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Blog post: Sound, Silence, Me and Everyone

Everyone likes to talk about themselves, writers more than anybody. There’s something satisfying about describing the painful process of shoveling through the thoughts in your mind, flinging handfuls of sludge over your shoulder and hoping nothing good flies out with it.

Maybe it’s just because writers like to talk more period. (Talk in the sense of communicate — some of the very finest writers were mouth-shy. One of the best craftsmen I know stutters when he has to speak to an answering machine.)

New York has forced me to refine my tendencies to speech and silence. I natter less and glower more. I’m also more aware of the efficiencies — and deficiencies — of it all.

My work requires that I be on a conference call (which I secretly refer to as The Neverending Gory) with anywhere between 10-15 people, every day. For eight straight hours. We have a very high pressure job that’s time sensitive down to the hundredth of a second and a non-stop buzzing of noise in both ears that can’t be tuned out or you’ll miss critical information. The amount of chatter and our intense focuses occasionally lead to someone’s (my) joke falling flat or a question (mine) being unanswered. This is a very unusual situation. Imagine having 10 bosses monitoring you constantly and never knowing if they would answer when you asked an important question.

As a humor writer, I have some of the instincts of a stand-up comic. When I make a noise and I hear silence, something in my heart breaks off and goes tinkling to the floor. Being ignored at work (if you can call it that because everyone has a legitimate reason to focus on something else) has taught me to speak only when it’s really necessary. I’m less myself, but it makes everyone else’s life easier.

I called a girl last Sunday. We used to be best friends until we had a falling out my last year of college. In the four years we haven’t spoken, I got a Master’s degree and my first live-in boyfriend. She started teaching ninth-grade algebra at a school for inner-city Boston kids returning to class after dropping out, having babies or any number of disruptive things.

She’d deleted my phone number (I’m ignoring that, having kept hers all this time), so I had to identify myself when she picked up. I used my first and last name, to the person who helped me zip my fat-suit Halloween costume two years in a row. At that moment, more words were strange.

We recited paragraphs of our lives back and forth, taking turns, cracking innocuous jokes — the kind you’d tell your dentist or tax lady — and it felt a little stiff until the end, when I had to go.

“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m sorry too.”
“Things have really changed for me, especially since I got to New York, and I really miss you and I think you should be part of my life again.”

She was silent.

“I’d like to be friends again, if that’s ok with you.”
“That’s ok,” she said.
“Really?”
“Yeah…. I’m sorry, you have to give me a second.”

She was silently crying.

When we hung up, we used our names, full first, not our old nicknames, but not our last names either. Fewer words were better.

2010. The year of the wedding. At least for me. Rapidly approaching three years of post-college life has apparently scared my friends straight… into marriage. I know this is the first wave (I can’t seem to stop using war terminology when I talk about this) and more will come, but I yearn for the lull between.

The art of the wedding gift, similar to the knack of composing the perfect greeting card, is an area in which I consider myself fairly expert. My two rules: never buy something on the registry and never get anything new.

I haven’t always been fond of the antique. When I was 14, I chided my parents for their mismatched house decor. (You may feel more sympathetic if you saw the sousaphone hanging above our fire-engine red leather couch.) My exasperated mother asked just what I would like to change and after a few moments of thought, I exclaimed, “Well, at least have matching dishtowels!”

I can’t figure what changed between then and now, but in my own house, I’ve taken a more relaxed approach to decorating. And the other day, I looked around and noticed most of my favorite items are old. I have a 1956 Underwood typewriter that I adore, despite the fact that it hasn’t technically worked in a few months. (A user error — I loaded the tape incorrectly and now every two letters, it falls below the keystrokes. I’m sure it can be fixed, just not by an engineer like myself.)

Many of my books are old, including the 1962 Encyclopedia of Modern American Humor. The record collection I’ve built is mainly of my parents old vinyls. My mother contributed Blood, Sweat and Tears and Joe Cocker and my father let me have his Cruising ‘58 as long as I swore to give it back someday. (This column is also about the pleasure of possession.)

