Anti-Pleasure Dissertation

R.E.C. and I have set this site to ‘private’ for some time now. There are some things I’ve written on it that I’m not proud of. I wasn’t exactly proud of them when I wrote them, either, but I still wanted to write them on the odd, shape-shifting palimpsest that is our Internet. I could have written them on a Word document if I really didn’t want them to become public, and I take full responsibility for that decision, even though it has caused me and people I wrote about pain. There are still people who I hope will never read this site, which I know is unreasonable, like leaving a diary open and saying “but don’t read it!” Nevertheless, I hope.

The reason that I’m making the site public again is because I want anyone who cares, if anyone does, to be able to read my side of the story and form their own conclusions. In the magazine article that Josh wrote about my having written about him on this blog, he made it sound like I had created this site in order to smear his reputation, which he found “creepy.” Well, yeah, that does sound creepy! But I think it would be hard to read all the posts that Ruth and I wrote and conclude that we were doing anything other than writing, for each other and whoever else wanted to know, about what our lives were like in the aftermath of long-term relationships, from manic rebound highs to depressive lows. Josh also made it sound like the impulse to share details of your private life with strangers was completely alien to him — in an article where he shared details of his private life with strangers. I hardly need to point out the irony there, except maybe I do, because it seems to have eluded him.

When you write about things as they’re happening — which is what most people do on blogs — you lose perspective, or rather, your perspective shrinks, so that only a tiny slice of your reality gets recorded. The cumulative impact of several months’ worth of posts can lead to an entirely different conclusion than a few snippets taken out of context. This is the danger of blogging and also its seductive charm. It’s so easy and fun to report on your current state of mind and your opinions, especially when you have strong feelings, and strong feelings are also fun to read about. You hated that movie! You’re in love with that guy! That person’s a douchebag!

Unfettered self-expression has its drawbacks, though. Like: what if you change your mind? What if you learn some things that make you feel entirely differently about that person, that movie, that guy? The version you recorded is still perpetually available, making you seem wishy-washy or, worse, like a liar if you flip-flop now. Your problem now becomes that the most popular result of a Google search becomes “the truth,” even if you’d like it to be otherwise.

Well: You can’t control what people think, and who cares what they think anyway? By now, the only person who really cares about this stuff is you, and maybe Nick Denton because he is, among other things, a pervert who delights in other people’s misfortunes. Josh is busy altering his odd sweaters with the $2K he got for his article and probably doesn’t give a shit about anything but that money, and the fact that the whole little scandal gave Gawker commenters another opportunity to marvel at the musculature of his torso. It’s better to leave well enough alone, take the high road, and just try to forget about the whole thing.

Well, obviously I couldn’t quite do that. But I also won’t go through that article point by point and refute what I think its omissions and inaccuracies are or try to revise history by erasing or altering anything I’ve written here, tempting as it is to do so.

I made some mistakes, it’s true. Writing this may well be another! But I am not going to shut up just because I might regret what I’ve said later. That might be the smart thing to do, and I’ve tried to, but I can’t. It must be because I’m a blogger.

 

Red Wine and Vicodin

Last night I drank too much. Usually that means I can expect to roll out of bed around noon or 12:30. Today, though, I’m afflicted with one of those hangovers where you wake up absurdly early and can’t fall back asleep, unable to concentrate on anything or engage in any sort of productive behavior save maybe brushing your teeth (which I failed to do before collapsing into bed at 3:30 AM). I don’t know how I got so fucked up. Ha, kidding, I do know — booze, Vicodin, pot, barely any dinner. Classic. The last few days have been like this, ever since I found out Martin has a new girlfriend. Not every night has ended on the ringing note of the unbrushed teeth/fully clothed/face plant into pillow, but certainly, every day has been devoted in some part to the pursuit of numbness. Vicodin is great for this, especially if you play around with the dosage a bit. There’s a really nice plateau between the minimum dose, champagne-in-the-veins body high and the “I’d really like to sleep for 12-18 hours” end of the spectrum where you continue to be somewhat alert and observant but just don’t care. That’s what I’ve been shooting for.

