Tall boots
Clean sheets
Expensive cheese
Cheap manicures
Stretchy pants
Bear hugs
Dog sneezes
The smell of bacon
Grey beard stubble
Broad shoulders
Real mail
Throw pillows
Almond flavored things
Lemon flavored things
Peppermint flavored things
Cobblestone streets
Movie previews
Boozy brunches
Stacks of books
Dangly earrings
Cable knit sweaters
Old-fashioned packaging on cosmetics and toiletries
Lip balm
Salt water taffy
Firm mattresses
A full house
The sound of corks popping
Fireplaces
Spooning
Brown leather saddle bags
Exposed brick
Little kids wearing backpacks that reach the backs of their knees
Felt tip markers
Cured meats
The smell of D’s head
Farmers’ markets
Corn on the cob
Guacamole
Dogs who carry their leashes in their mouths while walking
Tiny bikes with training wheels
My parents’ kitchen
The Brooklyn Bridge
Summer afternoons at the cafe in Riverside Park
Brown paper packages tied up with string
These are a few of my favorite things
December 24th, 2009
The day I realized I was getting a divorce – months after separating but still mired in What Are We Doing – I left work early because I could not stop crying. I collected myself as best I could and took the subway uptown, stopping at Gracious Home where I wandered the downstairs kitchenware aisles, eventually walking home with a new bread knife and a set of nested measuring cups. I had left Brooklyn with the bare minimum, not really knowing where, when or if I would return but on that February Friday, through my tears, I suddenly felt it was imperative that I buy myself another set of measuring cups. And then I went home and drank wine, and later met friends out for fried food and beer, and began putting my life back together.
I recently read a blog post about someone’s breakup, and in reading it as well as comments in response to the post, I was taken back to that time in my life. Divorce, even amicable ones that you asked for and know are the right thing to do, is a heart-wrenching, gut-wrenching thing. I view it now much the way I view old and unfortunate photos from the mid-nineties: Ooh, that was unpleasant, I can now say, laughing at the scrunchies and mom jeans as well as at the way in which I thought, really and truly thought, I’d never get over the end of my marriage. (This sounds crazy, I realize. My ex husband and I both knew with total certainty that we did not want to remain married to one another. We both knew there were better potential partners out in the world for both of us. We both knew we brought out bad things in one another. Yet undoing a life you share with someone is hard, and I felt like a failure.)
The memory of that bruising comes up every know and then, like it did as I read the comments of people offering advice (and counter-advice), on what should and shouldn’t be said to someone in the aftermath of a breakup. Certain things that people said to me were helpful, “Just go ahead and feel bad, go ahead and cry, do whatever you need,” and certain things were kind but hard for me to believe, “You will be okay, You will be okay, You will be okay,” and certain things were meant kindly but stung, “At least you didn’t have kids.” (Because while yes, children would have complicated the matter, leaving my marriage without children felt a lot like leaving behind the chance of ever having children, and besides which there was the frustration of failed ‘Trying’ and a whole slew of emotion.) It’s easy, while in the throws of breakup pain, to forget that scores of other people have been punched in their guts with heartbreak too, and that they really do know how awful you are feeling. To that blogger, I wanted to say: I know how awful you are feeling, I know, I know, I know.
I was making cookies earlier this morning while D. wrote about the Celtics on his blog. Music was playing and the dog was sleeping in a ball on our bed and I measured ingredients out into those same little measuring cups I bought nearly two years ago. That I can look at them and feel no sadness, no twinge, no regret, no bruise is a testament to the human heart. Mine was put back together again, and my effort now is to appreciate those that helped me, and to not let the fear of hurting again get in the way of what I have. I have a lot.
December 19th, 2009
When I was six my brother M. and I were playing in the downstairs rooms of our then-house. My mother was upstairs (on the phone, in our memory) and we were playing hide and seek or tag or maybe even just ‘Unattended Children’ and we opened up the door to what was used as a storage room and saw piles (Piles! Oh the skewed yet immovable memories from childhood!) of toys, just sitting there. There was a red rubber four-square ball, I remember (or do I?). We ran upstairs to tell our mom, who got off the phone (a key detail in our collective re-telling) and came downstairs, trailing behind us as we insisted that we had discovered an entire early delivery of Santa’s stash. We opened the door to the storage room, made some sort of TA-DAH motion, and looked inside to find…nothing. The toys were gone.
