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A few weeks ago, as I waited to board a train, I was struck by an advertisement advertising something I can’t quite remember. Two children, being cradled by their father in a sun-bleached grassy knoll, or something, on a summer’s day.
I honestly do not remember what was being advertised - life insurance, probably - but I just started thinking about the advantages of being so young, so innocent.
Once, when I was still quite young (and probably being cradled in the sun, too), I remember asking my Father on Father’s Day when Kid’s Day was. And his answer, which really riled me up at the time, was that, “there is no Kid’s Day. Every day is Kid’s Day.” And then he started laughing, maniacally, with my Mother, as thunderous bolts of lightning illuminated my house which suddenly seemed to take the shape of a wicked witch’s castle.
I was hurt by this response because it seemed to me that my parents were wholly unsympathetic to what I perceived as the very real trials and tribulations of childhood (“Does my Father even know what its like to have a crush rejected!”)
I think there is a general biological mishap with youth. Children are blessed with the magical nature of youth. I do not enjoy the sentiment, “youth is wasted on the young”, because I think it implies that kids don’t deserve uncompromising physical bodies; nor am I referring to physicality at all - it’s the mindset. Children all the way up to teenagers seem to believe that childhood is a curse. I know that my attitude during childhood isn’t exactly the norm - I HATE HALLOWEEN - but as a rule, most children and teenagers wish for more mature years. It means being taken seriously, driving around in cars with boys, not worrying about curfew… being an adult. It isn’t until we reach twenty, when the word “teen” doesn’t accompany our age anymore that we feel desperate to cling on to the advantages of youth.
I wish it had been possible to go through my teenage years with the understanding of my advantages. Which is impossible, I know, and ignorant of the ignorance we must have at that age. I do not envy those kids who have to be adults at that age. The thought of having an outside job on top of high school study seems impossible. But what if I had realized that my troubles with girls, or the isolation of being from a minority in a secular school, or that being an actor, were all relatively trivial issues? Would I have learned to enjoy myself more? Let go a bit?
Adulthood puts so much in perspective that we learn to understand what is truly difficult and what is not; or perhaps what deserves immediate attention and what might take care of itself.
A lot of this ran through my head as I stared at this poster of kids waiting to board my train, risking looking like a pedophile in crowded New York subways. I became very anxious about what everyone else is anxious about too, the overpopulation of a city about the size of my pinky, my money, my future, my future with money, anything and everything under the sun (I suppose I’m a bit of hypochondriac), and I wished I knew how to take advantage of my youth, and then once again realized I was only a twenty-two year old child.
A couple years ago, when I was studying at the Stella Adler Studio in Chelsea, living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the play Red by John Logan took Broadway and garnered Tony’s for Best New Play and Best Featured Actor (Eddie Redmayne) and was nominated for Best Actor (Alfred Molina, who portrayed Mark Rothko).
I had a panic attack, laying awake late at night in late June in my apartment in the sweltering heat that would overtake everyone’s lives that summer. Redmayne, a British actor, has already established himself as a powerhouse actor, working in equal parts in London, New York and Los Angeles - and he’s still in his twenties. And I laid there that night, anxious as all hell about myself and where I was headed in life, as an artist and human being. Why couldn’t I be on Broadway? Or working in Hollywood? Why was I seemingly nowhere with an unmarked road stretched out ahead of me?
And as I unreasonably panicked and perspired, I got out of bed, grabbed a cigarette, climbed the stairs of my apartment to my roof, stared at the conglomerate of lights and shadows of a Manhattan skyline stretched out before me, it hit me like a bolt of lightning: I’m still so, so, so very young, and am running as fast as I can, like Charles Bukowski’s wild horses over the hills, as fast as I possibly can. And I am just as ignorant about who I am and where I am as I was ten years ago.
The greatest lesson my adulthood has been the realization of how so very young I am. And I’m going to hold on to that till I can’t anymore.
…
“Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me and I was unlike anyone else. ‘I am alone and they are EVERYONE,’ I thought — and pondered.
From that it is evident that I was still a youngster.”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
KK
I often think that one of the greatest advantages to growing up in a financially comfortable home is the option to explore art. I do not say this facetiously or at all casually; I really believe this is a major privilege in a world where it really should be a given. I do believe, quite passionately, that arts education should be just as commonplace in our schools as any other subject, but this knowledge, and my own frustration with this obvious blight in the American school system could not provide me with more patience as, a couple days ago, I walked through the Museum of Modern Art and asked repeatedly to myself, “Why are Americans allowed inside museums?”
…
This past Monday I had the luxury of two and a half hours of free time in downtown New York in between an early-morning audition and a three-hour improv course at Upright Citizen’s Brigade; a luxury I am sure to have much of this summer as I still struggle to find things to do tomorrow, let alone next week. So I walked to the MOMA.
I find the museum setting to be problematic. There’s something of a sacred feel to a large, world-famous museum, which I understand, but I think it provides for an atmosphere of tepid enjoyment and much anxiety, like a library. I know this is not a shared view, necessarily, but I have found that I much prefer artistic environments where I take a more active role. But, as a photography student in undergrad well-versed in the art of Cindy Sherman, I decided to check out her retrospective at the MOMA.
New York City was experiencing that odd level of rain that feels like God, or whomever, has made a non-committal attempt at relieving himself (or spitting sporadically over us), and, when I entered the museum lobby, I had to fight off about eighteen thousand throngs of obnoxious American tourists on my way to the information booth to get my free ticket by way of my super fancy Ivy League ID card. I suppose I shouldn’t be so judgmental or assuming as to the background of these people (and I admit I overheard my fair share of Italian and French and other such European languages I could not accurately discern), but it does feel like an overwhelming amount of terrible museum goers are in fact American.
I had two and a half hours to see one exhibit. This is how much time I gave myself to see one floor of artwork, fully aware that it was too much and I’d have plenty of time to see other work, but I was dead wrong. As soon as I got to the staircase to go the sixth and final floor of the museum to Cindy Sherman’s work, I started praying for a Fast Pass machine you only see at Six Flags. Or a time machine. Either way, the line to go upstairs was about as fast as waiting in line with ten thousand other people to use one toilet. But I eventually got upstairs and was not at all disappointed by the vast, multilayered work that is Cindy Sherman’s career.
Sherman’s photographs work on so many levels. They simultaneously attack gender lines, question the isolation and criminalization of AIDS victims, the synthetic nature of Photography itself, and the dependence of American society on the Hollywood image, and more. But what I find most impressive, really, about Sherman’s work, is the humor. I was laughing like a little child through most of the exhibit (and then alternatively being slapped in the face by her pathos). It is incredibly difficult to achieve humor in visual art of this kind. Certainly harder than, say, sketch comedy on Saturday Night Live where humor is more obvious. But Sherman does it masterfully, and I was the only one laughing. I wish I were kidding. But people were staring at me like I was a petulant boy (I suppose I did just call myself a child), and I couldn’t understand it. But I amused myself by hearing the voices of old society women in my head as they stared at me chuckling.
“Oh my! The impudence of the child.”
“This is the very reason that Reginald and I do NOT go to the museums much anymore.”
“Someone ought to take him away.”
“MP3 Players!”
I found myself next to a girl, whom I keenly discerned as an art student by virtue of her purple hair, twenty-seven face piercings and linen scarf, showing her mother around the exhibit. I creepily followed these women around because the way in which the daughter was describing the value of these portraits was not by aesthetic quality but by degree of fame and I found this hilarious.
“Oh, Mom! This one is really famous.” I took this to mean that the photograph had good contrast but the content was bland.
“Mom! This one is like, SO famous.” This means that the photograph is excellently printed and the content is challenging.
“Oh! Oh! Mom!!! This photograph is insanely famous.” This means that the photograph is provocative, revolutionary… anything to make it so insanely famous. It was probably in her textbook at Pratt.
