25 and Familiar Things

No one rides the buses in New York City unless they have to.  The subway takes a quarter of the time and is generally more reliable.  But I kind of love the buses.  I like the back right corner seat the most, especially when the back half of the bus is elevated so I can see out the window.  I like that it never makes me feel claustrophobic and no one’s ever yelling on the loud speaker to “stand clear of the closing doors.”  I like that the people who take the bus aren’t in such a hurry.  I’m on the 104 bus, heading south, because the train isn’t stopping at my station this weekend.  But we passed the next train station, and I’m still on the bus.  I think the 104 goes all the way to Times Square.  I guess we’ll see.  

I turned 25 a couple of weeks ago.  25 doesn’t seem like a possible age to associate myself with, and I’m sure it’ll take the next ten or eleven months before I get used to saying it.  25 means the last year I can be on my mom’s insurance, the year I’ll find a real job (hopefully one that gives me my own insurance), and when I’ll have to start paying back student loans.  But all of those only make 25 feel daunting.  It’s better to think that 25 is the year I’ll graduate, the year I’ll finish my thesis, the year that I’ll leave New York for somewhere new, or somewhere warm, or somewhere familiar.  

I’ve been craving familiar things.  I went to DC a few weekends ago to visit my best friend from college who I hadn’t seen in too long.  The best friendships are the ones where you can eat Thai curry on the couch in sweat pants while watching X-Men, and it doesn’t matter that you haven’t seen each other in a year and a half.  I visited a couple of museums while I was in DC, but I couldn’t make myself care about them.  I only cared about coffee shop conversations and visiting my friend and his family.  And I was reminded again that I’ve put myself in a position to always be far away from people I care about.  

On the bus back to NYC, I saw a horrific wreck that put me in a weird mood.  There was an incessant beeping noise that persisted for all 5 hours, and I tried to sleep in a position that set my whole spine and rib cage on fire.  I got home to my empty apartment, my Halloween pumpkin on the table with mold in his smile, and I wanted to turn around and get right back on the bus.  

I saw my favorite poet read a few nights later, and he made me miss home and New Orleans and possums and pancakes.  

One of my oldest friends came to visit last week.  He arrived in the evening and had to catch his bus back just after midnight, but it was nice to see an old friend even thought it was only for a few hours.  I brought him to get his first slice of New York pizza and a Magnolia Bakery cupcake, then took him to see the new World Trade Center, even though it was too rainy to see the top.  He kept offering his seat to women and children on the subway, kept running to open doors for people, kept saying ma’am and sir, and it made me feel far away from home and glad that I have some life-long friendships that distance doesn’t diminish. 

My best friend from college came to visit the next night.  We got bagels and coffee in the morning, like we have a thousand other mornings in settings that weren’t this one, and even though I no longer eat bagels or drink coffee, it felt right.  We went to the Museum of Modern Art, which I’d never been to, and I had the experience I’ve had in museums in New York, Rome, Florence, and Madrid— the experience of having to remind myself that even though I’ve seen these paintings hundreds of times in my life, this time it’s real.  This is the time it counts.  

That night my Columbia friends came over to celebrate my birthday.  My roommate baked a cake and everyone brought snacks and drinks.  The last birthday party I had was my 18th— it was small, with a few high school friends, and we ate pizza, drank Powerade slushes, and watched Aladdin.  Seven years later, I’m in a city I never though I’d live in with an apartment full of people I’ve only met in the last year and a half, people that have made me happy to be here even when NYC has tried its hardest not to let me be.  

I like finding familiar things in the new ones, and I like letting what’s familiar be new again.  

Autumn

Somehow, October happened.

They turned on the heat in my apartment building, and it sounded like someone trying to break in with a corkscrew.  The colors bled out of the leaves upstate and are still trickling down the East Coast.

I kept meaning to write about things.  Like riding the camel in the Bronx Zoo, and visiting Coney Island.  I meant to write about apple picking-- how I couldn't let a 6th year of living in the northeast go buy without picking an apple.  So I gathered six friends and we rented a car and drove to Warwick,  and the road turned into a two-lane trail up the mountains, and I'm not sure I'd ever seen autumn so beautiful.  We picked Empire and Macintosh at the orchard, then went downtown to the annual Apple Festival, which was like a cross between the Franklinton Fair and the Picayune Street Fair, and it made me happy to be here and miss home at the same time.

