A Decade

Manfriend has returned to life!  The weeks preceding his arrival were filled with imaginings of the moment he'd appear.  As he drove away in July, I was relieved that I would never be so far away from him as I was at that moment - the last glimpse of his shaved head over the leather in the Volvo had passed.  Each minute after that was bringing us back together, which felt comforting.  I savored the idea of my alone time with New York, always finding new things to explore and love, always with the backdrop of Manfriend to color my days.  But then the moment arrived - I peeked  my head out of my apartment building - but felt more trepidation than excitement.  This was the first time in our decade of dating that we'd spent so much time apart.  Would it still feel the same? 

In truth it was very much, those first few hours, like Quentin Compson had come to stay.  Not in the suicidal-in-love-with-one's-sister kind of way, but more in the you've-lived-so-long-in-only-my-mind-and-words-and-now-you're-really-here-and-want...wanton soup?!  It took a solid 24 hours for the desire to poke him to subside (think kindergarten, not Great Britain) just to be sure he was really there.  What does one do when confronted with so many new feelings, many of them confusing about one's soon-to-be-husband?  Drink wine, of course, and lots of it! 

  We ventured up to the Hudson Valley to try some wine.  Mother would have been proud of all the local farm folk we met and sponsored.  Most of the wine was underwhelming at best, save a few gems.  Benmarl had a view that must have assured the colonials that yes, they had found paradise in the new world, and a deep, musty wine cellar in which to bury one's drunken enemies.

We also stumbled upon a distillery that looked much like what one would look like were Dad to turn our pole barn into a moonshine still.  I loved the mud and the barn cats - Manfriend loved the whiskey. 

All of the nostalgia I feel while on the East Coast solidified that I had made the right choice in returning home.  Nothing out west easily allowed me to feel connected to my family and the kind of person I want to be - in every changing leaf I project the way our children will be raised, what our home will look like, and how Manfriend and I will ring in the next celebration of another decade together.  It's impossible to take the luxury of future plans for granted - reminders abound in the Empire State. 

The World is Getting Smaller

In a new attempt to both avoid becoming my father and also keep my brain young I have recently learned some new things and joined the 2010 online community.  The first dabble was the blog, but I've now traded in my archaic phone with a shiny, new BlackBerry and gone a little technologically crazy.  Within one day, I've now joined Tumblr, FourSquare, and added all kinds of fashion and political blogs to the blogs I follow.  Upon checking into a local coffee shop this morning, I was immediately reconnected with an LA rowing friend of mine - the world got smaller!  Will I have time to keep up with all of these things?  That remains to be seen...

Today was a welcome peek into what I used to believe being a normal, real-live adult would be like.  All day, as I loved on my city, I wanted to stop every other person on the street, desperately inquiring, "And what do you do?  Can I do that so that I, too, can wander the city, or brood importantly in this lovely coffee shop?"  Roommate and I went out last night, ate, danced, were insulted (more on that later) and came home after midnight.  This morning I had leisurely coffee, a bagel, read part of a real book, hung out with some lovely students, and read up on friends, fashion, and politics.  This isn't to say that there aren't bits of all of those things peppered into my teaching days, but the fact I continue to combat is simple:  I have a job where I teach students every day, beginning at 7:15 AM and ending at 5:30PM.  Don't get me wrong - I do love my job, and am reminded in little, every day things that I teach for a reason.  I cannot stop the connection  my brain immediately makes when reading about a delicious pumpkin cinnamon roll recipe that without the ability to sound out multi-syllabic, closed syllable words like pumpkin, my students may not ever have the cultural or literal capital to enjoy some of life's little luxuries.  So yup, I love the job and know why.  But then it's 4:40AM and my alarm clock is going off, and I yearn for a 9-5 gig.  Working from a small coffee shop seems so attractive.  How to squeeze it all in?  Is technology a piece of the time-stretching I seek?

