This is where I tl;dr all over your face.

It’s been years since I’ve had to stay away from the dining room table where the adults ate and lingered afterwards to talk. When I went off to college, that’s when I earned myself a permanent spot at that table. It wasn’t so much of an exclusive arrangement; I was frequently bored or annoyed by the things my aunts talked about and in those instances, I would get up and go upstairs to the boys’ room where they would be playing video games. And so the tradition of me migrating between floors began.

We sat down for coffee this afternoon. Everyone had gotten their hair cut recently so naturally we were all comparing styles and raving about the hairstylist. Of course we all used the same one. Ken’s the best! My mother’s older sister, who is a housewife, finally caved and got a cell phone recently so I was playing with the camera, taking pictures of the sisters while they talked. When they saw the photos, they lamented how old they’ve gotten and then they looked at me and were like, “You know you’re really old when the baby of the family turns 25.” And I was like, “First of all, I was never the baby.” And then the Stories started. Below, the top three they like to tell whenever we gather:

1. How, when I was first getting potty trained, I refused to let anyone clean up after me except my mom’s older sister. When asked why I insisted on having only her be the one to wipe my butt, I said that it was because she was my favorite. “If I was your favorite, then I shouldn’t have to wipe your butt! Oy!” Never gets old.

2. How I was really jealous of my mom’s younger sister babysitting someone else’s kid while she was looking after me that one time and I chose to convey my displeasure by conking this newborn baby on the head with my bottle.

3. The third isn’t really one cohesive story as much as it is random one-liner notes about what a good kid I had always been and how no one ever had to worry about me.

I never really have anything to contribute to this part of the evening so while they reminisced about my childhood, I concentrated on getting Ryan to engage with me and repeat the words I was saying. They watched me and marveled at how compliant he was being with me and I wanted to say that it’s because I’m the only one in the family who truly understands and accepts his diagnosis. But I didn’t because I didn’t want to get into that sort of conversation today.

When my mom and I walked home, we walked with our arms linked because she had already slipped at least 3 times in the last week from icy, snowy patches and there was already one large bruise on the outside of her right thigh. She was afraid of falling again and getting another bruise, or worse, having to suffer through another thing like the time she had a herniated disc and my brother and I spent that entire summer going to physical therapy with her. I was afraid she would fall and wind up with a spinal cord injury and as we walked, I told her about all the random ways in which the people on my unit have wound up there before she told me to stop talking about such unlucky things.

Her arm slipped out of mine at some point when she reached for her cell to check the time. I wound up walking a little ahead of her, shuffling my feet over wet patches to let her know in advance if it was water, slush, or ice. At our own corner where there wasn’t a clear path shoveled through, I stood up on the ice and reached a hand behind me to take my mom’s arm and found her warm hand already extended out towards me. We walked the rest of the way holding hands. She said, “I haven’t held your hand like this since you were 9.” I could’ve cried.

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This is how it’s supposed to end. Or, an open letter to any and all future lovers.

We would have gone on the cutest dates. I would have spent a lot of time trying to get you to admit that, compared to California, New York isn’t that bad at all. I would have taken you to maybe every place I ever listed on my geek tours. Some you would love. Some you would lie about enjoying. You would learn exactly how nerdy and geeky I can be and what “fangirl” means and eventually whenever we saw a puppy you would grow to stop bracing yourself for the gasp and the incoherent babbling and not even notice it.

And for as much time as I would spend on the internet, you would try valiantly to get me to spend outside. It would be easier in warmer weather. We would go out and walk all over the city.  Once we will run together but you will learn fast that I can’t keep up so you will never ask again. We would spread a sheet on the grass in the park and you would tell me that you miss beaches. I would take you out to Coney Island and you would say it was not a real beach and I would launch into as good of a historical lecture on the boardwalk as I could and we would look at the vestiges of the amusement park and then we’d have hot dogs at Nathan’s and you would shut up about Coney Island for a while.

In my mind you love coffee as much as I do. We would have spent many weekend afternoons sampling beans and trying new coffee places and we would wind up back at your place and experiment with our own blends. I would have told you all about the Chemex and you would have told me that you too love Intelligentsia and together we would make a list of every coffee shop in New York City that brews it.

