Note: I wrote most of this on my Blackberry while walking home from work. Related note: what on earth is wrong with me?
I hate that jewelry companies have co-opted the word “timeless.” There are certain moments in my life that I’d like to call timeless, but I don’t mean “lasting forever” or “a sparkly way to tell her she means the world to you.” I mean that they have achieved exemption from the space-time continuum. These moments have allowed me to become unstuck. They’re not lasting (or fleeting, really) but they completely transcend the mathematical ways in which we measure experiences. They are moments, not minutes, if that makes sense.
I have been lucky enough to escape the bounds of time a handful of instances in my life. The instance I want to tell you about now happened last month. It was March, and though it was blustery in New York, it was springtime on the West Coast. I was driving across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco back to the East Bay, admiring the vast stretches of open space, the flat white roofs of buildings atop hills, the monstrous mechanical oil arms dipping into the sea. It was warm and we had the windows down, and I appreciated the weather in the way only an East Coaster can: back home that week it snowed, but out West my shoulders collected freckles from the sun.
“Colors and the Kids” by Cat Power was blasting from the speakers and that part came on where she belts, “I could stay here, become someone different/ I could stay here, become someone better.” It was then that the word “timeless” struck me, though I suppose I wouldn’t put it in those exact terms until later. There are other words that come to mind: defining, crystallized, revelatory. As Cat Power’s wail climaxed it hit me: I am going to move to San Francisco. I didn’t have a job yet and I didn’t have an apartment yet and every logical neuron in my body was screaming at me to stay in New York, but it was then that I just knew–something broke in me and I knew–that the next time I came back to San Francisco I wouldn’t leave again for a very long time.
“We came to writing at an earlier age, from an urge to release a scream that had stuck in our throats. Then we worked on our screams until we thought they were something someone might want to hear.”
- Stephen Elliott, Why I Write
- I got an apartment in San Francisco! It’s on 26th St. and Guerrero right in the heart of the Mission; close to the BART and Dolores Park, and a 25 minute commute to work. I’ll be living with a very nice 30-something Yahoo programmer so hopefully I’ll be able to up my nerd quotient even further.
- The internet on Monday was so amazing that it completely set the tone for the rest of the week. Between the Gizmodo iPhone 4 story (ARE BLOGGERS JOURNALISTS?!), the WSJ vs. NYT infighting, the #freetavi trending topic that Joe and I started and the Xanga-ridden chain of e-mails sent between Local staffers, Monday was one of the best days I’ve had in a long time. I had dinner with Seb and didn’t cry! Instead we talked about FTC blogging regulations for half the time. It felt good to feel so good, like my life finally (but quite suddenly) regained its composure.
- I wrote a lot this week. I compiled an epic post of middle school Xanga entries from the NYU Local staff, which was definitely one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever written for the site. I also wrote about NYU spammers and my clueless Comp Sci professor. I wrote a heartfelt goodbye post on NYU Local and when Lily e-mailed me a response to it, I broke into tears at work over how nice it was. I was linked to by two of my all-time favorite websites, The Awl and This Recording. I was so inspired by today’s installment of Stephen Elliott’s Rumpus newsletter that I @’d him to tell him so, and he @’d me back (and followed me!) to thank me. I told Joe I was proud of myself for being so brave on the internet this week. He said he was proud of me, too. I planned SF media world domination with Katie and started working on pitches for SF magazine/website columns. If this week were a movie, it’d be called “How Jessica Got Her Groove Back.”
- I finished school! I had my last final of my undergraduate career today, and it was laughably easy (“Do JPGs support animation?”). I graduate May 10th and I’ll be working until May 21. I leave New York on May 23rd for Pennsylvania, and I move to San Francisco on June 2nd. I spent so long being nervous that now I’ve crossed into excited. I can do this. And now that school is over, I have more time to focus on my writing, which has always been a more beneficial way of spending my time anyway. I want to pitch features to magazines and websites; I want to start working seriously on my essay anthology; I want to start my life as a writer and as an Adult and as a San Franciscan. I have a feeling, one that is beginning to spindle its way through my bloodstream, that everything will be okay. I am overwhelmed by that naivety characterized by young people poised to take their first big step into the “real world,” and it feels good.
The future is bright, and I got my sunscreen right here.
And reminds me of some of the reasons why I’m moving to this inspiring city in just five weeks.
San Francisco in 4K from Patrick Lawler on Vimeo.
I have this theory that every person in the world has a finite amount of love that they can ration out to those around them, depending on who they like the most. If someone we really, really love comes into our lives, we have to love someone else less in order to give that person their deserved helping of our love. I guess that’d be the downside. The upside is that when someone leaves our lives, we get to redistribute our love to people who may have been missing out on it while we were focusing it mostly on one person. My cat, for example, has been incredibly spoiled these past few weeks.
I saw Kick Ass last night and absolutely loved it. I’m a sucker for kitschy gore. I’m pretty positive now that video games do encourage people to act violently, because last night the movie inspired me to:
Keep reading…
I wrote this for an essay class last semester, but didn’t get around to posting it until now. The assignment was to reflect on a strong reaction you’ve had to another author’s writing. Sorry if it’s a little tl;dr.
“Good-bye to All That” by Joan Didion, the mandatory “this city has ruined me” essay that all New York writers inevitably produce, is a piece I’d composed in my head many times before realizing she had already penned it.
Written in 1967, the sentiments woven into this essay still resonate more than 40 years later, though maybe that’s because, as she writes, “One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.” Upon reading “Good-bye to All That” for the first time, I realized that many of my own essays had a similar spine, albeit with a contemporary twist: they were peppered with misanthropic indictments of the internet and the personal challenges I’d faced in coming to grips with the city, but somehow I always eventually stumbled upon the same point that Didion makes: to be young and disaffected in New York is perhaps the most unoriginal stance a writer can take, but in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, it’s also one of the most resonant.
When I was little I spent a lot of time in bookstores. Particularly after my parents’ divorce, which wasn’t messy as far as divorces go but was painful nonetheless, I saw bookstores as a place where my deep desire for solitude could be cultivated and–thankfully–go breezily unacknowledged. Bookstores are one of those few public places where nobody questions a person on their own. In restaurants or at movie theaters there’s something deeply shameful about being seen alone. If you have people in your life, why would you ever go to these venues without them? I discourage that kind of thinking, and I love going to movies alone, but it’s bookstores that I favor most because a person alone in a bookstore is a person who is okay with creating and living in their own tiny universe.
Yesterday I passed my colloquium, which means I’m just two projects and one final away from graduation. I staved off a lot of emotional messiness in order to properly prepare for my colloquium, and it all started to seep back last night. So, I decided to stay in and do things to cheer myself up. First I watched Let the Right One In, a Swedish vampire movie from 2008. It’s on Netflix Watch Instantly and I HIGHLY recommend it; it was creepy and beautiful and moving.
Next, after being inspired by Color Me Katie, I decided to Photoshop some new icons for my Macbook’s dock. Check out the results (click to enlarge):
Click here for instructions from Color Me Katie on how to make your own desktop icons.