And so on. She must’ve pointed ten or so works in the same way - by saying it was famous - and expecting that this was a sufficient manner to describe art.
I got through the exhibit and was thoroughly inspired by Sherman, and with just enough time to walk through a bit of MOMA’s permanent collection, only to find what is actually one of the worst designed floors of any museum I’ve ever been to. First of all, MOMA’s incredibly overpriced restaurant is across from their major gallery rooms, which means a few things:
1) The aroma of roast chicken and organic brussel sprouts fills the rooms while you’re trying to concentrate on Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”
2) A gazillion yuppie middle-aged women yapping away about Dolce & Gabana (is that a clothing store or ice cream? I don’t know) while they wait for their table.
3) A tiny woman who I suppose must be the host of this eatery asks people periodically, “are you here for lunch or to see an incredible collection of modern art?” because there are so many people congregating in that area and they need to figure out who is who.
I may have changed the exact phrasing of the question, but you get the point. But I walked through the exhibit anyway, ignoring the fact that it was as crowded as the subway during rush hour, and tried to extend my enjoyment for just another half hour. But I was shocked to find so many people taking photographs of paintings. I don’t understand this and I never well. Why do people do this? So they can go home after their trip to New York and present a slide show of things they saw? Even if this was the case, go on Google. Search for the image. I am sure that you will find a better quality picture than the one you took on your point-and-shoot with the flash on and random passerby’s in the corner of your frame. I truly don’t understand the impulse to do this, especially when we have search engines that can help find these paintings without us. But what’s really frustrating are the people (and you know there are entirely too many) who take a photograph with their cameras and walk on, not stopping to actually see the painting with their own eyes before or after the picture.
For my taste I also don’t understand the audio-guide. I understand people want historical and cultural context to the artwork in front of them, and I applaud this impulse entirely, but I hate seeing the people who just stroll on with this thing attached to their ears who, like our photographers, don’t pause to consider the work on their own and take away what they want by their own perceptions. It is this museum-tourist person that also does not consider a piece of art if it does not have a description on the plaque, or if it isn’t placed right in front of their face. And even in this instance it can go unnoticed. On the fifth floor of the MOMA there is work by Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max Beckmann as soon as you step off the escalator, and I watched for a good ten minutes as hordes of people walked right past them as if they were works by a fifth grader. Of course, some of this blame has to go to the people at MOMA themselves, who curiously placed Andrew Wyeth’s famous work”Christine’s World”, Charles Sheeler’s “American Landscape”, Georgia O’Keefe’s “Farmhouse Window and Door” and Edward Hopper’s “New York Movie” all around the corner from aforementioned restaurant and across from the bathrooms and elevator.
But nothing could really take away my newfound optimism that was given me by the work of Cindy Sherman and others on that Monday, and I walked out of the museum with the understanding that the level of my happiness is directly proportionate to the amount of good art in my life. And the thing is, I’d rather see masses of stupid people looking at art in MOMA than none at all, and I certainly prefer them there than seeing tourists lining up for rush tickets to Spiderman at the Foxwoods Theatre. But then again, they’re probably one in the same.
KK
I remember seeing a commercial for a medication - Lipitor, or something - which matched up people’s choice in high-calorie food with a picture of their smiling face. An old crotchety aunt wearing a colorful necklace next to a fruit cake; a particularly large man next to ham and eggs; an African-American woman next to a chocolate mousse. The idea being that these people’s choice in food is represented in their facial structure. There was also a commercial of similar message for a used-car website or something of the like and one with dogs. I’m intrigued by this question- can we really be defined by our choice in material objects? Does this somehow reveal more about us than, say, the details of our relationship history?
Yesterday I sat on an E train connecting me from Queens to Manhattan, across from three book-readers. An older woman wearing a pure-white chemise with bright red lipstick and graying hair with a large opal ring on her thumb was reading a book called The Nitric Oxide (NO) Solution. A thirty-something tall white man in conservative pleated brown pants and a blue dress shirt with a wedding ring was reading a book called Committed, with those words inscribed inside a ring in a graphic on the cover. And the woman next to me, getting on in years but connected to her presumably Bohemian roots via a plethora of vintage jewelry and 1970’s style blouse was reading a book called Dying to be Me, focused intensely on the chapter “Allowing and Being Yourself.”
Somehow, as I sat with no earphones or book or anything but my iPhone, these choices in literature made perfect sense. They seemed to match up with their readers in logical manner - would it make sense for them to have switched books? Would I have still said, “of course”, or would I rather think, “Well that’s an odd choice of book.” I’m not so sure but I think its the former. I think we attribute facts about a person based on the activities they pursue. If the conservative fellow had been reading Dying to be Me, I might assume that he was struggling to find his identity in a stuck-up world of office buildings and cornered desks. Or if the Bohemian lady had been reading The Nitric Oxide Solution, I’d assume she was a scientist pursuing alternative means of medicine.
I’m intensely interested in people’s choice of literature, something that will be increasingly hard to do as the popularization of e-readers like the Kindle and the Nook take away our love of the printed word. And when I go to someone’s home or apartment for the first time I enjoy perusing their bookshelves and DVD collections. But when I think about what I am reading, I wonder what people might glean about my personality without knowing anything about me. And since I seem to be reading about a hundred items at once, it might all seem strange to a naked eye:
The Actor and the Target by Declan Donnellan, Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson, and The New Yorker, every week.
Bill Bryson’s book, a memoir on his travels through Europe one summer in the seventies, was loaned to me by a friend who takes pleasure in underlining sentences and passages that particularly speak to her. I don’t often borrow books - kind of a purchasing obsessive - but I took exception when she loaned it to me. I find that I am learning more about who this person is by the kinds of things she underlines that I might not otherwise be able to understand. And I wonder if the fiction we choose reveals more about us than the non-fiction of our lives. Somehow, it seems to me, knowing that X person loves ravioli and watching World War II documentaries gives me more information than knowing that same X person has been in a damaging car accident. In other words, do the things we choose to pursue reveal more about us than what has happened to us? How much about us is assumed based on what we choose to follow or read or paint or eat?
I wonder about the effect of Facebook profiles on all this. I used to argue vehemently that having a profile with a list of band and movie favorites was not an accurate depiction of someone’s actual self. But maybe its not so simple - after all, saying that you enjoy reading Shakespeare is vastly different than saying you enjoy reading Twilight, and that difference tells a lot about these different people. The distinction here is that a Facebook profile is completely subjective and made by the user. If I was on Facebook I could say I enjoy reading Schopenhauer (which I don’t) and that I only watch HBO dramas (which I don’t), and I’d be projecting a completely false image of who I really am. But if you saw me in real life, the choices I actually make in philosophy and television entertainment might say something quite profound about who I am. And maybe our personalities shouldn’t be determined based on our own desires. The Greg Nussen that X person sees is much different than the Greg Nussen that Y person sees. One might be a lover and the other a staunch opponent, but they are both me. Maybe who we really are is vastly more dependent on other people’s opinions than we realize.
Theater director Anne Bogart, who, like myself, strongly disagrees with the teachings of Lee Strasberg and most of the rest of the Americanized system of Stanislavsky acting techniques, argues that, Strasberg’s system gets us into the trap of believing that “if we feel it, the audience feels it”- a false ideology. In essence, it doesn’t matter what you feel on stage; the audience must see it and feel it themselves. And lately I’ve begun to be convinced that this philosophy in acting is directly applicable to our lives. If I love a person, it doesn’t matter so much as how I show that love. And maybe I believe I am a strong liberal democrat but maybe my voting record displays something else. I’m not suggesting that we need to broadcast our daily desires and actions so that the world can say, “Oh I know who this person is”, but maybe we’d get into less difficulty and traction if we were more forthright about the people we desire to be. Many things are inherent in our personality, but many other things that we desire to be as people need more action. It’s like that oft-used Gandhi quote, “be the change you want to see in the world”; saying we want to be something is great but it doesn’t matter if we don’t actually put it to action.