Clearly Santa knew we had sneaked a peek, and he made sure to take care of business, zapping our toys back up into the netherworld. Clearly. On Christmas morning, the very same toys re-appeared, this time beneath the Christmas tree. Clearly Santa was real. Clearly he was not only real but capable of magic. Clearly.
The story became family myth and we clung to it, until a few years ago when my mother finally shook her head and said, You do know it was me that moved the toys, right? And while I hope that my brother and I did, in fact, know that it was my mother who moved the toys and not Santa (”I mean, it wasn’t that hard to outsmart two little kids…”), we’d always sort of loved embracing our story as proof that holiday magic was real.
I’ve probably told that story here before but I mention it now because every year at this time I am reminded how different all of our holiday experiences are. The first time I realized that some people grew up with gifts from Santa that came WRAPPED (I mean, why bother, Santa?), I think I actually took a literal step backwards in shock. December tastes and smells and feels like childhood, but WHAT DO YOU MEAN you wore your pajamas all day long on Christmas and ate roast beef for dinner, at 2:00 in the afternoon? THAT’S NOT HOW WE DO.
My entire extended family has matching knit Christmas stockings; the tradition began a few generations before me and yes, I know I’ve blabbed about the damn stocking before, but I was pulling my stocking out the other day and D. mentioned that he never had a stocking growing up (the fact that he is half Jewish and was Bar Mitzvah’d might have something to do with that) and so I again launched into the tale of How My Family Does It, Re: Christmas with a little addendum about Stocking Stuffers.
And then I bought him a stocking. It doesn’t match mine, but sometimes change is good.
December 7th, 2009
There’s a part of me that loves the stress and drama of holiday travel, the hustle and exasperation and story-topping complaints, the very sturm und drang of it all. That part of me, however, is perfectly happy to spend the day before Thanksgiving with nary a care in the world and a glass of wine in her hand. I’ve traveled on many, many holidays, and I do have a little nostalgia for the haul, in that I like to imagine myself and my fellow travelers as characters in glossy holiday movies with twinkle lights and family hijinx, but oh, how nice it is to stay in one place on a day like last Wednesday.
D. and I stayed put for Thanksgiving and it was wonderful. We got up on Thursday and took the dog to the park and drank coffee and came home and ate bagels and made Bloody Marys and watched football and one of D’s good friends came over and we had more drinks and watched more football and I cooked (Chateaubriand! Not even a turkey! Clutch the pearls!) and we drank wine and lo, it was good. Later that night D. told me that after many years of being the orphan who was adopted at the Thanksgiving table of others, it felt really good to be the one providing the home.
It might not have been intended as a compliment but few things have made me feel better. I’m proud and delighted with the home we’ve carved out for ourselves, and I am thankful every day. Every single day.
And then I ate for three days straight. Seriously. We had a delicious dinner on Friday night, and then spent Saturday doing my favorite thing ever, which is a sort of urban walkabout/pub crawl hybrid…basically, we wandered and ate. Then we sat down. And ate some more.
In unrelated news, I think I might need to shop for new jeans.
(No really: I like the boyfriend jeans rolled/pegged with flats or heels but it is getting COLD and I have one pair of skinny jeans but they are – see above – tight and I’m not sure what the best jeans for boots are, and for that matter, I think I need jeans for both flat and heeled boots, no? You see how hard it is!)
Tied to the Stressful! Holiday! Travel! stories are, of course, the Christmas! Shopping! Begins! anecdotes and I should probably apologize to, oh, America for this but I’m so very over the gifting of the holiday season. Don’t get me wrong; I love (LOVE!) the holidays but I have run out of ideas for gifts (to give OR receive) and I am terrible at the process and end up buying three things for one person and nothing for another and then worrying that I’ve somehow indicated that I care for that first person three times as much as the other when in fact, I just am a terrible shopper and buy things without clear recipients in mind and every time I think I’ve landed on a truly remarkable gift for someone, it inevitably goes bust. Last year I 1) adopted/sponsored a polar bear for D. (he told me he loves them!) and 2) bought a t-shirt from a bar in Chapel Hill as a replacement for an old and long-lost favorite t-shirt he had bought in his Youth. The WWF never sent any of the promised documentation regarding the polar bear and the t-shirt was way too small so D. gave it to me, and within two weeks it was lost by my (ex) cleaners. So you see what I mean.
In short, I avoided the shops all weekend long and have not really started thinking about gifts yet. I have, however, been menu planning: we are hosting our first (very small) party this weekend, and I am torn between putting out a proper spread, or just going to Shake Shack and buying 20 cheeseburgers and a mess of fries. Both options sound pretty good.