And now back to the insults last night - Roommate, Neighbor and I, as stated, enjoyed a dinner that ideally would have taken hours upon hours to be able to savor every truffle-filled bite at Sojourn in the Upper East Side, and then headed to FB Lounge for some Latin jazz.  I learned so many things (like a motherf*@#ing adult) about my terrible dancing skills, how little I understand any form of jazz, and why the trombone is a really great instrument.  But then an older (not old, just older) man came up to the mic to do a series of spoken word pieces.  Usually I find spoken word forced and pretentious at best.  I loved it in the Mos Def DefJam Poetry days, and some artists are still able to manipulate language and make connections that instill some awe, but now the tenor and syntax and long... drawn... out... pauses to illustrate my....... brilliance is a bit too much.  This particular series, however, brought too much to a whole new level.  Why, oh why did this man decide that a room filled mostly with women needed to hear a piece informing us that as women we trap, manipulate, and stifle the men in our lives through our very presence in theirs?  Why, oh why was it necessary to then read an entire piece entitled "Spic" in a Latin-inspired establishment?  Why, oh why did the jazz drummer then need to follow up said verbal excrement with a short lecture about the importance of the poet himself, as though like jazz, I was a bit too uncultured to really "get it?"  Why, oh why, oh why did Neighbor's Friend (white, male, and wearing the kind of glasses that state "I take myself so seriously that I assume that you don't realize that I am just trying to look ironic") sitting to my immediate right THEN feel the need to let the rest of our table, clearly upset by both the letter and nature of said pieces, inform us that he "really wants to hear what we thought, just not right now?" 

What better way to end that kind of an evening?  By eating most of a pint of Roommate's Ben and Jerry's ice cream, of course.

Late (or early?) Beginnings

It's a very foreign idea to me - this blogging business.  I have lovely friends, many of whom Tweet, sign in on FourSquare, and also blog.  I had been considering beginning a blog, usually in times of great vocational distress, dreaming of becoming one of those possibly fictitious bloggers who have become well-read enough to blog for a living.  I imagine myself, waking up leisurely in my Manhattan apartment, enjoying coffee slowly, feeling the excitement but luxurious lack of urgency in my day, pulling out my laptop and spilling my thoughts out onto the world.  The bibliophile in me, however, was always taught that to write for public consumption was to perceive greatness in oneself, which makes me nervous.  I find some solace in the fact that particularly with the great mass amounts of mediums for friends to stalk friends, strangers to judge strangers, and Martha Stewart to bombard my inbox with a paralyzing number of ways I am currently not improving my life but should be, that not even my mother will actually read this.

My general hope is that this blog will simply allow me an outlet for the millions of thoughts that bombard my brain every minute.  I've always had an intense feeling of trepidation about the passing of time.  As a young child, growing up on a farm (hence the name) always meant that to sit still was to waste time that could be spent working.  I hoped that if I just noticed enough, paid enough attention to the details of every day, that I could, in fact, slow time.  As a fake adult I'm not as convinced as I used to be that that is the case, but I do think that noticing the details, taking the time to (cheesey as it sounds) seize the day will allow for a richer, slower passing of time. 

I start with all of that to say that my vision is to use this blog to publicly bookmark for myself ways that I can better take advantage of my time while I live in, in my humble opinion (and the opinion of its almost 19,000,000 inhabitants) the greatest city in the world.  (Trust me, it's true!)  Again, as that small, time-slowing child on the farm I always dreamed of being in New York.  Teach for America brought me to Las Vegas for 2 year after college, which was a lovely adventure for a time.  The love of a man brought me kicking and screaming to Los Angeles for another 3, but I came to visit my brilliant sister, who was studying at Manhattan College in the Bronx every possible second I could.  The plane rides back west were always dreadful, as though I was living my life just to get back.  And now I've been one of the lucky nineteen million to be able to call New York City my home for a full year - and I feel I'm missing a bit.  I have a job I believe in as a teacher in Brownsville, and that consumes so much of my time and energy, but there is always room for more. 

In the spirit of no longer wasting time, around 2AM I was turning restlessley, unable to return to sleep and decided - why not?  No time like the present!  So I got up, got some water, organized my closet, and started my blog!  Hey, if my middle school academics can do it, I'm up for the challenge.