I meant to write about thesis semester.  And how half the time if feels like a battle through the doubt that plants itself firmly in my head and asks questions like, "Why bother writing this?  Who really cares?  How many people are you in danger of hurting/offending if they ever see it?  How conceited do you have to be to write a memoir?  Oh, and also, do you even think your writing will ever be any good?"  And I respond with a lot of quiet blinking, because doubt is reasonable and full of excellent questions.  But I've got only a few months to go and a book-length manuscript to finish, and so I try to ignore him.

Last night was Halloween.  I'm not sure I've ever seen a more fascinating thing than the NYC subway on Halloween night.  I rode to 72nd street to buy a couple of the best cookies ever created by human hands, and when I emerged from the subway, I saw fireworks through the buildings in the direction of Central Park.  They were because of the NYC marathon, apparently, but I didn't know that at the time.  Never, in the year and a half I've lived here, have I ever seen everyone look so happy.  The kids were screaming, clapping, like it was a firework show at Disney World instead of barely glimpsed lights through building gaps.  The adults stopped on the sidewalk and took pictures with their cellphones, awe on their faces, as if they'd never seen fireworks before.

I joined the herd of trick-or-treaters and walked to the park to see the end of the show, passing dozens of shops and restaurants giving out candy from their doorsteps.  Entire families were dressed up instead of just the kids.  And I kept thinking, maybe somehow I've missed this before.  Maybe this is part of what people love about this city, and I couldn't see it until now.  Or maybe it's just that mysterious and magical things happen on Halloween.

The magic was gone in the morning.  The subway was closed at my stop, and I had to wait in the rain to take a shuttle full of angry and belligerent people who were offended that my suitcase took up floor space.  The trains were delayed, so I had to pay to take a taxi to the bus, which I was 4 minutes from missing.  But I wonder if the magic is still somewhere here, hidden for the people who know how to find it.

I'm on the bus now, to see a friend I haven't seen in too long.  Below the Mason Dixon, the trees are still bleeding.

A letter to John Green

Dear John, 

A little over 9 years ago, you received an email from a 15-year-old girl who’d happened upon Looking for Alaska on the new release shelf of the YA section in Barnes and Noble.  The book had been published a month or two earlier. There was no Michael L. Printz award sticker on the cover yet, and no one knew your name.  But she liked the candle picture, and the jacket summary said it was about students at a boarding school (for which she had something of an obsession), so she bought it.  She read the book, then wanted simultaneously to share it with everyone in the world, and to hide it.  For a long time she hoarded it, feeling like it was a secret that belonged only to her.  She wrote you an email - a nervous 15-year-old’s attempt at telling you what your book meant to her.  (She will spare the the details of said email now, as it’s rather humiliating and probably should have been discarded immediately.)  You didn’t discard it.  You graciously wrote her back, telling her that she made your day.  She treasures the response, still. 

At 15-years-old, she’d read many books that had impacted her, a handful of which even changed the way she thought about the world.  She’d read books that even now, at 24-years-old, are still the works of literature that influenced her the most.  But when she read Looking for Alaska, she didn’t know how to articulate that this was the first time she’d ever read a book that made her feel desperate to have written it herself, a book that said all of the things she hadn’t even realized she wanted to say.  Because she was 15, and she didn’t write words for strangers to read, and she didn’t know that wanting to be a writer was even a valid aspiration. 

She gradually started sharing the book with her closest friends, but only the ones she felt deserved it, still selfishly hoarding it while she could, until her friends started recommending it to their friends, and they recommended it to their friends, and all of a sudden, there were a handful of students at her high school who had read the book without her having been the one to recommend it.  And you wrote other books, and then you started the vlog with your brother, and your words started to no longer feel like they belonged to her.  

During her senior year of high school, she applied to many colleges she knew would not accept her.  In her personal statement, she used the Rabelais quote she first read in your book, “I go to seek a great perhaps,” and wrote about how she knew every reason the universities would have for not admitting her, and how she dared them to take a chance on her anyway.  One of them did.  She went to Brown University in the fall - the school she’d dreamed of going to, a dream that you indirectly helped come true.  She wanted to tell you that when she traveled to Boston to meet you at a release signing for your third book that October, but she felt too awkward and nervous.  She wants to tell you that, still. 

Nine years after I sent you that email, I’m a teaching assistant for a writing class at Duke TIP, where the students are obsessed with the fact that you were once a Tipster yourself.  Over the past nine years, you’ve become their most famous alumni, their role model, their hero.  When I asked my students on the first day of class to name their favorite author or book, 9 of the 18 named you.  Looking for Alaska is no longer the book of yours that everyone’s read.  The movie version of your latest book was released a couple of days before the student arrived, and it’s all they talked about for two weeks.  They wear t-shirt with quotes from your books and use acronyms to refer to them.  They obsessively follow you on all social media and quote you whenever possible.  Even my co-workers joined the hype, excited for the movie whether they’d read your books or not.  All of a sudden, you’re on all of the talk shows, a household name, the author whose books people know even if they haven’t read a book in years.  You’ve achieved this nearly mythological status in contemporary literature - a celebrity writer.  

