Jacoby met me at a beer hall somewhere in alphabet city. It was a spring night, March 2009, cold enough still for jackets. He had a gap between his front teeth, a feature I find both repulsive and alluring. He was tall. I was with David and his wife Isabelle, on our way to see David’s band. He came to my table and sat with my friends.

David is the only person I know who’s actually making it as a musician in New York City. Sometimes I get angry at him for contributing to the overall noise in this place but his really is different from everyone else’s. Whatever notes he plays, they feel round and good to me. Like cherry tomatoes. Both David and Isabelle liked Jacoby. He paid equal attention to them as to me, which I appreciated. I liked that I felt a little jealous of it too.

We walked to the gig and he carried an amp. Then we didn’t talk much because I felt ridiculous explaining my theories on religion and classism and my family history in the 30 seconds between songs.

“I like the way David holds his guitar,” Jacoby said. “He’s protective. You can tell he respects it.”
I looked up at him and smiled.

Afterward, we went for eggcreams at Belgium Fries in Tompkins Square Park. I read about eggcreams when I was 12, I think in a Judy Blume novel, and they’ve haunted me ever since. When I learned they were originally created in New York, my obsession with foamy, fizzy chocolatey milk became intimately mixed with my sense of self in this city. Jacoby offered to pay. As we walked out of the shop, he told me about his ex-girlfriend, who he’d dated for six years. He described her as a bitch. I could tell he was hearing the impression he made, so I gave him a pass on it. I reminded myself that I know a few people I’d describe that way.

David and Isabelle made excuses about taking his gear to their car, leaving us standing on a street corner. He slurped while I chattered out a few more jokes. Then we kissed.

“You taste like chapstick,” I said.
“Not eggcream?”

I laughed because it was a strange thing to say, and we kept kissing. On the ride home, from the back of David’s bumpy car, I texted Jacoby that I’d had a great time. He asked if I wanted to get together the following day.

The next morning, in my gray pajama pants and light blue t-shirt, I asked what time he wanted to meet. He said he’d come down with something and felt awful. I wished him well and spent the day eating cranberries and Greek yogurt in bed, winding my way through a Jane Austen novel while the sky outside never got brighter than a dark gray.

I never heard from Jacoby again.

I work the early shift. I wake up at 5 a.m., am in a car to the office by 5:15, at my desk with both hands on the keyboard and a mic at my mouth by 5:45, and I leave promptly at 2 p.m. This allows me more afternoon flexibility than the normal working New Yorker, though my evenings in da club have been severely curtailed.

This afternoon, instead of going to yoga as I normally would, I decided to get a manicure. And a pedicure. And a ten-minute massage in one of those cushy chairs with the rotating iron fist behind the leather.

It was a pleasure made sweeter by the fact that everyone else was on their way to or from a meeting. There’s a line in a fine movie, Priceless, where Audrey Tautou says to her beau, “I love drinking in the afternoon. It’s like you’re keeping a secret.” That’s how I felt.

As I was rubbed and scrubbed, I couldn’t help noticing (as I always do) the sense of surprise when someone touches my hand. I believe that hands are the window to the soul. (I’ve never bought into that whole eye thing. My main complaint is that the eyeball itself can convey very little. The pupil can dilate, which expresses either “I’m on cocaine” or “I’ve just seen the doctor.” It seems to me that most expressiveness is really from the eyelids or the upper cheeks. Anyway, I’ve never met someone and seen more in their eyes than color.)

We touch many things with our hands each day, including each other. But it’s a rare instance when another hand directly touches ours in a non-romantic setting. And when it does happen, the mind is brought back from its wanderings in an instant. Shaking hands takes only the briefest of moments, but think how much stock we put into the exchange. There’s something intimate about it. I think I developed this idea in high school.

I’m not a big Shakespeare fan, though I appreciate his contribution. (Perhaps this is because I just don’t like the word ‘bard.’ It sounds to me like someone vomiting.) But one thing we agree on is the power of the hand.