We would have tried Shake Shack and you would maintain that In N Out is still the best and when I tell you that I only had it once and didn’t opt for animal style, you would cry out in disappointment and we would have planned a trip out West so you can fix that.

We would make a habit out of finding each other whenever you wound up at the hospital. Sometimes you would leave me notes in my mailbox. Mostly it would just consist of smiles and under the guise of refilling my water bottle, the occasional carefully timed rendezvous by the freight elevators. A quick kiss, a few moments just to be able to touch each other, hold hands, be near each other.

In bed, we would run our fingers up and down each other’s spines, count off the segments of the spinal cord as we went as an homage to the thing that brought us together.

And we would tell each other things. You would find the ease with which secrets and fears and dreams would pour out of you in my presence confusing and intimidating because you’ve never been one to be so forthcoming with all these personal details before. When you admit this to me, my last wall would indubitably crumble and I’d tell you my entire life story and I would tell you that my attraction towards you, my affection, the chemistry, everything scares me a little bit. But I would have felt safe with you.

And then you would let me snuggle up behind you and that we wouldn’t be facing each other would make it easier for us to tell each other these embarrassing things. Like all the different times in the whole year before we really spoke to each other that we noticed each other, or exchanged words.

Like the time over the summer when I was training what’s-her-face to do this interview and I was sitting on this guy’s bed, talking to him, when you just breezed right in and talked to him as if we weren’t even there. Or the time when, allegedly, I thrust a neuro exam form in your face in the clinic and told you to fill it out for a patient and then just walked away without another word.

Or the times when you would be on the 4th floor for some reason and you would just look at me with an undecipherable face and I would stare back: blankly, in my own opinion; coldly, according to you.

We would lament all this time that we think we lost, not Knowing. But then we would just snuggle up closer and things would feel all right and nothing would feel like it was missing and that regret wouldn’t feel so heavy anymore.

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When you find out (by searching all of facebook instead of looking through your own friends list because you had been defriended at some point within the last 4 years – ew, facebook’s been around that long? – and finding his profile, still open to the public, in which the first photo you see is of him holding up a newborn baby) that your first college boyfriend, who married the girl he met before you and then went back to a few years ago is now a father – legitimately! Oh man, what a stellar track record I have – it gets you Thinking about Things.

These Things don’t include “That should have been my baby he’s holding!” Oh Christ, no. As hard as it is for me to understand this relationship and figure out what we had meant to each other, never once did I actually think we were going to end up where he is now. After we first broke up and he moved back home to Wisconsin and I found out he had gotten back together with his ex (this lovely Japanese girl who suited him in every way, down to his conservative Catholic ways, probably), I was convinced that I had just been a random placeholder. When we told each other that we loved each other, I think he meant it because his definition of love was derived from his wholesome Christian values and I sincerely believed that I did because, as I’ve come to realize painfully over time, I always want to love somebody. Trying to figure out what it means to be in love, what it feels like, what it is, HOW YOU KNOW, is like, the impetus for scores of literature and music and every single rom-com ever made and therefore completely ridiculous and pointless and stupid.

There are those who will say that Love is an ideal, it doesn’t exist, it’s unattainable, it’s just hormones and neurotransmitters sending signals to each other. If it’s this abstract and intangible and so frustratingly inconsistent, then I maintain that I am not doing things all wrong. (RIGHT??)

What I need to do is stop questioning if every relationship I’ve ever been in was a REAL relationship or if I meant it when I told these boys that I loved them and especially if they meant it when they told me they loved me. Well, except for the one relationship where the answer to all these questions is a loud, brutal HELL NO.  But the rest, and from here on out, I’m just going to be like, WHATEVER. I copied and pasted the whole exchange I had with this boy once to a friend (maybe more than one friend) and he was like, “You’re a classic overanalyzer!” DUH. I mean, I guess he doesn’t, or didn’t, know me all that well, or maybe that was just the first time this obvious QUIRK about me had to be stated and contextualized. But enough of that! I’m not going to think about SHIT anymore.

