ping

having unfortunately laid this post to the wayside these past few months, it is with great pleasure that i once again take up the noble pen - so to speak - now.

it's funny...it's not that i've been extraordinarily busy.  i haven't saved any orphans, dug any wells, adopted any kittens, none of that no sirree.  when i think about the last few months, i see nothing but a haze of colors swooping by, a face or two here, an experience there (some super shitty, i can't lie, some so so so so sooo great), all wrapped up in just about the greatest most glorious summer days one could ever ask for.  truth be told, looking back over the ribbon of memories that constitutes what i remember of those days that have streamed passed, what sticks out most glaringly are those moments when i felt like i actually came up for air...there's a massive hole in the ribbon there, and there's just not much, except air, pure clean hey i'm alive air, and i'm breathing and i'm living, and all of that seems so very very good.

while i wasn't writing, i was keeping some notes on the things that i would have liked to have written about, so i'll take the liberty to share them, in no particular order, here:

- really, what the fuck is this thing called "Love", and why are white boys so short?
- full sleeve tattoos, how do i really feel about them?
- why is it that when i'm in a rush to get coffee on my way to work, there is inevitably a person of obviously lesser pressing issues taking their sweet dandy time ahead of me.  I PARTICULARLY hate when it's grungy skateboard dudes who are in their 30's.  two words for you, buddy: "fuck", and "you"
- sometimes i watch those "gotcha" tv shows on cheap cable tv networks at the gym and find myself feeling really really sorry for the jackass who stole the car while all 17 of the hidden cameras surrounding him catch every single painfully sleazy move.  man buddy, even i feel bad for you, is pretty much what i'm thinking when the cops catch up to him and his (or her, sorry - don't want to seem sexist) face is now broadcast in gyms from sea to shiny sea.  that is just sad, you dumbfuck.
- linden trees in Brooklyn in early summer smell so sweet.  i didn't know the word for "lipa" in English. my mom had to tell me and my grandmother makes one tasty tea out of those little white blossom suckers.
- FaceTime faces look absolutely fucking ridiculous.  it's mortifying.
- subway elevators smell so fucking rank.  who's in charge of Fabreezing the shit out of that shit??
- why do hand dryers always seem to run 10 seconds too short? seriously - "wtf"?
- a white line someone had chalked on a brick building on Broadway.  underneath, they had written, "this is where i draw the line"  ha!!

i may have mentioned this before, but there is a Crest WhiteStrips commercial that i find just too uncanny - as all the flashing pearly white start fading away, the pleasing, bodiless female announcer's voice says, real spunky, "When you open up to Life - Life opens up to you!"

if you weren't near blinded by the sparkle coming off that one, you should have been.

   

purpose

i woke up this morning looking forward to seeing my therapist who i haven't seen for months, because really, i've been feeling fine, but this time around i really needed to discuss my anger management issues when i realized that somewhere in last night's stupor, i lost my favorite sunglasses.  as i was thinking this in utter dismay, the strap broke off my favorite purse, which happened to already be on my shoulder.  staring at the busted buckle on the floor, the contents of my spilled purse all around it, i burst into tears, stuffed my wallet into a bag no bigger than it anyway, ran to the subway still in tears, and to my therapist's who took exactly no more than 45 minutes to tell me that i'm in a vicious destructive pattern that i will live my life out in and that i shall never get out of and that oh well at least i'll be happy when i'm with him again she's seen it a million times in her practice.  all that time i stared at her thinking really what the fuck i'm paying you and when i asked about the insane rage i often find myself in, she leaned forward and said, we all go there, *I* go there, nothing, and i mean nothing about why it comes up, what causes it, how can i preempt it, all those things, no, only - "forgive yourself, it's okaaaay!"  so i paid her not one but two copays, went back to Williamsburg, was so nauseated by life it made my Brazilian breakfast the worst thing i've ever eaten, went right back to Manhattan, tried to get jolly and find purpose in life with Natasha, it didn't come on a bench smelling like mothballs facing a church on 16th street, but lots of people did wave at us.  feeling utterly purposeless, i decided yoga by my place would do me good, so i headed back to Brooklyn only to find a message from my godmother who was very upset and waiting for me although i thought that was tomorrow, checked the yoga schedule, realized i was headed to the wrong studio, rode my bike frantically toward what i thought was the right but was just another wrong studio, finally went to completely the wrong one at the right time, but got there too late and was mat-spaced out, cried some more, rode my bike to Natasha's, sat and stared at the sky, the sky rained in my eye and the wind blew away my hair-tie, i checked the yoga schedule again and realized that really there had been a class by my place when I thought there had been a class way back when, flipped a coin, changed my mind, went back to another class at another studio, did Dragon Yoga for Babies for an hour and half with Jackie Chan's son, swam in my own sweat, found some center, thanked the Universe, almost fell into the street in front of a car on my now very weak legs, went back to Tasha's to get my bike, ate some fake chicken, listened to jazz, talked about Paris and this day one year from now, rode my bike back in the dark, felt the air on my skin, looked at pictures from when it all started and i looked so happy like hit me now and now i'm staring at my toothbrush which is on my desk and i'm thinking wow i am one disgustingly beyond-spoiled brat and you should never have too many days where you just don't do anything.  