I was in ninth-grade English class when I first saw Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting in Romeo and Juliet. And with them, I was able to transcend the snoring around me and do exactly what I was supposed to do. Despite the grainy film. Despite the sounds of other teenagers shuffling by the open classroom door, slouching towards detention (our own Bethlehem, in a way). I shall never forget their ‘holy palmers’ kiss.’

I suspect the other contribution to my theory is my mother. When pressed to list her favorite things about my father, says she knew he was a good man because she liked his hands.

And he’s never even been to get a manicure. He has no idea about the massaging chairs.

Fashion and I intersect at the crossroads of “I half-wish that I could do that, but haven’t got the interest, the money or the time to really try it, though maybe I ought to wear more belted dresses.” I do, however, love fashion photography, particularly the old Hollywood glamor shots and some of the more contemporary underwater photos, but my interest peaks there. And here, at a fashion blog run by Scott Schuman called The Sartorialist.

In one of his recent posts, Schuman describes a store in Brussels full of canes, cufflinks, fedoras and all manner of high-class (if somewhat forgotten) male fashion paraphernalia. He describes it as “the kind of store where a man goes to become a gentleman.”

That got me thinking… where would a woman go? (Not where would she go to become a gentleman, but the rough equivalent of a cane-and-suspenders store. Ahem.)

When I started this blog, I made a conscious effort to avoid topics that would prompt comparisons to Carrie Bradshaw, the fictional sex columnist/protagonist in HBO’s Sex and the City. Sex made up a large part of what Carrie discussed, and I doubt we’d intersect there. (Ever since Paul Theroux said, “There’s a lot of self-revelation in the way a writer describes sex,” I’ve been terrified to try it. I do not want to self-revelate in that manner.) Many of Carrie’s musings could overlap with mine, though. She talked about making her way as a writer in New York, balancing passions with necessities, understanding herself enough to know when things were right and when they were wrong.

For instance. There’s a scene in one episode where her toilet breaks and she struggles to fix it. Her boyfriend ultimately rescues her, a poignant moment because it’s the last thing he does before they break up. I was reminded of this scene today as I struggled to put two air conditioners into my apartment windows. I finished the task with two stubbed toes, sweat drops on my glasses, one trembling tricep and a stream of curses. Would I have liked a man to do all that for me? Sure, but what I would have liked more was another pair of hands, just to help. As a modern woman, it doesn’t have to be all-by-yourself or doublemint twins. There is a middle ground. It’s right where the window comes down onto the top of the AC box.

I saw a media screening of the new Sex and the City movie last week. I described it afterward as “offensive, shrieky and trite — with cute hats.” I won’t get too involved in reviewing (not getting involved being the most SATC thing I could do), but I will say the characters felt like shadows of their former selves. The four women in this movie were stick figures compared to the Rubenesque goddesses they used to be. Their situations, dialogue and problems were lacking in zest and intrigue. (Not sex, you might note.)

It’s as if the writers forgot the character’s depth. Or maybe the girls lost their way to the shop where they became women. I wish they hadn’t, because now I’ll have to find the way on my own.

My writing goal is to become a humor columnist, most of you know that. There’s no clear path to get there, which is why I’m working as a full-time headline reporter and blogging here once a week. This is the place to hone my skills and test my wits and enjoy my father’s weekly commentary at the bottom of each post. He, by the way, has for some reason decided to pen-name as Briggsie, our dead family dog. One wonders.

I don’t plan on being in New York forever. I’d like to spend some part of my 20s in at least one more city, hopefully abroad. With this in mind, I feel pressure to meet and learn from other writers. I should say that, so far, I have met no other humor writer. Nor have I met any writer doing what I want to do or who appreciated, particularly, what I had to offer. This is very discouraging to someone who thought she had plopped herself in the bosom of a million other writers who’d at least get her jokes. Not so.

I tried to network through friends. I researched writing groups. I signed up on mailing lists of book groups. I tried to go to one storytelling event at The Moth but it was rained out. Apparently insects don’t like to get wet. I’ve been to a few journalism networking events and have met some lovely (and kooky and unemployed) people, but no one I thought could teach me more about being funny. Very disappointing.