I’ll let you know what we decide.
November 30th, 2009
Not my intention. Sigh.
November 29th, 2009
While I’m not one to necessarily go around claiming that there are two kinds of people in the world, I kind of think there is something to the notion that certain people are just lucky (and conversely, some of us are not). I don’t know if people are born lucky or if they are karmic-ly being rewarded for past hardships but I’ve always sort of felt that there are people who walk through the world with slightly surer steps than the rest of us, and those people seem to encounter a lot of good fortune. When I was younger and much more foolish I might have said that Yes, there are in fact two kinds of people in the world: lucky and unlucky, but nothing is ever that simple, now is it?
I can think of a few people in my life who fit this ever-so-vague criteria, and I’m not trying to downplay any strife these individuals have faced, but from my point of view, their lives have been a little less fraught with drama, a little sunnier, a somewhat easier fit and a little less peppered with indecision. To an outsider, they seem lucky.
I certainly have never considered myself lucky. I have a wonderful life, but there have been missteps and mistakes, misdirection and missed signals. I sometimes (okay, most times) feel like a bumbling fool, doing the best I can and over-analzing every step of the way. I’ve been hurt. I’ve made wrong turns. I righted myself (I hope) but there have been many What The Fuck Am I Doing moments. (Moments? If you listen hard enough you can probably hear those closest to me guffawing at the idea that my WTFAID crisis are mere moments.) I’ve learned a lot about myself over the past few years and I suppose being able to grow and gain perspective is quite lucky, now that I think about it, but I’m not the chick who walks through life with a sunbeam shining down on her always-well-coiffed head. I’m not the happily ever after type. I don’t find a $100 dollar bill in the cab I just climbed into, I don’t stumble onto amazing apartment deals, I don’t win things.
BUT YOU GUYS I DID I WON SOMETHING, SOMETHING AMAZING. I won a contest, a lovely little contest that I read about on Whoorl’s site and which completely spoke to me, and I knew as soon as I heard about the details I would enter, even though I never expected to win. But I did. I wrote about going to Paris at a time in my life when I felt spectacularly unlucky, and now – two years later and a million miles from where I was, emotionally – I am being given something wonderful.
And I feel lucky, sure. But not nearly as much as I feel thankful. OH HEY LOOK AT THAT, IT’S ALMOST THANKSGIVING.
And I am thankful for so very much, including all of the delicious fortune which has brought me to this place in my unlucky, unlikely, sometimes surprising and perfectly imperfect life.
ETA: I’m not trying be to evasive by not mentioning the contest or prize, just not sure how much I can say yet BUT it was a writing contest and I won a trip to Hawaii, so you can see why I am so giddy!! Also, you all know that I am calling myself unlucky with my tongue firmly in my cheek, right? Because this life of mine, I like it very much.
November 23rd, 2009
…I’ve been neglecting you.
Don’t worry, it’s not you, it’s me. I’m fine, I’ve just been distracted by, oh…this:
Happy Autumn internet! I hope you are well. I promise to write more soon, but in the meantime, go read Doxie (who is back) and The Trephine (who I just discovered), because whenever I start to write all I can think is that I’d rather just go read their sites, sometimes more than once.
KIT, internet, miss you lots!
November 20th, 2009
I’ve never been a good sleeper but in the past six or seven years I’ve become a downright bad sleeper. Getting a dog probably contributed (because there have been all manner of sleeping arrangements, from crates to the floor to my bed to under my covers to back on the floor to pacing around the apartment with clicky-clacky dog nails and collar-jangling racket) but I’ve always been a light sleeper. I do not remember the last time I slept through the night and I know those of you with children are probably all, BISH PLZ but I’m just laying the facts out there: I am a shitty sleeper.
Last night I woke up around 4:15 in the morning to the not-so-unusual sounds of Tuesday, doing her passive aggressive ‘Oh, am I making noise? Why don’t you let me on the bed where I will be SO MUCH QUIETER’ thing. She was making a sort of smacky-licky mouth noise and sighing loudly and seemingly trying to get my attention in what I assumed was a ploy to get me to invite her on the bed. And thus a battle of wills ensued.
And [spoiler], she ended up on the bed, because I am weak. But she was still not relaxing, and was shaking and panting and seemed to be having a canine panic attack. That’s totally a thing.