I may never understand what love is. Or figure out what I want. Or stop trying to find IT. I may never not be stupid when it comes to love. Or life.

But WHAT.EVER.

Anyway, congrats, Tim! Your baby is totally adorbs.

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this is my annual pep talk

Oh, what a year.

When I look back over these months and recall what I can of the lives of those around me, I feel like 2009 was all about change. I watched the people around me grow closer, drift apart, move away, move back, move on, and while all this was happening, one thing that became clear to me was that none of these things were happening to me. I didn’t do anything in 2009. I sat back and let things happen to me. And the things that did happen to me were more often than not, wholly unpleasant and outside of my control or understanding. I mean, this is more or less the story of my friggin life the way I tell it but it seemed to take its toll on me this year.

And I don’t like that feeling. I don’t like knowing that everyone around me is doing something, whatever the hell it may be, taking charge of their lives and I was just still standing here. Stagnant. Worse still, over the last few months, I felt like I was slipping backwards. Without actually being able to pinpoint the exact reason(s) why (which is merely a euphemism for “I know precisely why but I just don’t want to say right now”) I think this last half of 2009 is the unhappiest I’ve been since sophomore year of college. But this is all to say that when it comes down to it, I’ll keep soldiering on and carry this weight because I have to and ultimately, I know I’ll be okay, that everyone will be okay. Because I’ve been through worse before and whatever’s going on now is not as bad as it had been when I was just a kid and hey, if I survived that then I can get through this. Whatever this is.

But the only way I can is if I keep moving. Once the new year comes, I will be a week away from turning 25. I’ve said before that when I turn 25, everything will change. I don’t know where I got that idea from it was born out of my fear of not knowing.  I don’t know what lies ahead of me in the next year. I literally can’t even plan anything beyond January because I’m so wrapped up in applying to schools.  But whatever. Fuck all that quarter-life crisis bullshit. I have absolutely no reason to panic. I’m turning 25. I’m applying to schools. There is a chance I won’t get in anywhere, but we’re not going to talk about that. And if I do get accepted somewhere, I don’t know who’s going to pay the rent, but we’re certainly not going to talk about that! My brother may never get his shit together but that’s okay because I’ll be okay. I’ll figure it out. Everything’s going to be juuuust fine.

I’m ready. Bring it.

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this is by way of explanation

I’m going a little crazy. That’s everything on my mind, in my heart, and in my life reduced to its simplest form. I’m going crazy. I almost don’t even want to admit that I may or may not be PMSing because that seems to discredit my worries and heighten the irrationality of how I’ve been feeling lately. Is this how people who suffer from depression feel? Slighted? Discredited? Do people take comfort in knowing that they feel completely hopeless about life because of something as fundamental and uncontrollable as a chemical imbalance? Or does that make them feel worse? I suppose this philosophical debate is too much to get into here and certainly not something I intended to explore right now. So never mind.

Anyway. Yes. Life is ridiculous right now. So much so that my usual tiny-comfort habit of looking out over the bridge as the D takes me back into Brooklyn isn’t working. The train isn’t crowded, I’m sitting, I’m staring out at Chinatown and the FDR Drive and the little sigh/shrug of relief that usually escapes me isn’t there.

Until I turn my head (which, frankly is a more natural angle) and look north back towards Manhattan. And for the first time in my life, that I can remember anyway - but you know, my memory is a little shitty these days - I notice the Empire State Building. And right next to it, the Chrysler Building.

I don’t know if it’s because I didn’t expect to see them, or see them so clearly, or that they looked so much closer than I think they should seem or what. But it was nice.

It was more than nice. It was like, ok, someone’s throwing me a bone. I wanted something to look at and that’s what I got.

Now excuse me while I scarf down some fast food for dinner before I go on a conference call and then immediately tutor this girl.