I finally saw the movie this week.  It was sweet and too giggly and underwhelming, as I expected, and I couldn’t help but feel sad that now people may only know your novel in a diluted movie form.  I thought I would hate it when your books inevitably started becoming movies.  Part of me still does, but at the same time, I can’t help but be excited for you.  I’m not so selfish anymore.  Everyone deserves your words, and you deserve every ounce of praise you’re getting.  

Nine years after I wrote that email, 6 and 1/2 years after I wrote that personal statement, I graduated from Brown with honors in Literary Arts, with a concentration in fiction writing and a second major in English literature.  I’m about to start the last year of my MFA in creative writing at Columbia University.  It’s time you know that I have you, in part, to thank for it.  

Emergency Rooms, Surprise Visits, and One Year Down

            After battling through the last few weeks, I’m finally home in Mississippi.  I’d originally planned to spend the last couple of weeks of the semester finishing all of my classes and finals, celebrating the end of the year with my classmates, and spending the free days between my last final on the 9^th and my flight on the 13^th to take advantage of the (finally) warm(er) weather to check some things off of my Must-Do in New York List (the top of which was to visit the Bronx zoo and ride the camels).  But alas, things don’t always go quite as we plan. 

            It all started three weeks ago when I had the always pleasant experience of waking up unable to breath through my nose.  For the past 3 ½ months, ever since I returned to New York after winter break in January, I’ve had mysterious and ongoing sinus problems that no doctor has yet been able to explain (my current best guess is that I’m allergic to something in my apartment… but that’s a tale for another day), but I could tell this was different than the usual sinus issues.  What I believed to be a cold progressed from my nose to my ears, then throat, then a cough, and then a few days later, I woke up in the middle of the night shaking with chills so strong that even a 2:00 AM scalding shower didn’t stop them.  I had suspected my recently purchased thermometer was unreliable for several weeks since it kept telling me my temperature was in the low 97s, and my suspicions were confirmed earlier that week when I took my temperature three times in a row and got three different temperatures.  I gave it a try regardless – 98.6 – the highest the thermometer had ever measured, leaving me to believe that I probably didn’t want to know how high my fever actually was.  With the help of some Advil, the fever finally broke, but I had shaken so hard for so long that my entire torso felt like a truck had hit me squarely in the left side, and trying to take deep breaths felt a little like torture.  I visited Columbia’s health services the next morning, and the nurse told me he thought I had a viral respiratory infection, which meant no medicine for me.  Then followed several days of a lovely combination of fever, body aches, headaches, a strange sharp pain bellow my left collar bone, and stomach virus-type symptoms that resulted in me subsisting mainly off of frozen apple juice, blue Gatorade, Van’s crackers, and cinnamon raisin toast. 

By the end of the week, things were finally looking up.  I went a day or two without fever, the soreness in my back, ribs, and under my collarbone was feeling better, and I started craving the brown rice bowls from Community Food and Juice.  I even managed to go to one of my final classes on Thursday.  And then, that night, everything took a dramatic plummet. 

I went to bed on Thursday night and woke up just before 6:00 on Friday morning with a pain low on my left side and back worse than any pain I can ever remember experiencing in my life.  I sat up and immediately felt like I was being repeatedly stabbed.  Inhaling made it even more unbearable.  So, of course, I called my mother. 

“Something really bad’s happening!  It can’t be a muscle; it’s gotta be an organ or something,” I gasped at her, probably sending her blood pressure to dangerous levels.  “Which side is the appendix on!? Where’s the spleen!?” (We will look back on this conversation and laugh, though this will probably happen much sooner for me than for my mother.)  I then forced her to let me hang up so I could call the 24-hour clinician on duty at Columbia and ask what I should do. 

You might expect one of the best research universities in the world with one of the top medical programs in the country to have top-notch health services for its students.  You would be sadly mistaken.  After waiting on hold for twenty minutes, I finally spoke to a clinician who gave me the enlightening revelation that I was “experiencing severe symptoms” and should go to the emergency room. 

“Might you give me a hint as to what you think could be happening?” I asked him.

“I could only speculate,” he replied gravely. 

