Public Introspection

Wishing Against This Dry Spell While Watching the Rain...

I'm sitting in a Starbucks on Broadway near NYU, watching the rain with about thirty other New Yorkers.  You'd think they were showing a Sex and the City/Indiana Jones double feature on the front window.  When the downpour lets up for a second, we lose interest.  But, in mere moments, it flares up and you'd think a prize fight had broken out on the sidewalk.  Laughter at a passerby wearing a grocery bag on their head.  Sympathy for inside-out umbrellas. 

It's rain!  It happens all the time!  What is the big deal, anyway?!

I've been sitting here all afternoon, and I keep getting tricked into thinking something interesting is going on outside every time I glance up to see the crowd looking expectantly out the window.

Guess what?  It's rain, every time. 

I'm sitting here, blogging about the stupidity of watching the rain because, simply, I'm having trouble coming up with anything else to write about.  I came here today to write.  To work on "the novel."  To get out of my apartment, where any attempt at writing would surely turn into a day long nap, especially on a day like today, to be inspired by being out in the real world.  To write. 

Let's talk about this novel.  I don't do that much, for a few reasons.  One, I don't want anyone to ask to read it.  Two, I don't want anyone to think that I'm so delusional as to think I'm actually a novelist.  Three, I don't want to actually talk about the story, because, what if, wonder of wonders, someday, the thing actually gets printed, but all my friends already know all about it?  Who will buy it? 

I'm on version, uh, let's go with four.  Original, New, New Intro, and Newest are the files I open when I pretend to sit and work on this thing.  Not to mention Cuts, Edits, and Character Sketches.  And Crap That I Can't Believe I Wrote But Can't Bring Myself to Delete.  When I'm not looking at the screen, I think about these characters who have lived in my head now for OVER TEN YEARS and I love them.  I don't want them to not be in a book.  I want them to get published, not to mention me.  I believe that these characters have a story to tell.  The only trouble is that the story keeps changing, and I keep having trouble finding it. 

I have a story to tell, but I'm having trouble finding it.

I've always had a problem with my writing: once I figure out what the end of the story is, I lose interest in the story.  That's happened with other attempts at short and long fiction, and I have pages that just trail off into... nothing.  With this story, I knew what ending I wanted the main character to come to when I typed out the first paragraph.  And I kept writing.  That's why I thought this was the right story to write.  I knew the ending and wanted to keep reading.  Maybe someone else would feel the same way.

But, somewhere between my latter high school years and now, the story, the main character, the ethic and moral of the story changed.  Not just of the novel.  Of the writer. 

So what do you do when you have all this story and no ending?  All this character but no resolution?  It's like bringing a child into the world and holding it up, looking into its wet little eyes and thinking, "I have no idea what to do with you."

If I have the ending, I can't write the story.  If I don't have the ending, I can't write the story.

I read an idea in a book yesterday - a book by a writer, writing on writing - that said something to the effect of, "Plumbers don't get plumber's block.  They just work.  As a writer, you should just keep working."

Ten years of working, but I feel like I'm plunging the same dang toilet.

Something Borrowed...

"There are roughly three New Yorks.  There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable.  Second, there is the New York of the commuter - the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night.  Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something... Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion."

- E.B. White, from Here is New York, quoted on a poster in a train car on the N line

Doormat or Diplomat...

If the trains had hearts, would they feel guilty?

Everyday here, I hear excuses based on train service.  I am not so stupid that I believe them all or even most of them, but I hear them nonetheless and am forced to accept them at face value.  It's impossible to dispute such arguments, and harder still to disprove them.  I myself have been late to appointments because of the train, but rarely in any other instance than when I probably should have taken an earlier one to begin with, knowing full well the fallibility of the system. 

I just wonder, if only the trains could speak in their defense, would they be sorry for making all these people appear irresponsible and arrive late to important engagements?  Would they appreciate being the scapegoat that allows people to chronically avoid owning up to their own shortcomings? 

