a letter to my former self
dear krissa,
hey, you. i know you’re sixteen and you’ve just discovered email, so real letters seem a little old-fashioned and pedantic (look it up). but six years later, i find myself thinking about you. when you think about me, you probably have no idea what i look like, or what it feels like to be me. you imagine that i’m just as thin as you are (i wish!) just as much a star in the crowd, just as ambitious. i’m sure you look at twenty-two and think, wow. she’s got it all.
i’m writing to explain some things to you about the differences between you and me. i know the things you think you want: you want to be as shining and fresh-penny-new as you are now. you want to see people around you admiring your courage, admiring your intelligence, admiring your presence. i understand. you feel like the acceptance of others – the encouragement of others – is the ultimate crown on your charming head.
from where i stand, i’m going to give you a piece of advice, something i should have realized when i was you. don’t wait for other people to admire your courage, your intelligence, presence. instead, beat them to the punch and admire your own. when you do something you’re proud of, tell yourself how wonderful that was. be the first to congratulate yourself on victory, and be the first to face your own fears and flaws. right now, you think you need other people’s spotlights to make your star shine. you’re wrong.
and another thing about spotlights – don’t be so eager to bathe in people’s adoration that you’ll rest under just any light. i know you at sixteen – you are brave but you’re also vain, and unaware of the desperate need you have for people to love you. not everyone has to love you, sweetie, and not everyone deserves to. a wise man (your father) told you once that if you leave this earth having made five true friends in your life, you are lucky. you don’t believe him – someday, you will. until then – be cautious with your generous trust in people. especially fellow sixteen year olds.
and lastly – don’t be afraid of failure. so far, you have never encountered more obstacles than you can handle. you’ve got it easy at sixteen. the next few years will be difficult, and they will bring failure, and you are unprepared to fortify your confidence against internal attack, so that your faith in yourself weathers this storm. you will doubt – you will forget to have faith in the amazing person you think you are now. you will forget how to look in the mirror and be proud of what you see. you will not listen to the loved ones who attempt to remind you of your uniqueness. but if you start now, forming an unshakeable faith in yourself, the next six years will be that much easier. believe in yourself – understand that burdens are never too great for you to bear.
and be nice to mom. she adores you. you being sixteen is as difficult for her as it feels for you. one day, you’ll realize what a silly pain-in-the-ass you are. but i love you anyway.
krissa, 2002.

a terrible name for a tropical storm and looking for screwed-up 17 year old boy who needs mrs. robinson
part one: the sopping wet part
*first, okay. sorry louisiana, i know you hate your tropical storm, but if you send her up here, i will grab you by the creole scruffs of your sodding red necks and kick you back to that louis XIV from whence you came. harrumph.*
new york [and poor dear flood in north carolina] is clouded and cloaked in the sideshow that is tropical storm Isadore. which, for the record, i think is a terrible name for a tropical storm. why? isadore [or isidor] is a deriviative of Isis, the egyptian goddess who traditionally is pictured with horns on her head and is known for being all around very stubborn indeed. isadores and isidores, like isabellas, tend to be temperamental and unpredictable, possibly inbred royalty, historically known for making tragically stupid errors in judgement. and plotting to kill their husbands. see: isabella of france, 1292-1358. and of course, which geek here could forget the tragedy of isildor, leader of the race of men in middleearth? i mean, but for his profoundly greedy ambitious lunacy, we wouldn’t be trying to fight the powers of the evil sauron with a few midget people and some trees*. isadore, clearly, is a disasterous naming choice just waiting to happen.
this whole system of naming the storms is flawed. remember floyd? floyd is the guy at the deli who’s got all gold teeth and calls you ‘baby’. floyd couldn’t rub his two brain cells together if he tried. consequently, floyd was the storm that couldn’t even decide where in hell it wanted to land. “florida!” they yelled, and floridiots ran for cover. “new york!” they bellowed, and new yorkers knocked back an extra scotch-on-the-rocks and called their brokers. “north carolina!” they screeched – and by then, of course, north carolinians were like, “duh!” or more like, “glug glug glug.” floyd was an idiot.
and now, we have isadore, blowing all her french displaced-royalty fury over the peaked rooftops and old world charm of n’awlins. silly temperamental blue-bloods. never to be trusted.
so, bon courage nouveau orléans. shut the blinds, have a stiff cocktail, and laissez les bon temps … roulez.
*yes, yes. i know. i’m a huge dork. go to mordor, you non-believers.
part two: the juicy part.
yes, yes. saw that film igby goes down a few weeks ago. and let me say, other than the depressing nature of the film, what i really took away from that experience can be summed up in the following mock personal ad:
Wanted: 17-19 year old boy, tortured-soul type, for romantic yet doomed relationship. must be from weathly, screwed-up family, preferably upper east/west side; needs constant mothering and will adore me for the stability and comfort i provide. in turn, you must worship the ground i walk on, write bad poetry about me, consider me your muse and your hero all in one. upon inevitable breakup, where i tell you it’s just not working, you’re too young and tortured, you must have sobbing conniption fit at my door. ALSO: it will greatly aid your application if you look distinctly like this fine young man or, if you are in fact kieran culkin himself*.
see? won’t that be great?
*c’mon, kieran. i know you live in new york. with your mommy. come over some night, hmm?**
** hey! it’s legal! he’s nineteen.