I called my mom and woke up one of my roommates to let them know I was going, then I set off for the ER, where the doctor told me she suspected it was a kidney stone.  By that point, the pain was nearly gone, and a kidney stone sounded like an obvious explanation that I should have thought of in the first place.  But after looking at the results of the urinalysis, she changed her mind, told me that there was no sign of a kidney stone, that it may have just been a strong muscle spasm, and instead focused on the fact that I was extremely dehydrated.  Both of my roommates, who had loyally arrived at the hospital shortly after I did, waited with me for the next three hours, during which the doctor gave me a mini-cup of apple juice and a graham cracker for the dehydration (the source of my craving for graham crackers which continued for the rest of the week), a “prescription” for ibuprofen, and discharged me with the diagnosis “lower back pain.”  By the time I’d walked the half block back to my apartment, the pain was already returning, this time in both my side and the spot bellow my collar bone, and my mom, who’d secretly been on her way to the airport since I told her I was going to the hospital, said, “Alright, I’m coming up there.”

My attempt to take a nap made it immediately apparent that lying down was impossible, so I made another visit to health services hoping to get something more useful than Advil.  The nurse practitioner I saw listened to the whole story, told me that she wouldn’t rule out a kidney stone even without anything showing up in the lab work, but that her first guess was something called costochondritis, which can happen after a viral infection and attacks the muscles and cartilage between the ribs.  (Further research still doesn’t have me quite convinced, but it was certainly a better explanation than a “muscle spasm.”)  She gave me a muscle relaxer that did basically nothing for the pain, but made me so tired that my eyes would cross when I tried to read, which tripled my misery.  My mom arrived only a few hours later, and I spent the rest of the day in a drugged stupor, eating graham crackers and frozen apple juice with a spoon, and unable to lie down or lean back without feeling like someone was ripping bones from my body.  I slept with about 6 pillows propping me completely upright. 

Gradually, things got better.  I had another fever spike the next day and the pain traveled farther up my rib cage and back, but that night, I was able to (mostly) lie down for the first time (though in only one very strategic position on my right side), and my appetite came back.  Then I started coughing again, which felt like ribs were being wrenched from my body, so I went back to health services for round three, and was told that in addition to the virus and costochondritis, I might have a “touch of” pneumonia or a sinus infection and given antibiotics. 

My mom valiantly spent the whole week with me, making me soup, helping me buy groceries, opening all the heavy doors, doing laundry, helping me pack up my room for the summer, and pretty much every task that required lifting things that weighed more than a pound and/or excessive movement.  Once I’d recovered enough to travel, she bought a return flight for the weekend and we changed my ticket to the same day so she could help me carry all of my luggage. 

After the weather delayed our flight so that we missed our connection and had to stay at a hotel in Houston, we finally made it home on Sunday morning.  Just a couple of nights ago, I was finally able to lie on my left side for the first time (though not comfortably and not for long), and coughing finally doesn’t feel like I’m horribly injuring myself.  I’ve become much more appreciative of lying down and deep breaths.  I’m thankful to my lovely roommates, who made me jello, bought me flowers, and made sure I had a constant supply of apple juice and Gatorade.  And I will be forever grateful to my mother for coming to the rescue. 

And so, I’ve completed half of grad school, though perhaps in a more dramatic and less celebratory fashion than I’d hoped.  Now I can at least look forward to riding the camels in August.  

Tourist Time

I’ve fallen short in my blogging efforts these last few weeks due largely to A) work, B) pre-spring break busyness, and C) spring break computer avoidance.  The week before spring break, my lovely friend Deenene came to stay with me.  For the final semester of her graduate program next spring, she’ll get to do an internship wherever she wants, and since she’d never been to New York, she decided to spend her spring break visiting to see if she wanted to apply for internships here.  You remember just how massive New York City is when you sit down with someone who’s never been here and try to come up with a 7 day itinerary to cram it all in.

It was also a reminder of all I still haven’t done, having bypassed most tourist attractions for the routine of school, work, cooking, and coffee shops.  Which isn’t to say I don’t like my routine.  I love cooking, and have no desire to eat out every meal.  But it’s a misfortune that I live in a city with some of the best restaurants in the country and have eaten at hardly any of them.  I love wandering aimlessly without an itinerary, but it means I’ve missed some of the best museums and exhibits in the world.  I save all the money I can, but as a result, I’ve seen exactly 1 Broadway show, and only 2 shows total (if you count Sleep No More as a show), and both of those were when visitors were staying with me and coerced me into splurging.  I haven’t been to the top of the Empire State Building or gone to the Statue of Liberty or been to all the museums.  I feel like those are things for visitors to do, and that maybe I’ll do them eventually. 