My boss has taught me that there are three sides to every story - your side, my side, and the actual truth.  I have never in my life experienced just how misaligned these sides can be as I have since moving to New York.  Self-preservation is a completely different animal here, and as a result, I find it hard to trust anyone.  Maybe I've just never been made aware of what a force this notion can be - looking out for number one - but it seems to me, even as I know I'm growing out of some deeply ingrained naivete, that the power of this mindset is insurmountable here.  This level of distrust is more than double-checking to make sure I've locked the door or not wanting to walk down certain dark alleys; this is a distrust that plays itself out in broad daylight, in full voice and an unapologetic tone. 

It says, "I'm looking out for number one, and if you were smart, you would be too." 

It says, "I'm not going down without a fight, and I'll take any one of you down with me." 

It says, "I will take grace and mercy from you - rip it right from your hands before you're ready to release it; and I will use it up down to its last drop of worth.  But you will not find that same grace or mercy in my hands, either one.  Look as long as you like.  It will not appear, and I will not create it just for you.  You are on your own."

I have never known before just what turning the other cheek feels like, looks like in the everyday.  I went to a conference a couple of weeks ago where Brian McLaren was speaking, and this picture came up in the conversation.  I'm not sure how much I'm embellishing, but the image that comes to mind today is that turning the other cheek isn't the cowardly, namby-pamby, pacifist act that we might read it as.  Think of yourself in an altercation.  If you get punched, square in the jaw, you might be inclined to follow the force of the blow right over your shoulder and run away.  You might be inclined to snap back with your own counter attack.  But there is a third possible response.  Snapping back, face front to your aggressor, and making them own their action.  Showing them the mark on your face and giving them the opportunity to make another decision - a second strike or a second thought.  It doesn't place you on the level with the doormat you're standing on; it lets you act as a reflection.  It lets them see what they've done.  It stops the natural momentum of the situation, which might inevitably be reduced to a simple winner vs. loser contest.  Turning the other cheek simply says, "Let's see if you'll do the right thing if you're given another chance."

It takes a great deal of confidence to turn the other cheek, and a good amount of pain tolerance doesn't hurt either.  And fortunately, there's no mandate that it has to be silent act, so having the wherewithal to come up with the right words in the moment of reckoning is pretty essential as well.  It's a fine line between doormat and diplomat, and I believe that this city is forcing me to tread that line cautiously and daily. 

I will no longer be reduced to being too nice or too harsh.  I am not that simple, and I will not crawl into either of those holes to rest.  If only it were that easy.

Freedom and the Shiny Prize...

I woke up yesterday and found my hand caught in a raccoon trap.

When I was younger, I was a nerdy little reader kid, thick glasses and the whole bit.  My favorite books were this series by John D. Fitzgerald called "The Great Brain."  The books were set in rural Utah in the late 1800s, and they told of the adventures of the young Fitzgerald boys, including the conniving "brain" child Tom and his brother, the narrator, J.D. 

One detail that I remember from these books that was pretty inconsequential to the stories was a description of a raccoon trap that the boys used.  It was basically a box with a hole just big enough for a raccoon to fit its little hand through.  Inside was something shiny.  When the 'coon reaches inside to grab the shiny object, as apparently these animals are prone to do, their balled-up fist is too big to be drawn out, and they're stuck.

I was always fascinated by the idea that all the critter had to do was let go to be free.  But the set-up always kept them trapped.  They were prisoners of their own natures.  They never let go.

All I had to do yesterday, when I found myself in a familiar old 'coon trap was remind myself that I did not have to allow this thing to have a hold on me.  I could just let go and be free.  But damn that shiny object...

It was my pride in that box, and a slice of entitlement.  My ethical code and a compassionate nature that I've worked hard to develop.  And the ability to hang on to a small remnant of several wasted years of my life. 

Being human, I guess, is just almost as tough as being a raccoon.

I wonder if a raccoon ever had the wherewithal to break the trap, bang it around so much that it just broke off of their hand.  Freedom and the shiny prize.  That's the happy ending for everyone.

