look what's beautiful

It's Saturday and GG's made pancakes to bribe me into cleaning again. 

The faces around our antique dining room table are an endless shuffle playlist, but today it's just me, Liz, and the Geege. 
Liz tells us about the gradual emancipation of slaves in the 19th century, because these are the kinds of conversations that happen here, and we split the last piece of bacon. 
Then mid-philosophical musing, GG grabs her-- 

"Look what's beautiful!" 
Her eyes laser beam across the room onto a patch of light floating along the wall, making a shadow cutout of the tree outside our window. 
"Every once in awhile, when the sun hits just right, you can see these shadows making shapes..." 

*** 

I came to New York one year and 25 days ago. (The plan was to poetically drop this blog on my anniversary, but you can read the getting-one's-shit-together-late thing as a thematic choice.) 


In digitally scrapbooking a year of my life, I thought it was important to give you a list-- The 10 Reasons Being a Barely Employed Twenty-Something Is Less Sucky Than It Sounds. Or, 5 Things About Graduating With a Humanities Degree That Don't Provoke Suicide... 

But in the end it hasn't been a year of lists, it's been a year of moments.

It was the year I cried when the Spice Girls came back, and cried more when Michael Scott did. 

It was the year I met a few oddballs that made me feel right at home.

The year I met a boy at a concert and got to live that dizzy dreamy high that songs are made of.
Like happy songs made sense all of the sudden.


The year I got to drink beer with my dad, which is the most telling symptom of adulthood, and I learned to make guacamole (13 avocados for maximum effectiveness).

This was the year I fell in love with Tom Robbins, Junot Díaz, and John Green (and flirted with Mary Karr and Patti Smith).

The year we got caught in the rain and rainbows of the Pride Parade, and I saw my first drag show.

This was the year I shared pizza and angst and The National with one of my favorite people in the world.

(So much angst.)

It was the year I babysat a guinea pig, and "Gangnam Style" somehow happened to all of us.

It was the year I finally met some of my biggest heroes.

    

This was the year I got to intern with the kind of boss who wore matching socks and bowties, packed the same lunch in the same tupperware all 100 days I knew him, and showed his interns that they mattered. The year I saw my name in a byline in a very tasteful font.

It was the year I worked with someone who left me very instructive post-its.

And someone who helped me make menacing ones, a la Phoebe Buffay.

And a lot of other people who somehow made me feel welcome in the Scary Office World.

It was the year Tegan and Sara recorded a dance album (and if you've ever been to my apartment, I'm sorry I played it the way prison guards loop songs as an instrument of torture).

The year I found out church can be home, if you let it. And it can be where you find people who share your affinity for glitter and disposable cameras, and your awe of a being capable of perfect love. 

Who will talk meaning-of-life with you over IPAs and hard cider anytime you need to (which turns out to be a lot).

This was the year I took the train to Brooklyn in the middle of the night so I could climb into bed with my best friend and have her tell me it's all right.

The year I watched some of the people I love face the big grown up kind of loss, the kind I can only shiver at and hurt for, secondhand. 

And I felt the feeling you feel when you are not, cannot ever be, enough.

The year a lot of messed up people did a lot of un-wrap-my-mind-around-able things that I am ill-equipped to write about, that made all our worlds stand still. 

...This was the year I learned that some people leave. It's just in their bones and you have to let them.

But (and listen here) some people stay, and you have to let them too.

Some people will belong to you long after the details of your lives overlap, when friendship is a plane ride or a handmade card or an email covertly sent at work. When it's a practice you sometimes fail at to remind each other of your devotion. 

But these failures are forgiven even before they happen, because true friendship is grace. 

This was the year I experienced so much grace.

 

 

***

I came to New York one year and 25 days ago. 

I thought I'd find a job, a plan, an identity, but instead I found music and wine and hurt and beauty and questions. 

And eventually I learned that my last blog was wrong: there is no space between diploma and real life. This uncertainty is my life, and thank God.

13 things

learned in the space between diploma and real life

1. Ian Crane is never going to pay you back. Just accept that his presence-- a whirlwind of urban diva, southern mama, and glitter nail polish-- is payment enough for all the wine.

