When I was 20 years old I was young enough to believe that it was still possible to invent new ways to love, ways which no one else in history had conceived of before. Lying in bed with my Macbook at night, “long distance” seemed like a concept that had lost its definitional punch. What was distance but a physical longing, one that we could now abate by a simple click of the keyboard? When I was 20 I had more faith in Skype than I did in neck kisses.
In the beginning long distance was easy: our veins lay out quietly like cables beneath the sea, transcontinental passages for messages to strike through. I woke up as he was coming home from work, our internal clocks ticking in mismatched rhythms, and we were happy every day. We sang Joy Division together on the telephone. “My mother thinks that you are pretty, too pretty for me,” he said, “and that this will surely end badly.” But he had the softest hands!
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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.
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.
Please feel free to skip this if you (understandably) don’t give a shit about my life and you just want to watch YouTube videos or read about journalism or somethin’. I don’t really want to make a Heartbreak Soup #2, so you’ll have to bear with me while I work this stuff out.
While I adored the book, I thought LOTR director Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lovely Bones skewed too far cheap thriller for me to actually ever pay to see. Unfortunately the trailer appeared before every movie I went to see last semester, as well as every episode of “The Real World: DC” that I consumed. There was always one quote that kind of got to me, despite my general abhorrence for the film itself. While trying to parse the line between life and death, Susie Salmon’s younger brother points to a cerulean space drawn between the earth and the sky and says, “Susie’s in the in-between!”
For the last 10 days, I myself have been living in the in-between, teetering somewhere between life and death. During the days, I force myself to live. This takes a lot of effort, because at night I basically allow myself to die. In the mornings I wake up and drink coffee, I go to work and answer e-mails and do homework and take the subway. Sometimes I even eat. At night, I lie in the dark and I cry until I’m exhausted. I will time to move faster, but then realize that it doesn’t matter—when I wake up the next day I will feel the exact same way: empty.
I am alone again.
Manhattan is one of the most densely populated places on earth, with over 71,000 people per square mile in a 26 square mile radius. This sloppy, crowded mess of a city becomes most evident if you’re ever caught near Herald Square or Penn Station during rush hour. In those places, at those times, the desire to jump in front of a cab may rise in you so swiftly, so violently, that you may wonder how you’ve made it so long in a chaotic place such as this one. According to Empire State of Mind by Jay-Z (a song real NYers pretend to hate but secretly love), New York is:
- A concrete jungle where dreams are made of;
- A manic coke fiend that encourages the use of prescription sleeping pills (the city never sleep, better slip you an Ambien);
But most importantly, NYC is:
- A pity, half of y’all won’t make it.
I did not make it, or am in the process of not making it, and one of the outstanding factors that contributed to my failure to ‘make it’ is the density issue. For instance, it would be quite nice to not get jostled and elbowed every time I walked down the sidewalk.
In cities with space, there is not a line to get out of the subway station.
In cities with space, there is not a 50% chance you will end your commute with a fresh new bruise.
In cities with space, the following annoying sidewalk inhabitants do not impact your ability to move in any crucial way:
- Gaggles of chatty teen girls flirting with baby-faced boys weighed down by North Face backpacks.
- Tourists flanked by other tourists flanked by other tourists, stretching five-wide across the sidewalk, paused, while the one in sunglasses studies a map.
- People who move slowly because they have to: children and the elderly, primarily. Mandatory slow-movers are the worst, because you can’t really make a scene about how slowly they’re moving without being an unsympathetic asshole. But still, must they walk down the direct center of the sidewalk?!?
- Drunken bros in backwards caps and Yankees T’s trying to figure out which bar out of the ten bars on the block will have the most “grade A pussy.”
- People from chill places on the West Coast who don’t understand the importance of urgency (or of themselves).
Because of these people, and the sheer lack of space New York offers (my apartment is close to the size of the elevator at my job, for instance), you have to become incredibly adept at weaving. Weaving is one of the first things I picked up when I moved to New York four years ago. Even though I am chronically early to everything, I operate under the basic assumption that I am going to be incredibly late. This means that I rush everywhere, and usually end up getting to places 20 minutes early only to sit in the lobby/outside wishing I’d taken my sweet time. However, I could not rush if I didn’t learn how to weave. Dodging on tippy toe, I scan the crowd ahead of me for any of the people above so that I can plan my attack a half-block early. Dip to the right to avoid the stroller, swerve to the left because I don’t want a flyer with coupons for pizza. Muttering under my breath all the way about how much I hate New York, I eventually make it to my destination unscathed, annoyed and freakishly early.
When I move to the Bay Area, I will miss the skill that proper weaving requires. I’m sure I’ll get to use my weaving abilities should I ever find myself near popular BART stations around rush hour, but the urgency will not be the same. I will still be freakishly early to everything, but at least I won’t be so covered in elbow-shaped bruises.
Aspiring to write on the internet is like aspiring to shred on Guitar Hero. The best part of both is wearing your pajamas. The worst part is the tense shoulders.
-JoeCo, All the “Sad” Young Aspiring Media Careers: The Kids Are Apparently Just Fine
Since I was just an angsty lil’ teen, punctuating the drum beats of Dave Matthews Band songs with the furious slamming of my bedroom door, I’ve craved a little white box just like this one. Whether it’s because I am inherently a narcissist, inherently over-analytical, or inherently both, I’ve always needed a space to work shit out. Sometimes it was in Harriet the Spy-esque notebooks with “Keep Out (that means YOU, Mom and Dad!),” stickers on them. But mostly the rhythmic turbulence of my life has been confined to places like Xanga, Livejournal, Blogger and WordPress–I’ve had a blog on each service, at one time or another–sometimes private, but mostly public because of that whole “need to connect in a human way” thing. I’m terrible at doing that in person. I’m fumbly and shy. Here I am those things too, only less dramatically so.
So with the shuttering of J&J, my blogging home for the past two years, I’ve decided to launch this website, designed by my incredibly talented roommate David Aragon, as the new space for my mostly-jumbled-but-occasionally-valuable thoughts on media, feminism and–yes–being young in New York (or at least the East Village).
So I hope you have your earnestness hat with you, because I’m a millennial, so all I want to do is drool over rainbows and cupcakes. Join me!