Everyone, I guess, except the trapper...

Five Hundred Twenty Five Thousand Six Hundred Minutes...

Four seasons.  One lease.  Twelve electric bills.  52 People magazines.

Last night, I chatted over cupcakes with a good friend of my best friend and watched as he convinced himself that there was no better fate for him than moving here to New York.  It was probably a realization he'd had, just as I had, a million times before.  Even after living here for a year - easily one of the toughest years of my life - I could sit there and respond to his wide-eyed excitement in resounding agreement.  He should move here.  Everyone should.  It's the most valuable education that anyone could invest in.

If you can stand it.

Today, a young man had his first day of work at my store.  He moved here last week from Oklahoma, transferring with the company.  He's waiting on movers to bring him his stuff, meanwhile sitting on the floor of his new, presumably tiny apartment as these first days of acclimation are soaking in.  The trains were dependably ridiculous, and thus, he was late.  It wasn't his fault, but he was kicking himself.  He's not yet learned how to balance impatience and hurry with the knowledge that really, we aren't in control.  On my first day on the job, I got the horrific news that I had to wear a hat everyday.  Today, I had to tell this guy to go buy new shoes.  And where he could do so.  And what train to take to get there.  It all seems so simple now, but I hope that I never forget how hard moving here was, and I hope that I am always sympathetic to those who do so, and to those who visit.  I hope that I always know and understand just what a peculiar and fascinating place this city is, because I really feel that it's unlike any other place on the planet.  I've tried to explain to people, like my co-workers in preparing to welcome this new kid or our friend who also dreams of making the big move: there is no way to describe the vast different-ness of New York City.  It's not one thing - it's everything.  It is it's own world, it's own strange, gritty, surprise-twist of a fairy tale.  Our local news is everyone else's national news.  Our skyline is everyone else's postcard.  It is the center of the universe. 

And I moved here, a year ago this week.  For no good reason.  I serve coffee everyday and try to make a positive impact on other people that serve coffee everyday.  I stick my toe in the melting pot, pondering on the novels and scripts and poetry that it should be inspiring me to create, only to find myself occupied, at times, with staying afloat.  Depending on the day, I ask myself one of two questions:

Why would anyone ever want to come here?  And why on earth would anyone ever want to leave?

Today, a year in... the second question rings in my ears and brought tears to my eyes this evening as I walked down Lexington Avenue on my way home from work.  I've been fighting this stupid notion lately that now that my big dream has become reality - I live in New York City - where do I go from here?  What do I dream next?  It's been this impending crisis of direction.  Today, and thank God for days like it, I find myself not needing to think about going anywhere from here.

Here is just fine...

Familiar Tune, Strange New Meter...

Things are a little blurry right now, to be honest.  It's been a year now since I packed up my little life and relocated it to New York City, and it feels like it's been a handful of years, long ones.  I wake up every morning and ask myself, "Why am I here?"  The tone of the question isn't one of frustration, though in the beginning it might have been.  It's just a question, like someone asking about the weather.  I never sleep through the night; I always wake up at least once or twice to check my phone, check the clock.  For several weeks now, I've been waking up about an hour before my alarm goes off, which is odd, since I rarely set my alarm for the same time two days in a row.  It seems like my body and my brain are having this unusual philosophical battle, and when the dialogue gets abmormally robust, I awaken.  I awaken, but never participate in the discussion.  It's as though both parties stop talking when I enter the room.  It's like when you know you've been dreaming some very vivid dream, but you can't remember even one detail, no matter how hard you try.  It's just on the edge of what you can see when you close your eyes, but still...

There are so many things that I don't know right now.  I've never been in a place like that before.  I've never lived in such a state of pause in so many ways at once.  I'm stopped, but moving forward, like I'm on a long escalator.  I'm not being pushed forward, not moving against my will, just going, straight ahead, yet standing still.  I can turn and look behind me, but everything back there is disappearing fairly quickly.  Plus, looking back makes me dizzy.  If I look just at the spot I'm standing in, it doesn't even seem that I'm moving really.  But if I look ahead, I just see more upwardness.  All the people in front of me are blocking the view of the top. 