I care a lot, of course. Despite all that, I am completely destroyed by the idea of him with someone else. There are the specifics (it’s only been a few months/we were together for SO LONG/ a GIRLfriend?/I know her/She’s blonde and thin and pretty). And then, there’s a miasma of incredibly disturbing and painful memories, thoughts, and speculations that I can’t shake no matter how sternly I talk to myself. Are they snuggling in bed together right now, enjoying a Sunday morning lie-in? Will he get her flowers from the farmer’s market like he did for me? What does she think of his body; does she know where all his birthmarks are, like I do? Was she just waiting for me to leave? Was he?

Usually this is where I take another Vicodin.

The irony is, I don’t want him back, not really. I want that first flush of love back, that time when everything was mostly carefree, when we could sleep in together on the weekends and then walk around the corner for the paper and some coffee. International long distance killed that pretty fast, and then, what survived didn’t make it through the pressures of living in another country. Their relationship must be so easy right now; they live in the same city, have the same kind of job, the same schedule. Why didn’t he care enough to keep things easy with me? Wasn’t I worth it?

“She’s not a patch on you,” my friend who told me the news said. She meant that this new woman has nothing on me, that I’m smarter and funnier, more interesting, etc. The thing is, she is a patch on me — she’s Martin’s temporary fix for having lost me forever. I just wish this made me feel better.

 

Empty Apartment

We found an empty apartment out near the highway, left the dogs and milk outside. You know how it is when you get back with somebody you’ve loved. It felt better than it ever was, better than it ever could be again.

– Junot Diaz, “Aurora”

These lines were originally going to be my jumping-off point into something else, something completely different. But here I am in New York again. I’ve been away for almost two years, and I can barely describe how it feels. That’s why I love this passage so much, that gesture towards what can’t be captured. That, coupled with the acknowledgement of experience that is particular, powerful, and idiosyncratic but also, at the same time, universal. You know how it is. The inclusion of the reader. Who among us can’t nod along? Yeah, I totally do.

So being back in New York is like getting back with someone you loved. And I love New York so much. Everyone does, right? You can hardly order a drink in some neighborhoods without overhearing some made-up, highlighted, halter-top wearing publicist rave about how much she loooves the city, how she wishes she had more time to take advantage of it. The thing is, people who really love New York pray that publicist, and all the junior bond traders, hedge fund managers, and event planners of her ilk will be the first to beat a retreat to Montclair once they get MY RING, OMIGOD, and us, well. We can’t leave. Nowhere else will have us. “But you really love New York!” so many people told me when I decided to leave. “More than anyone I know!” They were — and are — right.

Because of that, I was expecting this visit to be happy-go-lucky, a whirlwind of favorite friends and restaurants and neighborhoods, unburdened with second thoughts or regrets of any kind. It started off that way. Waiting for my bag at JFK, I let myself be absorbed in the press of people, people of dozens of classes, languages, nationalities, different in every conceivable way save their monomaniacal desire to reach their next destination as quickly as possible. Outside the lightest flurry of snow sifted from the overcast sky, and I pulled on my gloves as I sped-walked to Airtrain. A tall, thin, craggy man dressed all in black shared the elevator with me, and for a second I thought he was Anthony Bourdain. “God, it sure feels good to have cold hands again!” he declared, making a theatrical show of rubbing his together. So it wasn’t Anthony Bourdain, it was a native New Yorker possibly returning from a disastrous tropical vacation, but nevertheless, I couldn’t have agreed more, and I told him so. Enough with the room-temperature climates already. I was home, and it felt cold but very very good.

Then I got on the Airtrain. When was the last time I had ridden Airtrain? Oh, right, two years ago, riding with Martin to the airport so he could return to New Zealand after the briefest of visits home. On the way back to my apartment, alone, looking at the Manhattan skyline, dreading going to work the next day and dreading the looming loneliness and separation even more, my face sore and streaked with salt from the near-hysterical goodbye at the international terminal, I had decided enough was enough. I would move to New Zealand too.

Memories!