Last week, wavering between calm desperation and desperate calmness, I attended an event hosted by the Paley Center for Media. The evening featured a panel of women who write for late-night comedy shows like The Colbert Report and The Late Show with Jimmy Fallon. I arrived with five minutes to spare, having spent half an hour waiting for Obama’s motorcade to pass my blocked-off street. I finally cut towards the park and slipped under some Do Not Cross lines, reciting in my best David Attenborough: “The intrepid journalist moves along the forest edge, trying not to disturb the other creatures around her as she stalks her prey.” In any case, I arrived. And I very much enjoyed the discussion. I…. aspired.

I was fascinated to hear the experiences of women “in the writer’s room,” creating gags and monologues for our most revered comedians. Some of them grew their humor through improv comedy and one (the funniest, Morgan Murphy) regularly does stand-up. I have no interest in either of those genres. I asked a question at the end of the panel about whether any of the women also did humor writing for print. None did.

I left feeling more inspired and energetic than I’ve felt in a long while. So much so that I signed up for a sketch and sitcom-writing class as soon as I got home. I fell into bed feeling happy, content and on my road again. Moving forward.

It wasn’t until the next morning that I learned there was a waiting list and it could be months before I ever get the opportunity to bomb a joke in front of peers. I shall endeavor on, one titter at a time, until I’m famous or knock-knocked out. Which brings me to what I really want to know: who’s there?

My soul is designed for few things. I’d make a wonderful sharkologist, baker, basketball coach or (let’s hope) writer. I consider this a decent spread, all told.

Two weeks ago, on a balmy weekday evening, I sat at my desk in the darkening room and parsed my life enough to see that I could benefit by adding a thing or two that would make me happy. Suddenly, my soul’s skills came together, like blurring streaks of light, like Captain Planet, and aligned in the sky, shooting down to me through cracks between the windowpane and the sill. Whispering together in a silvery, harmonized voice, they hummed three numbers into my ear: 826.

826 National is a nonprofit co-founded by Dave Eggers, a flopsy-haired writer best known for “A Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius,” a quasi-memoir about the semi-sudden deaths of both his parents when he was in his 20-somethings and the subsequent bringing up of his eight-year-old brother. Though I find most of his writing to be self-indulgent, high-handed and too stream-of-conscious for my taste, Eggers has become the mermaid adorning my literary generation’s ship. He’s prevalent enough that I force myself to read one of his books every so often if only to remind myself what I want not to do. 826 National is the overarching name for Eggers’s seven-or-so writing and tutoring centers aimed at students from six to 18. It’s an extremely well-run nonprofit and my job there would be to work with kids on their creative writing skills. As I faced my soul and my computer screen, with the whipping winds of my leanings circling round me, I realized I had to get over my prejudice. I had to volunteer. And it was to 826NYC that I sent my application to work for free.

Maybe it was the heady scent of my abilities or maybe it was just poor judgment, but I decided, since I was applying to be a volunteer writing tutor, that it would be appropriate to have some fun with the application. Whe asked for any non-English language abilities, I wrote “Southern; Spanish-ish.” Under the extra skills section I proclaimed proficiency in knitting and said I could grow a mean cactus.

Now, before you judge me completely clueless, know that I did consider whether this was appropriate. 826NYC seems like a fun, open environment, but it isn’t unprofessional. I worried that my joking would be misunderstood but figured other writers would be reading the application, so why not put the creative in creative writing.

It’s been two weeks, and I have not heard anything from 826 National, 826 NYC, 826 Topeka or any other branch. This potential rejection ranks almost as highly as that one summer when I applied to two McDonald’s, a Burger King, three Hardee’s and one Carl’s Jr./Long John Silver’s and was rejected from all. Clearly I haven’t become more marketable.

So I sit, 14 days later, in my darkening room and laugh as my soul’s true talents fly back out the window and into the New York night.