the view, ground up:

Serbian, not Syrian

for those of you who don't know, i am so very very lucky to spend some of my time influencing the susceptible minds of today's fragile youth.  some days, i do it better than others, but oft times, i find that they actually have a lot more to teach me.

these last few weeks have been very busy.  i don't know why, but it seems that every spring of the last couple years has just been nearly tumultuous in terms of too much going on.  i wonder what spring was like for ladies in the Renaissance?  i bet they didn't have to worry about audits and sick buildings and getting the Loves of Their Lives to get it together and all sorts of other weird shit that one has to deal with today.  then again, who the fuck knows.  sometimes, i think life is kinda like your purse.  the bigger it is, the more shit you're going to shove in it, and it's certainly entirely up to you as to what kind of bag you want to trudge through life with.  mine seems to be busting my back these days, so my goal for the upcoming weeks is to clean out my bag(s), but now i digress.  as to ladies now and ladies in the Renaissance...well, at least we don't get shut up in isolation and fed bland food after being diagnosed with hysteria (although that might actually be a little later than the Renaissance, but you get my point) so there's a silver lining to everything, i suppose.

regardless, spring has come, and spring will soon be over.  Life is lovely...crap i almost said and it will soon be over, but really i don't mean that anymore than the valid truth that is a fundamental part of that statement meaning we really really better suck every bit of juice out of that sucker, but alright, i obviously need to turn this around, so yes, Life is and always will be lovely

i went to a lovely wedding a few days ago, of my lovely friend Jess, and her amazing husband, Brian.  readers of my post will know that Jess is hands down the most amazing colleague and stand-up friend that anyone could POSSIBLY ever ask for, and Brian - well, as far as i know, is pretttty dang funny, other than thinking that i look up to, or come from, terrorists.

some time ago, i had my students dissect "Pandora's Box" and this is the theme some of them came up with.  keep your bags light, Brian and Jess.

     

fast track, ex-press, no stops

the nyc subway is veritably its own study in top-notch Chekhovian drama and lessons from the Universe.  sometimes, i'd seriously like to pick out some randoms (folk) and have them spill it: what's your furrowed brow all about sister, what's worrying you bud, what's making you happy child, who do you love woman, who do you hate bro, what do you want man, where do you want to be darling, who do you wish you were sir, where are you coming from madame, oh, and most importantly, where are you going you fool????

sometimes, as i'm rushing to and fro, quick glimpses of something seemingly profound will hit me.  exiting the L on Lorimer platform, i looked up to see a woman in a white jacket in a Manhattan-bound train tightly grasping a pole, facing out the sliding-door window, head down, eyes closed, actually it looked rather peaceful...as the train screeched out of the station, i realized that woman had pain written all over her shut eyes, and she was crying, quite solidly.  next stop: Reality!

once, running down the stairs from the Downtown 4 to the Brooklyn-bound L, i saw a woman leading a young boy with long blonde hair like a girl, clutching and waving a white stick in front of him.  for a moment, i was so very deeply struck by this touching scene of what i thought was a young blind child in this wild morning crowd, when i realized...it was only a hockey stick. asshole!

upon exiting a particularly frightening 3 train heading home from the west side, i saw a...bum...clutching his head, large splattered drops of bright red blood strewn all about him on the dark subway floor like rose petals.  i ran away quickly to the ever-so-stressfully long underground transfer to the L at 6th avenue, and what do you imagine could possibly be waiting for me there?  rose petals, real ones, bright and red, strewn about my feet like large red splattered drops of blood: hey you, you're a star!

i can't seem to figure it all out, today and tomorrow, everything, him, him, everything, on a veranda overlooking a bay in Jamaica, me, but better, nowhere, and hopefully not straight to hell.

this is rush hour on a bridge.  there's life on that side, and life on this.  it might look like it's not moving, but right now, it is.  this is a standstill on a bridge.  there's life on this side, and life on that.  it might look like it's moving, but right now it's not.

blues and garbage

this morning, on the way out of my current homestead, i heard the most amazing, unexpected tunes floating up my block.  it was the blues (!), classy, classic, with a sort of contemporary deep house-y twist; really just mind-blowing and perfect and i wondered who in God's name was letting loose with such perfection this early in a daylight savings morn on my block.  i appreciate where i live, but usually the tunes blasting that early are the random reggaetons blasting out of souped-up wheels and tinted windows that i inadvertently start salsachachachaing to as they whiz by.  but, no...the blues.