I took the subway to Brooklyn where I met up with EG and another old friend, and everything was great for a while. We went to dinner at a Cuban restaurant, and though New York may be a distant second to San Francisco when it comes to food, I hadn’t eaten in like ten hours and everything was delicious. We had plantain chips with a green parsley sauce kind of like pesto (chimmichurri?), and I inhaled two baskets. Then beer and a tangy pepper stuffed with squid and shrimp, covered with a cheese so savory and toothsome I was sure for a brief disgusted second that it was chicken. Plus beans and rice, of course, and more chips. By the second basket of chips EG and Z were deep in a discussion of work and industry contacts to which I could contribute nothing. I wondered then, and not for the first time, if my issues with inarticulation, silence, and apathy were a passing phase, or symptoms of a deep depression I had chosen to ignore. Or maybe (I considered this, also not for the first time) it was neither of those things. Maybe my lack of energy and ideas was indicative of nothing, I mean, it wasn’t indicative, it just was. I lacked energy, ideas, talent, drive, brainpower. Full stop.

Mulling this over, my initial “I’m back!” high dropped off precipitously. I felt too old and beaten up to try to make it (blecch! that phrase!) in New York again, ergo, New York wasn’t my home anymore. I couldn’t even really find my way around now; that day I had spent a lot of time turning in circles at street corners, looking for a landmark to tell me which way to go. Where was my home? Even in my diminished state, I recognized a high-school essay topic (or an emotional-diarrhea blog post topic!) when one came to me, so I kept it to myself. Meanwhile, EG and Z discussed a thirtysomething media crazylady who had slept with someone who slept with Candace Bushnell, thereby placing her one degree of sexual separation from like half of the men in Manhattan. This saddened me for a lot of reasons.

And yeah, I’m going to go all the way with the Sex and the City thing here - remember that episode where Carrie voiceovers how breakups turn the city into a minefield (or was it a war zone?) — streets that must be avoided, blocks that bring you to tears? Well, we were eating on Smith Street, the primary theater, if you will, of Martin’s and my relationship. Two doors down was the restaurant where we went on one of our first dates. That night my friend, who was along and meeting him for the first time, had to repeat herself twice every time she spoke to get his attention, he was so besotted with me. Near the Carroll Street F stop, happy and tipsy in a winter storm, I had jumped on his back in triumph after pulling off a majorly devastating witticism at his expense, and he had given me a piggyback ride to the train, laughing the whole way. Several blocks over was the bar where he had first told me he loved me. “I didn’t want to say it like this,” he had shouted above the pounding music and the drunken ramblings of one of his more louche friends, who was accusing Martin of cockblocking him the previous weekend. But then he did.

It’s been a long time since I thought about Martin’s and my happy days in New York. Thinking about them makes me wonder if I’ll every be that young and carefree and confident again. Probably not. But I know so much more now. Does that count for something? Anything? Is it enough to re-stake a claim somewhere in the five boroughs?

No, I decided, it’s not. Youth and trust funds will always take the day. On that note, I spent the rest of my time mostly in EG’s empty apartment while she bustled from appointment to appointment. I thumbed through all her incredibly tasteful/literary periodicals and tried to imagine a life where reading them was part of my job. It was fun — it’s certainly something I’ve imagined before. I went to a job interview, and traveled back to Brooklyn on a rush-hour A train. Wearing heels, nice clothes, and a full-length wool coat, I saw myself reflected in the window holding onto the subway pole. It could have been two years ago except for the deeper crease on each side of my mouth.

I had skipped lunch before the interview, so by the time I got back to Brooklyn I was starving. I went to the bodega under EG’s apartment and got a sandwich: provolone, lettuce, onion, pickle, and mayonnaise on a roll. No tomato because only California has good tomatoes this time of year. $2.50.

I am, as Edith Wharton or Henry James would delicately say, no longer in my first youth. I don’t have a trust fund. Some time ago the burnishing glow of nostalgia outshone any recollections I had of the gross, insider-y, grasping nature of the city. But man, I love $2.50 deli sandwiches. I might be back.

 

Tea and cookies

My happiest moments in San Francisco were spent lying alongside RC in her cozy bed, dozy from her Vicodin, watching tv like invalids. We watched The Office and The Sopranos. We also watched a French movie that tracked the course of a terrible marriage backwards, from divorce to first meeting.