—
I’ve begun to understand in the past few weeks that I have very little actual understanding of who I really am. Which feels like one of those questions that is impossible to answer, but one that, as an artist, needs constant questioning. For as long as I can remember, I’ve kept that person a secret, not just from others, but also from myself; what my friend suggests is a fear of my own mind. And in my quest to understand who I really am, I’ve started to see this summer as a daunting challenge, wherein I have essentially nothing on my calendar until late August. But I’ve started to see this in a more liberating light.
Last night, I found myself at Rizzoli Bookstore in Manhattan as I tried to kill time before seeing Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros at the Roseland Ballroom. And as soon as I walked in, I was overcome with a fear of the outside world I had just walked away from. I perused that bookstore completely, examining nearly every title with very little desire to actually purchase a book (I have a stack taller than Jack’s beanstalk on my window ledge already). I walked this three-story bookstore, up and down their comprehensive collection, and wondered what it was in there that actually interested me. Am I a fiction nerd? Do I relish in large photography coffee table books by Robert Frank? Am I intrigued into exploring philosophy, poetry? Non-fiction? Am I trying to break it down too minutely and am I really just a general literature fan? Or am I not at all - do I believe I am out of escapist fantasies? Or was I trying to determine who I am through printed words? I’m not sure if being in there for so long was therapeutic or causing me to fill with more gut-churning anxious regret and confusion, but at some point they were announcing the closing of the bookshop and I panicked at the thought of returning to the rainy streets of a Tuesday evening in New York. I longed to find some answers to my mind through that bookstore, and understood, as I was essentially forced out of their double-glass doors onto wet pavement, that the quest for self-realization is impossible through our eyes alone. In a lot of ways, we need the help and opinions of others to determine our own paths.
The choices we make in art and life reveal, through some sort of pointillism or a sky of scattered stars, both to ourselves and others, our vast and endless identities.
KK
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I once spent a night in Oslo, Norway where I heard this phrase uttered to me in passing by three strangers in the span of an hour.
Perhaps I was overtired from traveling and I only believe I heard this phrase. Perhaps I only heard it once and then imagined, through my sleep deprivation, that two others said it. I can’t say definitively one way or the other. Nonetheless, I heard it and whether I imagined this or not, I heard it and felt it.
When I was spending my semester abroad in Paris, I chose to spend my two weeks of spring break on a solo backpacking trip in Scandinavia. I only knew going in that I had a ticket from Paris to Helsinki, Finland and a ticket from Copenhagen, Denmark back to Paris. This kind of “planning”, or lack thereof, is completely unlike my usual nature. I’m a habitual worrier, which I mask pretty well with the ability to calm myself (at least on the outside), and I am not prone to do something so inherently dangerous. And yet, I did.
I ended up traveling through the four capitals of the Scandinavian contingent in what was still very much winter time, with little more than what was at the time a pretty haggard beard, Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert on my iPod (I probably listened to that album all the way through fifteen times by the time I returned to France). In Helsinki I ate reindeer and elk. In Stockholm I ran into my childhood friend I hadn’t seen in three years. In Oslo I had what may have been hallucinations. In Copenhagen I confronted my very existence.
Living abroad is a very strange experience. It is one thing to move from one American city to another, which in itself is a difficult transition to make; how do you meet people? How do you settle yourself in a place that isn’t home - one of the most fleeting of concepts? But the move from one country to another is an altogether different change, and dealing with a new language and a different currency are only at the bottom of the list. I think there’s something inherent in the journey that makes you question everything about yourself.
Who am I? How did I end up here? If I had made a turn there instead of there, would I be here? Why am I interested in these things? Why do I have such a strange aversion to peas? From the most mundane to the most grandiose of questions; an investigation ensued that never really ended.
I believe that my specific experience of self-vivisecting was amplified by my decision on more than one occasion to travel alone - I also went through a few strange happenings in Budapest, Hungary - perhaps because I met so few people in my time and I was forced to either make friends with myself or turn right back around.
I remember particularly one night in Copenhagen when I sat on a bench facing a port in the western part of town - streets lined with pastry shops and sausage stands on cobblestone streets - I questioned nearly every part of my existence, understanding more and more but by turns losing more and more of my self-knowledge. But at some point I learned to let go, and wander, and wonder.
My generation is consistently plagued with the pressure to know oneself, as if this were a concept both tangible and easy to grasp - and the failure to do this is seen as sad and unfortunate. I felt this kind of pressure particularly in my undergraduate school where everyone around me seemingly knew intrinsically what they were going to do with their lives and had it all planned out. But I keep thinking about Conan O’Brien’s last words as the host of The Tonight Show
“Life rarely turns out exactly the way you plan it.” In fact, I would go further and say it never does. But there’s a lack of effort amongst our elders to encourage the cultivation of not knowing. Most of my self-discovery while living abroad and my time since then has happened spontaneously, unexpectedly and rather powerfully. Good things don’t necessarily come to those who wait, but I think there’s power in aimlessness. Knowing what you’re after is great, but pursuing it vigorously without the ability to pause for a breath of something else is dangerous and deadly.
I do not function well in environments where I do not know what I’m doing, and I believe that many of my peers would say the same of themselves. But if patience is a virtue, maybe aimlessness is too, because I think it is possible to be on a path towards a goal but with the awareness that those tiny revelations and understandings and discoveries usually come in the times you aren’t looking for them, like creatures who only come out in the dark for fear of exposure to the light.
I think we learn best when we’re open and not trying to gain anything. I think we fall in love when we’re not actively seeking out the best match. I think my best writing has come out of not knowing what’s going to turn up on the page (or screen, as this case may be). I know that I have discovered my favorite nooks and crannies of cities and landscapes with nothing more than my thoughts. And I have consistently been told that as actors we should prepare so that we can improvise when on stage - and I have found this to be true for myself.
…
Scandinavia is a beautiful section of the world, and its four countries (Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark) have some of the most remarkable terrain in the world. At that time though, I was an unsure adult with lack of confidence in myself, my future or the people around me. I wasn’t doing well with my Grandmother’s death, whom I believe gave me my soul, nor with the knowledge that I was traveling instead of home for her funeral. I was also in the midst of a really debilitating bout of insomnia. I was getting maybe three hours of sleep at night, and I had lost so much weight that I resembled Christian Bale in The Machinist. But I learned more about myself and the kind of art and life I want to create and live in just through letting go and wandering, dazedly, through terrain and streets and fjords and trees blanketed in fresh snow and ice. How is this possible? Maybe I had vacuumed out my brain so much that the only possible result was a gulping down of self-realization.
I’m not sure what I would have answered in response to these three people, these apparitions, I don’t know, who asked me such a simple and yet vastly complicated question. Perhaps I would’ve said my time was beneficial, or maybe just: well.. it’s eye-opening. But instead I just kept walking, and eventually I learned how to fall asleep.
KK
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Every so often, when I get in bed, I get a strange sensation of vertigo.
I lay there, feeling as if a ghost is holding a video camera and zooming out further and further away until I see myself, through closed eyes, from the furthest possible vantage point. Periodically I will open my eyes and remind myself that I am here. I am not elsewhere. I am not there, with you, where I may want to be. I am here.
This strange, out-of-body experience seems to be wholly unique to my life. I have shared the feeling with others and been met with skeptic eyes, questioning glances. And it seems I have it more often lately, as if I cannot believe I am here and the only way to digest my daily life is through the safe and distant lens of an imaginary camera.