i have arrived [and other tales of manhattan].
well, well, well.
last night was one of the reasons i love this city.
at about nine pm on a tuesday night, i dressed chic, yet carefree, yet weather-appropriate, like the upwardly-mobile, smart urban lass that i am*, and traipsed over to the upper east side, to meet melvin at elaine’s.
yes! elaine’s!
when melvin [my old writing professor at slc and a riot of a human being] and i spoke on the phone last week, i suggested we meet for drinks, as we do on a monthly basis. and casually, oh so casually, melvin says, “well, how about elaine’s?”
and now, i can cross that off my things to do before i die** list. elaine’s! the mecca to the literati! elaine’s! where you simply cannot get one of the first four tables along the side wall unless you have a pulitzer around your neck! elaine’s! where today leading elite in journalism spent their impoverished youth getting drunk and running up a tab they couldn’t afford! elaine’s! where if she recognizes you and gives you a hug, You Have Arrived.
well. and now, little bitty me was having drinks there. i arrived late, fashionably so, to find melvin tucked in a corner nursing a scotch. the arrangement between us is as follows: i provide the cigarettes for chain-smoking, melvin provides the drinks. not a shabby deal. after introducing me to the people he knew at elaine’s [i got Introduced Around!] we settled down and started updating each other on our lives. i found out one or two tawdry things about the old alma mater, and a few sad tidbits about people we both know, and got to hear all about his new class. but mostly, i just breathed the air, the same air that so many of my heroes have constant access to. 1960′s posters of Paris Review covers hung on the walls, which were red and cheery. The bartender lit my cigarettes for me when he saw me take one out. I was introduced to a producer friend of Melvin’s, who laughed off the recent cancellations of his shows, and asked Melvin about a slew of their other mutual friends.
the night proceeded to get funnier. after we’d tired of the noise at elaine’s, we hopped in a cab and went to this bar down in the east 50′s, because a friend of melvin’s [another producer] was thinking of buying it for his wife to run. so we were sent to scope it out. wasn’t bad – quite empty, nice lighting, simple decor, enough space. after another rousing round of drinks [well, wine for me] we headed out yet again, jumped in a cab, and landed at the seediest bar in midtown, a place owned by another friend of melvin’s***, called siberia. only, it wasn’t really called siberia .. in that there was no name on the door, only a little red light. inside was a cavernous space and a disaffected bartender, who nonetheless perked up and rustled me up a grey goose on ice when melvin asked whether tracy owens [the owner] was around. the crowd was sparse – mostly my age and more hip than me. but melvin and i plopped right down at the bar and chatted about life, optimism, creation, art, family, career, and egypt. they were playing modest mouse. i looked around and thought, only in new york can you go from elaine’s to this chummy dive in a span of four hours, and still feel perfectly normal.
we finally rounded out the night at 1:30 am, whereupon i leapt in a cab and simply cruised all the way home, ten dollar fare be damned. i arrived home happy – hours of conversation with melvin always makes me feel like my mind has been running a marathon. my ego was satiated – i had drinks at elaine’s and got introduced to hollywood television producers as ‘a magazine editor here in new york’. and i realized something about elaine’s last night – it’s not who you know, it’s how long you’ve been around. new york is all about creating communities in a city so structurally hostile to the notion. watching melvin talk about new york and it’s most celebrated aspects, while peppering the discussion with stories of friends who’ve either written or made headlines, i realized it’s a matter of time. you can spend years feeling like you’re on the outside of something, he told me, only to wake up and realize you’re right in the middle. it just takes time.
so here’s to all the time in the world – and here’s to you, new york. and you, elaine. and to melvin – and here’s to me.
* and i am.
** other things on said list: make my own polenta, build a darkroom, be a super-mom, write for atlantic monthly, climb mt. kilimanjaro, learn to sail/oil paint/web design, own a vespa, live in canada, write a book – even if only my kids read it, marry for love, convince erin into having children at the same time i do, and grow five inches.
*** melvin bukiet is not only an accomplished writer, wonderful teacher, and all around wonderful human being – he also knows, literally, everyone in new york city.