Yesterday I met a friend at the Brooklyn Flea, which is a three-story amalgamation of young t-shirt designers who all try to look like Elvis Costello and batty hoarders selling broken costume jewelry. I like flea markets and antique fairs, though I can never find a happy medium between haggling the seller until I feel guilty and being ripped off completely. I spent about $200 on two beautiful pieces of art, one of which I believe I’ll give to a pair of friends who are going to be married in November.

If I were getting married, I would want gifts like a washer and dryer, or other expensive houseware items. The rest I’d like to be fun pieces that reflect me and the person who gives them. I think this is much more meaningful than that set of stemware from Williams Sonoma. (But what do I know…. I drink out of something that half resembles a sippy cup.)

I don’t believe in reincarnation, but I do believe that something of yourself remains in the objects you use. When you buy a new cooking pot, you must first season it or the things you make taste bland. They lack depth and personality. But once you’ve used the pot for a few years, you build a relationship with it and you trust each other and the end result is a better collaboration than something new and sterile could have produced. (That and you ought to have learned to cook better during all that time.)

The one thing I’d hesitate to buy used — wedding rings. I love the idea of an old piece that’s been worn before, but I fear the other marriage’s problems would come along with the diamonds.

I guess it’s a good thing I’m not the groom in any of these weddings, just an attendee who comes bringing great gifts.

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton knew what he was talking about. (With that many names, you’d have to, or else nobody’d get past the first syllable.) His phrase “the quiet simplicity of exquisite neatness,” while referring I believe to a gentleman’s clothing, has earned its merit in my life. Or as he may have spelled it, lyfe.

For a full week I have been lying on the couch, drinking Koolaid spiked with so much Emergen-C, it’s the texture of wet concrete. Coughing, moaning, sneezing, dribbling, shuffling, croaking. (Not THAT kind of croaking. Still here to blog, thanks.) During that week I have also begun playing a game called “Test the Cockroaches.” It consists of me, in my helpless state, leaving things on the floor for days and fearing the appearance of a roach but never mustering the energy to clean up.

I’m not a messy person. I’ve raised a few dust bunnies, but I really run a pretty tight ship. My friends always compliment me on the status of my home. And only one of my skirts has a soup stain on it. (It’s paisley, you can’t even tell!)

Nevertheless, I do live in New York. In an apartment building. And though I’m clean, I did have my first roach experience over the summer. I was eating watermelon and watching television. I left the rind sitting on a paper towel on my floor while the program finished. Shortly thereafter, my cat, James, started acting very strangely. (Which isn’t noteworthy for either of us, but well, stranger than normal…) I saw a black cockroach dart out from under the couch and onto the watermelon. James and I leapt in unison, him towards the exoskeletonic threat, me from it. I skittered into my bedroom. Then I laughed at myself, grabbed a shoe and went back. No roach in sight. Fearing to sit on the couch again, I cleaned things up and got ready for bed. James was still lurking near the couch but seemed quite frustrated at having no sign of the bug.

There was nothing left to do. I took a deep breath. I stood in the doorway of my own living room, James curled around my feet. I said, “Roach. I don’t want to hurt you. You can do whatever you want in my house, as long as I don’t see you and you don’t scare me. If that happens, I’m going to try to kill you. Ok? So keep to yourself and I won’t seek you out.” It’s the same speech I’ve been giving spiders since I was 12.

I turned on my heel and went to bed. A few hours later, I was awakened by James thumping around in the other room. I sat up, flicked on the light, sprang to the window and threw open the sash! I saw the roach zoom from the living room into the hallway and then into my bedroom. James was frantically swiping at it, while it hid in the dark space created by the door’s shadow. I got up, grabbed a shoe and together, James herded it towards me and I smashed it.

I know that it’s pretty impossible to live in New York, no matter how clean you are, and not have a few cockroaches. But in my current sick state, frankly, I’m not sure I have the energy to survive another. Edward George and his exquisite neatness be damned.

I don’t know where I pick up some of my habits. I suppose many of them are pop-culture parasites left in my skull like ticks under a sock. Others I consciously borrowed from my parents, heroes, cool kids. I even got a favored phrase, “Who, I?!” from Petticoat Junction.

Just goes to show.