Deenene was the best kind of visitor, because she was excited about everything.  Everything.  She was as excited about a bargain skirt, the candy store, window shopping, and her mango and avocado yogurt at Chobani Soho as she was about the MET, the new Aladdin musical, the Empire State Building, and Times Square.  I was busy with work and school, so I experienced most of her New York exploration vicariously through texts filled with exclamation marks and pictures.  But I was free on Tuesday afternoon, when the temperature reached 60 for the first time this year.  The two of us met downtown to join the masses walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, after which we sat down for the traditional post-bridge-pizza at Grimaldi’s, neither of which I’d ever done before.  And though the bridge was so crowded that I kept almost getting hit by bicycles, and we agreed that Grimaldi's was far from the so-called “best pizza in New York” (or anywhere), it was well worth the experience.  Deenene’s inexhaustible enthusiasm reminded me that it’s worth the occasional splurge (of time and money) to make the most of being here.

 She left a few hours before I did on Thursday, with a bag of bagels to bring back to her family in Georgia, and the desire to come back to the city because she didn’t get enough of it in one visit.  I’m spoiled, because I have plenty of time left here, and maybe also deceived in believing that any amount of time here is plenty. 

Ice and birthday cards

Living in New York this winter has been a bit like living in the tundra, except the tundra has fewer sick and unhappy citizens.  I’ve been a victim of the polar vortex gloom myself.  I’ve been sick on and off for the past month, and I may be guilty of having watched the entire 4^th season of Breaking Bad because arctic conditions have provided me with an excuse to become a hermit. 

It’s remarkable how much difference 25 degrees and some sun can make for an entire city.  The temperature reached 40 for the first time a couple of days ago, which, at this point, felt nearly tropical.  Today it made it all the way to 50.  As a result, I accidentally walked 75 blocks, which I only realized just now.  The small ice mountains on the edges of the sidewalk crunch when you kick them, and I can finally see the concrete that’s been buried under snow in the alley behind my apartment.  I left my window open all day for the first time since last year. 

It’s 75 degrees at home, where my whole family just spent the weekend celebrating my grandfather’s birthday.  He turned 90 yesterday.  I’m not sure if it was the actual card I sent that thrilled him, or if it’s more that he was fascinated by the success and existence of the postal service.  But either way, I’m glad it made him smile.

A fun pastime is trying to imagine specific individuals being in New York.  My roommate’s grandmother is coming to visit in a few weeks.  She’s spent time in the city before and is excited to return to her favorite Jewish delis.  She’ll fly here alone, stay in a hotel nearby, and she and Sophie will do things like see Broadway matinees and have coffee and treats in cafes. 

I try to imagine my grandfather here, but it doesn’t work.  I can’t imagine him at a Broadway show, or on the subway, or eating New York pizza, or in a coffee shop.  I can’t even imagine him on a plane.  I think the farthest I’ve ever seen him from his house is two and a half hours away in Clinton, and that’s only happened twice.  It’s easy for me to forget the years he spent driving 18-wheelers around the country, and the ones before that he spent in the Pacific during World War II.  I like to think he’d like New York, at least for a little while, maybe even more than my card or the postal service.  But I like that after 90 years of life experience, it’s the small things like cards and cake and Jack’s fried fish that still make him so happy.

The sleet/snow is supposed to start again tonight, and tomorrow it’s back to the 30s.  The library wouldn’t let me check out the 5^th season of Breaking Bad, and my computer refuses to play Netflix.  I wish I could be in the 75 degrees with my family for Mardi Gras so we could eat Paul’s Pastry King Cake and I could go to Sam’s Endymion party.  But today was beautiful, and I bought some walnuts, and last night I made marinara and came up with a new recipe for the best turkey meatballs that ever existed, and a new restaurant just opened around the corner that has tasty vanilla mint rooibos tea, and we can keep letting the small things make us happy. 

113th Street

I wrote this for a class last semester.  We were supposed to write about coming to New York, and our relationship with the city in comparison to another city we know well.  I've since been home for five weeks and come back, but this still feels relevant. 

            I saw New York City and Providence for the first time during the same week.  It was the summer before my senior year of high school, and my parents and I drove up the East Coast to visit Boston University.  It was the first time I’d ever been north of the Mason Dixon.  On the way, I made the shy request that we stop in Providence, Rhode Island, to visit Brown University.  “Just to see it,” I clarified.  Visiting with actual hopes or expectations would have seemed preposterous. 