Most days, I cannot understand how I got here or why. On these days, I feel like someone has picked me up from where I was comfortable and put me in a place where comfort is a rarity, as if to say Fuck you, who are you to believe in peace and comfort? This is a test and I am rapidly failing. And being present in my day-to-day life is a concept I am learning how to grasp.
We face psychological changes everyday, the eighteen of my M.F.A. class, who have been supplanted and chosen to eat ourselves alive on a daily basis, and the struggle to deal with rapid changes in such short periods of time is a struggle we have to learn to cope with. Being present is a skill, not just a product of merely turning up at a certain place and time; its a state of mind that requires the pushing away of external factors.
When even the question of where we will be this very winter has to be answered before we can even answer where will we be in three years, and how did I leave where I was and even was this the right decision, the right decisions, the right choice and choices, it is increasingly harder to say, once again, I am here. It seems that acknowledging our failures is easier than understanding our privileges, and, I think, one of our biggest challenges as aspiring artists is remembering how lucky we are to be here.
…
Seven years ago, with very little understanding of the world outside my privileged upbringing, I went to Poland with only the minutest knowledge of what the Holocaust was or what happened during World War II. I saw Auschwitz and Maidanek and others and what struck me most, beyond the horrors that I and others have already oft described, was the plethora of ignorant tourists who treated the camps as if they were standard monuments from any other city; pictures of families smiling underneath the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign and in front of piles of shoes and hair as if they were on the Ponte Vecchio or at the Tower of Pisa. People who go to a certain place in a foreign country and look in their Frommer’s Guide and see a monument, believing it to be the same as any other.
I feel bad for these people. I feel sorry for their lack of comprehension of the place they are in and for their inability to question their own actions. But I think that this is, on an admittedly graver and stranger level, what I have been doing since I got here. It is a deflection; its the choice to ignore my surroundings in favor of something different, whether for the desire to be somewhere else or for the need to act as if whats happening isn’t real to preserve mental stability. What I saw on those days were people who smiled and joked in what, at least I hope, were attempts to not deal with the reigning sadness and devastation. But what I have been doing, and what I am fighting against, is the sometimes deliberate choice to go to a place of melancholia in the face of having the incredible luck of being where I am, because telling myself I can’t do something or that I should be somewhere else with someone different or being frantic about the future feels easier than saying:
I am talented. I deserve this. I am in the right place.
Regret is easy. Wondering about the past is easy. Beating oneself up into a pulp is the easiest. Having doubts about the future and believing that our goals are unattainable is child’s play. It is staring down the present, living in the now, putting yourself in a room and a place and a time and saying: I am here. I will get the most out of where I am at this moment - it is this that makes us better and stronger, and perhaps more than anything else, this is the part of the learning process that needs to be embraced the most.
And so next time that I get this vertigo and see myself through a camera that pulls away, I will try to reach out and grab it and pull it with all my force back into my brain and my body.
I am here. I am okay with who I am. I am in a new place, with new people, and my shit is all over the place and I will not try to pick it back up.
KK
Adidas sells tee-shirts in the same green color the Celtics basketball team wears that proudly states in big white block letters “Boston is a Neighborhood.” This is metaphor, or only a symbolic statement, of course, because Boston is, in fact, a city.
Boston (pronounced /ˈbɒstən, Wikipedia tells me), is America. In the spring and summer months there are seemingly more tourists than natives and the freedom trail functions as a makeshift history class for those unfamiliar with the battles won and lost in nearby Lexington.
I am sitting in my apartment, and the seventy-seven degree weather outside is abnormally pleasant for a place where the weather is oft described as schizophrenic. Two summers ago, the last time I spent my idle hours in Beantown, it rained all but two days in June, and I wonder if we might have the same maligned forecasts this year. But in Boston it is just as likely that tomorrow will be seventy-seven again as torrential downpour could plague the cemented streets.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are from Boston, and might in fact still be here but I’m not sure. Maria Menounos is from here too, but I don’t know what she does in the professional world except that she was on the cover of Boston Magazine when I first moved here four years ago.
September weather is remarkably similar to May weather in Boston, which provides for a nicely accidental weather sandwich to the school year. They say that 66% of Boston’s population are students, but I’m not sure who “They” are and whether or not they are reputable people. They could, after all, just be assuming students.
Beacon Hill is lined with colonial and stately homes and apartments, the Massachusetts Bay’s equivalent to the Upper West Side. When October and November roll around, young romantics enjoy strolling the cobblestone streets in fantasies of cozy futures by well-lit fireplaces and furry dogs and cats. Halloween here is a special occasion, but its slightly creepy to trick or treat as a college student. Although, I suppose, that’s keeping in line with the holiday’s themes.
If Bostonians are lucky (and, by consequence, non-Baseball enthusiasts unlucky), the Red Sox are deep into the postseason and there’s hardly room enough on the T to take a breath without preventing the rickety sliding doors to close at Kenmore station. Living on the Cleveland Circle and Riverside lines are a drag during game times but the city is alive with communal spirit, and I suppose that’s what those “Neighborhood” tee-shirts refer to. The Citgo sign lights up like the Batman signal and America’s favorite team is playing at America’s favorite ballpark, and some little boy is holding a brown leather mitt in hopes of catching a stray foul ball on his first game.
When snow falls in Boston, in December, life doesn’t really change, except Bostonians like to talk about how this winter is significantly colder and/or warmer than last winter, which probably means that this coming summer will be significantly warmer and/or milder than last summer. There are gatherings on the Boston Common to witness the lighting of “The Tree”, as if there’s only one, and ice skaters ice skate on the lake within the beloved park to commemorate the coming of Christmas season. In Brookline, Hanukkah is acknowledged as Hassidic Jews congregate around lightly burning candlesticks.
Harvard Square is packed on any weekend on any season, not usually with Ivy League students but with demonstrators across from the school’s co-op preaching the word of God as people stop momentarily before heading for their burgers at Bartley’s up the street. Pahk the Cah in Hahvad Yahd is a terrible cliche but Bostonians are the only city natives in the world who cherish their stereotypes. Thousands walk through Harvard’s campus during the week, many with vain attempts at absorbing some magical insurgence of brain power and intelligence.
M.I.T. students are down the block, relatively speaking, in I.M. Pei designed buildings housing students pursuing complex degrees in subjects difficult to pronounce and hard to understand. 50 Vassar Street has become a haven for artists as a rehearsal space thanks to its liberal lacking of locked doors. Classical dancers use iPods and iPhones as orchestras to move to in the wide, open, marble hallways as a lab practice group decodes Fermat’s Last Theorem.
Emerson students have lined Boylston and Tremont, an intersection once introduced to me as the “Second-Windiest in America” behind someplace somewhere in Chicago, and I doubt the measuring tools for such a qualifying statement exist, but then again I wouldn’t know. The stereotype hipster with American Spirit cigarettes is on a ten-minute break from a four-hour photography class and the driver of a duck tour can be heard saying, “… notable alumni here include Jay Leno, Dennis Leary, Henry Winkler and Kevin Bright, the creator of Friends.” Comedy kids like to include Jennifer Coolidge and David Cross to that list, but Cross didn’t graduate, so its hard to take credit.
Tourists are familiar with the Boston Common, the big green expanse that lies dead-smack in the center of the city with its hilly slopes, baseball field, tennis courts and two gazebos, but natives are prone to like neighboring Public Garden a bit more. Quieter and cozier, partly known for its Good Will Hunting fame and that homeless guy who plays about fifteen instruments at once as he makes laps around the lake. A few twenty somethings are sitting on a few benches smoking clove cigarettes and another sits apart reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in tribute to the city in which she resides.