One habit I’ve never been able to trace is one that has also been the subject of many conversations. Each time I get serious about a man I’m seeing, I buy a new perfume. The idea is to have a scent associated exclusively with him (and by proxy, that period in my life). I’ve done this as long as I can recall. It seems strange to many people, but to me, it’s a way of consciously setting myself up to remember.

Occasionally I take the fellow with me to choose the perfume. And actually, to be honest, sometimes it’s a lotion or a scented soap. Once I chose a wax balm. (Wouldn’t recommend it. The fragrance didn’t linger, and neither did he.)

I can feel you starting to judge me. You see this as some kind of bizarre reliance on a man, a sort of nasal-born separation anxiety. It isn’t. But I admit finding a perfume when I’m single is a bit trickier. I never know whether I should buy the one that smells like me or the one that smells like the person I want to be.

Walking into the perfume section of department stores must feel something like what Kipling experienced in his first boat ride down some jungle river. The sights, the noises, the smells, the ticking and chugging of the brain suddenly palpable… the scene overwhelms. And I assure you, no tribe of hostile natives could be ever more intimidating than an army of shiny-shoed Bloomingdale’s sales clerks, all bent on wringing your last dollar from you. And, as they expected, you will spend it lustily on a bottle of Vitamin C Pre-Liner Primer Tonic for the Eyelids.

I went on scent mission today, looking for a solid perfume for several upcoming trips. Solid perfumes come in small jars with screw tops, and they’re great for taking on airplanes. They feel like a thicker version of honey, and as I was instructed, all you have to do is dab a dot onto your “pulse points,” wherever they are. (I stared at my particular sales clerk, thinking I must have left mine at home today…)

After an hour standing at a white counter with Janis (who does not appreciate Joplin and does not know any song lyrics and does not want to talk about it), I was convinced that choosing between 30 different scents would throw anyone into an identity crisis. I liked tuberose, but it reminded me of the word tuberous. Wild orange smelled like cider on winter nights, but also like a grandmother. My neck hurt from craning to sniff. I kept dropping the thousands of white paper strips that Janis handed me after spraying them with something I just had to try. Dazed and blurry, I clutched the counter for support. Who am I? Where am I? What am I doing here? And more importantly, what smell expresses me?

I settled on a beautiful round jar comprised of bergamot, gardenia, iris and white musk. Still not sure exactly what that says about my personality, but I’m fully convinced that any man would be lucky to catch a whiff.

I was given a book and I broke its spine.

It is a gold book of haikus with a lacquered cloth cover. It says “Lotus Blossoms” in clear silver type on the outside and “To Molly, Happy 2008!” on the inside. It came from some family friends, and I cracked its back about a year ago. Not having much of a taste for poetry (and being even less interested in cryptic absurdity), I am surprised by how often I turn to it for advice or inspiration.

Tonight, these lines, by Buson, seem appropriate:

Icy winter night…
I unfreeze the writing-brush
with my two good teeth

Last week it snowed in New York City. Oh, we’d had spritzes in early December, but these fat flakes were the season’s first real snowfall. It started while I was at work. I sit by a large window, and the blinds are controlled automatically by our facilities manager, who has them timed to go up and down based on the amount of glare we have on our computer screens. When the blinds and the snow began falling at the same time, I was ordered to sprint down to the manager and request a clear view of the windows so we could watch.

The first snow I ever saw here was the day I arrived last year. I was staying with a friend who lives in Turtle Bay, a small neighborhood in Manhattan. She took me for a walk through the city at night. Some of the Christmas decorations were still up, and we went from couture feather dresses at Lord and Taylor’s to glittery gummy bear statues outside the Gap. But my favorite part was the Diamond District. We turned down a sidestreet and were surrounded by stores devoted only to diamond jewelry. I looked down and noticed that suddenly the sidewalks had a high content of mica, making them sparkle. At the same moment, it began to snow icy crystals, the kind that burn when they hit your skin, but look beautiful passing by.

Between the shimmering jewels, sparkling sidewalks and flashing snowflakes, I felt truly overwhelmed. For me, being overtaken by curiosity and joy while teetering on the brink of not coping is a New York-only experience.