  Providence felt like the epitome of New England.  The colonial houses rested on the hills in every color I could name.  Trees canopied the brick sidewalks.  The river walk ran the length of downtown, with gondolas floating by the docks.  The campus was full of 19^th century, ivy-covered stone and brick buildings that looked like they belonged in oil paintings.    I didn’t think I’d ever seen a place as beautiful.

            On our way back south, my mom and I convinced my dad that we should stop in New York.  We’d never been there, and we were too close to miss the opportunity.  We passed through the city, parked in New Jersey, and rode the PATH train into Manhattan (a feat that took us hours to figure out).  The train, the first I’d ever ridden, emerged unexpectedly in the cavity of the World Trade Center – my first up-close view of Manhattan.  We lingered at the site for a while, then set out to accomplish a short list  “NYC To Do” list.  We bought my sister a fake designer purse in Chinatown, ate lasagna at an obscenely touristy restaurant in Little Italy, went to Strand Bookstore, walked into the lobby of the Empire State Building (establishing that it was too expensive to go up for the view), and then took a taxi to Times Square. 

            The taxi dropped us off a couple of blocks away, and I remember rounding a corner and all of a sudden feeling like we were right in the center of the square.  None of us spoke.  I slowly rotated, taking in the lights.  Then I nodded and said, “Alright.  I’m done.”

            Our New York visit only lasted a handful of hours, but I’d gotten all that I wanted from the city.

The word “providence” means divine guidance or care, which felt apt, considering that only a miracle could have gotten me there.  The streets of the city have names that wouldn’t let me forget how lucky I was.  Hope, Benefit, Prospect, Power, Angell, Meeting.  I spent my first year in Providence crisscrossing the city, walking from coffee shop to coffee shop until I was a regular in all of them.  There was an urgency to my restlessness that prevented me from remaining stationary for more than an hour at a time.  I walked for miles every day, even in rain and snow, and filled journal after journal on the barstools of café counters.  I subsisted on plain bagels with cream cheese and iced mochas.  I couldn’t work in libraries, and I couldn’t work in my room.  I never got tired of walking.  I’d never known a city so well. 

            After four years, Providence started to feel smaller, and I knew that it was right to leave while I only had good memories to hold onto.  I left Providence, spent the summer in Segovia, Spain, and then in Rome, and then went back home to Mississippi.  For months I kept imagining myself moving to New Orleans, Boston, Austin, or Washington D.C.  I applied to MFA and Ph.D. programs all over the country, confessing only to my parents that the MFA program at Columbia was my top choice.  It felt silly to give the idea of living in New York much thought, because I knew how slim the chances of getting in would be. 

            I got a phone call from a New York number as I was pulling into the Winn Dixie parking lot in March.  It was Lis Harris, telling me I’d gotten into the program.  I asked if she was serious several times, and then sat in my car in front of Winn Dixie, stunned.  I hadn’t received a financial aid award yet, so I didn’t know what to think about the money.  And I didn’t know what to think about New York. 

I never wanted to live in New York.  I was content to see it on TV from my couch as I watched the Macy’s Parade on Thanksgiving morning and New Years Eve in Times Square (both live and again at midnight when they replay it for Central Time).  I knew a lot of people applied to the program because of the city, and I felt weirdly defensive that anyone would assume I was one of them.  I imagined New York as cutthroat and competitive, unforgiving and overwhelming.  I dreaded the thought of trying to find affordable housing, coming up with enough money to survive, and watching the loans pile up.  It’s only two years, I kept telling myself.  You can stand anything for two years.  This is what you wanted.

I have a spatial memory so acute that it almost feels more like an extra sense.  After I’ve been somewhere once, for even the briefest of visits, I have no trouble successfully navigating it again.  I memorize maps instead of writing directions, because once I have a mental image of a city’s shape, I feel like I can never be lost. 

But New York can’t be memorized in a glance, I kept reminding myself as I studied maps of Manhattan last summer.  I could visualize the layout, the arrangements of the neighborhoods, but I don’t feel like I know a place until I can draw my own map with my own landmarks.  I’d never lived in a place that I hadn’t been able to memorize in days.  I couldn’t imagine how long it might take to know New York.   

I came to New York with my guard up.  My mom and I stayed in a hotel next to Port Authority while I was moving in.  I navigated from the passenger seat, directing her as we drove our Trail Blazer towards the Ikea in Red Hook.  I’m a nervous passenger, especially in cities.  Traffic got thicker as the skyscrapers of downtown got larger, and my heart started beating faster.   I felt a nearly overwhelming urge to get out of the car immediately. 

“What’s wrong?  Tell me what’s wrong!” she kept demanding, trying to glance at me without fully taking her eyes off the road.  I shook my head, eyes closed, whispering, “Please stop, please stop asking me anything, you’re making it worse, just please stop,” my body shaking as I tried to take deeper breathes. 