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this is displacement

When I left the office tonight and literally dragged my feet to the train station, I had every intention of getting off at 14th Street and finding ways to amuse myself until I felt ready to go home. On the train I read my book only because I needed to distract myself. The lights on the 6 were too bright, the woman sitting next to me took up just a little too much space. Every pair of eyes that locked on mine made me feel like they saw right through my schtick, like they knew. What it is that they know I’m not too sure of but the interaction left me feeling embarrassed. I kept my eyes glued to the floor for the rest of the ride. And when the train pulled into 14th St, I hesitated. The hesitation lasted too long and I ended up not getting off. There were multiple chances for me after this to go somewhere and do something: see a movie by myself, get some dinner by myself, hole up in a bookstore and read. By myself. There was a pattern here, obviously. And it’s not that I would have been doing all these things by myself that stopped me from going for it. It’s really that this was not at all what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was go home and relax and let the wear and tear of this week fade away. What I wanted was peace.

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this is about expectations

1. If you head for an event, say James Franco speaking for the New Yorker Festival, and it’s the first social engagement you’ve had and stuck to since you’ve gotten sick, and you keep (irrationally, and quite crazily) thinking about how unfair it is that he enrolled at Columbia after you’ve graduated and that you never see him wander the streets of New York and that you’re actually paying to see him now, you’re going to expect the event to be awesome.

But it isn’t. But in terms of realizing your goals of a) getting out of the house and b) seeing James Franco, you’ve done a great job!

2. Walking around the winding, tiny streets of the West Village during the prime bar-hopping hours on a Saturday night, what you expect is that it’ll be annoying. That you’ll have to weave in and out of slow moving groups of rowdy party-goers. But instead, you only have to step into oncoming traffic to sidestep a group that one time. And for the rest of your way to the train station, all you really hear is the pat of the rain on your flimsy umbrella. There are traffic noises coming from some unseen location and you’re walking towards it, back to civilization but other than that, it’s just you and the West Village at night. The stoops are illuminated only by their own porch lights and everything around you is glistening in the dark. You know it’s only from the rain, but still. It feels a little unreal.

3. When a man who needs to shave sidles up to you in a rain-splattered sweatshirt and purple camo pants and though he’s holding a Venti Starbucks cup, you can smell the alcohol on his breath when he asks you if the trains are running normally and it is getting close to late night, you expect the worst. Okay, not the worst, because the worst would be.. This isn’t the worst, but you don’t expect this conversation to be a good one. But he turns out to be kind of endearing in a very distracted way and he kind of can’t stop talking and he’s revealing a lot of personal details about his life for someone you’ve just met and are still not done sizing up. But he keeps alluding to the fact that he’s gay and that automatically disarms you and you give in to the late night chatter.

And it’s cute. You talk about the MTA and the trains you used to take growing up and how you had to relearn the system after the bridge repairs, “B for Bensonhurst! What the fuck are we doing with the D?!” You talk about the Jews and the Chinese on the Lower East Side and how we as people should really be best friends for life. You talk about opportunities, and the projects, and Harlem and gentrification, and Jersey and B&T. To be accurate, he talks; you chime in when you can with a comment or two. He’s really all over the place.

Before he gets off the train, he fishes out a business card from the mess in his pockets and tells you to visit him at the store he’s working at, come in and say hi sometime. You take it, genuinely echo back that it was nice to have met but you doubt you’ll ever see him again.

You’ve already given him more credit than any other man who has ever tried to chat you up in public, and gay or not, you’ve learned your lesson from men you randomly meet on the streets and who happen to hold jobs of the same variety.

This is good enough.

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new york stories expectations

this is about crushes

I am sitting in my office, hiding again from my work and responsibilities because I have this amazing ability to shut down completely under too much stress, and I’m squishing my Dwight Shrute stress ball between my fingers, magically aging his yellow face with all the wrinkles that appear. So instead of working, I am trying to put my feelings and thoughts into words.

But it’s proving to be quite difficult as I’m trying to talk about my crush. Well, not my crush. Or crushes. (I crush easily.) Ha, let’s deconstruct that, shall we? Who’s doing the crushing?? So, really, just crushes in general. It’s something that’s been on my mind lately..