it's morning, it's glorious, i'm in a touch of a bad mood because it's daylight savings and i can't even write to anyone to complain about the useless strain it puts on my life for the good week or so that it takes for my circadian rhythms to get shit back in tock (i mean, who could i write to?? God?  the UN??) - and oh, that, plus i'm STILL trying to figure out LOVE and you know what, it might really just involve another four letter word that doesn't even have an e or a v or an o or an l in it, so there i am all grumpysville and here comes the blues: goooooood.  morning.  

as i trip-putzed down the block at 750 which actually should have been 650 therein i still actually would have been sleeping had it only been yesterday, the source of these fantastical tunes gradually came into focus: a new york city department of sanitation......garbage truck.  yup, there they were, those men in green or orange, i can't even remember anymore, scurrying around the back of their truck, muscles a-bulging, bags a-heaving, crewcuts all over the place, scooping up my trash from all of last week that i finally got around to disposing of, and from the open doors of the truck's cab: THE SEXIEST MOTHER FUCKING BLUES TO EVER TOUCH MY SOUL

what the fuck.  seriously.    

shades of grey

every once in a while, i find that i've left a draft out in the open on this site, accidently clicked "publish" and not "save", so that months later, i'll come back and be mortified that my readers have been privy to my half-thoughts.  shame on them.  it's like watching someone with their skirt tucked into their panty hose for the length of a subway ride and not saying anything.

i won't comment on my various states of mind at those moments when all buttons - "publish", "save", "preview" and "close" - are all the exact same, and i mean all, but that reminds me of a time i worked for a spell at a hospital in the summers between semesters while at school...

i was supposed to be scheduling appointments and checking ill-folk in to the prime care clinic, but really i was usually just juggling my time between being bored to EXTREME, sick-stomach inducing agony OR stalking handsome young residents and learning their schedules so as to conveniently run into them on their lunch in the hospital caf, but that's obviously another story

anyhow, on one particularly slow day, i typed a poem out to some of the girls who worked with me.  i remember mentioning fat - fat on my own body and certain, specific others; i made fun of jerk-ass patients and waxed more than poetic on the physical attributes of some of the doctors and turned less than Shakespearian sonnetarian on some of the nurses...i remember sending that email to "all" and by all i meant the "all" on the list of recipients i had typed in, but as i sat there with the orange cursor on the small black screen blinking back at me for a very long time (it was the late 90's - no ipad in sight) before the home screen reappeared, i should have known something was up.

after sending the email on that fateful day, i went down to aforementioned caf to see if i could ever-so serendipitously run into a certain young Doctor Tellman, when instead, i ran into a girl i kinda knew from xray at the pudding bar, who, when she saw me, simply said, "I GOT YOUR EMAIL"

mortified, i ran back to my desk, trying my best to remain calm throughout the rest of the morning's duties pull this chart, cancel that appointment, when, lo, the clinic administrator called me to her office.  to make a REALLY long and terribly bed-wetting story short, it turned out that by "all", everyone in the hospital's five county network had received my ode to cellulose that afternoon.  everyone, including the board of trustees, the hot docs in ER, the president, probably even the fucking candy stripers.

the clinic admin was really a terrifying woman with short brown hair who took her job super seriously and she made it clear that she could fire me but wouldn't and sent me off telling me never to touch the computer again.

sometimes when i feel i've really messed up on something, i remember the feeling i had back then on that day when my blood ran cold and i figure, well, at least i'm not emailing everyone in five counties, AND i have a Brita.  that's a lot more than i can say for, i dunno, say, 884 million other fellow citizens around the globe.  imagine that.

agapi mou

names are so powerful.  i struggle with my own sometime, since so many people have a problem saying it, but have you ever noticed how most people's name seem to fit them just so?  it's like your friend Tom just couldn't possibly be a John or John a Tom or back to vice versa.  imagine your friend Abhicandra as a Louis or Melania as Jane or Mary Beth as Lahnny?  not right, right?

there are some names that are truly magic to me.  magic.  i see the name, be it in my mind, or flashing across the screen of my phone to alert me to a message gloriously sent to me by the person of the name in question, or randomly on some sign, street name or billboard, or maybe i run into someone else who i barely know but who has the same name, and a ZING truly shoots straight through my heart and somewhere out into the universe to Them, to that real piece of magic.  magic.  it's like all those simple consonants and vowels all come together into a visual fairydust cupcake that bears all the fruits of what you LOVE and LOATHE most in a mere mortal, all in one or two or three consonants.  that's-what-life-is-all-a-bout.  there's seven, and they seem to make perfect sense.

there is magic all around you, if i do say so myself.