“Tell me what’s wrong!” 

“I need you to stop talking to me!” I was scaring her, I knew.  I was scaring myself.  I don’t think I’d ever had a panic attack before.  How was I supposed to live in a city that I couldn’t even look at through a windshield?

            I moved into my apartment the next day.  There are wood floors and the walls are a warm cream color.  My window is large, with a view of 113^th Street.  I sat on the floor with a hammer and screwdriver and put together all of my furniture.  I hung my maps and paintings of Providence, Rome, and New Orleans on my wall.  I set up my coffee pot, and my mom helped me put away all of my dishes.  I bought the first full-sized bed I’ve ever owned and slept on an air mattress for a week until it was delivered.  I started to imagine that I could feel at home in this place. 

Something happened between Providence and now, and I can’t drink much caffeine anymore.  I try to deny this fact, and still drink it once a day in small quantities.  A few weeks ago, on my slowly progressing quest to find the best coffee shops in New York, I spent $6 on a mocha.  I tried to console myself with reminders that it was a one-time treat, that I hardly ever buy espresso drinks, and that I’ll never do that again.  I drink most of my coffee in my apartment, because I can’t afford the drinks or the subway rides to get to them.  No barista knows my name.  I haven’t eaten a bagel in years.

But I’m getting to know New York in a different way.  I pick a new place to explore every day I’m not too busy.  I walk for hours with snacks, a book, and my 35mm camera.  I went to the Union Square farmer’s market every week and watched the peaches and nectarines gradually become apples and pumpkins.  I took pictures of the autumn leaves in Central Park, and I watched the first snow through my bedroom window.  I have dinner parties, because I love to cook most when it’s for other people.  I have roommates that I feel lucky to live with.  I don’t feel intimidated or overwhelmed.  New York doesn’t feel like home, but it feels like a place where I’m happy to be. 

            Providence belonged to me in a way that no other city ever had. It will always be the first city I felt belonged only to me, just as New Orleans will always be a version of home, and Rome will always be the romantic notion that managed to live up to my every impossible expectation. New York is an elaborate gift I hadn’t asked for but couldn’t refuse.

There’s a camaraderie I find in all of the people who are just passing through – in the joy on the girl’s face when I recognized her accent on the subway and told her I was from Mississippi, too, and in the jolt I feel each time I see one of my former classmates who shared Providence with me for four years and have somehow found their own way here.  It happens a lot.  In the middle of Times Square. At a book signing at the Brooklyn Book Festival.  In a café in the East Village.  In advertisements for a new Broadway show. 

            One of my roommates spent the last five years in New Orleans, and has adopted it in much the way I adopted Providence.  Never have all my worlds collided like this. 

For now, I’m happy to hold onto New York until it’s time to pass it along into the next eagerly grasping hands.  It’s a temporary loan, and we all know it.  Right now I can’t tell you how long the loan will last, nor how hard it will be to let go when it’s over.  

the tutoring quest

            As you might be aware, living in Manhattan isn’t exactly cheap.  And though I rarely spend money on much besides Greek yogurt, used Amazon books, and subway tickets (and even those I limit), my champion budgeting skills can do nothing to lesson the blow of rent.

            I had a job last semester that I might gently describe as less than ideal.  Unfortunately, the quest to find a preferable one that pays the same amount didn’t go well.  On to plan 2 – consider taking a lesser paying job if I can supplement it with an occasional second job, so that the combination salary is equal to/greater than the pay of the original job.  Which is how I started searching for all the tutoring services I could find in New York City and sending in applications.  I went to/go to a good school.  I double majored and graduated with honors.   I’ve got some teaching experience.  Surely an agency will hire me! 

            False. 

            In reality, tutoring services in NYC want a few things from their applicants.  A) Advanced degrees from universities that make you sound more impressive than you probably are. B) Perfect test scores, ideally on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and a dozen or so AP and SAT II subject tests. C) Roughly half your age in tutoring experience. 

            Seeing as how the thought of looking at the SAT or GRE ever again makes me want to hide under a desk, the fact that I could probably use a bit of tutoring myself for the math (and science) of any high level standardized test, and the minor detail that I’ve never tutored anyone in my life, I clearly leave much to be desired. 

            “Maybe you can get more experience and try applying with us again,” one of the guys who interviewed me over the phone said.  “You can do independent tutoring by setting up a profile on a tutoring website.”

            “Can you give me some?” I asked.