Specifically, how much it fucking sucks. For me. Maybe it’s not nearly as agonizing for you as it is for me. And if so, what’s your secret? Oh, you’re not insane? Oh yeah, that could explain the difference..

When I try to think about what words come to mind that best describe having a crush on somebody, the only words I can come up with are basically: eee!!, argh, ugh, ohhhh, aww, teehee, and the high-pitched kind of whining/whimpering noise that I know I make that’s accompanied by hands flying up to my flushed cheeks in reaction to some most likely innocent comment that I read too much into. If I had to assign words to all that? I don’t even know where to begin.

But I suppose “silly” is a good place to start. What is it about having a crush on someone that turns me back into a 12-year-old? I guess calling it a crush, for one thing. But what other way is there to describe it? It’s like a chicken-or-the-egg type of question: am I behaving like a lovesick teenager because I’m identifying this as a crush? or do I know it as a crush only because I’m behaving in this particular way? Will I ever not get all eee!! argh! ? I don’t know if I’m asking if I will ever evolve past this level of emotional maturity or if I’m wondering whether I’ll ever make it past this initial whirlwind phase of romance.

So I do all these silly things and react in silly ways and just generally feel like a giant silly tool. And the worst part of it is, when it’s not driving me crazy, it’s actually… fun.

It’s nice to have that small ball of anxiety mushroom in the pit of my stomach when we exchange a small glance, or when our knees touch, or are so close that they could be touching and I can feel your body heat across that space, when we’re sitting next to each other and I tell myself it’s because it’s crowded and it’s really warm so that’s probably why I feel so much friggin’ heat where our knees are touching.

I squeal and freak out when I see that I’ve gotten a new email or a reblog on tumblr. Every second that passes from the moment I see you typing in gchat up until when your message appears means trouble for my nails and cuticles.

The only thing that makes all this worth it and not 100% pathetic is the potential that one day all this could lead to something. If not the potential, then the fantasy that we’re living in this bubble where we can continue this back and forth and speculating and giggling forever undisturbed.

But when that potential dries up or the fantasy dies?
Well.
That really sucks.

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crushes run-on sentences attack

this is about migraines

I start to feel it building up right after my conference call. We were going over our projections and trying to see what we would need to do to have the majority of the data collected before the Project Directors meeting in December. And what we would need to do is clone me because I can’t miraculously increase my consistent rate of 5 interviews per month to 5 per week. (Talk about a trigger, eh? Pretty sure stress is one of them.)

This is how it starts. A weight boring down on my brain. By the time I finish writing some impossible emails, pressure is pushing in on my temples. On ER, or Grey’s Anatomy, when they talk about needing to drill a hole in some poor guy’s brain to alleviate the pressure because there’s too much swelling, this is what I think of when I get to this point. I imagine drilling a hole in my head would probably feel really goooood. That should give you an idea of how not good the present situation is. I gulp down water. Take off my glasses. Put them back on. Gulp in mouthfuls of air. Close the door to my office and hide.

No use.

By the time I’m on the train, it’s here to stay. I don’t know for how long but it sure is making its presence known. I slump over in my seat on the end of a crowded, three-person orange bench. Part of my bag is on the knee of the person next to me. I have the heel of my palm nudged up against my right eyeball because without it, my eye would throb its way out of my head.

When I open my eyes again, I experience my first ever visual aura. It’s like I’ve become an animated character who has just gotten bonked on the head and now I’m seeing stars. There are birds singing.

It’s like fireworks going off in my retinas. Minus the blooming effect. So really a shower of sparkly confetti before my very eyes. Which sounds like it could be fun. And is actually quite a spectacular experience. If only it didn’t come with any pain.

I’m not sure if I actual hear fireworks or birds singing in that moment, which would make it a bonafide aura and truly a first-time experience, or if I just hear it in my head now in retelling this story.

When the confetti dissipates, I am staring at this:

and think that it might be pretty awesome to hallucinate that. Because that giant blue circle with the black one inside? That is one majorly dilated pupil.

And then I thought to myself, Hm Kandinsky must have had migraines. Or he could have been high. Whatever.

I have migraines. Which means that one day, I will become Vasily Kandinsky.

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