In the North End, Italian immigrants begrudgingly live alongside the college students who take advantage of the cheaper real estate, but at two in the morning they can all usually be found at Bova’s Bakery deciding between apple turnovers and whooping pies. There’s an intoxicated couple who’ve just gotten back from Goody Glover’s up the street and she wants a Salami sub “so bad”. He makes a lewd joke. Giacomo’s restaurant is lined up with hungry, albeit patient foodies who crave the handmade pasta and lobster sauce, and a hundred cannolis just got sold at Mike’s in the span of two minutes. There’s a frightened looking older man in the apartment next to Theo’s Cozy Corner on Sheafe Street with a perpetual cigarette and possibly only two teeth, no one’s quite sure.
Government Center is not really the center of the Government but the Big Apple Circus comes once a year and the Scooper Bowl’s free ice cream is eagerly gobbled up by people who forget that it gets this hot in the summer during the winter and forget that it gets that cold in the winter during the summer. There’s an odd Holocaust monument plopped by the line of Irish pubs adjoining Faneuil Hall and a McDonald’s on the corner has an unusually high concentration of the homeless population. Tourists and Natives alike clamor to get chowder here, and many enjoy the verbal abuse hurled at them by servers at Dick’s Restaurant. Comics and records enthusiasts crowd the inside of Newbury Comics.
Speaking of Newbury, have you been to Trident? It’s that adored little alcove of a literary/cafe establishment with the tremendous huevos rancheros and stacks of obscure magazines and novels by New England area authors. Newbury Street is the “Rodeo Drive” of Boston, a nickname only tourists are sure to enjoy, as Bostonians aren’t prone to their sports rival city out west. Boston folk like San Francisco and Chicago, but they loathe Los Angeles and New York City. Galleries on the southern end of Newbury street have large French poster prints or impressionist takes on the Charles River and nearby Back Bay residents walk their dogs in hordes. The northern end has clothing outlets with price-tags that drop jaws but just past it all is the Other Side cafe and vegetarian dieters and Berklee musicians have a hard time deciding between eating there or at Spike’s for hot dogs and sodas.
The Symphony area houses the monstrously large Mary Baker Eddy library and adjoining Christian Science church where this author was seen taking his first photographs two years ago. Marble domes and black metallic fences and doric columns are amongst the external features and the timelessness is in stark contrast to nearby Prudential Center with shops by the hundreds and curious Rosetta Stone outlets.
Next door is the South End, Boston’s colonial and yuppy neighborhood. The Boston Center for the Arts a haven for the small but burgeoning theatre community and families in running gear that perpetuate the academically fake term known as “heteronormativity.” When the leaves are changing and the colors transition from greens and blues to oranges and browns, romantics and brooders alike adorn their newly bought North Face jackets and long black coats and stroll with hands clasped and smell the approaching December and January winter months.
In Central Square, music is king and literature is still alive and kicking. Cheapo Records still has original copies of The Beatles Abbey Road and Rodney’s has Heidegger philosophy, but the Middle East is the focus on the weekends when drunken indie-lovers eat Hi-Fi pizza after the show. Cambridge isn’t technically Boston, but the residents of Central, Harvard, Inman Square and Kendall don’t mind the geographical distinction. When they’re not eating Moody’s Falafel Palace $5 falafel, they’re probably choosing between the plethora of Indian establishments and picnicking on the Charles.
In Allston, Boston University students are in and out of fraternity houses and late-night diners off Commonwealth Avenue, which sounds strange when it isn’t abbreviated as Comm-Ave., thanks to the frequent usage of said moniker. Here it gets especially warm in the summer and it’s hard to understand why or how. No one outwardly enjoys Allston but many people live there. Boston College is forgotten at the end of the B line but roars back during college football season.
Patriots fans are the most stubborn, Celtics fans are the loudest, Bruins fans are the most loyal, but Red Sox fans are the most loving of their own team and the most hateful of yours. When the Sox aren’t playing the city seems oddly quiet and provincial but riotous when they are.
Boston is the city of Good Will Hunting, The Departed and The Town; its the city of Infinite Jest,Jhumpa Lahiri and Dennis Lehane. It is the city of American academia and one of the few surviving literary cities in the world. It is a sports town, and a uniquely American town. Ethnicities seem at times oddly gentrified and at times oddly integrated. It is the place of social progress and liberal bias, but on the streets can seem as the city of remaining racism and intolerance. It is a proud city. It is the city where everyone is celebrating The 4th of July together and not in their own ways, where flags blanket the streets as effectively as the snow in mid-January; the city where being un-American is sinful.
Boston is the city of a universally adored speaking regionalism, second only to North Dakota’s accents made notorious by the Coen Brother’s Fargo. Its the city where yachts and canoes and kayaks welcome in the summer on the wide expanse that is the Charles River and the city where the wind factor gives Chicago a run for its money. Its the city of New England Clam Chowder and of old architecture fighting frantically against the tide of new urban modalities. Its the city often too deficient in artistic presence but overflowing in neighborly mannerisms and niceties, the kinds usually lacking in most urban cities in the world. Boston is a “green” city, a label crowned by American environmental societies but easily noticeable by the common eye. Boston is the city where natives get the Red Sox “B” tattooed on their forearms and transplants tearfully say goodbye. Boston is the city of twenty-one official neighborhoods but one official neighborhood mentality and the pride of a high school championship football team.
…
In four years, I have lived downtown by the Common, in the North End, in Central Square and in a cross section of the Brookline/Fenway/Kenmore areas. I have found my penchant for photography and the presence of East-coast soul. I have run along the banks of the Charles River with my eye fixed on the vanishing point of the endless water and I have stuffed my face with pounds of pasta and chowder. I have sweated out Red Sox games and ragged on Celtics fans; I have stood in line to be disappointed with the rest by the midnight showing of Tron and I have followed the masses into Beacon Hill to trick or treat. I have frozen on the streets of Allston during December attempting to enjoy a beer keg party and cursed the very streets of the city for having too much quaintness and not enough excitement. I have marveled at the lack of things to do before marveling again and finding a nook and cranny in this or that part of the city that I had previously undiscovered and through it all, I have laughed.
Before coming here I was told that Boston is like “New York City but not as ‘in-your-face’.” This is not true. Boston is a soulful city with too much heart for its own good. Its a deeply flawed city but it is a city where the word “home” seems to have been invented. It is uniquely Bostonian, uniquely American. Its the city of the revolution and a strangely paternal city and the city where I understood what humanity means.
KK
Post with 1 note
There’s a man standing outside with a video camera pointed at himself, practicing his cadence in his sign off line, and I’m wondering if this is what it takes to earn your degree in journalism.
He says, “… the plethora of students lining the streets are proof that life indeed, does go on.” I’m not sure what he’s referring to, but he sounds serious and I have the urge to congratulate him on his profound gravitas. But he’s clearly not satisfied because he’s pressed the reset button on himself and has repeated this one line about ten times in the time it takes me to walk from my buildings entrance to the burrito restaurant on the corner.
The hiring manager at the restaurant I work at told me the day she hired me that when “you’re working at a restaurant, you’re always on stage.” So, I guess I can stop trying to make it as an actor (I did it Mom)! This is great news for me, because graduation was like, way less terrifying yesterday knowing that I’m already a working actor at Papagayo restaurant on the Boston Wharf.
After my first shift, one of the Mexican bussers was walking towards the T stop with me. His English is not very good, but he inquired as to what it is “I do”. Naturally, I was surprised at this question - clearly, we work together, and he must see that I am one of the four actors on staff at the restaurant. But its hard to explain to a non-creative type what a creative-type job is. I told him I was an actor. His next question was a lot easier to answer.
He said, “Oh WOW! An actor!” Then he paused as he gathered his thoughts, translated them into English and asked, “… so like, Tom Hanks? Or… Orlando Bloom?”