By that point both D. and I were both awake and trying to reason with her; yes WITH OUR DOG. She jumped off the bed and was pacing the bedroom in a total frenzy, which is when D. got up and flipped on the lights. Tuesday was totally spooked and acting strangely and in my 4am mind I decided it was one of three things: she had seen a mouse, our apartment was haunted, she was the harbinger of some natural disaster about to strike.
The mouse seemed the most likely, especially when she started frantically nosing around under my dresser and so D. got on his hands and knees and looked and looked and finally went into the bathroom, grabbed a wad of toilet paper and went back under my dresser. “IT’S A LITTLE BUG,” he said. “A TINY LITTLE BUG.”
Tuesday remained unconvinced that the threat had been taken care of for a solid half hour after that. She paced, she checked the perimeter of the apartment, she panted DIRECTLY IN MY EAR, she whined, she got up on the bed, I got down on the floor with her. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Eventually she calmed down.
At then we dozed off for a brief nap before getting up and getting ready for work. BECAUSE OF A TINY LITTLE BUG. Ah, parenthood.
October 21st, 2009
Although I am far from a minimalist, I am not someone who enjoys Stuff. I purge my closet (too) frequently, I hate clutter, I strive for tidy and organized spaces. (Strive = constantly stacking and re-stacking things on coffee table; obsessively wiping down kitchen floor with Method wipes) I am not a gadget person. I don’t collect anything. And I hate shopping.
Less than a philosophy I’d say my minimalist tendencies are a result of inertia and status quo: I am all about making do. Sure, it would be nice to have a food processor/coffee maker/full length mirror/iron/curtains on living room windows/pair of rain boots/drawer dividers in the bathroom/new lip gloss but whenever I start to think how useful those items might be, I swing right back to, ‘Eh, but I’ve been doing fine without them’ (up for debate: the full length mirror). “Eh” is a powerful argument. “Eh” is hard to top. “Eh” usually wins.
“Eh” coupled with the 300 square feet that was my last apartment meant that when I left my Brooklyn condo, I did not take much. I took just enough to Make Do, and then I bought six green bowls at Anthropologie. The end. I gradually furnished myself with additional odds and ends (a rug! a replacement for the 2qt saucepan I missed so much! a toaster!) but my distaste for Stuff and general belief that there are only five kitchen essentials (chef’s knife, Microplane zester, 4qt saucepan, one big fry pan, wooden spoons) plus the fact that our current kitchen is OHMYGOD SO VERY SMALL has kept me far away from Bed, Bath & Beyond and the like.
But there was something else going on. I hate to even write this down but somehow, somewhere I got the notion in my head that: “That’s What You Do When You Get Married.” As if anything I bought pre-marriage was disposable and that post-marriage I was supposed to exist in some sort of spartan purgatory with my refugee silverware and four plates. It’s bullshit. Total bullshit. Even so, the idea of furnishing a home for myself seemed frivolous.
Which is not to say, Hey! Everyone go buy a $300 stand mixer! but rather that gift registries are not where kitchens are born and if I need a toaster or new mattress or if I want bright green towels despite the faded grey ones working just fine, I can buy a toaster or a mattress or bright green towels. There is no minimum occupancy for a home: if you live somewhere, you have a home. And you should be comfortable in it, whatever that means. If you live alone, you are just as entitled to steak knives as the newlyweds among us. If you and your roommates want to have a martini party, buy the damn martini glasses. If you happily live with your partner out of wedlock, you can still have nice things. They just might not come with wrapping paper.
A friend of mine is moving out of an apartment she’s shared with a roommate and into a sweet little space of her own, and when she told her roommate the news, the roommate understood but then started to panic as she realized that most of their Stuff belonged to my friend. “But what if I need to BLEND something?” she asked. “Well,” my friend answered, “Aside from the fact that I’ve never seen you actually use our blender, you’d probably do what I did: go to the store and buy a blender. They are $50. You’ll be okay.”
Independence is not the same as spending power and I hold to my Less Is More mantra of home furnishings (my rule: if something comes home with me, it should either perform a critical job or be something I love.) (I have broken that rule more than once, like for a coat rack which I now loathe and which does a job, sure, but is hardly essential when you consider that we have a coat closet and that coat racks become blights once they are actually covered in coats and so now that coat rack has created more of a problem than it solved and every time I look at it, I get angry.) but I think it’s ultimately unhealthy to live in a state of permanent temporariness. Which is not a thing, I know, but living in tiny rental apartments or with roommates can sometimes fuck with your head and make you feel as if you’re in limbo and that should never be the case. Live where you live. Get what you need. Enjoy it.