wasting my time, wasting your time:
this is funny. take this quizzie and see how well you know me*. leave me comments and tell me how annoying that was.
in other news, it’s friday and i’m off to rhode island for a relaxing weekend. unless i have to amputate my left leg because of the combined pain of shin splints and open blisters. damn you, fashionable shoes, damn you.
*warning: some of these questions, only erin and raychul will be able to correctly answer. sorry.

i have a dream .. and it involves a hasselblad.
i know i’ve got this great job, and blah ditty blah. but i’ll tell you a secret. it’s a secret fantasy of mine. one of those middle-of-the-work-day, what-else-could-i-be-doing-with-my-life fantasies. one day, maybe i’ll open a portrait studio in my parents’ basement, in rhode island.
sound like a stupid fantasy? i’ll tell you why it’s not. well, first, because it’s my fantasy, not yours. so, nyah nyah nyah. secondly, well, goddamn but i do take some rockin’ good portraits of people. thirdly, because providence [at least where my parents live, the chi-chi east side] is a pretty wealthy town, with a lot of banking young new england families with blond children and volvos, and they love having those classy, black-and-white portraits of them, all laughing in some cheery park, littered around the house.
think about it. my parents have an enormous basement – it spans the whole bottom of the house. i could easily have a black-and-white darkroom down there as well as a portrait studio and a small gallery. with a digital SLR, the new epson color printer [which is ahhhmazing, by the way] a good computer, i could put out some beautiful color photographs. and with a medium format and a black-and-white darkroom, i could make some amazing b&w portraits.
and i’d have my own business, and run my own life, and my own hours, and still have time to raise a family and be that soccer mom you all know i’m going to become.
and you know the scary thing? as much as i love my life, and i’m excited about my career path, there’s that moment in the middle of the day, when i think about how many years of clawing my way through the corporate world it’ll take for me to be the journalist i know myself to be capable of becoming, and i think….
what’s wrong with a thriving little portrait studio in my beautiful house, being around photography equiptment all day, and having time to write, read, take pictures, and love my friends and family?
all i need now is about twenty thousand dollars, a husband, and some patience.