There is something to be said for not knowing yourself. The lesser-touted quality of self-unawareness has its benefits. For example, if I was less hyper-aware (and less a product of parents with Too Many Degrees), I’d probably be a bit happier. I won’t say ‘ignorance is bliss’ for fear of throwing too many cliches at you too early into this post, but as long as I know you’re thinking it…..

Which brings me to say, I’ve noticed a pattern in my New York life. I can tell when I’m upset about something or too rundown or too hyped up because it manifests in my kitchen. The place of so much joy for me and others becomes a direct representation of what’s happening in my heart. The word I’m looking for is fester.

I am a tidy person. My house is clean and things have their place. I don’t ordinarily let dishes sit in the sink overnight, with the exception of a pan or two that I can justify soaking. But when I’m having a hard go, cereal bowls and water glasses are allowed to percolate in that aluminum rectangle for days on end. Once I realized this pattern, it began to be a reason in itself to be upset or put-upon. I imagined the scum covering my forks and spoons sliming over my head as well. My brain sponge smelled like mildew. My spinal drain was clogged. (This, I discovered, is how cycles begin. And I don’t mean wash cycles.)

I won’t bore you with tales of recent life difficulties — mainly because they’re the same ones as before — but I will tell you my dishes aren’t getting washed. One pan lately reached a full six days in my sink. I relay this information not to disgust you or embarrass my parents, but to express the full amount of stress inflicted by last week. Just so you know what I’m dealing with.

There’s something almost flagrant about a pile of dirty dishes sitting there, staring saucily at me as I drag around the house, getting ready for the next draining day. It’s offensive. The nerve those knives have! It feels like a jeering crowd reminding me of all the things I didn’t finish.

One great side effect of having a direct dish-to-emotion metaphor is that I’ve noticed it goes both ways. If I’m having a bad day and I do my dishes before I fall asleep, I feel better. It perks me up. And so, a year and a half into our journey, I’ve learned not to blame the forks and spoons but to view them as an impartial barometer for my mood.

After all, it’s not the flatware’s fault.

There are many things I have in common with Martha Stewart, the most legitimate of which is that both our names start with the letter M. One other thing, however, is our affection for spring cleaning.

When I spend a whole dusty day crawling under tables and dusting behind books (only Martha and I think to do that, you know), there’s nothing better than ordering dinner in and throwing open my windows to the Astoria sunset for a big breath of fragrant air and a satisfied smirk.

It’s taken me a little longer this year to get around to cleaning. My tally so far shows that my junk has outperformed me. I did manage to donate three pairs of shoes and to drop some old sneakers off at Niketown to be shredded and made into rubber tracks. Those two acts have kept myself self-satisfied for weeks now. But other tasks remain… I plan to create a full budget for my expenses, and wallpaper and paint a bookcase, and throw out the half-scribbled notebooks I’ve been keeping since graduate school. I’ll recycle the notebooks of course, to be shredded and made into that new material that goes around the lead on pencils. Those pencils will inevitably write on notebooks and voila, we’ve arrived at the most meta circumstance my brain can handle. I am a woman comforted that the world is round.

Anyone who’s watching this season of The Real Housewives of New York will know that one of the characters/women/fembots, Ramona, has been shoving the phrase “renew” down our throats since Episode One. (Her recently-revealed skincare line, funny enough, incorporates the word. Saucy minx.) I’m not sure if it’s all the dust motes settling or too much Bravo television, but I’ve been inspired to renew too.

But then last week I read a terrible thing, in a terrible magazine (it was either Self or Selfless or Shape or Shapeless. Cosmopolitan or Gin ‘n Tonic or Maxim or Minum, strange I can’t remember the name…). It was an article that advised women to choose one thing to improve and forget the rest. And to paraphrase the most insidious part — “Your brain is only wired for so much self-control. You’ll be more successful if you focus on one thing, such as saving money or losing weight or staying in better touch with friends, than if you spread your brain’s energy among all those things.”

