altered vision

I got a new pair of glasses. They are of the dark, thick-framed variety that is popular with the kids these days. I haven't yet built up the courage or commitment to wear them outside the house (the prescription is the same as my old pair, which are functional if held together with electrical tape) because I bought them in such haste, with such concern for wasting the saleswoman's time, that I didn't allow second guessing to enter my mind until after I had already shelled out a *very* hefty fee for them. And now, in the privacy of my own home, I hem and haw about whether this was a wise consumer decision, and whether they are too small for my head, and whether it is a sign of fiscal irresponsibility on my part to have purchased such a potentially ill-fitting luxury item when my prior pair of specs were just fine, and whether this potential hastage and wastage means that I am a careless and contemptible person (the answer, of course, is that everyone is somehow contemptible, if you simply have enough contempt to go around, so i should start working on reducing my supply). I hope someday to resolve the issue.

Meanwhile, it is not only the wiseness of purchase that looks different seen through the lens of my new glasses. It's everything. Everything is crystal clear, of course, but what I mean is that everything is newly framed. I never realized before how prominent these thick-framed glasses are in your field of vision; everything I see is surrounded by the dark edge of my frames. I'm hoping I get used to it to the point that I don't even notice anymore, but for now, it's kind of fun. It's like that late '90s/early '00s art fad of hanging picture frames on everyday scenes so as to emphasize their inherent picturesqueness (literalizing the Duchamp quote CS always references: "In the future, artists will merely point.") A novelty act for now, but one can always hope that these not-quite-rose-colored glasses do focus my attention on the loveliness of the world around me. Perhaps this will aid in my contempt-alleviation efforts as well. Matter and anti-matter, and all.

shame and renewal

Yesterday I backed into what I hope will be a big turning point for me. A co-worker delivered a response to my question that made plain her disdain for my lack of productivity on one of the primary tasks for which I was hired. This sent me into a downward spiral of shame, not because I'd been unaware of my underperformance, but because no one else in the office had made an issue of it, so I'd allowed myself to keep shelving it, too. I've been letting myself hide in the type of work that I'm comfortable with, for which I wasn't hired, instead of doing the work that appealed to me about the job in the first place. Mostly, I think, I've been doing this because I'm inexperienced, feel overwhelmed and don't have a mentor on that front to guide me. But her comment made clear that she's been keeping tabs on me, and that she's not impressed. In an office of six people, one person's opinion matters a lot, but more important than hers is mine: I'm not impressed, either.

I think I've been lazy, in handling various matters in my life, for a long time. I've required a deadline or a necessity for action; I haven't been pro-active on many fronts; I've hemmed and hawed, and then I've lamented my lukewarm bath. My co-worker's point is a simple one: I have no one to blame but myself for the underwhelming situations in which I find myself. I'm smart, capable and privileged: it's on me to make things happen. I just have to decide that I want them to happen.

Spurred by this culpability, I quickly wrote to a variety of people I know who can help me make something happen at work. Two wrote back immediately to set up meetings. I don't know why I hadn't written to them before--maybe because the range of obstacles seemed larger and more dense. Narrowing it down to one obstacle, myself alone, made it manageable.

But that small validation didn't do much to assuage my feeling small, lazy and worthless. Even an extracurricular project work session, in which I think I made a positive contribution, didn't do it. I spent three hours walking around SoHo and the Lower East Side in increasingly uncomfortable Chuck Taylors feeling alone and like I didn't want or deserve companionship because I am a slothful, non-committal leach. It was as low a feeling as I've felt in over a year. But it also felt comfortable, familiar, and even reassuring: I've spent more time feeling that way as an adult than not, and this relapse was kind of a homecoming. That's self-indulgent and masochistic, I realize, but I wonder if that's just who I am, and a place to build from. After all that wandering, I finally sat down for the midnight screening of Synecdoche, New York, which issued both a warning and a validation on this front: sure, the Phillip Seymour Hoffman character is overwhelmed by insecurities, but look! Charlie Kaufman, who must have a lot of these insecurities, too, made this weird and ambitious movie! So there can be productivity to come out of self-loathing, too.

I've spent the day in bed, hiding from foul weather inside and out, not sure what my next move is. I feel like now is as good a time as any to start a new chapter in my life, but I'm still not sure how to do that in a way that will last and will feel authentic. I'm not hopeless; I've been here before. I just want to find a new way out that doesn't lead me back.

tuneful

This morning on the subway platform, a dredded man with a guitar serenaded me and my fellow groggies with 'How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,' and I wanted to profess love to him then and there. Oh Barry Gibb! Oh Al Green! Can you two craft and recraft a song to tug at the heartstrings.