that certain someone…
i met him in french class, my senior year of high school. i had just returned to houston after two and a half years in kenya. i didn’t like being back, with all these white-washed kids, in this white-washed public high school. i had changed.
so there he was, in my first class of the day. we both spoke far better french than the teacher. i thought he was amusing, if strange. his black hair was all over the place, curly and untamed with fading blond streaks. he wore tee shirts from punk bands i’d never even heard of, and skater shoes. all my “normal” girl friends, some of whom were in the class, thought he was strange. so, at first, did i.
he started bringing me an extra kudos bar in the morning. he sat behind me, and i could always feel his presence there, leaning over his notebook to doodle something [later, i learned, he always chews on the edge of his tongue when he's concentrating]. i realized that i had more fun talking to him than anyone else in the class. he was funny, with this heaving laugh [probably from too many cigarettes and late nights]. there was something contradictory about him – so sweet and yet so nonconformist. i thought he was different. i liked different.
the notes started later – we’d identified each other’s cars in the school parking lot, and one day he left me a note, with a simple 3D cube drawn on it, and his messy signature. how cute, i thought. so i left a note on his beat-up old volvo [may she rest in peace]. the back of the volvo was covered in black-and-white punk stickers. how cute, i thought.
i think the turning point was when he actually, honest to goodness, came into the gap where i worked. there he was, looking completely out of place. he bought socks. he told me that he was “hanging out” at the starbucks around the corner, and that i should drop by. several hours later, when i got off work, he was still there.
the story is common. we dated. we broke up. later, we dated again and broke up again, and so forth and so on. so it goes.
the point isn’t that he’s my ex boyfriend [although he proudly holds the title for the only ex-boyfriend that i still talk to...]. the point is, he’s still around. he’s changed, i’ve changed. somehow, over the course of four years of college, we’ve never lost touch. there was a late night my freshman year, an all nighter, when he drew me a picture of some flowers and emailed them to me, since he was still up. there was a winter when he made sure to send me baby-blue connected-with-a-string mittens for the first day of snow. there was the time he said, ‘you’ll be recieving a letter from me’, and instead, i got the most beautiful painting of two llamas, that now hangs in my living room. there were nights, when we hung out in houston, where we just sat around all night, smoking cigarettes and watching bad television, that were some of the happiest nights of my life. there’s the knowledge that no matter how much water is under the bridge with us [and there's plenty], we’ll always be friends.
because after all those memories, matt’s still around. he’s funny, he’s honest, he’s kind as hell, he’s smart and talented and still humble, he’s wonderful at just listening, and then he’ll just dispel my bad moods just by laughing. this is my little birthday gift to him – because i don’t think he really understands just how important he is to me. if you’d told me, four years ago, that he would still be one of my best friends … well, i wouldn’t have believed you. i was going away to new york, how the hell would we stay friends? i underestimated him. i don’t do that anymore – i think the world of him. he’s one of the few people i trust completely, because after all we’ve been through, i know he’d never do anything [else] to hurt me.
so, happiest twenty-second** birthday, matthieu. i love you.
[and get to the goddamned post office and mail my painting, you lazy prat. or i'll call you and wake your ass up.]
** duh. i’m an idiot. it’s his twenty third, as he so kindly called to remind me. and he’s mailing the painting. good boy!

how to never get over anyone.
it’s pretty common to say, ‘yes, i’m over so-and-so’, or ‘no, i’m not over so-and-so.’ i have several friends going through the various stages of break-up. and during a conversation with flood, i realized something about the heart.
there are some people you’ll never get over. in your heart [that tricky and profound organ] there’s a little piece of each person you’ve loved. you don’t even think about it, but it remains there, like a secessionist island, that has a little flag pinned to it, and it obstinately refuses to give up it’s share of your emotional commonwealth.
it’s the thing that still, after months or years, that still beats faster when the name is mentioned, while the rest of your heart feigns emotional nonchalance. it’s the part of you that remembers what their pillow smelled like, how their collarbone arched a certain way, their favorite song, the sweater you wore that drove them crazy. love is a funny thing.
so, every boy i’ve loved, in any capacity, will always have a little sympathetic underground revolution, a little stubborn cuba, hanging on to the edge of my fully recovered heart. at last count, there were about five. there will be more. eventually, their causes will become more and more muted. and then one day, when the rest of my heart is triumphantly unanimous for one person, those little islands will sigh, take down their battered little war-flags with fading names on them, and recede slowly into the recesses of emotional nostalgia.
but for now, they are powerful hell-raisers, capable of throwing my whole day off with one little whiff of hermes cologne, or white button downs, or when my sheets smell like soap and cigarette smoke, or the sight of a battered volvo, or rainy nights, or the memory of kenyan red dirt on the soles of his feet, or when i see moss-green eyes smiling, or nat king cole.
which gives me pause to wonder – should any of these pieces of history decide to reclaim their territories, would my heart be strong enough to stand its ground?