Where am I going?  Why am I here?

I'm not struggling with these questions right now, as I always have in the past, although I do anticipate a new episode of the fight on the horizon.  I'm here, where I've always wanted to be.  I'm still in the process of figuring out if it is really is everything I ever wanted or nothing I ever could have imagined, as well as figuring out, day to day, if I want it still.  I read an article about a well-known young actress who feels that life evolves in seven-year cycles.  If that's true, then second grade, freshman year of high school, senior year of college, and last year, the year I finally realized my "big dream," mark my cycle renewals.  You know, that actually sounds about right.  Each cycle has felt shorter yet more full, and they each mark very different, very significant sets of learnings.  Some recurring themes, but all composed in variations.  And it's safe to say that at the beginning of each cycle, I had no idea what I was getting into. 

I guess that makes me feel better about having no idea what I'm getting into now.

I ran across this Blaise Pascal quote in an old journal:  "All men seek happiness.  This is without exception.  Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end.  The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views.  The will never takes the least step but to this object.  This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves."

OK, so Pascal's kind of a downer there at the end, but I still like this quote.  Seeking happiness takes on so many different forms.  For some, it's really seeking understanding, such that even in tangible misery, some joy resonates; for others, it may look like pursuing moments of mindless pleasure at the cost of depth and meaning.  Happiness.  Money can't buy it, nothing guarantees it, and you're lucky if you have it for a fraction of your days.  Thank God, I'm pretty lucky. 

Familiar tune, strange new meter.  I hear it, I just can't quite dance to it yet.  Past cycles have brought to the melody rhythms like... a Texas two-step - simple, fun... a strenuous yet rewarding jitterbug... a fast, rim-shot laden march... Today, things feel like they're slipping into a hazy waltz, stiff brushes on a rough snare, not brisk but moving ahead, just in front of the beat.  In six more years, I may look back and laugh at such a notion.  Who knows what the band leader has in store?  It's early in the set.

But in six more years, I have a feeling I'll still be asking the same questions of myself in the middle of the night...

Maybe Life IS a Subway...

I have discovered a new talent in myself.  I am uncharacteristically well balanced on the train. 

I say uncharacteristically because having good balance isn't really a conclusion you might jump to about me.  I mean, it's not like I fall down a lot or anything; don't get the wrong idea.  But I was certainly never a gymnast or ice skater or dancer, much to my mother's dismay.  But I can vaguely remember not being terrible on the balance beam in the playground.  And I actually took to snow skiing quite well the few times I've gone.  Maybe it's my flat feet that keep me so grounded, or some scientific miracle in the distribution of my weight.  At least it serves some purpose.  At any rate... I rarely need to actually be a straphanger on the train.

If you're paying attention, really focusing, it's not hard to be able to stand in the middle of the train, not holding onto anything, and stay standing just fine.  It feels, I would imagine, kind of like surfing.  If you're focusing on the view or your phone or your daydreams, it's a bit harder.  I was thinking through this whole theory just the other day on a crowded train ride home.  I was deep in thought about the philosophical meaning behind this phenomenon when the train jerked to a quick stop, and I ended up embedded in the back of a trench coat standing in front of me.  I laughed to myself after apologizing and thought about how God was probably having a chuckle at me as well.  Here I am, thinking not just about the picture of my standing on my own two feet in the midst of a crowd and keeping balance without help just fine, and then the brakes screech and smack.

Oh, I so would have opened a Sunday school lesson with that thought just mere years ago.

Pages...

The anticipation of possible new readership here at the blog caused me to go back to the archives and nose around, doublechecking just what I might have agreed to reveal when inviting a new spectator.  I used to talk a lot about things I no longer do, like God and the Church and what I might believe.  It's odd, how much I use to talk about these things and how seldom it crosses the radar now.  As I sit here at my desk, I'm surrounded by books, Bibles, hymnals that used to mean something to me.  They strike me the same now as it would if it were stacks of coloring books and first readers and maybe high school yearbooks that were piled around. 