I said Tom Hanks, but I think in reality I’m somwhere in between the two acting camps. For a Mexican busser at a restaurant who only recently moved to Boston, I was impressed by his very clear understanding of acting techniques. I know many people who are Orlando Bloom actors, but I like that I am “outside-the-box” (as my Grandmother believes) as a Tom Hanks actor.
And but so anyway, what’s really interesting about this new acting job I have at Papagayo restaurant (ahem, excuse me, Mexican Kitchen & Tequila Bar - which brings me to another side note question thing like, when do you use the ampersand and when do you use the word “and”, and (&?) how many people know this answer or like that the symbol is called an ampersand) is that no one outside my hiring manager knows I’m a paid actor at Papagayo. I’m pretty sure (although of course I can’t prove it) that none of the customers who come in to eat overpriced enchiladas understand that I am clearly an actor and any and all words that come out of my mouth are clearly part of a well-rehearsed script by (an albeit poor) playwright(s).
“Thank you for calling Papagayo, this is Greg, how may I help you today?” That’s what I say when I answer the phone. Not very rich with subtext, clearly, but still a line and I am paid to say it, which makes me a paid actor. Sometimes it gets interesting when I get to say, “Thank you for calling Papagayo, this is Greg how may I help you tonight?” But that’s not as frequent because people normally call during the day.
There was a really interesting moment though on stage last week when this customer told me I “ruined her evening plans” because she was waiting for two hours. OooOoOoOo so much drama and excitement!
I feel truly blessed to be a paid actor already. It’s quite amazing. So many people have to work their way up, but I have FOUND it already.
My costume is determined by me alone so that makes it more enjoyable because I have a bigger hand in the creative process than most actors.
My degree is in Media Studies, which I can’t explain… although a whopping twenty-one other students at my school graduated with the same degree so I’m thinking that clearly I made the right choice. Also, like, I wanna brag about it? But it’s hard to when I’m busy preparing for my professional acting job at Papagayo.
The coolest part about it is that its this new kind of theater called “site-specific”, like that show Sleep No More. What I mean is that the audience is like all around you. Which is great. It’s totally innovative. It means I don’t have to wear stage makeup which is great for my pores.
You know, actually, when I think about it, this is my second professional acting job. Last summer, when I was a barista at a sporadically frequented Italian bakery in Brooklyn, my boss asked me what I want to do “in life”, which is how he phrased it I remember specifically. I answered, “I want to be an actor!” I think stars burst out of my eyes, but I don’t remember. I DO remember though, that my boss responded by saying this amazing piece of advice:
“You know, everyone in life is acting all of the time. When people realize this, they are much better actors.”
His English wasn’t great so please excuse the grammar, but clearly this man has an eye for theatricality! So I guess I’ve been acting all of my life and I am therefore a professional actor.
Thanks, Nino, for your sound advice. Good luck to everyone else who is clearly unemployed, unlike yours truly!
KK
EDITOR’S NOTE: THIS POST IS BY FRANK, A FRIEND OF A FRIEND, WHO WANTED TO WRITE THIS LOVE LETTER OF SORTS TO HIS GIRLFRIEND, MELANIE.
Now that we’ve been dating for some time, I’ve been finding myself nostalgic for that first phase of our relationship. It’s weird but, I can’t quite remember how the attraction first started.
I think maybe it was when you asked to be my friend. On Facebook, I mean. Not in person (do people still do that?), but on Facebook. I remember thinking, “oh, maybe she likes me!” But then I wasn’t sure, because even though we hadn’t met in person yet, lots of people become friends on Facebook without having met.
Usually, I keep my pictures private so that only I can see them, but then I thought, “maybe if I make my photos public again, she’ll see how good I look in that one blazer I wore that night a few weekends ago at the party/fundraiser for that fashion show.” So I made my pictures public, hoping you would Facebook-stalk me, as I had been doing with you.
Wait, I think maybe you liked me when you “liked” my comment on our mutual friend’s wall about this memory that I share with that mutual friend. It was about this time where I was only thirteen? Remember? The post said something about how our mutual friend made me eat this weird rice dish that he tried to convince me was a cultural specialty, but was actually just a weird rice dish. And I saw your name with that thumbs-up that you like my comment. Maybe it was because it was a funny comment or maybe it was just because you liked the idea of our mutual friend being a weird liar of sorts.
Oh! But then there was that time where I decided to be bold and put a link to this hilarious cat video on your wall, even though we still hadn’t met in person. I thought like, “oh she’ll definitely like this,” - not like you’d enjoy it, although I’d hoped you would, but that you would “like” it by clicking next to it - “I mean, who doesn’t like hilarious cat videos?” But then a few days went by and you hadn’t liked my video post on your wall and I got nervous that I was overstepping some unclear boundary line. I tried to comfort myself by saying, “maybe she just didn’t think the cat video was funny and didn’t want to lie to herself and to me by pressing the like button on Facebook.”
Ugh. I still get a little teary-eyed when I think about the day when you started following me on Twitter. That was a great day. My heart was so full that day. Because it was like you didn’t just want to Facebook-stalk me but you wanted me to openly know that you wanted to “follow” me. It was such a cute thing for you to do when you re-tweeted my tweet about LeBron James’s tweet about the Heat game. Of course, we still hadn’t met yet (in person), but I figured that things were clearly looking up. I mean we were following each other on Twitter now, and posting videos on each others Facebook wall on a pretty consistent basis (I had learned, of course, by finding your Vimeo channel, that you were actually way more interested in hilarious baby videos, so I started posting as such).
No… I think the day I found your Tumblr page was the day I realized I was falling for you. It was listed on your info on your Facebook page and also on your Twitter page and also on your Vimeo channel, so naturally one day when I was watching that hilarious video you posted on your Facebook, Twitter, and Vimeo channels of you and your friend throwing pies at each other while baking for Thanksgiving I clicked on the link to your Tumblr. I had been tumbling for only a few weeks, but yours was amazing. I mean you had pictures of other people’s pictures and huge glittery letters that said what your feelings were and I just was so amazed at your brutal honesty when you posted along with a short loop of Michael Cera dancing on the set of Arrested Development, “I am so HAPPY right now!!”, so naturally I clicked on that heart symbol below your post. I was so excited when it said below your post “therealfrank liked this” just above “melaniemelaniexoxomelanie posted this.”
Maybe that was when you first realized that I was seriously interested in dating you, because I remember that was about the time you sent me an invitation to join LinkedIn, which I am ashamed to admit I was not a member of yet (the reasons for which, I won’t go into detail about, but I just didn’t feel like a professional yet). I decided to join, if for only the sake of flirting with you on another level, and soon enough you were sending me messages about job opportunities near my apartment, which is how I got my job working at Dunkin’ Donuts across the street. Your profile was so professional, and I was intimidated.
I decided I needed to impress you, which is when I sent you a link on Facebook to look at my photos of flowers and empty chairs in shadow on Flickr. I was nervous about this, because I don’t usually share my photography, but you commented on my picture of a lonely shoe called “Lonely Shoe I”: “Frank, this photo is so beautiful!! :)” I think I may have realized then that you liked me because you had two exclamation points in conjunction with a smiley-face emoticon that was really unnecessary. I decided that you must like me because if you only liked the photograph but not me you would just say something like “Frank, this photo is so beautiful.” And, if that had been the comment on my Flickr, I would just have been more confused - not sure if you liked me or just my art. Thanks for making that so clear. We’re so good with communication, you and I.
This was about the time that we started sending each other music and collaborating on a mix CD which we put on MySpace, LiveJournal, Facebook, Twitter, Twitpic (a hilarious picture of us in a photoshopped studio), Vimeo, and links on Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, Blogspot and even on LinkedIn (which I think really solidified for me that you were interested, because that one is the one your employers might see). And then to add to the joke about us being in a proverbial studio, which of course we weren’t, because we had never met in person, we both checked in on Foursquare at a fake music studio called “Ultimate Music Recordings”, or something. That was so adorable of us.