Neither of us could understand what the couple’s marriage was supposed to have been founded on in the first place: deep compatibility? Pure animal lust?  Love? Love wasn’t telegraphed in this movie the way it is in American movies, with wide-eyed staring, breathy whispers and smiles. Maybe the couple was in love and I just have no idea what that’s supposed to look like anymore.

We walked around in Golden Gate Park which, like a lot of other things about San Francisco, is incredibly pretty in the abstract, but grimy and depressing up close.  We walked along a lush forest path, everything extra green and enlivened by the soaking rain that had fallen nonstop for the first two days of my visit.

(Also it was very windy and cold and no one has heat in their houses, I feel obligated to point out!)

Anyway we walked  along, smelling the eucalyptus and pine, avoiding eye contact with the grimy people who live in the park (”It’s like an outdoor music festival with no music,” RC had explained earlier).  We started talking about how she thinks her exboyfriend never loved her. I eventually got her to amend this to: He never loved her, based on her definition of “love.” From what I know about them, this seems accurate. She said she wished she’d never gotten back together after the first time they broke up.

And I remembered, for the first time in a long time, about how, a couple months into our so-intense-so-fast relationship (I’ll never be that young and trusting again!), William had freaked out and tried to break up with me and I hadn’t let him.

I sat on his lap in the kitchen and deployed the biggest weapon in my arsenal. It was the only weapon in my arsenal, actually.  Also it had only just then occured to me. I asked him to imagine me with someone else and, because he couldn’t imagine that, he stayed with me. I wonder whether it should have ended then. I wonder what the past six years of my life would’ve been like.

RC’s relationship totally should have ended the first time it ended, right? Or maybe there’s a purpose to everything she’s suffered since. Does all suffering have to have a purpose? Does any suffering ever have a purpose?

Anyway later we went to a teahouse that had at least forty floridly described varieties of tea on its menu. One had been specially blended for the Dalai Lama. Another was described as being somehow like the thundering hooves of a herd of majestic stallions.

San Francisco!

RC sat across from me, dipping green tea cookies into her $6 chai. “I wonder if I’ll ever date anyone again,” she mused.

I got ready to launch into “Don’t be ridiculous, of course you will, and sooner than you think,” but it was late in my visit and each of us had given the other one so many hollow pep talks by then, all the words had been said so I stopped a few words in.  I ate a bite of cookie.  It was delicious.

“I wonder if I’ll ever love anyone again,” I said.

Then we sat there silently for a while, stabbing our forks into a little puddle of green tea mousse and then into the fudge brownie alongside it.  It was an unexpectedly good flavor combination.  San Francisco does have the most amazing food.

 

Hippie Soup

“This is my little brother Ben. He’s a hippie,” I told Patrick, who owns the friendly cafe a block away from my house where I always feel bad about noticing movie stars, because they have so obviously come here to be safe in a homey little corner of Brooklyn where no one will recognize them. (However, someone once sent a sighting of ME at the Victory to the Gawker Stalker tip line, so this is a delusion on everybody’s part).

“Nice to meet you, Ben,” Patrick said, and told us a story about how he used to steal pot from hippies when he was 11. Then he gave us a free breakfast. I really like Patrick.

Ben rolled his eyes. He doesn’t especially like being called a hippie, but that’s what he is. Personally I would be a little bit flattered if someone called me a hippie, but I guess that’s one of the differences between being a (semi) adult person who has always had a job who, like, has some tattoos and will order her entree with brown rice instead of white if that’s an option and being an almost 22 year old male college sophomore with long, long Jesus hair who has spent time — like, years — living on actual communes.

Anyway, Ben and I took our tea and bagels and walked to the Flatbush Avenue Long Island railroad station, where we caught the train to Rockville Center to attend our grandfather’s funeral.

The funeral home was lame as fuck, not at all like Fisher and Sons. I found myself wondering whether a small cottage industry of Fisher and Sons-themed funeral homes has sprung up to tend to the deathtime needs of hardcore Six Feet Under fans, and whether it would be possible for me to have my funeral at one, and whether I would actually want to do that. I also mused about a lot of more appropriately somber things as I sat on some fake-fancy furniture with my family, facing away from the corner of the room with my grandfather’s coffin in it.

