new york

Visited New York with my boyfriend this weekend.... the city that will always, for me, be one of opposing forces… the happiness of making new memories with my current
boyfriend – walking across the Williamsburg bridge at 1 am, finding bliss in
the spectacular cityscape in Dumbo, getting lost in the miles and
miles of books at the Strand... And then, butting in, on occasion, when I step
back, in the bathroom, during the pause, the awareness that comes from sharing with him
the old memories, ones that I carved with the other boy, the one I followed here as a bright-eyed college grad almost five years ago – the cheeseburger and the creme
brulee French toast at our favorite cafe,
the weekend farmers’ market at Union Square, the hum of the young energy of Second Avenue,
the eclectic buzz of the Lower East Side (where he lives now) – and the slight
worry that maybe, maybe, he’ll turn up where we are, an intruder on our fresh
memories, or my old memories reborn.

The girl I was, who worked at 46th between 11th and 12th, all the way on the water, who trained, bussed and walked to work and ate $7 lunch specials and was too hard on herself,
the girl I am, whose scenery is very different, who with the slowness and green and air can feel her soul opening up
to being more forgiving.

The love of the bustle and opportunity and people and plenty, the
fascination at the color and convenience,
and then
The yearning for the sacredness of the pause, the inner reflection. How can you
value something if you never want for anything? New York, the Google of
cities,
everything tangible is at your fingertips, everything
spiritual?
Always a distraction ready
for when you don’t want to look inside.

new

listening to music from india, walking
(slowly or quickly, depending on my mood), to work, paying attention
to how i move and how others move.
reading up on feminism, bodies and perfectionism and how we got this way...
setting up novel ideas in my head, and
expectations -- an equal parenting family (never before knowing there was such a thing,
an alternative), putting together bits and pieces of philosophies on how
i am going to raise my daughter, and cultivate my son, and expect of my husband. finally,
finally finding a yoga class i like, learning that i can support my pointy knees with towels,
catching a glimpse of krishna running
through sherbet colored fields,
floating home on clair de lune, on at just the right time on pandora
(remembering a beautiful moment when my beautiful friend played it on piano on one of our beautiful [too few] nights together. how her eyes fluttered closed.). loving cherries,
cheese, pizza with my boyfriend, the olympics, our cat on the edge of the couch,
eating, without analyzing -- just tasting.
living, without analyzing, just tasting.
good god, everything tastes so good.

glass half full

I am so, so tired of being a nobody.

Ok, I am somebody. I am a curvy body and a brilliant mind and a deep heart. I have wide thoughts and can paint vivid pictures with my words, I feel the vibrations of people, pulses beat in my ears, new songs fall on my lips, I dream of guitars and tambourines and sometimes I have realizations -- what those in churches or religions might call "epiphanies." I can also hear the breathing of flowers, I can sing on key, and I think you and you and all are/is beautiful.

... but you wouldn't know it.

... because I am afraid.

I know I am meant to add a chapter to the big Book of all the men and women before me but I don't know where to start. I don't know, exactly, what to say. What. to. say. So many ideas, but where are the Ideas?

Fear of imperfection, long within my veins. Since I came out of the womb with black hair and wincing, skeptical blue eyes. The big birthmark on my milk-white skin that called out that I was different, that this was a unique and marked child. My quest, all my life, to cover it up. To do all right, but not great. To sing, but never into a microphone. To climb, but never to the top. To look, but never leap.

To live, but in peace -- do not disturb.

And while I know there is maturity in peace and thankfulness for the daily breathing and blessings -- the waking in the morning, the set schedule, the available food and roof, the decent sleep and the accepting love -- there is equal pain in denying what you can possibly be. A dissonance and an easiness. At night I am not tired. My resources are full and unused. I fall into my pillow instead of collapse.

But the words and phrases and ideas keep coming in. The stir to get them out gets stronger. I don't know what it will look like, in the end. I don't know it it will help anybody. I don't know if it'll stand on bookshelves for years or simply be stumbled upon by a few random Internet explorers.

I don't know, I never will. But I'd like to try anyway.

nietzsche & the typewriter

     Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

     But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
     “You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
    The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

From Is Google Making Us Stupid?, by Nicholas Carr. I just got his book, The Shallows, in the mail and am so excited to read it. Especially after discovering my man Jonathan Safran Foer said he "changed [his] life in response to it."

and i said WHATEVER,

i don't care what you and you and you think!
take your rights and wrongs and ideas and judgments and ...

and then suddenly life got a whole lot better, and
my breath came back into my lungs.