It’s a city that feels like it’s seen it all. There’s no crime gruesome enough, no sound loud enough, no street busy enough to really blow a New Yorker out of the water with novelty. But when it snows — when it really snows — the sidewalks get covered. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can make the first set of footprints on a few squares. And when that happens, you are a pioneer. You are thrown back to New York’s first days, when people tramped, instead of shuffling. I’m prone to romanticizing the past (who isn’t?), and I’m at my blissful worst when the snow stills the city and I can break my own path.

It’s almost as satisfying as a great winter haiku.

I was 22 when I took my first solo cab ride. I was 22 and a half when I hailed my first taxi. I was 23 when I was first certain I was being ripped off by a driver. ($25 to get from Park Slope to Bushwick? Really?)

There are no taxis where I come from. There are trucks. And 8-wheeled trailers. And four-wheeler ATVs. Growing up, the closest I came to a yellow cab was sitting in a bucket seat surrounded by peeling buttercup paint on my father’s farm-use vehicle. In a small town with no public transportation (aside from school buses), there was no need for taxis. Everyone had their own wheels. And you better believe tractors count.

After I left the county with no stoplights, I moved to Washington D.C. Then Chicago. Then New York City. As I gradually increased the size of the population around me, I also increased the frequency with which I take taxis.

I like cabs. They generally make me carsick, but I find that they’re a great place to have… moments.

One of my favorite rituals was taking a taxi from Midway airport up Lake Shore Drive and to Lincoln Park, where I lived in Chicago. My apartment was about three blocks from the water, so most of the trip was spent with glorious high rises on my left and steely Lake Michigan on my right. I usually flew back in the evening, so all the buildings were lit, and most of them were close to the road. I loved feeling the dark, moving expanse of the lake on one side and catching glimpses of fancy art and track lighting on the other.

It was on that same Lake Shore Drive that I was once taking a cab with three visiting friends. It was a frigid — and I mean bone-freezing — January day and we were off to meet other friends at the Shedd Aquarium. We’d taken the bus downtown, but due to my er, miscalculations, we overshot Shedd and couldn’t bear to stand outside waiting for a bus in the opposite direction. After an icy ten minutes, once our arms were frozen in an upright position, a cab finally stopped and we clambered in, all yodeling for the driver to turn up the heat. It couldn’t have been ten minutes later that we merged onto Lake Shore Drive and blew a tire. The driver pulled over. Philip, one of my friends, gallantly offered to help repair the tire. Rachael, Jen and I stayed in the car. Philip and the driver soon gave up and we were told to get out and find another vehicle. Chivalrous (and shiver-rous) Phil stood on the narrow strip of snow beside a streaming highway for almost 20 minutes trying to get an empty cab to stop on the side. Finally he did. Memories.

I’ve been in cabs that hit other cars. I’ve been in ones that came so close to crashing that one of my impeccably mannered New England WASP friends, who never says anything more offensive than “oh, shoot” exclaimed “Jesus Christ! Are you a maniac?!”

I was in a cab, coming home from a bar with a friend I was preeeetty sure was intrigued when I invited him back to my apartment. “Two stops,” was his only response.

A taxi was taking me to a cocktail party (I was wearing impossibly high heels, poorly suited to subway surfing) when I found out one of my best friends was engaged.

As I get older and spend more time in transport in taxis, I can’t help but feel a fondness for them. They’ve been around for some of my finest moments.

I like Christmas. I like the gift-giving because I’m generally a very good guesser when it comes to figuring out what someone wants. I like the food because it involves showing off one of my few skills (The baking, not the consuming. Ahem.). And I like writing holiday cards.

Throughout my life (short, if you’re a octogenarian, long if you’re a caterpillar), I’ve built a reputation for writing really great cards. I’ve made people cry, made them laugh, made the least likely to write back respond within days. I have two penpals in the military, both in Iraq, but more impressively, I have an astounding 100+ greeting cards ready to be sent to eager friends. (I counted them just for this column, and I didn’t include the sheets of special handmade paper or sticker collection.)

The December month for me is filled with red candles, baked goods of all kinds and events, like last week’s gingerbread-house decorating party.

The month is also packed with cards. Lots and lots of greeting cards.

I have about 75 people I MUST send a note to and about 50 others that I ought to write. This year, I’m having trouble getting started on my list. Perhaps it’s because, to date, I have received ONE card. And it’s from a former editor so it practically doesn’t count.