Also, what a good idea to busk during the AM rush. Appreciated.

bolted

I am sitting on the BoltBus taking advantage of its wi-fi, for which I have paid, if not handsomely, then at least in a manner deserving the love of someone beyond said payment's mother. Maybe said payment's mother and a drunken sorority girl. My connection is stable at any moment the bus is not in motion, which has been much of the ride, so I am current on today's events, my e-mail correspondence and what the landscape we are driving through looks like from space. I just read Mandy's latest blog post, which is full of the sort of happy delirium/delirious happiness that I also experience at 4 in the morning but am not able to put into the sort of joyful phrases she can conjure. I'm happy that she's recently experienced that kind of happiness, and I hope I can experience it soon, too, and I hope that you can too, and that in telling you that it exists, a pure sense of joy that results from nothing but being awake, alive and sensing the amazingness of the world--that in telling you this, I am helping it happen for you, too.

warm and fuzzy

Had Claire and Meera & Fran over for dinner last night. I never have dinner guests, but I'm not sure why--I love cooking for other people. Made a mixed green salad with halved grape tomatoes, avocado and an apple cider vinaigrette with some fresh rosemary and thyme; channa masala (my old standby, but with less tomato juice in it) and wild rice topped with whole milk yogurt; and these super delicious George Foreman Grill-pressed sandwiches of gruyere and carmelized onions on sourdough, after a sandwich Ari had described having at 'wichcraft. Meera had made a really tasty strawberry-rhubarb cobbler and whipped cream, so we followed dinner with that, and then I boiled up some of the sassafras root I harvested last week in Central Park on a walk with "Wildman" Steve Brill, and we had some tea. It was kind of licorice-y and a little mentholated. After all that, we played Squabble and I impressed myself and others by transforming "MASS" into "SWAMIS".

Dinner parties are so fun! Only successful if the guests all get along and have things to say to each other, which they did, in this case. Though I'm convinced that Claire is just really good at making interesting conversation--and reserving choice stories for varying occasions, so that the fact that she was raised in a cult only became known to me last night, six years into knowing her! That was a good hunk of fascinatia for the night.

I'm so happy to have such cool friends! And I hope I get to have a lot more dinner parties in this house--it's particularly good for entertaining.

at the risk of turning this into a dream journal

One from the middle of the night was a movie I was convinced, in brief moments of wakefulness, was an actual Coen Brothers or Frank Darabont production I'd seen. It was a dustbowl era parable about a doctor of mixed race whose industrialist father accepted his financial support but not his love. Robert Duvall played the father. There were all types of setpieces in this film: a spelling bee, a supermarket hold-up with an array of streamer-shooting tommy guns, a flood that ruined the industrialist's factories. An old man, maybe the hero's senile grandfather, opened and closed the film with the same speech, addressed to the camera, delivered at two different moments in his life. It had something to do with what he called the "buxenell vagaries of life and business. That's what this film is about."

every day i wind the coil

I went for a swim this evening and discovered that I'm alarmingly out of shape. I was exhausted after 20 minutes and had the good sense not to push myself past my doughy limits for fear of collapse. I walked home, dazed and high from all the oxygen, and then I practiced the banjo and made this and fell in love with myself for being able to follow a recipe. Then I proceeded to ooh and ahh over Karen's bag-ripened mangos, which are still in my teeth.

But whatever discipline and sagacity I exercised at the gym didn't transfer to the home environment, because I started futzing with the tuning on the banjo after dinner. And when I tightened the fourth string too tightly and it popped like a gunshot, it was like I had pulled the trigger on myself. Now I can't play The Crawdad Song no more, at least until I buy me some new strings.

Lesson learned for the night: Be aware of limits, when to push them, when not to, and when to leave well enough alone.

my subconscious is telling me something

Another dream: I lay on my bed and look down to see that my right leg is covered in dark purple bed sores all the way down to the foot. Alarmed, I hop to my feet and walk around. Sores gradually disappear.

Ever since buying the most comfortable mattress and mattress pad combination ever, I have been spending more than a healthy amount of time either asleep or trying to be asleep. I have not been to the gym in a month. Today I forewent a 40-mile bike ride for four more hours of sleep. I am thinking of cutting friends out of my life so that I may spend more time with my beloved.

This is getting to be a problem, but I am in no position to stage my own intervention.

assumed names

In the dream I just woke from, a friend of mine was going by the pseudonym "Teshevta Aron." Is this a real name in any way? Pretty sure said friend was not Jewish and was going undercover, ala Melanie Griffith in A Stranger Among Us.

the view from here

I don't think I've ever been so aware of the onset of spring as I am this year. Maybe because so many of the trees in New York are bloomers to lend this exact awareness (smart, landscape designers/urban foresters!), I register this awareness as a gift, and I'm grateful for it.