I really appreciate about Judaism that everyone gets buried in the same unvarnished wooden crate. It was jarring to actually see it, though. The funeral director came and made my Dad look in the coffin, which I guess is an important duty that someone has to do. This started a mini-trend of people looking in the coffin: My aunt and my brother both did. “He looks good, he looks good,” my aunt kept repeating. My brother said he wished he hadn’t looked.

I felt like I was being chicken, but I was not about to go look in the coffin.

I have seen the going-out-to-the-graveyard scene in a hundred movies and tv shows but this was my first time experiencing it, and those tv shows and movies have it right, pretty much. People in black stand in the wintry, windswept graveyard looking stoic while a priest or in this case a rabbi says a couple of things, and occasionally the people burst into tears. Again, Judaism has a good aspect: everyone shovels a ceremonial shovelful of dirt into the grave. The dirt makes a loud plopping sound as it hits the coffin. When you see a coffin lying in a grave as you shovel dirt on top of it, you cannot help but realize that the person in the coffin really is dead.

Afterwards, we spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on the couch in my grandparents’ apartment, eating cold cuts and rugelach. For the next few hours, old people and middle aged people were talking about movies they’ve seen recently, what their grandchildren are up to, doesn’t Medicare suck, what medications they’re on, and other old-people topics. I kind of wished that someone wanted to talk about like ‘death, man, what is up with that’ but a funeral isn’t really the appropriate venue for that kind of conversation.

However, the rest of the evening, which I spent with my little brother at my apartment, completely was the appropriate venue for that kind of conversation. We talked, not only about ‘death, what is up’ but also: ‘is the government spying on us at all times (yes)’, ‘capitalism is so so so so bad’, and also ‘consumerism, corporations, and global agribusiness are so so so so bad’. We talked about ‘basically we live in the Matrix’ and about the commune in Hawaii Ben’s hoping to start. It was equal parts bleak and fun and annoying. Along the way, we — or really Ben — made some soup out of the vegetal contents of my fridge. We ate it with a salad and some Irish soda bread.

Hippie Soup (tastes especially good if the only thing you’ve eaten all day is a bagel and some funeral meat)

One can black beans

One can whole tomatoes

a few cloves of minced garlic

a diced onion

Whatever vegetables are in your fridge. I had:

Half a head of Savoy cabbage

Four potatoes

A parsnip

Saute the onion and garlic. Dice the potato but leave the skin on. Remember, you’re a hippie! Slice up the cabbage and the parsnip and add those too. Add the beans and the tomato, salt and pepper, and a bunch of water. Simmer until the veggies are soft.

Irish soda bread

2 cups of preferably bread flour but it’s not like I have bread flour

1/2 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 cup buttermilk or failing that, milk or even (this worked!) soymilk with a splash of vinegar added

Preheat oven to 350. Sift together (or just whisk together) the dry ingredients. Add the buttermilk or faux-buttermilk and knead on a well-floured surface for about a minute. Add more flour if the dough is too sticky. Shape into two mini-loaves and place them on a greased cookie sheet, scoring across the top with a sharp knife. Bake for 45 minutes. Try to let them cool before you eat them.

You’d think a hippie would use whole wheat flour but life is too short for that bullshit.

 

Pecan Pie

When people asked me about my Thanksgiving plans in the weeks leading up to the holiday, I always smiled and said the same thing:

“Drinking myself stupid at the nastiest bar I can find in the Tenderloin.”

This was quite the icebreaker around the water cooler, but truthfully, I was terrified. I had only been single for about a month, in San Francisco for two, and I had no holiday options whatsoever. After hearing my “shitfaced in the Tenderloin” joke for the fourth time, Carrie pulled me aside.

“You know, you’re totally welcome to spend Thanksgiving with my family in the East Bay. It’s going to be really low-key, but we’ll have a big meal and you can hang out at our place for as long as you want.”

Relief, relief, relief. I checked holiday BART schedules, went grocery shopping, and made two pecan pies to bring along.

Thanksgiving morning I ran out to the corner store to pick up half-and-half for my coffee. The owner gave me a rose for reasons I can’t remember — probably because he had to get rid of them before the long weekend, but whatever, his gesture made me happy. It made me feel like part of the neighborhood, and a long time had passed since I felt part of anything. I was putting the rose, which I noticed was already black around the edges, in a glass of water on my desk when I saw I had missed a call from Carrie. Something bad had happened — “a family tragedy,” her message said, in Carrie’s characteristic Phyllis Diller rasp. Her mother, already very sick, had had a stroke over the night and was in the hospital. Thanksgiving was cancelled.