2. People are nice. Like the guitar player on the 1 platform who asked you to sing along to "Wonderwall" because he could tell you were a '90s baby. Or the gay couple who invited you to dance in their wedding in Central Park. Or Henry, the 82-year-old regular at New Kam Lai Chinese who bought you a drink and told you why he'd rather live in a triscuit-studio here than in any other city. Realize that there are more stories in a given block than you could scrawl across the empire state...listen to as many as you can.

3. Try harder to be grateful. There will be days when it will seem impossible to extract yourself from  your cotton cocoon of a bed and go be a person. There will be days when you don't feel like a person. At least not one you recognize. And no matter where you are or who you're with, that absence of identity is the loneliest. 

But you have to get up. You have to count again the million and seven things that make your life worth it, starting with your steady pulse and ending with this blog.

4. Take chances. You never know when someone you track down on Missed Connections is going to resurrect your buried smile.

5. Say hi to that awkward girl in the corner of the party. She will become the kind of friend who brings a turkey-shaped loaf of bread to Thanksgiving dinner.

6. Invest in long socks. Amid mental breakdowns and identity crises, chilly ankles will remain your biggest problem. 

7. Find solidarity in art. Know that people you will never meet have been where you've been. And some have the soulpower to translate that tornado in your skull into something beautiful. 

Like Harry Potter surrounded by a fortress of dead loved ones, never but always there, you will brave the world made infinitely stronger by the voices in your earbuds and the pages between your fingers. Love them and don't give a damn if that makes you weird. You are. It's better that way.

8. Hummus is crack. How did you not realize this sooner?

9. Waiting on a subway platform with no sign telling you when the next train will arrive is the six-and-a-halfth level of hell. 

10. Next time, hit on that Trader Joe's cashier. The only thing you have to lose is sea salt brownies.

OK, maybe keep it a strictly business relationship.

11. Church is home. Find comfort in the ritual-- sacred songs lit up on shoddy projectors, basket-passing through the dark, hundreds of thousands of millions of people throughout existence drinking holy purple drink.

Let the radicality of a person who loved wholly shake you anew each Sunday and leave you stupid for words. 

But,
12. Don't offer your snacks to strangers on the train. They don't take kindly to your awkward evangelism in this town.

13. Force yourself to be patient. It may take an existential smackdown between God, middle-class entitlement, and your ego to finally settle into the sweaty, exhausted reality that it's not going to come together perfectly. Or right away. Or at all. 

Now keep living in light of this.

sandy: a sing-along blog

Friends, here is a guide to living on the frontline of the end of the world.

Play: "Fistful of Love" by Antony and the Johnsons

Step 1: Wake up feeling a little bit like it's Christmas. No work, no obligations, and a rising giddiness in your ribcage.
Jump on your roommate's bed and plot heroic evacuation strategies. (Wonder if two writing majors have what it takes to execute said strategies.)

Play: "She Wolf"by David Guetta feat. Sia

Step 2: Suit up and brave the roaring breeze and wailing drizzle like a boss. Make your way through four whole blocks of mild discomfort to pick up the essentials.

Play: "Trapeze Swinger" by Iron & Wine

Step 3: Once safely home, brew a pot of tea and bust out your Iron & Wine vinyl (double hipster cred). Spend some time reading, writing, and discussing philosophy. "It's like everything has already happened. That's why we live in a world of memes and hashtags." #firstworldproblems

Play: "Help I'm Alive" by Metric

Step 4: Get cabin(/angst) fever and suit up again. This time with velcro hightops, because you mean business. As you walk through kids playing football on the sidewalk and old rain slickered men with smiling eyes, feel, as you do whenever a whole town goes slo-mo, that you are part of something extraordinary.

Step 5: Take a picture of your feet.

Step 6: See yellow-black plastic hanging wimpily across the park entrance. Hop it. (If they were serious, they would have at least double wrapped the place.) Join the slow procession of urban pilgrims moving wordlessly to the Hudson. Feel that thing again, times seven.

Take in the tipping waters, poised to spill, and ragdoll boats. 

Play: "Hide and Seek" by Imogen Heap

Step 7: Contemplate the sheer beauty of objects flying around, a la American Beauty. Stand on the edge of chaos and feel the wind actually try to pick you up. Instinctively look for something to grip and picture yourself, like a Titanic extra, hanging from a metal railing. Relish the idea with 94% gratitude for its impossibility and 6% longing.

Feel that you finally understand the lyrics "...when busy streets a mess with people would stop to hold their heads heavy." 

