This week, New Yorkers seem more bitter than usual. (It’s like the difference between a tidal wave and a typhoon, but what’s a good lunarial shove between friends, eh?) Might be the summer winding down or just the fact that we’re between seasons of Real Housewives.  I know I’ve been feeling unsettled.

I’m planning to spend the month of September working from my home in the mountains of Appalachia. This is a source of great joy and great stress. It’s also causing me to look too far forward; I find myself buying one orange, thinking I won’t eat more than that before I have to leave. I should say that I’m the kind of girl who can eat an orange per hour, so this is quite a cutback, since I have a full three weeks before departing.

Along with my trip home, I’ve been feeling the urge to travel abroad.

Last year I visited a friend living in the Netherlands. I came away with an appreciation for canals, a slight fear of Belgium and knowing the Dutch word for garlic. (Knoflook.) What I remember most, though, was my first night there. I arrived about 6 a.m. in Den Haag, having been up about 24 hours. She deposited me at her house and toddled off to work, and I promptly fell asleep. When she got home, we went out into a beautiful early fall sunset and walked round her lovely city. I, like any good tourist, nearly collided with a bicycle every chance I got. I also dropped the little plastic fork I was meant to eat my pommes frites with and had to ask for another. My most bourgeois moments.

That night, my hostess went to bed, but I was wide awake. I stood in her living room and looked down her beautifully narrow European street into an open square. I saw the fountain being turned off.  I watched the moon hang over nearby apartments. I took this photo.

I flipped through her foreign channels and found reruns of an old Australian show called The Secret Lives of Us. It was one of those elusive television moments when you stumble upon something that will become so much a part of your psyche that you can no longer remember if it was you or the protagonist who developed an opinion or preference or catchphrase. Forget instant play, this show and I were instant friends.  I sat on a creaky Dutch couch and ate stroopwafel with thick strawberry yogurt and chunks of real, rich European chocolate. Everything was dark and still and quiet, and I couldn’t have been happier.

This is what I envision when I think of living abroad, the sense of newness and satisfaction that comes with traveling outside your comfort. It’s so much easier to imagine a different version of oneself with a drastic scenery change. I’m reminded of stage managers calling for a bath of blue lights, then red, as people dressed in black scuttle around, pushing fiberboard cutouts around.

My mind knows this is not the reality of moving out of the United States. I can convince my brain of the obvious problems and setbacks. But, right now, my angsty New York feet are aching to be somewhere else, though I know I’m home.

Slowly, I rock.

side

to

side

I feel the base of my back against the deck’s wood. I feel my right-hand fingers scrubbing slowly up and down on my pocket’s zipper. I feel the salt drying between my toes. It is a buttery night, and this boat and I are gliding through the waters off Rhode Island.

There are seven of us lying on the deck, all looking up, all silent. We’re tired in that beachy way and thirsty and tender from new sunburns. Swirling just below the ocean breeze is the milky ghost of my teenage dreams, of kissing on ferris wheels and late-night visits to someone else’s couch. I know without asking that all of us feel it. Swift and searing New Yorkers, just this once we allow ourselves to revert back. To relapse to humanity. My god. How we are romanced by our surroundings. I think of Rousseau’s “The Sleeping Gypsy.”

Next to me, Andrew rolls himself over. He is short and a little doughy (though English, which makes it make sense, I tell myself). His blond hair is soft and clings to my hand, like I think a baby’s would. I wish it were fuller, but then I notice how serious his eyes are, and I laugh to cover my anxiety. Andrew is new to this group, a favorite ex-boyfriend of my friend’s and ought not to be touched. I try to think of the most un-comely thing to say.

“I wish I were a mermaid.”
“What color would your shells be?” he asks.
“Not shells. Hollowed out sea urchins, so certain young mermen don’t get fresh.” A smirk. Damn. I decide to try to frighten him with honesty.
“I think I would be the happiest I could be if I was swimming alone through some beds of kelp.”
“Don’t divers get snagged in those and die?”
“Yep,” I say and watch a constellation finally pass out of sight as the boat flows on. “An element of violence is necessary to every important action. Surely you know that. And just think how quiet it would be.” Andrew leans and lets the rocking carry his weight back until he settles flat again.

Later, when everyone has paired off or gone inside to do the dishes and have a few more beers, I am standing at the railing, feeling the ocean slip by. I don’t really think of Andrew. I am too interested in myself at this moment, of what I’ll think and how I’ll feel. It is one of the times when I am all I need, though I am not perturbed when he stands next to me. Just surprised.

“Hallo, mermy.”
“I cannot believe you just interrupted mon reverie with that.”

Soon he puts his hand on my elbow. It is a strange feeling, his warm skin cupping my cold and neglected joint. We are like this for miles and miles. Later, once everyone’s cigarettes are crumpled and the yellow cabin light extinguished, I tell him the story of Oscar Wilde’s grave.

“It’s in a cemetery in Paris, and there’s a big gray statue on top of it. It’s a winged figure that’s arching up to take flight. One of the first statues that gave me any real sense of movement. Anyway, it’s beautiful and a little simple, but the best part is that women from around the world come to his grave and kiss it, so all over the monument there are red lip marks. Isn’t that wonderful?”
“I thought he was gay.”
“He is. And that’s sooooo romantic.” I am tired now. I take a big breath and lean forward on the boat’s railing. His hand falls from my arm and as I turn, I hear Andrew quote from Wilde’s “Wasted Days”:

“The boy still dreams: nor knows that night is nigh:
And in the night-time no man gathers fruit.”

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.

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.