I wish I could say that I called her right back, to see if everything was okay, or okay-ish, to ask if there was anything they needed or anything I could do. Eventually I did. But first I crawled back in bed and cried, and not in a subdued, tears-trickling-silently-down-my-face way, but in a shoulders-heaving, snotty-nosed, choking, gasping, that-sounds-like-a-dying-animal kind of way. Wouldn’t you? After all the horrible, painful shit of the last year –no job followed by terrible job (repeat as necessary), unhappily coupled with the love of my life and then unhappily single, broke and then dangerously, perilously, un-funnily broke, living someplace I hated and then moving around the world to a place I’d basically never been, now I got to spend Thanksgiving absolutely fucking alone against my will. Fucking great. Seriously, does this ride have an emergency brake? ‘Cause I’ve had enough, I’m ready to get off, you’ve made your point, anytime, thanks.

My first instinct was to call Martin, and I actually did, but mercifully — even more mercifully from where I sit now, a month later — I got his machine. I at least knew enough not to leave a message. After about ten minutes, I pulled myself together to the point where I could call EDG. She said all the right things about how it was OK to feel terrible and that spending Thanksgiving alone was legitimately shitty. I should give myself permission to feel my feelings, she said. We talked a bit about how the holidays are awful when you’re in a fragile state because you can’t help but compare where you are to where you were the previous year. Both of us, of course, were with people we loved who are no longer a part of our lives. How can you not think about your little habits and rituals, the travel plans made together, about sharing the preparations for the big dinner? And how can you stop thinking about the specter of building all that again, with someone else, of introducing another stranger to your freakshow of a family and explaining to a different person how he has to sleep in the guest room for the duration of the holidays and how church attendance is absolutely mandatory?

How not to think about all that: for me, the answer comes in a bottle and is served at a bar. Back to my original Thanksgiving plan. I did make some modifications, though: I reserved a table at the first place I could find online that still had openings for Thanksgiving dinner, and I decided to walk there, stopping at any drinking establishment I could find along the way that was open. The walk was 4 1/2 miles, so I expected to have many opportunities. By the time I showered and loaded myself up with provisions for the day — two books, the newspaper, water, dried fruit, my Streetwise San Francisco — I was actually kind of excited to leave the house.

(to be continued)

 

Not hungry

In the trash room of my parents’ new condo in Coconut Grove, you can press a button to tell the trash chute what kind of trash it will be receiving: periodicals, cans and bottles, or regular garbage. The hallways are plush-carpeted and floral-scented. Even the gym, which is just a largeish mirrored room full of different kinds of brand new exercise equipment, is plush-carpeted and floral-scented. Everything is done in subtle, soothing shades of cream and pale brick red and pale green, and in the hallways there are large oil paintings of dead pheasants and tapestries and heavy chandeliers. It’s like a cartoon about the idea of luxury, sort of like how Florida is a cartoon about the idea of paradise.

Today we went to a big manicured tropical garden where my mom has purchased a membership and we walked around the man-made ponds and waterfalls looking at hypertrophic versions of familiar houseplants. There was an iguana with a ruff around its neck and I moved too close to it and made it hurriedly clamber up a palm tree.

On her cel phone, my mom was talking to my little brother about the plans for my grandfather’s funeral, so I didn’t have to smile or make conversation and I could just walk around and think about whatever was in my head. I stared up at the perfect blue sky, dotted with fluffy white clouds. I bent my head and took a big whiff of some little purple flowers so sweet-smelling they didn’t even smell real. I felt the warmth of the sun and the slight balmy breeze on my bare arms. I tried to absorb it all through my eyes and my pores, like it was some kind of medicine. I tried to remind myself that beauty is here for us to enjoy, and that we are here to enjoy beauty.

But I didn’t start feeling better. I keep not starting to feel better. There’s nothing I want to do and nothing that I want to think and nothing that I want to say. There’s no one I want to talk to and no place I want to go. And there’s nothing I want to eat. I haven’t been hungry in weeks.