When you requested to be my girlfriend on Facebook, I was so overjoyed that I tweeted about it before I even accepted. I’m so embarrassed about that because I confused so many people… especially when I wrote on my LiveJournal that I think I had found “the one”. But I eventually accepted, and we started “poking” each other on a really consistent basis (I’ll win! Better give up! Haha, just kidding).
I suppose it doesn’t really matter when we started to truly like each other. We’ve been Facebook official now for three whole weeks, and Melanie, those three weeks have really blown by. I can’t even count the amount of times we’ve poked each other, or liked each others comments and videos on each others Facebook walls, or the amount of times I’ve reblogged you on Tumblr, Blogspot or Blogger, or the amount of times that I’ve recommended your profile on LinkedIn to other people, or the amount of times that I’ve updated your twitter on my iPhone, or the amount of times that I’ve checked in at the fictional place called The Love Cafe on Foursquare (our fake but oh, so true favorite coffee spot) or the amount of times that I’ve thought about skyping with you, or ichatting with you but got too nervous… It’s really been a wild and amazing ride. You’re the best ;)
KK
People talk about the weather when there isn’t anything else to talk about.
It’s nearly April but its “so darn cold, isn’t it?” and you’d think spring would announce its presence already.
People talk about the weather because they just ran into that guy from that thing you did with the stuff? You know? Back when? Ahhh, the weather, its the craziest!
People talk about the weather because they just bought a new pair of shoes, a pair of shoes that would look great with that pair of shorts and tee-shirt they bought at H&M, but its not warm enough yet and they’re pissed off.
My Mother asks me about the weather because we’re on the phone, and she’s basking in southern California’s year-round 75 degree weather and can’t understand how anyone lives in anything below (or, I suppose) above, that threshold.
I talk about the weather when I’m nervous, because its a neutral thing, isn’t it - it has nothing to do with you and it has nothing to do with me, but we both share it, which is, I suppose, symbolic?
When we talk about the weather I usually bring it up because my real question is bursting from my heart, which is, of course, “are you having a good time?”, but I don’t want to appear insecure. We talk about the weather because I’m hoping it will lead me to tell you about the time when I was skiing with my family when I was only a small child. That story, coincidentally goes like this:
We were on vacation, and I thought that it would be fun to ski by myself at six years old- no wait, that doesn’t make sense grammatically. What I mean is, I was six years old and I thought it would be fun to ski by myself but I obviously didn’t know how unsafe I was being. I was too assure of my maturity level, undoubtedly imagined.
Oh crap, I forgot to ask you about the weather. But that’s okay, because this story is good, I promise, and I think maybe when I’m done telling it you’ll reply with like a “Oh, that’s so adorable!” or a “Oh, that’s so cute!” or a “Oh, that’s so FUNNY!” but hopefully not “Wow, you were a dumb kid.” Although, I suppose, if you said something like that, it could be a good thing if you said it in a way that actually meant “Oh, that’s so cute!” Do you know what I mean? Like that cute thing that couples do sometimes when they tease each other?
Oh… No, no, no, no… I know that we’re not dating or anything (yet), I just… well.. yeah.
Isn’t it ridiculous that its still cold out? I feel like its actually still like, November, or something, and we’re only about to start the winter season, not end it. Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!
You want to hear the end of my story? Oh! Right! I forgot. Well, see, I wanted to see what it was like to ski by myself. So I did… I skied all the way down to the mountain. Which is when, I suppose, I started to realize I had abandoned my family. Either that or I was just tired, which is apparently what I said to my parents when they finally found me at the lockers where we kept our after-ski boots.
When you talk about the weather, you talk about it because you’re frustrated with the assholes on the street who don’t know how to handle New England weather. “Get over it!”, you say, with an incredulous look that says “I’ve been here for twenty years! This is nothing!”
In the summer, we talk about weather because its so dry and hot - that kind of hot that makes people say “I bet you could fry an egg on the street”, which, at least for me, is the kind of expression that always makes me wonder… maybe you could… has anyone ever tried? Then I start to have daydream fantasies of opening a restaurant called The Sidewalk Cafe, which is a great name for a brunch restaurant, but our secret is that we actually fry our eggs and bacon on the sidewalk.
Oh, don’t worry about it, the “kitchen” is cleaned every day.
Obviously our special “Sidewalk Eggs n’ Bacon” is only available during the summer months (or depending on the temperature on any given day), so I can’t serve you what you want today, sir. It’s December, and I’m wearing a Northface jacket that makes me look like I lift weights with the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, pre-Hollywood (and pre-sobriety).
In the summer we talk about the weather because we’ve both experienced that excruciating phenomena where the sweat starts coming even after you’ve just showered. We both realize at the same time that we check to make sure that its sweat and not just water we failed to wipe off with our towels.
We talk about the weather in the summer because it’s two in the morning, the windows are open and we’re both naked, covers strewn on the carpet next to your bra and my boxers but we’re still sweating. It’s sticky, and it’s kind of gross, but we’re in love in that especially summery kind of way, so we ignore feelings of discomfort and kiss, hands, arms and legs tangled, only stopping for a drink of water.
In August, we talk about the weather because we can’t believe that where we are right now can ever be as hot as it is on one day but as cold as the arctic only a few months later. “Isn’t science crazy?”, you say, and I agree.
In late October we talk about the weather because the leaves have changed to oranges and browns and impossible reds. We walk about the brownstones and talk about the weather and how this is our favorite time of year because its that really refreshing kind of cold- the brisk air clearing your sinuses better than a Claritin pill, the Turkey roasting in the oven and the kids dressing up in spandex Halloween costumes. “Something is so romantic about fall weather, don’t you think?” I say, and you agree.
In the winter months we talk about the weather because you can’t believe I moved here from the west coast. I talk about the weather like its really nothing, and then I prove it to you by taking off my jacket while standing in knee-deep snow.
In February you talk about the weather because you think its so fascinating that on the other side of the world, you know, the other hempisphere, there are people who are enjoying summer. I talk about the weather because I refute that the snow is dreary, and that it makes me dreary, and that I love the sound of the crunch of an ice patch underneath my feet.
In the coldest of days you talk about the weather because you get to relay your favorite crappy joke where you pretend your smoking. You even give me a fake acting lesson.
“Just take your fingers and pretend you are holding a cigarette.” You are using a high-class British accent. “Yes, good, but instead of a commoner’s cigarette, use a cigarette holder, like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” I do this, and you laugh. “Perfect, darling. Now suck in as if you’re taking a magnificent drag… and now exhale.” When our breaths make copious, non-tobacco clouds, I attempt the British accent and say, “Ah, yes… we’re smoking.” You laugh but tell me my accent is “horrific”, in your much more advanced accent.
Football, baseball, soccer and tennis commentators talk about the weather because it affects the game. Weather reporters on television talk about the weather because they’re paid to, and they say it will affect your commute. The concierge talks about the weather because she wants you to have your best tourist day possible. The news flash reporter on the radio talks about the weather because there is new snow at the local mountain. There are weather notices, weather systems, weather reports, weather restrictions, and some things happen, weather permitting.
In the spring we talk about the weather because the transition is so drastic. We think this is true because it seems like last week there was so much snow that white encompassed our entire eyesight and now there is more green than in the Irish countryside. But really the transition is just the same as any other monthly change. But winter into spring has the visual component. We talk about the weather on the grass, and you say, “I’m glad we live here where weather exists. Where seasons happen. Because each season has its own character and each season has separate emotions and certain things are only possible in certain weather… don’t you agree?”
I agree, and we continue talking about the weather as we put on our fake Ray-Ban sunglasses and look cool doing so.