and furthermore…. blegh.
some days, i try and fake myself out by not bringing any cigarettes to work. well, i made through most of today until 3:45. being able to stand it no longer, i went downstairs and availed myself upon a kindly stranger for a smoke.
leave it to me to pick the one guy in the courtyard who smokes newport light 100′s.
*shudder*
i hate menthol cigarettes. they make me feel like something, somewhere in my lungs, has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

and on a completely materialistic note….
i want these pants and this sweater, along with this scarf and these boots.
anyone feel like breaking the bank on my good taste?

one year later.
it’s been a year. you’ve all seen it on tv, you’ve been inundating by tear-jerky, flag-waving, nonstop documentaries. all the emotion and turmoil you experienced a year ago is being dregded back up and shoved down your throat. but here, i swear i won’t make you cry, and that’s more than i can say for diane sawyer and her ilk.
i took today off from work. not so that i can attend a weepy mass memorial, or go to a prayer service, or light a candle. those are valid ways of dealing with grief, they’re just not mine. instead, i’m going to spend the day without turning on the television or the radio. i’m going to stay away from manhattan. not because i’m afraid of history repeating itself as macabre farce, but because i don’t want to look into the eyes of other new yorkers and read their thoughts. see the same questions: where were you a year ago? did you lose your loved ones? did you see the planes? are you okay?
i’m okay. and i’ll tell you what – so is new york. we’re okay, here.
but i’ve got a few things i want to share with you. to begin with, i slept through the attacks. that’s not entirely true: the new editor of the paper at slc woke me up that morning, by calling my land line, at 9 am, to tell me, “something wierd is happening down at the twin towers, when you wake up, will you write a quickie news piece for this week’s paper?” at that time, it was only one plane, one strange fluke, one bizarre moment on an achingly blue day in september.
by the time i woke up, at 10:45, the towers were gone. i spent the day wandering around in a daze. my story of that morning blends into a whirlwind of other normal new yorker’s stories.
what i really think about, when i think about the disaster that shook the foundations of new york and all our lives a year ago, is actually an older story than the saga of that day.
when i was 19, i lived on the west side of washington square park for six weeks in the summer. it was a riotous time, full of debauchery and disobedience. i lived with a bunch of other young kids in an nyu dorm – with nothing to do, we would go drinking down on macdougal til all hours of the night.
some nights, we’d be out so late that some of us would watch the sun come up. it was on those nights that we’d hop on a train, still pretty soused, and head down the the world trade center for krispy kreme donuts, at six in the morning.
we’d sit out there, with our donuts, and our clothes all rumpled and smelling like smoke and bars, and we’d watch the businessfolk scurrying to work. we’d laugh, we would, because they just looked like tools, cogs in the faceless corporate machine. i admit, i mocked them. not maliciously, but still. they weren’t people to me. the towers weren’t beautiful and majestic to me, they were eyesores. they dwarfed the empire state building, one of my favorite pieces of architecture in the world. and as i watched the people walk by in their grey suits, i never once thought of who they really were.
well, now i’m one of those people. i get on a train every morning, with countless faceless workers, and go to my job. and when the towers fell, when i wandered around manhattan seeing those heartbreaking signs, ‘missing, my wife’ , ‘missing, my wonderful son’ – suddenly all my naivete, those long summer days in 2000, looked painful to me. these were people, not faceless cogs in a machine. and they died, having done nothing horribly wrong.
here’s what still hurts me, a year later: for each one of those deaths that september day, at least four people’s lives were shattered, irredeemably ruined. those people loved people. those people enjoyed days at the beach, or running in marathons, or late night television. they laughed a certain way, their hair parted a certain way, they’d had tragedy and joy and frustration. they were human. they had kids, they had college buddies, they had their regular deli guy who knew they liked their coffee cream, no sugar. they were loved. and now they’re gone.
and that’s what i think about today. not the fight for freedom, not the war in afghanistan, not getting revenge, not the american flag. i think about each one of those people, and i humbly offer my apologies to them for demeaning their value in the world. i miss them.
and because of that, i’m going to spend this day remembering what love really means – love makes us unique. love makes us human, it makes us irreplaceably valuable to the people who love us. and those people who are gone, they are still loved, for exactly who they were.
on ne voit qu’avec le coeur. l’essentiel est invisible aux yeux.