Building a home with someone is a privilege for which I am thankful, every single day. I love coming home at night. I don’t mean to sound preachy and I don’t mean to sound smug. Building a home, period, is an essential delight, and it’s never the wrong time to start doing so. I remember a friend telling me, when I debated whether to buy four plates or eight after moving into my studio apartment, “Just get four; you’re going to end up moving in with a guy eventually and you’ll get new stuff.” On the one hand, she was right (I did move in with a man; ironically our dishes used to be hers as she moved in with new roommates who provided a fully stocked kitchen) but on the other hand, I really hate the “Wait until you are living with someone before committing to anything because it’s all just temporary if it’s Just You” sentiment. (I am a hypocrite, by the way: D. lived with a roommate and had hideous black dishes that I absolutely considered to be temporary for him as there was NO WAY IN HELL they were making the move with us.)
I just bought eight new wine glasses, is the short version of this post. Just because I liked them. (And because I realized that if more than two wine-drinking people ever came over at the same time, we’d be unable to put out matching glasses.)
October 14th, 2009
I have had writer’s block for so long that I can’t even pretend that I have writer’s block anymore; I’m just not writing. I flopped and moaned and pouted my way through August and used, ‘But it’s August’ as an excuse well into September. And then suddenly it was October and have no idea where the past three months went but gone they are.
October is nice.
This was my first full season as a Red Sox (albeit by proxy) fan. I met D. towards the end of last year’s season and sat tensely next to him during the final game of the ALCS series, unsure of what – if anything – to say (I opted for nothing) and when the Sox lost to Tampa Bay we hopped on a plane and headed to Barcelona, which was a pretty nice way to spend an October week, post-baseball. This year I was at Fenway for opening day and in between that cold and rain-delayed afternoon and yesterday, I probably watched 100 games. That is a lot of baseball, and while I’m not necessarily a legit fan, I invested a lot this year (100 games! Maybe not a full 100, and maybe not all watched in detail, but still!) and went through my own ups and downs (the downs seem to stand out) with D. and the Sox and I have to tell you: it’s draining. By 4pm yesterday, I was drained. And a little sad; post-season baseball is fun. Even so, October is still nice.
A dear friend from home was in the city this weekend and I had brunch with her and her husband and her baby and we walked through Central Park and plopped the baby in leaves and took photos and ended up on the east side where we walked up to the Guggenheim and it was great for several reasons: I got to spend time with lovely people, I got a nice big bite of October, and I got to see New York through fresh eyes. I need to do that more.
My mother was also in town this weekend, and she texted me last night to say that Beyonce was on her flight back to California. That never happens on my JetBlue flights to Oakland.
My 8-week old nephew has my parents wrapped around his little fist. I had to laugh when, during dinner on Friday night my mother said, “Now, I know people say that all babies are beautiful, but they just aren’t. But Ronin! Ronin is – objectively speaking – a beautiful baby.” Objectively speaking, of course, as all grandparents do. (He is, though. And he has giant cheeks and wears special earmuff headsets when he goes to concerts with my brother and sister-in-law which are the cutest things I have ever seen, aside from a beagle puppy I saw one time who tripped over his own ears.)
My friend Laura had a baby on Sunday, the day before her own birthday. Her name is Margot and she lives in Queens and I need to go meet her soon.
I have eaten an entire jar of Nutella in the past week. I cannot get enough of wheat toast with Nutella and banana on it. And when I run out of banana, or bread, I’m content to just eat Nutella right off my finger, which I am shameless about dipping into the jar.
Some friends-of-friends are in a band and that band was playing on Saturday night so I took a break from my Nutella binge and D. and I went out for tapas and sangria and then walked over to The Mercury Lounge and every time I go there I forget how small it is, and perhaps this is just a sign on my age but I also forget how LOUD it is and it’s definitely a sign on my age that three songs into the second band’s set I was yawning and asked D. what time it was and the answer was 12:34 and I was like, OH DEAR MUST BE IN BED BY 1AM NEED STRETCHY PANTS AND A PONYTAIL ASAP so we stayed for a few more songs and then ducked outside where we both remembered how annoyingly hard it can be to find a cab at 1am on a Saturday night in downtown Manhattan. MY FEET HURT, D. said. I’M SO TIRED, I said. We found a cab, made it home and were asleep within half an hour but here is the saddest thing of all: I was tired for ALL OF SUNDAY. All.
Sigh.
October 12th, 2009
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