KK
“Miranda” was a stolid figure, standing a good half a foot taller than me. I remember she had long light brown hair that reached her mid-bicep and was straighter than the purest definition of a line. Her face resembled that of a Modigliani painting: impossibly oval and narrow in shape and strangely accusing eyes. She was my “girlfriend”, which of course meant very little at our age - I was eleven - or at least not in the sense that a twenty-something having a girlfriend would mean today.
My courtship of Miranda was pretty minimal. Eleven year-old’s do not exactly look to match ideological similarities when finding a potential suitor. I was a white boy, which, at my heavily Persian populated elementary school was quite uncommon, and she was a white girl (equally uncommon). Maybe I found her attractive, but in retrospect its quite difficult to testify to my as yet undeveloped sexual desires.
In those days, as I’m sure it only continues now, you either “liked” someone or “liked-liked” someone. Love was a word reserved for Mothers and Fathers and the occasional Aunt or set of Grandparents and was nowhere close to my radar, at least, although I have heard on occasion of some sprightly young girl falling in “love” with the boy who sits at the neighboring desk because he likes the same color: a sky blue. Somehow, in some adorable adolescent prepubescent manner, it must have been communicated to Miranda that I, indeed, “like-liked” her and not just “liked her”. The details of how that came to light are now hazy, but I imagine that it was something like this fictional conversation between me and a mutual friend:
Me: Hey, Sarah, do you know if Miranda likes anyone?
Sarah: You mean like… like-like Miranda?
Me: Yeah… sure.
Sarah: Oh my GODDDD, you totally like-like Miranda!
Me: I mean… what? Yeah… BUT DON’T TELL HER.
Sarah: My lips are SEALED, I promise. This is so cute!
Sarah is a rude little girl with the shapely face reminiscent of Ernie from Sesame Street and her promise to keep my boy-crush safe is almost immediately broken when, at lunch hour, over lukewarm cheese pizza and french fries (it’s a Friday), my secret is revealed to an unsuspecting Miranda. Then again, Miranda is the type of eleven year old girl who know she’s catching everyone’s eye during recess because she can hula-hoop like her lawyer Father has invented the damn plastic ring. Miranda is also the type of girl who (at least at this period of her young life) only “likes” a boy back because he “likes” her in the first place.
When I encounter Sarah at 6th grade level Mathematics, I am told that Miranda now knows that I have a crush on her and is expecting me to “ask her out.” I do not know what this means. Although I have had crushes before (I was in love with one “Jessica” until 9th grade), I have never “asked a girl out” before, and I am completely ignorant as to what this might entail. I figure though, in my brilliant logic, that this has something to do with being boyfriend & girlfriend (a conjunction that I have yet to encounter in my adult life).
After History, I go to hang out with “Billy”, my elementary school best friend, who lives by school and is allowed by special written permission to walk home. My parents have called the school’s headmaster to grant me permission to go home with him that day, and we immediately start talking about this new possibility on the horizon. “Even my two older brothers don’t have girlfriends… not that I know of.” In fact, I’m pretty sure one of my older brothers had kissed a girl at summer camp, a particularly juicy piece of gossip that floated around the entire summer, but rumors are rumors and I am skeptical of my brother’s apparent scandalous behavior.
I talk to Billy about how scared I am to “ask her out”, but Billy comforts me by at least showing me the best course of action.
“Ask her to be your girlfriend!”
This solution seems practical enough for me, and I wish today that adult courtship was so easy. After all, we ask people to marry us, but it seems that being “boyfriend & girlfriend” as a twenty-something is an unspoken precipice that only is reached when two people have been dating and having sex for a few months and are no longer afraid to change their relationship status on Facebook.
It takes me about a week to muster up the courage to ask Miranda to “be my girlfriend”, but I’m currently in my stage debut as The Scarecrow in the Adderly School for the Performing Art’s production of The Wiz with an all-White cast and I am learning courage through performance. I can only surmise that we went with The Wiz and not The Wizard of Oz because Janet Adderly herself is Black, the director of an after-school program that teaches children from ages seven to fifteen or so the art of musical performance. I used to eat McDonald’s on my way to rehearsal after school. I was as pudgy as Augustus Gloop in Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory.
Finally, after a week of being teased by all my guy friends and being eyed by all of Miranda’s girlfriends, I ask her during recess while I notice that she is standing alone if she will be my girlfriend. This is what it must have been like:
Me: Hey Miranda.
Miranda: Hey Greg.
Me: (Heart beating faster than the fireballs explode out of Goku’s hands in my favorite show of the time, Dragonball-Z) So um… do you want to be my girlfriend?
Miranda: Yeah… okay.
I said “cool” or “okay” or maybe even “thanks” but I can’t remember now, but strictly for humor sake, let’s say I said “Thanks, I really appreciate your kindness.” I HAD A GIRLFRIEND!
My next step was to figure out what exactly this meant, so I asked my Mother, who, after gushing for ten minutes about how cute I was while I ate my after school snack of six chicken nuggets from the freezer heated up with ketchup and a Yoohoo chocolate drink, told me to take her out to see a movie. I’m surprised now, thinking about it, how strange it is that my mother had no qualms with her own suggestion - sending an eleven year old child to see a movie alone with his eleven year old girlfriend. Though, I suppose my Mother had the understanding that we were entirely too young to even know what to do, sexually, at that age - but more accurate is probably that it didn’t cross her mind (because in later years, it never crossed her mind that drugs, alcohol or sex would ever be aspects of high school life that would interest me until maybe college).
I called Miranda on the phone later that night to see if she wanted to see a movie on Sunday afternoon.
Me: My mom can drop us off.
Miranda: Cool, yeah… I want to see What Women Want.
Me: Okay.
I knew that the movie was PG-13 and I wouldn’t be allowed to see it, so I probably told my Mother that we were going to see an animated harmless movie, and in hindsight I wish we had - because the thought that What Women Want was the core of my first date ever is both alarming and hilariously pathetic. And what a great way to be introduced into the mind of the opposite sex! Directly transported through an act of freak natural violence in the atmosphere into Mel Gibson’s head and subsequently the heads of all the women around him. In the film, Gibson is struck by lightning, whereupon he is given the gift (or curse) of hearing the thoughts of women everywhere.
My Mother drove me first to Miranda’s house and then drove both of us to a nearby movie theater, and I’m not sure why we weren’t turned away from the presumably lazy employee working the box office at the cinema complex, but we were allowed into a movie that not only featured sexually promiscuous scenes and language but the highly inappropriate for an eleven year old acting of one Mel Gibson. I have not seen the movie since that fateful afternoon where Miranda and I said no more than a couple words together and definitely did not hold hands (let alone *GASP* kiss), but I remember being struck by the film in a manner that I am not sure I can accurately communicate to you. I know that I thought the movie was completely accurate. Or, at least, did not understand well enough the world of adult dating that I could challenge its findings. I can’t remember if I even enjoyed the film or loathed it (as I probably would today), but I’m sure that I was much more focused on calming my rapidly beating heart and attempting, nay, failing, to act like a gentlemen in an arena where I was completely and utterly uneducated.
When we left the cinema, we waited awkwardly by the steel railing overlooking the enormous fountain spewing buckets of recycled water into the slightly windy December air (it’s Winter in Los Angeles)! My most distinct memory of that day, in fact that entire “relationship” (which ended in me dumping her solely because I found out she was going to dump me only a week after we had seen the movie together) was standing by that railing. I thought about how pretty she was, how the wind would gently push her hair over her shoulders and how she would delicately wrap it around her ears. I remember finally accepting that my heart was beating so fast and so uncontrollably and thinking, “I know what love is. It is this feeling here, where I have no idea what to do but you’re pretty and you make me feel special.” And, if I had had even an ounce of the Cowardly Lion’s courage from The Wiz, I would’ve grabbed her hand and asked her what she thought of the movie.
KK
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