The moment I read that, all my willpower went downhill. (It landed at the base of the hill and staggered into a nearby bar where it feasted on unattainable men and nachos.) The months I’ve spent using only half of each facial cleansing cloth per night to be less wasteful led to purchasing too-expensive eye cream that smells like plastic. My microwave soup made way for street-cart tacos. I didn’t call or email any of the four people I’d scheduled to be in touch with last week.

But, luckily, I spent most of today watching Martha and painting flowerpots. (Not the most pressing need, but it was on the list, ok?) And it’s Sunday. Which means there’s a whole new week to come, and I can start redoing my renewing.

I am a 24-year-old woman from one of the most rural places East of the Mississippi, trying to make my way in one of the most unforgiving professions at one of the most difficult times in recent history. I, who was named Miss Peach by the opposing basketball teams in high school because I always helped their players up, displaying an amount of wisdom appropriate to my years, decided to specialize in business reporting. I now work in one of the most cutthroat fields, at one of the fastest, most competitive news organizations and for one of the most rapid-fire, go-with-your-gut, take-no-prisoners teams.

In short, I’m a fish so far out of water, I’ve evolved.

It is in this atmosphere that I had a small revelation. (A small one, proportionate to the amount of my brain cells that fire on all cylinders. Some have even taken to firing on trapezoids. Or each other.) The revelation came after I read a press release that detailed a CEO’s salary. It was impressive. I glumly remarked to my team, “Man, I should have been a CEO.” Someone responded, “I bet you will be.”

Smoothly sidling past the idea that someone fewer than five years out of college should be lamenting her lost career choices, I was surprised by the confidence shown by my coworker. He thought I had the potential to be in charge of a whole company.

And that’s when I realized that’s exactly what I want to do. (Along with the bakery and humor columns and small-town tour playing ragtime piano, of course.) I want to be in charge of something.

The concept of building a career is fairly new to me and that’s not just because I’ve never done it before. I’ve existed at my current job for exactly one year tomorrow, and done it happily (enough) because I worked on being the best headliner I could. Now that I’ve decided I want to lead… something… I have to make some decisions based on their effect on my future. I don’t think I have the éclat (or the estomago, to make this a three-language sentence) to really play that game, but it’s something to bear in mind.

Roger Altman, former deputy Treasury secretary and chairman of Evercore Partners said, “Hyper-competitiveness is not an unalloyed good.” I agree with him. (And it’s not an un-alkali-ed good either.) My style of management — which orbits around teamness to the utmost — clangs a little against the iron bars of today’s capitalist competition. I vote in favor of loyalty, honesty, fairness, transparency. It hurts my feelings when coworkers have goals like individual success or personal wealth on higher pedestals.

But perhaps these antiquated notions of being a team are just other items to add to my list of ways I’m dissimilar from my peers. And maybe that’s why I’d make great management.

Every time I go to Bloomingdale’s — which until I moved to New York was never, but now that I work in an adjacent building is often — salespeople ask me where I’m from. I say New York, as they inevitably haven’t heard of Blue-Grass-right-on-the-Virginia-West-Virginia-line. They open their eyes wide, say “Wow!” and tell me I look very European.

I’m flattered, though I am adult enough to know this is not true. I do not look European. I look vaguely Scotch-Irish (freckles) and Jewish-ish (dark hair, prominent nose). I don’t have the spark of Spanish girls or the grandeur of a French femme. I don’t smolder like Brazilians. No, my face reads the same melting pot mishmash of most Americans. Which is why I get angry when salespeople say this to me — because it works. I inevitably giggle, blush, thank them and then listen very closely to what they have to say.

So far I have minimized the damage to my wallet by this flattery. I only spent $52.38 on my trip to the store today. I got the candle I intended to buy and a jar of very expensive hand cream. You know how people bring out the nice silver when company comes? Well, I’m going to bring out this hand cream. It’s the classiest thing I own.