It’s also because the past few months have been some of the hardest in my life. Joyous and full of progression and movement, but hard. Very hard. So what do I write in my cards? I can muster the usual non-sequitur jokes, the goofy signature, but I worry I won’t have much news.

It’s my first year in the working world and I find it difficult to keep track of successes as concretely as I used to. In internships, you finish the employment. You get a recommendation. In school, you complete a course, you build toward your major. In my graduate school, you get a piece published. There are built-in ways of measuring progress and success. Two -ess’s I’m finding very important to my life.

In the year (almost) that I’ve lived in New York, I can tick only two things off my list. I got a challenging job and a beautiful apartment. They weren’t easy feats, and I am certainly not taking them for granted, but the -ess’s are scarcer than they used to be.

I’ve made up for it in other ways. I’ve become — those of you who know me will howl with laughter — a bikram yogi. This means I practice high-intensity, fast-paced yoga in a 120-degree room for 90 minutes, five days a week. This is not the focus-on-the-end-of-your-nose, tinkly music kind of yoga. Last week, I made it through my first session where I completed every posture. To put this into perspective, for the first week or two that you practice bikram, the goal is simply to stay in the room for the full 90 minutes.

I signed up for a pottery class, and I’m working on ways to practice (and hopefully revive) my Spanish skills. All of these are in an effort to create goals that can be easily understood in terms of accomplishment.

But holidays are about ham, not hamstrings. Chimneys, not kilns. Nobody wants a card about that.

Last week I spent more than $150 buying calendars for 2010. I bought one for my desk, my house, my purse, my parents and several friends. I bought them as serious gifts, as jokes, as reminders of our impending doom, and mid-binge, I realized jut how important and personal a calendar is.

At my job, we have a calendar function. When you add something to your schedule on any given day, you can make it public or private. Most of my appointments are public (which should tell you something about the riveting life I lead). In fact, months ago, for November 9, I wrote “turn 24, eat cake” and forgot to make it invisible to my colleagues.

I tend to put everything on my personal calendar. Birthdays (my own and others), errands, grocery lists, subway poetry. Library due dates (riveting, I say!).

My life is my Moleskine.

Which is why, when faced with the prospect of junking my 2009 datebook, I couldn’t. Couldn’t do it to 2008 either. In fact, I have a shoebox full of old event planners from my first year of college till now. I never look back through them, but it comforts me to think that if I were to turn to April 14, 2006, I could see that I had coffee with a friend who I’ve since grown away from, or on January 1, 2004, a first date that turned into a relationship. In some way, these calendars are like an unformed memoir. They’re an unedited record of the way I spend my time, which almost makes them more valuable in reconstructing the past than the greeting cards and movie stubs I ordinarily keep.

Having a crisp new calendar feels like a luxury. My first step is to fill out the first page with my name and address. In the Reward if Found section, I write “karmic retribution.” Then I add my friends’ birthdays and anniversaries. Because I’m 24, sitting on an island in the middle of the Marriagiatic Sea, I put five upcoming weddings in my book too.

I am very particular about how I treat my calendar in the early stages of our relationship. I use the same-colored pen for every appointment, the same style of annotation and try to write as daintily as my grandmother did.

It is truly a shame that neat writing does not prevent messy living.

The color, style and artistic interpretation of a calendar is also very important. For years, I bought wall calendars of my favorite artists — Alphonse Mucha and Erte — and a black Moleskine to carry with me. This year, I chose a calendar with art from Maxfield Parrish, known for his children’s book illustrations. It was this picture, Solitude, that did it for me:

Something about living in New York, without air or ether or sunlight or silence, made this seem truly calming. I thought it might be nice to think of the art on my calendar as a form of fantasy along with the emptiness inside.

So really, $150 is a small price to pay for a blank page.

It offends me that there are oodles of books about growing old gracefully and none of them are aimed at 20somethings. I turned 24 last week, and I’ve had a crick in my brain ever since.

Twenty-four seems old. I can’t help feeling it’s a milestone at which I should have more on my “done it” list than I do. (I suspect this reveals more about the enormous expectations put on my generation than it does about my personal achievements, but that doesn’t make it any better.)