Feel sorry for every human who has not had the chance to play this song on top volume in the middle of a storm.

Notice the man with the green umbrella sharing your square of Sandy and give him a nod. He's probably thinking what you're thinking. He's probably thinking something cooler.

Step 8: Busted.

See the po-po rolling in to shoo us vagrants to higher ground.

Play: "Runaway" by Kanye West

(Fail to see the irony until you sit down to blog about it.)

Feel a fleeting solidarity with everyone in the world who has ever been shut down by the man.

...Remember that you are a middle-class white girl.

Trudge back over lame police lines with the rebellious (but not actually rebellious) masses.

Play: "Hurricane" by Something Corporate, which has come up on shuffle as an act of God or Ashton Kutcher

Step 9: Walk home laughing.

is this my old shape?

thanks to aimi for sending this song into cory's music collection, the top of a giant hourglass that sifts down to mine...





"autumn tree" makes me feel that sort of buried, howling human sadness that comes on suddenly and impersonally. it is too big to be mine, something encompassing a great war or loneliness.

it's the sort of music that swallows you up, but gently. you know it should hurt but instead it lulls.

the end sounds like every stupid thing i've felt from falling into a puddle one halloween in front of all the older kids to being friend-zoned to being alone in a city of 8.2 million. it sounds like missing things i can't go back to and all the dances i never got asked to.

it sounds like longing i don't understand.


i don't like to watch the video, because then it's hipsters in a room. if i click away from that screen or close my eyes it's all of life's perfectly cloudy, rented sorrow days. days when what has happened is heavy, but what hasn't is crushing.

it's the waiting for things that never come and the sitting with thoughts that never leave. it's an inadequate metaphor.

it's what makes me hope this town gets cold soon.

she said god was in the rain

My Dr. Suessy song for a day at the park...


Today I needed something
so I ran after the rain
but it was quick and it was clever--
took to hiding when I came

So I tiptoed through the grass and dirt
kicked prickers and dead leaves
brushed fingertips to speckled bricks
stood under dripping trees

A kid again, I tightrope walked
the cracks that webbed the ground
itching for the impractical
I sent prayers to God and clouds

I dare you!
No, I need you please
don't leave me dry and high
above the Hudson looking out
at jagged concrete sky

By now the sun was inching through
draining magic from my plan
But still I trudged through stale puddles
and, just in case, held out my hand

After thirteen songs, six bicyclers,
two catcalls and four moms
I decided this just wasn't it
and began the journey home

I was all the way to the corner
where the city meets the green
when I felt a drop, then two, then ten
then infinity hitting me

And suddenly the park was mine
bikers and moms all gone away
I turned around, face to the flood
danced laughing through my rain

The only other soul in the aquarium
(I swear that this is real)
was an old man in a tanktop on rollerblades
leaving ripples at his heels

We swam, the two of us, in a suspended world
and I knew he, like me, had waited
for a storm like this that would drench the brave
breaking lines of shoes and ages

Because in a storm you're just a kid
and that's all that you can be
out in a world that'll fall on you
if you wait impatiently

Seeking a Friend for the Beginning of the World

Two recent college grads seek platonic relationships on the upper west side. Non-smoking. Non-boring. Pets preferred.

Seeking someone who is kind, but not too happy. Likes books, but not pretentious. Likes God, but doesn't go door to door. Preferably single, 18-28, attractive (but not hotter than us).

Looking for supplements to friends on the west coast. Friends who were partial to the nose-boop form of affection, some who thought it was cool to read poems out loud, some who would rather read reddit posts. Some who would make us coffee in the mornings with just the right amount of creamer and share their spoons. Others who would brew a whole pot, then let it sit there day after day, microwaving cups full until it ran out. Friends who would make fun of professors. Friends who were professors. Friends who liked to climb on roofs and listen to indie music. Friends who looked good on the dance floor; some who could read our minds. Friends who ate entirely too many cupcakes. Friends who spoke the rare dialect of gersberms. A few who understood the vast metaphorical implications of Harry Potter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Some who wrote romantic letters in cursive and some whose chemistry notes were pretty much illegible. Friends who would leave post-its on our desks when we were having bad days and friends who would drive us around all night until we felt normal again. Some who are unforgettable; most who are irreplaceable.

But please contact us if you're willing to try.