 

La La Land

Last weekend I drove down to LA with Leah and her friend James. God, it takes forever to get to Los Angeles from San Francisco, like six hours at least. We passed the time chatting and listening to CDs (!) from college (double ! but that is how we all know each other) and playing with James’s iPhone. James, who is sort of manic, often did all three plus something else simultaneously. He was making a list and talking on his phone and intermittently directing remarks to me when I heard him say (to whoever was on the other end of the phone) “Actually, yes, I AM talking to a cute girl right now.” He poked me. “Did you hear that, R? I just called you cute!”

This barely registered with me. For one thing, James is about as tall as I am (5′3) (well, maybe 2 inches taller). Also, he’s slept with both of my roommates. And thirdly. . . . I thought about it for a while. Then we got to LA and had yummy homemade Korean food and went out for a few drinks. At the bar, I was still trying to think of a third reason, but I was also thinking about his thick blond hair and oddly sexy mile-a-minute motormouth when I accidentally (sweartoGOD!) brushed his foot with mine under the table.

He didn’t move it.

We stayed like that for a minute or two, acting otherwise completely normal from the ankle up. Then the moment passed, and the three of us — me, Leah, James — went for a walk on the beach, where we talked about Malibu and Hole and accidentally roused a homeless person from their slumbers beneath a lifeguard station.

The next day after breakfast, we went back to the beach. James ran ahead of us like a little kid while I talked to Leah about all the places I wanted to explore in California as soon as I had a decent job.

“Napa, Santa Cruz, Marin . . .”

James materialized next to me. “Are you serious?”

“James, I’ve only lived in California for three months!”

“Let’s do it! Let’s go!”

Okay.

At another bar (yeah, I know) later on that day, I left James and Leah deep in a conversation about exes and got up to look at the jukebox. I was choosing between Lily Allen and New Order when he sidled up next to me.

“What are you picking?”

Then we were leaning over the jukebox together, our fingers about an inch apart, our cheeks almost touching. I could sense the static electricity that had accumulated in his hair. I had not been this close to a boy person in, uh, three months. How did it feel? Fun. Being around boys has not been fun for me for way longer than three months.

“Stone Temple Pilots!” James said, as I punched in the first two numbers for Purple. “Which one, ‘Big Empty’?”

“No, ‘Interstate Love Song,’” I said.

For the first time that entire weekend, James remained still for a moment.

“REC,” he paused again, a big grin breaking over his face, “I really like you.”

See, fun!! I forgot that it all starts out that way. Not that anything else is going to happen (he has, after all, slept with two of my best friends). But it’s good to be reminded.

 

Marinated Kale Salad

The acupuncturist had just gotten to the part of the form I’d filled out where I’d described “any major recent life stressors.”

“So you broke up with your boyfriend of six years six months ago and moved into a new place by yourself. You have an ovarian cyst and you’re in pain a lot of the time. And on Friday you quit your job with nothing lined up.”

“Mhmm. Also I forgot to put that my grandfather’s in the hospital and it seems like he might die.”

Then I cried a little bit before hopping up on the table where the acupuncturist inserted tiny, thin needles into my feet, calves, wrist, stomach, and ears and I lay there for a while, feeling sleepy and calm.

Then I got on the train and headed to Greenpoint, to Scuttlebutt’s apartment where she lives with her boyfriend. Since the last time I was there, he’s put up a mirror in the hallway and a lot of little shelves. They also have a 48” white fiber-optic Christmas tree. We cuddled up by the tv and had a healthy dinner of tofu and rice and marinated kale salad.

Ingredients:

Some kale

A lemon

garlic

olive oil

young sweet carrots, cut into thin coins

avocado, cubed

Combine the juice of the lemon with the pressed garlic clove and the olive oil, then put the washed, cut-up kale in there and massage it with your hands for a few minutes until it gets nicely wilty. Integrate the carrot coins and avocado cubes. Season to taste with salt and pepper and serve. This salad is improbably addictive and delicious and very, very healthy for you. You get the sense that if you smoke a cigarette or eat a bag of M&Ms afterward, the kale in your stomach will be offended somehow.

