I’ve been taking a few deep breaths and trying to focus on the future instead of the endless now. A reverse zen.

It feels something like moving.

What I do remember was watching from a class room window as the second plane hit the twin towers. I remember crying in front of the television as the Iraq war began. I remember the slow sinking feeling I’d come to expect with the making of “history.” I guess, without realizing it, I’d begun to lose faith in our country in so many ways. I was definitely one of the masses that was afraid to hope.

I didn’t cry when Obama won. I smiled. I smiled till my cheeks ached and all I could follow it up with was occasional outburst of laughter and “I can’t believe we did it.” I ordered two Johnny Walker Blacks and I smiled in front of the tv and at the people standing next to me at everything in nothing in general.

I think our generation needed to see something like this, needed the type of hope it would provide. Needed to believe. Insert cheesy proud to be an american quote.

(I know I’m a bit late on the whole thing, I’ve been internet free for daaaays, but it was nice to finally say my piece)

It’s strange reading your blog lately – you seem to be in such a different world, such a different state of mind than me. It’s kind of a nostalgic, vacationing vibe, like there’s infinite time to think about that tiny leaf on the end of a fern frond – no, not the littlest one at the end (all proud because of its important location) but the fifth one in on the left, ignored for no good reason by everyone else throughout history. But it’s not your writing – everything seems different, skewed, changing, because I have few consistent relationships with people.

I adore and cherish each long letter I recieve. Somehow they always seem a labor of love. Every one of them. From one of my oldest and dearest friends, I thought it was too great not to reflect on it a bit…as he so eloquently called out my navel gazing.

As the stock markets came crashing down, a different kind of global devastation received scant notice. The World Conservation Congress revealed that 25 percent of the planet’s mammal species and one out of eight birds are on close to extinction. We’re not just talking about exotic animals in remote hideaways, but rabbits and deer and cardinals and turtledoves. As you meditate on how to reinvent yourself in the wake of the financial shifts, Cancerian, please hold a vigil in your heart for the endangered creatures. The two crises are related, after all. The greed to turn everything into a means of generating money has led humans to both despoil nature and risk the crazy gambles that have savaged the economy. The more you understand that, the better your intuition will be as you make personal decisions affecting your future relationship with money.

(via freewillastrology)

sometimes in that crazy good way, it feels like the universe is speaking to you…even if you don’t really believe in all that.

• a writer and a prop stylist (meg and i combined??)
• two upright bassist
• one actor
• ten kids with unsure job titles who live in a commune
• one recently broken up guy who kept talking about his girlfriend’s stuff
• drank twice with prospective roommates
• someone registered on couch surfing dot com
• a handful of photographers and graphic designers
• and one owner of a plus sized modeling company (of the girly mag variety)

Needless to day, as it draws closer to the wire, my standards have dropped considerably. Hey Mr. Plus Sized Model Company, is that room still open? I’ve made a simple math formula to help everyone understand what the search is like: Where A is the amount of cool people and B is the coolness of the apartment and C is the weird people and D is the weird apartment.

• A+B=no chance in hell.
• A+D=some chance but not likely.
• C+B=lots of chance but do you really want to.
• C+D=an apartment offer on the spot.

I was writing tonight, and not just writing, writing without effort, writing without thought. Writing from some place in me that just needed to sit down and put it down on paper. Its been a while since I wasn’t “trying to write” and was actually writing. The same way you breathe, because its whats necessary to survive.

We’ll see where these next few weeks takes me.

A friend and I were having a conversation recently of the not so original variety, musing on what we’d tell our past selves. I’m a bit more intrigued by what we’d tell our future self and what that older and hopefully wiser self would think of that advice.

I suppose I would tell my future self to take advantage of this opportunity, this time in my life that’s so open to possibility. Yes, its frightening and yes it’ll take a lot of work, but now might be one of the last times in my life where I can literally go any way I choose. I have fewer responsibilities than I’ve ever had in the past and I can reinvent myself, whether that means considering a big move or just choosing a new career path. Matter of fact maybe I’ll go write that letter now…

futureme.org

In fact it was difficult in the extreme for me to understand those young women for whom New York was not simply an ephemeral Estoril but a real place, girls who bought toasters and installed new cabinets in their apartments and committed themselves to some reasonable furniture. I never bought any furniture in New York. For a year or so I lived in other people’s apartments; after that I lived in the Nineties in an apartment furnished entirely with things taken from storage by a friend whose wife had moved away. And when I left the apartment in the Nineties (that was when I was leaving everything, when it was all breaking up) I left everything in it, even my winter clothes and the map of Sacramento County I had hung on the bedroom wall to remind me who I was, and I moved into a monastic four-room floor-through on Seventy-fifth Street. “Monastic” is perhaps misleading here, implying some chic severity; until after I was married and my husband moved some furniture in, there was nothing at all in those four rooms except a cheap double mattress and box springs, ordered by telephone the day I decided to move, and two French garden chairs lent me by a friend who imported them. (It strikes me now that the people I knew in New York all had curious and self-defeating sidelines. They imported garden chairs which did not sell very well at Hammacher Schlemmer or they tried to market hair staighteners in Harlem or they ghosted exposés of Murder Incorporated for Sunday supplements. I think that perhaps none of us was very serious, engaged only about our most private lives.)

All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in afternoon thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eight, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and ever procrastination, every word, all of it.

because, the light filters through the trees in a way that you’d forgotten, making beautiful silhouettes that you no longer take for granted.

because, we wear our beauty so proudly, most of us achieving that moment before flaunting it, leaving just enough for the imagination. New York bodies…so lithe and beautiful and bathed in sunlight. Who doesn’t live here that doesn’t love each moment that the sun shines enough to beat against their skin. Maybe its respite against the bold winters.

because, I feel like I’m seventeen again. These moments always feel like they can last forever, even when my age and my wisdom knows they can’t. I can feel beautiful and young and a part of it all. Some how this here and this now gives us this gift.

because, I drink wine in the park like I’m making love in broad daylight. Bottles everywhere. Abandonment. We just simply don’t care.

because, babies run through the parks and because we can pet random dogs in front of cafe’s on lafeyette and feel that its our rite to be as happy as they are when we greet them.

because, I can gather my friends on any given day and we have no excuse or rhyme or reason. It isn’t a holiday or a birthday, we just wanted to savor those last few moments and watch the sun dip down perfectly between the trees. Wax poetics about where the summer went and how fast it passes.

because, for hours everything can be possible and nothing forgotten.

because, these are the moments we live for. The moments we live HERE for. Breathing. Beating.

And because I could possibly ode New York summers forever. Because, it gives us a reason to keep living here through the harsh coldness and the angry pedestrians. Because, where else will we go.

You know it once you lived here, New York love is very different than any love you’ve ever experienced; from any habitat that you’ve ever lived.

Each morning I reach
my fingers, tentacles of light and sound.
There are daydreams with more scope,
Where the pale flowers still stretch
un-wilted by heat.

Each night I whisper;
your ears are willing accomplices.
Silent as the beating of butterfly wings,
(silent as butterfly wings beat)
that cause tsunamis in the Philippines.
There are much bigger pools to drown in,
none so much as our response ability.

(And this is how i draft)