You see, now it’s not really feasible for me to continue blowing around as a member of the “just out of college” group. Now I’m supposed to be gearing up for some kind of quarter-life crisis or a cocaine addiction or both.

But the scariest part about 24 is that it’s almost 25. And 25 holds a lot of weight for me. When I was a little girl, maybe 7 (at that point I would have just gotten out of my refuse-to-wear-pants stage), I envisioned 25 as the prime of life. I saw myself in a city, with lots of girlfriends who did things like lie on my bed with magazines and eat chocolate (we would magically look like we spent each day in constant movement, sculpting gorgeously lean bodies with hair, nails and teeth that showed we were spinach-eating, water-drinking health nuts).

I envisioned a happy job, saw myself walking past desks with a snappy joke for each coworker. I imagined getting nicknames from my boss and published in important magazines. A stunning success at such a young age!

There’d be a man in the picture, obviously. Not the one I’d marry, but someone I’d be with for two years or so. He’d be homey, handsome and a hardworker, and I would look back on my time with him fondly.

I don’t know where these visions originated.  My idea of my ideal self is equal parts Edith Wharton and Edith Piaf. With a pinch of Myrna Loy. I’ve always been susceptible to thinking perfection is possible, and I have decided to examine my old Martha Stewart magazines and Doris Day movies with a more critical eye. The point being, maybe my expectations were, well, off.

Whether it’s sensible or not, I’m still under a hell of a lot of pressure. My younger self is depending on me to fulfill those hopes, in New York, where people dash dreams about as often as they toast bagels.

I admit on my birthday-day, I let the momentous occasion overwhelm me. It was hard being away from my family and dearest friends, though they all did a magnificent job rallying round, electronically. I went to sleep feeling melancholy. (Or to personalize it– mollycholy.)

But I awoke happy. And it was the first time in months that the day’s starting emotion was joy. I don’t know if it was all the love and attention from the day before, or if my self-pity had worn off, but I felt good. And so far, it’s stuck.

Maybe I’m just getting older.

One of the interesting things about submerging your head under water is the moment between your neck wetting and when you feel the liquid coursing into your ear canal. (I always imagine it like a flash flood — the desert after a rain. A clear blue day and suddenly, with a trickle and then a roar, all the cacti are washed away and the tumbleweeds go all soggy.)

My life is like water in my ears right now. For some reasons which don’t bear going into and some which do, it feels like, as my mother would say, “someone has upsot the apple cart.”  (The apple cart being me.) It’s restlessness and discomfort and exhaustion and exertion.

Nothing’s going my way. Everything’s harder than it should be, takes longer than it ought to. Just this afternoon I went for a walk in the park to cheer myself. I saw a huge leaf pile, and instead of walking around it, I thought it might do me good to skip through it. I hit a rock and twisted my ankle. You see what I mean.

It’s a tough time. But what makes it interesting is that I know I’m in it. I know the water’s about to trickle into my ear. Somehow I got lucky enough to be aware of how much fun I’m not having. And I can’t decide if that makes it more bearable or less.

I know it doesn’t make it any better. Yesterday, I was slouching down 42nd (not to Bethlehem, but Times Square, where there’s no room on the inn), scowling and feeling pretty tough.  That area of New York is always crowded and seems particularly prone to wanderers or little lost citizens who get in the way. I was not in the mood for packs of tourists. I was about a block away from my subway — I could see the glittering yellow circles, smell the grease on the turnstiles — when I slammed into a girl about my age, walking the opposite way. I was knocked a  little off balance and turned to scoff when I saw the crash had made her drop her purse and most of its contents had spilled on the sidewalk. She was frantically trying to scoop them up amid the tangle of feet, more treacherous than jungle vines, and people were starting to complain. Even from my haze of misery, I knew I should help.

I didn’t want to. I wanted to give myself a break. “I’m in my blue period!” I said to myself. “I don’t have the strength to do anything I don’t want to, and I shouldn’t have to pick up some chick’s lipstick that’s in a shade too kitsch to bear anyway.”

And as I walked away, I realized that acknowledgment doesn’t make things better or worse. But it does change who takes credit for things. And I wondered — what if every time you feel the ground shifting beneath, maybe, like in the old disaster movies, it’s just you moving your feet.