I love Scuttlebutt but it made me so sad to be in her domestic, cozy apartment that she shares with her adorable boyfriend, and it made me even sadder to be in Greenpoint, which is familiar and homey to me in a way that I worry my new neighborhood will never be. The Christmas lights are strung up across Manhattan Ave. and as I walked from Scuttlebutt’s apartment back to the G train to go home, I had the wild impulse to call William and invite myself over to my old apartment to say hi. I imagined walking through the door.

And then I realized that what I was imagining going back to was our apartment a year ago, with a Christmas tree in the corner decorated with the ornaments I bought at Pearl River Mart and the ones from William’s grandmother. I remembered how happy I’d been to look in the window and see those lights every time I came home. I could almost smell the old fuggy smell of our apartment, pot and incense and pine needles and cooking.

I wanted to go there so badly. I wanted to run there. But you can’t go back to a place that no longer exists.

I stood on the platform of the G train with tears streaming down my face. It did suck living off the G train. That fucking train always takes forever to come.

 

Sweet Potato Casserole

Apparently it’s now “traditional” for me to make sweet potato casserole with crunchy pecan topping for Thanksgiving. I made it a few times, I guess, and everyone loves it, probably because it’s loaded with butter and sugar and is for all intents a crustless sweet potato pie. I was a little grossed out by it yesterday, but then, I was feeling grossed out by a lot of things.

I was grossed out by the sadness inherent in a day that’s about the anticipation of a heavy meal that everyone inhales in minutes. I’m also grossed out by the suburbs. What a snob, right? After all, I grew up here among these strip malls and and prefab houses with their potpourri bathrooms and sectional sofas. But this isn’t my home and it hasn’t been for seven years.

Back in New York, my dad’s father is in the hospital and not doing well. Last Sunday I went out to Long Island to visit him. I’ve only had to do this once before; I’m lucky I guess. The other time I think I also panicked beforehand. Actually I used to panic before every time I would be setting out early in the morning to visit my grandparents, because of how much I love them and how irritating they are and how much I feel like they’ll never understand anything to do with my life at all and how inevitably they’ll die soon. William was always pretty good at calming me down.

So the night before I was to go out there, I called him. There was no one else I wanted to talk to. It was the wrong thing to do but I needed to do it. It made me realize that there’s still a part of me that doesn’t quite believe, yet, that we’re not together anymore and that we’re never going to be again. That part of me is kept afloat by the knowledge that somewhere out there, he’s still caring about what happens to me. And that’s what I need to let go of before I can love anybody else.

But the pull of pattern and habit is so strong. Like: settling into being lectured by William felt so normal and natural, just listening to the cadences of his voice as he told me everything I’d done wrong.

When I hung up with him I felt temporarily better, and then I felt even emptier and more alone than before.

We used to have Thanksgiving at my grandmother’s house in College Park. Now we have it at my uncle’s house because my mom’s parents live in a place called Riderwood Village, where the apartment hallways are plushy carpeted and the different buildings have names like ‘Orchard House.’

I used to stay in my old bedroom in the house I grew up in when I came to stay with my parents. Now we stay in a Marriott Residence Inn.

Also I smoked pot for the first time in four months last night, with a 19 year old friend of the family who reassured me that I don’t look old (”I thought you were 22 or 24″) and wanted to talk geopolitics (”I’m just gonna lay this out there: we’re fucked.”)

Some things are traditions and some things are patterns and some things are bad habits. I can’t tell which is which anymore.

This casserole is good, though, in a “it’s bad but you can’t resist and after what you’ve been through don’t you deserve it?”way.

4 cups mashed sweet potatoes

3 eggs

1/2 cup whole milk

1/2 cup melted butter

1/2 cup brown sugar

splash of vanilla

pinch of salt

Topping:

1 1/2 cups pecans

1/2 cup butter

1/3 cup flour

1/2 cup brown sugar

Combine topping ingredients in food processor and pulse a few times until they’re a fun coarse brown topping-looking type of thing.

Beat the eggs, milk, melted butter, sugar and vanilla together, then add potatoes. Plop the orange mix into a buttered casserole dish, top with topping, and cook for a while in an oven (350 for 45? 375 for 30? You want the top to be crunchy basically).