There's a copy of The Lord of the Flies sitting within arm's reach, full of highlighting and paper clips and notes from senior English in high school.  I remember that book being the topic of a major project that seemed to take up months of that last year, and we discussed the ins and outs of every metaphor and twist of that story until I felt there was nothing more to glean from it than what we had.  We had stripped every ounce of meaning from that book and laid it to rest on a mess of note cards and posterboards, presenting a eulogy of essays and speeches to forever end our fight with this book that stood in the way of our own commencements. 

I remember very little of the story and I have no desire to ever read it again.

And as I am reminded, in reading old posts, of the stories that have laced my experience over the past several years, I wonder if I will ever have a true desire to return to those either.  Someone close to me just finished reading Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christian trilogy and wants to discuss it, but I've confessed that there's not much about these books, so life-changing on first read, so I thought, that I can remember.  It's hard to return to the place I was when I read them - the people and circumstances that surrounded me at the time are far in the distance now, and where some of them deserve a thousand returns, some don't and won't receive even one.  And thus it's hard to return to the stories of that time either. 

It's a struggle I've had for years now - how do I return to everything I loved about God without returning to everything I hated about how he seemed to be manifested in the world?  How do I find answers to my own questions, when I'm my own devil's advocate?  How do I read these stories fresh and new with no bad memories attached?  I do I exchange cynicism for optimism? 

And now that I've lived for a bit in this state of pause, how do I hit play?  Things won't start back where I left off.  And if they did... I'd probably hit stop/eject next time. 

Yes, I WOULD Like Some Cheese With It... Wise Guy...

I'm tired.

I'm sick of living on food that barely qualifies as food.  Coffee and muffins aren't really food.

I don't like only riding the train before and after dark.  That's on the same day.  You got that.

I must be getting pretty comfortable around here, because I've finally started offending people.  Nothing major, just general, conversational foot-in-mouth stuff.  That new-kid, spit-polish shine is wearing thin.  The Weedle-ness is starting to break through.  Not all in a bad way, though. 

The Weedle-ness is part of what's making me tired.  A good tired.  The kind of tired that reminds me of the "let's go to the middle of some cowfields, open up our magic box, and create an extension of the Coffee Kingdom in a couple weeks' time" days.  Fulfilling tired.

"Why don't you just work your eight hours and go home?" someone asked me today.  Fair enough question.  Can't whine much about working too much if no one's making me, right?

It's Weedle.  Weedle's making me.  Weedle's making me stay until it's all done, and not just done, but done right.  Done to Weedle standards.

Weedle can be a real slave-driver.

And, yeah, maybe all the tired is making Weedle filter things less.  Hence the mild offensiveness. 

Weedle's sorry, like she said.

But Weedle just signed her second year lease yesterday.  Jess signed the first one, but she let Weedle sign this one. 

So get used to it, Weedle says.  I ain't going anywhere.

Except to bed.  I'm tired. 

It Was Neither Pink Nor Berry-like...

There's a new addiction in town.

You might have seen this company on commercials for American Express's new "Plum Card," or maybe on a recent west coast vacation you've happened by one of their very colorful, hip, and plastic locations.  Wikipedia, I heart thee, because you've supplied me with a new term that I intend to work into conversation as soon as possible - "Crackberry" - which is apparently how hard-core Pinkberry frozen yogurt consumers refer to their drug of choice. 

They have three flavors - Original, Green Tea, and Coffee.

They all taste like key lime pie.

It's OK, since I like key lime pie, but had I known, I probably wouldn't have ordered it with Oreos on top.

What I like most about it is this, also from Wikipedia:

On October 16, 2007, the firm took in an $27.5M investment from Maveron, the venture fund founded by Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, to expand the firm's concept nationwide.

Just goes to show... all good things, especially addictions, come from one place.