One of the reasons why being told I look European works is that it enables me, even for just a moment, to imagine that I’m not myself. I’m not the girl who once sat directly in a fresh cow pie, I’m someone else. Someone with more money, which is the whole point of the exercise. I doubt Amparo, the lovely woman at the Hanae Mori counter who schnookered me into my purchase today, considered how much her approach affects me.

When I got home from the adventure, I did something practically anyone with internet access does — I googled myself.

But I wasn’t looking for entries about me, I was searching for girls living My Alternate Life. Other Molly Seltzers. What they looked like, what they did, why we were similar and different.

I’ve found two of them. Both have facebook friended me at some point or another over the past few years. One Molly was a student at UPenn, a year or two behind me. We look vaguely alike. She even wrote an article for her student newspaper. She spent a few months traveling in Europe and seems to have some great parties, particularly at Halloween.

The other Molly is more interesting to think about. She graduates from high school this spring and is planning to attend Clemson. She’s from Northern Virginia, the place where suburbia became supra-burbia. Molly also happens to be a blonde-haired, brown-browed Tea Leoni lookalike.

She describes herself as liking various things, such as showers, running, broccoli and banana peppers. In the same medium, I profess my affection for: sea monsters, infomercials and the Pittsburgh Pirates. You can see why I enjoy contemplating my alternate life as the fleet-footed, vegetable-consuming teenager who roots for teams that win. And I do get some kind of pleasure from imagining the ways our various Molly lives might be entwined.

The more I think about it, the more I’ve come to realize that I’m not angry when salespeople tell me I look like someone who I’m not. I’m just sad when the visions come to an end.

Today’s rain is the cold kind. Today’s wind is the blow-open-your-coat-and-drive-straight-up-your-sleeve type. All day, people made weather-related wisecracks. I never heard such groups for blaming their own grouchiness on a little hydration.

I love rain. I like the soft, wispy drizzly kind you find in Scotland and the Pacific Northwest. It hangs in the air and forms drops on the top of your hair. Sometimes it feels heavy to breathe, but I love it because it’s the perfect weather for grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. I can remember several very special days when I was able to take a long walk in weather like that and come home to something warm and filling.

I like the wild storms and the sideways sleet and hail balls. When I was 6 or 7, a period marked by the fact that I wouldn’t wear pants, my father used to convince me to sit on our blue porch swing during summer thunderstorms. Our pond water reflected the lightning and we could see white streaks above the hill across the road. I remember the goosebumps and my mom arriving to sit on the other side of me and keep me warm while we rocked and we all felt very in awe of the world around us. Moments of fearsome earth always remind me how impressive early humans were.

That was the setting for one of the interesting moments of my life. It was many years later, a few summers ago, when my dad and I were sitting on the swing during a brewing storm.

“How do you think you would have interpreted thunder if you lived a thousand years ago,” he asked, drawing air through the mild, woody cigars my mother and I love with a small pwah sound.
“Well, I would have had to associate it with something I knew through personal experience, right? And thunder sounds like a giant stomach grumbling. So I would have thought the gods were hungry,” I said. “I’d make a big feast to give them.”
My father paused for a pwah. Then two.
“I would have interpreted it as a sign of aggression and started a war on someone.”
Another silence.
“Yours was a very feminine reading,” he said, as the first raindrops began to splatter.

I think rainy weather has always been the source of my affection for cities like London and Seattle. I’ve been drawn to them for as long as I can remember and it’s not for the colonialism or fish. Part of it is the calming affect of rain. I like that it quiets the city — not like snow, which stifles. Rain makes the noises of a thousand neighbors softer, but adds a slight rhythm of its own. I like the fresh smell and the way it washes the sidewalks clean. I like knowing plants are being sated.

But mostly, I like coming inside while it’s raining. It appeals to all my homiest instincts — an opportunity to burn a candle, read a book and enjoy the quiet company of friends with some kind of simple, tasty meal. (Likely a carbohydrate.)

I am comforted by the idea that wherever you are, even if it’s not raining, because you’re reading this, you’re inside, warm and safe.