            Plan 3 – So I spent a week sitting on my living room floor, setting up a tutoring profile and taking online quizzes to certify myself in a couple dozen different subjects that I can never really imagine myself teaching, but, hey, why not?  Then it was time to visit the job board and beg for tutoring jobs.  Oh, your third grader is having problems reading?  I’d love to help!  Your 8^th grade son’s struggling with Algebra?  I haven’t taken an Algebra class in 8 years, but I’ll give it a shot!  You live 18 miles away?  Let’s meet halfway! 

            No luck.  Until last week when I got a surprise message from a mom whose 12^th grade daughter needed help with her American government midterm.  Yes.  Yes, I’d love to.  We set a date and time, and she instructed me to take a taxi from Union Square to her apartment.  I hung up feeling triumphant and relieved that I’d managed to avoid the fact that I haven’t taken an American government class in 6 years, and my knowledge of it doesn’t far surpass my knowledge of, say, botany, or greyhound racing.

            The possibility that I’d gotten myself in over my head has been lurking all week.  I’d given myself a half-hour overview to remind myself of what Legislative, Judicial, and Executive mean (via wikipedia, of course) and gotten ready to leave when another dilemma occurred to me.  I didn’t know how to get a cab.

            I’ve ridden in one taxi in New York.  It was the summer before my senior year of high school, when I visited the city for the first time with my parents.  The only thing I remember about that ride is that it terrified me.  I took taxis in Providence, a few times in Rome, and once in Segovia, but all of those were either taxis I called myself or caught at an airport or train station, where they were conveniently waiting for me/practically begging me to get in. 

            I had to confess, so I asked my roommate for help.  “How do I get a taxi?  Do I just, like… raise my hand?”  There's no way it actually works the way it does in the movies, I thought, but she reassured me about the proper curb standing/arm raising technique, and I set off. 

            I feared there was a secret trick no one filled me in on when probably 30 taxis passed me as I stood on the curb with my arm raised.  Should I wave it around?  Should I keep it raised? But one finally stopped.  The driver didn’t say a word.  I’m used to trying to have conversation in broken English/Spanish/Italian (this combination, regardless of the country I’m in) with taxi drivers.  I’m not used to my taxi having a TV that conveniently shows the week’s weather.  He had a soft, kind voice when we reached the address and he finally spoke.  “Which one?” The buildings around us looked identical.  “Oh. Uh. I have no idea.” 

            Ten minutes of trying to figure out the buzzer in the wrong building and getting some guidance from a delivery man later, I found the building across the street.  Two hours after that, I left my student with a completed power point project on racism in NYC, and more money than I make working two days at my current job.  No knowledge of government branches needed.  Mission accomplished. 

            And though I still have my old job and no more tutoring jobs planned yet, I’m hopeful.  

The text conversation between my sister and I yesterday:

Me - Maybe I should start a blog. 
Whitney - I think that's obvious.  Do it today. 
Me - How would I start it? 
Whitney - I think you shouldn't think about it too much and just do it. 

But then I couldn't stop reading Rachel Kushner's Flamethrowers, so I postponed it until today.  Here it is. 

I have a kind of debilitating fear of anyone outside of a classroom setting actually reading things I write.  I am aware of the irony of this predicament.  And maybe this can be another step in the direction of overcoming it.  

I'm a few weeks behind, but I don't think it's too late for the traditional "New Year's Reflection" post.  2013 was a strange one.  A year ago I was at home in a pretty low place.  My plans to move to Boston had fallen through.  I'd sent out grad school applications to a shameful number of programs, in 2 different subjects, and I felt stuck waiting for something to happen, with no idea what to do next.  But after several stagnant months, I miraculously got into my top choice program.  I got my first teaching job, as a teaching assistant for Duke's Talent Identification Program.  I spent the summer in Athens, GA.  I missed Rome and Segovia.  I went to Boston and visited college friends.  I missed Providence.  I missed Brown.  I drove to Manhattan with my mom and moved into my first apartment.  I started my MFA for nonfiction writing at Columbia.  I went to 2 friends' weddings and got to be a groomswoman.  I got a job as a college counselor for GED students, and I volunteered as a creative writing teacher at a NYC high school.  I made new friends and had some dinner parties.  I turned 24.  I flew on 16 planes, spent a month of nights in hotels and other people's houses, 2 months in a University of Georgia dorm, and 100 days in my apartment, and lived in 3 different states.  I read 70 books.  I obsessively documented all of it so I can give you these numbers now.  

And now I'm a quarter finished with grad school, and starting my second semester classes tomorrow.  Maybe we'll get lucky, and I'll figure out how to make this look more appealing before I post anything again.