."

"I can imagine. That really sounds so great." He wasn't looking at me anymore now. Perhaps he realized he was sharing his dream with a stranger. Perhaps my responses were too dry. Or maybe he felt the desperate yearning that his plans were creating in me. Desperate yearning is something I think a lot of New Yorkers have in common, and he was looking forward to getting out of New York. He was going to fulfill that yearning and dreaming in his spare time about what it would be like. So why would he want to hang out with a chick who was caught up in the desperation. Besides, all I could bring myself to say to him after all that detail was, "It's awesome that you're doing that," as if he didn't already know.

He looked at me a little sideways. We were out of the turnstiles now and outside in the cold. We didn't stop walking when he said, "Well it was nice to meet you."

"You too," I said. And we kept walking in opposite directions. What I see now is that we were talking to each other through a glass wall. On my side was a strong commitment to making a life in New York, firm, committed, ever-reaching higher and higher. The guy on the train had let that go or perhaps had never had it. He was breaking loose, escaping the island, going to see what else was out there, if we really do have everything in New York. Actually, he already seemed to know that we don't. Now I know too. And I'm dreaming about what's next.

The Beat Goes On

The first day back on NYC pavement was alive. The sun has been out all week and upon return, I feel that the life in this city had my blood pumping thicker and harder that first day, so much so that the force of it couldn't be contained within my skin. I walked around the Flatiron District then down through the East Village, then across the Manhattan Bridge into Dumbo all the while Jay Z pumping into my ears, one ode to Brooklyn and New York after the next. On the bridge, the East River swept underneath wide and dark, the lights of the two boroughs lining each side and motor boats glittering and tearing through the middle of it. Lighter off the ground, I rolled forward on my feet, greeting other passers by, but coolly and without too much warmth.

A few days later, including a day in Union Square with an old friend in the midst of Christmas shopping, I'm still far from convinced about staying here. Carving out a little life where you can live quiet, modestly, amidst quirks and strange ticking creatures and characters seems an impossibility here. I thought it could be done in Brooklyn, but I've lived there and I have my doubts. New York sets the pace, and we all follow. Am I wrong? What niche have I missed? This mainstream rush for gold is not feeding the beast, the hungry soul, within. I don't want to wear business casual or even office sleek; I don't want to do a 9 to 5 or even a 10 to 6; I don't want to ever have to use the internet to meet someone new again.

I'm still looking into other cities, in short. In the meantime, I'll take walks around Harlem and Red Hook today in search of life as it exists in real time.

Back, back, back again

Anytime, anywhere, anyone who inevitably asked the question, “Where are you from?” produced a strong response when I answered, “New York.” The response was usually impressed in one way or another, and after living in New York for over 3 years supporting myself and pursuing exactly what I wanted to (as opposed to money) I understand entirely why people would have that reaction. The next question would sometimes follow from the new face in the newest place, “So what are you doing here?” to which I would smile because it was a good question.

Here in the last 11 months has been the entire western stretch of India over a course of 6 months, then the Disneyland that is Florence, Italy, then 4 surprise months in Glasgow, Scotland. I left for India in January to get some perspective and planned to be back in 6 months with a clearer idea of what I wanted to do. That didn’t happen. Instead I felt for a longer and longer period of time that I had to keep going, that my heart was still thirsty, that after that soul-sucking last year in New York, I still needed the rest of the world to help me back on my feet.

Now, to be clear and fair, I love New York and I don’t live under the delusion that it’s the city’s fault I broke down. That’s crazy. Though sparkling and sludgy New York is a breathing, pulsating place that seems to possess, as a space, its own demands and has zero qualms about taking what it wants, I realize my own well-being is my own responsibility. (I was helped to realize that by the therapist I began to see a few months before I got the hell out.) So that said, I slacked off and was sucked in. I stopped going to the soup kitchen where I had worked every Sunday since I moved to New York. I wasn’t putting myself to bed, but staying up too late, too many nights of the week. I moved into an apartment I wasn’t crazy about and instead of finding another, I stayed there, didn’t take very good care of the place, and made my roommate and longtime friend pretty crazy. I also stopped writing, though I had come to New York, to write, plain and simple.

I was living as a loser, though of no special variety, just your average breed. And like any proper loser would do, I started to buy into all the things marketing promises will make your life better. And where on earth is there more marketing and promise of better life through money and services than, you guessed it, NEW YORK CITY. So I ate and drank what was easy and the only thing that made the city streets look warm from the outside—pizza and beer. To feed the loneliness, I Internet dated, but, certainly in the state I was slipping into, attracted no one of interest. I stopped reading Harper’s to which I had a subscription, I stopped reading The Times, I stopped going to the library. Instead of to MoMA or the Met, I went home, watched free episodes of Mad Men or Project Runway online, and collected my unemployment checks.

Yes, somewhere in the middle of this existential slip, I had lost my job as a grant writer. Essentially, I found myself in a position I wasn’t trained for and which required a great amount of earnest effort and hard work. In my expanding reverie, I couldn’t show up the way they needed me to. I was waiting to make a mistake that would cause them to have to get rid of me and finally, I did, so they did. Honestly, I was relieved.

But let’s be clear, I, like (most of) the rest of the human race, am ultimately driven by desire, love, hope—positive motivating factors. So I couldn’t remain in this state, though I saw no easy way out. Then I remembered: India! That was as far as the thought went, but I had been having it for three years. So that was it. I had been saving scraps of money here and there while living in New York—a difficult feat, as anyone who lives there will tell you—and I had hit a dead end. There was no way forward but up and out, on an airplane I mean.

Skipping over the last 11 months (as they can be found on another blog, An American in India, though I’m ever so slowly catching up on that one as well), I now find myself two and a half days back in New York City. Initial reactions: the magic is not gone, but it’s faded. I did not get back on the platform for the A train back to Brooklyn and breathe a sigh of relief, quite the contrary. After living for 4 months in a smaller city, filled with music and culture, rent ¼ the size for 3 times the space, tons of friendly local pubs with cheap and delicious beer, and with an equal number of spaces with calm and beauty as a necessary measure of noise and confusion, I’m finding myself with the sensation that it might be high time to find another home….