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I expected southern California to be full of a lot of people that look exactly like Heidi Klum, and I was kind of right: there are a lot of blonde amazons stalking around. But Californians are a diverse group, and I spent a good deal of time the first day looking at people and thinking, You live in California, pudgy little pale man? You too, sulky brunette lady dressed in black gothlike clothing? But then I got over it, because I was too busy gawking at the landscape.
It was a little odd, actually, this foreign land of placid people sailing along beautiful streets, their houses half-suspended from cliffs. I kind of wanted to yell at them: "DON'T you KNOW what we're GOING through? There is so much DIFFICULTY and TERROR and MADNESS, but there is also a good deal of HOPE and LIGHT for the first time in ages. These are very SERIOUS TIMES."
They just looked content. Like they were heading off to yoga, or perhaps a bike ride.
When I got off the plane on the East Coast, things seemed familiar and difficult again. I got a blister on my foot, my scarf was tangled in my iPod, and I had to catch a bus to DC, which meant hours of gazing at the endless beauty that is Delaware. Do you know how many chicken farms there are in Delaware?I think, perhaps, that California is not for me. I am very cynical, and I don't frequently rollerblade; I embrace carbs and I think cars were a terrible invention; and on most nights I want to sit in my dimly-lit apartment and drink a lot of wine. The east coast is the suitable type of place for these preferences.
But it is good, occasionally, to go to California.
Sometimes I write myself emails with lists. I came across this one that I wrote to myself two years ago and I was struck with my stupid sixteen-year-oldish melancholia and the fact that I still have it and will probably never grow out of it.
-If you cannot make someone love you, does that make you not a worthy person?
-Do people who are loved lead better lives? Or do they mostly lead the same type of life but just make everyone else jealous?
-Freud was right: Love and work, work and love, it's all there is.
I laughed so hard at that.
It's from "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist," which I watched because, I don't know, shut up.
It's settling in, isn't it? Three friends had their hours cut or lost their job this week. Today the coffee guy gave me a free pastry because he couldn't sell them all, I walked by two newly empty storefronts and read this article on the train, and when I got to work there had been a meeting and there was a lot of whispering about "looking busy" so as not to seem expendable. Dun dun DUNNN.
Fear is hanging in the air like smog. But there's also this feeling of crazy freedom that comes with hard times, the thrill that things are being shaken up. Maybe I just find it invigorating because I'm ass poor anyway, because I know my way around a package of Ramen and have shed a tear or two over the heating bill. And I know I talk about being poor a lot, but it's because this city never lets me forget just who is getting a break and just where I stand. Until, maybe, now.
And so, a short list of things I kind of like about the recession:
1. The twentysomething banker boys who brag endlessly about their expendable income, recommend I hire maid service as if that is a remotely normal thing to do, make jokes about needing a separate taxi just for their wallet, refer to a section of their apartment as "the east wing," etc., -- they are an endangered species these days, and I would not mind if they went extinct.
2. This dazzling, slightly bitchy article by Holland Cotter that calls for the re-defining of contemporary art while the industry that surrounds it collapses. "Will contemporary art continue to be, as it is now, a fancyish Fortunoff's, a party supply shop?" he asks, and recommends that grad schools send art students out into hospitals, schools, and prisons.
3. It's now a point of pride, not a guilty secret, if I spend multiple nights a week eating Soba noodles and obsessively curating my Netflix queue.
4. We're all learning to appreciate our jobs because they are jobs. It's something of a relief to be grateful for what you have, isn't it?
5. Maybe I will get a tax refund!
6. Hummers are on the way out and "Legally Blonde," the musical, closed. Can I get a a woop woop.
7. We don't know how long it's going to last, but it's not going to last forever.
Last week I was at a party with a girlfriend and a bunch of married couples. Someone asked my friend if she was dating anyone, and she made a joke about being single and how she'd probably die alone and be eaten by her cat. Everyone awkwardly laughed, and the conversation moved on to other topics.
I've made jokes like this too, when I've found myself in a room full of married people, and I just realized that I hate it and it perpetuates something that I'm not going to to put up with anymore. I am declaring right now: no more apologetic Bridget Jones-ish type responses when people probe into my personal life! After all, it's not like married people go around talking about how they sold out their dreams for a split-level and a china set. Just sayin'.
October
On yet another day when the lead image on the New York Times website features a diagonal line sloping sharply down, I wearily watch the two candidates slug it out again on TV. Craving a brief break, I step outside of my apartment to take out the trash, but during my trip down the five flights of stairs, I hear McCain's nasally voice echoing behind every single apartment door.
The next day, in the cafeteria at lunch, I overhear two women discussing art. It is the first extended conversation that I've overheard in days about a topic other than the election. How can they possibly talk about art at a time like this? I wonder to myself. Then I remember that I work in an art museum.
November
The morning after, I linger in bed listening to the barely concealed joy in the voices of the reporters on the radio. They are saying something about redefining patriotism, and my pillow is still damp from the happy tears I cried before I fell asleep.
Outside, the streets are still littered from the celebration. I linger in front of every newsstand on the walk to work, reading the headlines over and over to myself, struggling to believe it. Later, it will sink in that times are still dire, and that we would be stupid to expect immediate progress, let alone greatness. Failure and disappointment are very possible.
But, on this morning, I don't care. My generation has done something good, something huge and collective and symbolic and decent. We have surprised ourselves, and on the subway I blink like I am a baby who has just woken up, gazing around at other people in wonder.
December
It is 8:30 p.m., and I have to buy vanilla shortening and chocolate chips. I bundle up in my gloves and coat and step out into the holiday decor spectacle that is my new neighborhood in Queens.
Chevy Chase in "Christmas Vacation" would be impressed by the work of my neighbors. Arches dripping with tinsel and bells stretch across the main streets. My favorite pastry shop features in one window a Santa steering his sleigh down a hill, and, in the other, a life sized baby Jesus doll in an elegant pink gown with gold trim.
I pass a yard that features, in addition to an oversized snow globe structure and an assortment of blow-up cartoon characters, bushes covered in lights that blink in rhythm to an electronic piped-in version of "Joy to the World." I laugh out loud. It is snowing lightly, not enough to blow in my face and leave my coat slippery and wet, but just enough to make the air under the street lamps glisten slightly.
I have been worrying a lot lately. I saw a little black kitten wandering along the above-ground subway tracks a week ago, and I think about it all the time, cannot stop wondering if it is okay. My grandfather was in the hospital last week, and even though he is out and on the mend, even though he ate seven pancakes yesterday, I have an anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach. And I heard a woman interviewed on the radio who couldn't afford to pay her daughter's health insurance for bipolar disorder, her voice breaking with guilt and worry.
I look at the snow, the baby Jesus in pink, the electronic music light show thing, and I know that none of it is any help whatsoever in regards to the ridiculous cruelty that is everywhere. It is laughable, how little protection we have. But yet here I am, on my way to the grocery store, astonished. Annie Dillard said, "You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment." So I guess that is what I am trying to do.
At the register in a busy store, I hand the teenage cashier six dollars. He punches a few buttons, gives the register a puzzled look, and calls his manager. "I did something wrong," he says, and they stare at the register together awhile.
"OH NO," she says suddenly, her voice growing patronizing and deep. "You did the ABSOLUTE WORST thing you could possibly do." His face clouds over, and for the next five minutes she berates him for doing this mysterious terrible thing, while the line grows behind me.
I want to tell the manager where to put my six dollars. But instead I just whisper to him, "It doesn't seem so terrible to me," and on the way home, I try not to bodyslam quite as many annoying tourists as usual. It is Christmas, after all.
