now i know true love
i have spent the last two hours hitting f9 repeatedly, trying to decide if i want the dock to magnify and to what degree, picking the speed on my trackpad, setting my desktop picture/color/fonts, and happily freeloading off a neighbor’s generous wireless signal to correctly organize my bookmarks.
yes, folks, i have come over to the good side. and yes, i already put the free decal on my laptop bag.
viva la revolucion!
Archives for the month of: February, 2004
cupid is a straphanger
i will live a thousand years and love a thousand men and i will never understand the rules of attraction. what mystic force determines the subtle nuances between the moment you want to simply stand closer to someone and the moment you decide you want to rip their clothes off? what is it about the slightest hand gesture from a stranger in a cafe or on the street that makes it impossible to pry your eyes away?
yesterday i stood on the subway with a casual friend, having invited him down to a concert in the village. the downtown N was unusually crowded, consummate new yorkers suddenly thrown into tourist-mode by the recent subway changes. we held on to the same pole in an airless corner of the car and had an easy conversation about sailing. suddenly the train jerked and a wizened little woman shoved me out of her way and into my friend’s shoulder.
i straightened up and smiled, and listened to him continue talking. but by then, i was close enough to notice the way his shirt collar was crooked, to notice the curl of the hair tucked behind his ear. but more than that, there was a smell. a distinctive smell that never fails to make me just the slightest bit lightheaded… soap and cigarettes. not cologne, not laundry detergent, not hair product or incense or any of the other million ways a man’s smell can attract a woman. nothing draws me more than the smell of soap and camel lights. and he had it. clean skin and cigarettes. it reminded me of mornings, of post-shower sex, of holding hands in the front seat of a car in winter, of wearing his sweaters. soap and cigarettes is like intimacy and desire. there i stood, still chatting with him, but my mind had gone somewhere else completely. a million things that had never happened between him and i flashed through my mind and knocked the wind out of me, like the grinding movement of the subway itself.
usually the michievous god of romance is depicted shooting arrows. but it seems that in the big apple, when cupid snaps his fingers, trains jerk and a crush is born.
welcoming myself to the 21st century
some of you know what a low-tech girl i am. when spending my money, i would much prefer a weekend at the beach to a PDA, dinner out with friends over new CDs, and lazy analog weekends instead of sitting in front of the computer on a sunny saturday.
but my complete lack of a computer at home has started to get frustrating. both for this blog, where i often find my greatest inspirations when keys are scarce, and for practicality. you know, law school applications, crossword puzzle help, finding the right restaurant for sunday brunch. the stuff the web is really for.
this desperate lack of a decent computer led me to compose this:
isn’t that sad?
well, a few weeks ago, the pressing urge to find a miniature model of an airport and a plush-toy mouse was relieved. due to a great tax return and an even greater set of parents, the path to mac-vana was suddenly visible before me. and today, carefully and lovingly delivered at noon to our house in rhode island, is my very first apple:
fourteen inches. 933 Mhz. maxxed out RAM. forty GB. Airport card. plus an Epson 4-color printer with a flatbed scanner on top. pure apple bliss. all mine.
this weekend? forget boys. i’ll be curled up in bed with fourteen inches of smooth white digital brilliance.
nothing ventured, nothing…
what is it about love? what masochistic part of us keeps us coming back for more, or wanting what we don’t have, when the rest of our lives are so fantastic and exciting that we’d barely have time for it if we found it?
i have a philosophy of love, and falling in it. granted, if my philosophy of love was a self-help book, it’d be a spectacular failure only referred to as “you can buy those to prop your table up with”. nonetheless, i believe that my time and my friendships are valuable enough to me that the man who comes along to shift the sands of my life had better damn well rock the foundation as well. casual dating? waste of time. dating someone you have next-to-nothing in common with? a criminal waste of time.
i say the same thing, time and again: without exception, my friends are the most mind-blowingly amazing people i know. so if i’m going to change my life around to accomodate a man, he’d better live up to that standard of excellence. as a result, i barely make an effort to meet new men, i often preemptively reject strangers that flirt with me, and i never follow through on any of my half-hearted attempts to be more open to new people, or more trusting that love can be found in the strangest places.
this theory is starting to show its cracks. worse, it’s starting to look like sour grapes. i mean it, every word, about wanting to be with someone who shakes my world – both the bed and the mind. but stubbornly believing that my friends are all i need is starting to look a lot like making my friends all i need to avoid being hurt again. to avoid standing on the curb, heart in my hands to varying degrees of broken, while someone finds a new trap door and disappears into it. to avoid the feeling that i gave someone everything i had, proudly unafraid to love, and they politely asked for their money back.
the truth is, i do want more. my friends are a phenomenal support structure but they’re not the entire building. and i have to stop hiding behind the idea that the simplest kind of love – the kind i have with my friends and family – is ever going to be enough for me.
a few nights ago, it became impossible to ignore my own cowardice. there’s a bartender, at a bar, who made us delicious cosmos, was quite frank in his quiet flirtation, holding my eyes a second longer than usual, lingering quietly a few feet from our conversation. did i slip away from my friends and have a chat with him? no. did i even tell him my name, even though he told me his? no. why not? because i was having fun with my friends, and too thin-skinned to exchange the usual comfort of acceptance for the sharp wind of the unknown. why? scared. lazy. suddenly, inexplicably, first-time-in-my-gregarious-life … shy.
so this weekend, i’m going to do something that every safe-seeking molecule is screaming against, pulling frantically back from. i’m going to that bar. for one drink. alone. don’t get me wrong. i don’t actually want to go. but i keep remembering how sweet his smile was, how surprisingly non-sleazy it was when i felt him watching me, how very much i wished i was the kind of girl to kiss a random bartender as a thank-you for the delicious cosmo. typically, i did nothing about it, much to the dismay of my encouraging friends.
so i will go into that bar, will have one of that bartender’s absurdly good cosmos, and i will let myself consider the possibility that a complete stranger could, eventually, blow my mind.
nothing says spring like…
…fresh strawberries. they taste of newborn springy grass, streaming patches of sunlight, and cool breezes. so today’s le bakery, starting a bit late because our chefs were eating strawberries, will be nothing but fruit concoctions. order up your tartes, your meringues, your sorbets… and snozberries are most definitely allowed. even encouraged.
and yes, the wallpaper will be lickable.
fruits away! we serve at noon.*
* and by noon, of course, i mean thursday morning, due to a catastrophe with the lemon meringue and some exciting distractions elsewhere.
one side of romance, hold the cliche
i’ve never been the sappily romantic type. i got a lot of hurt looks from my guy friends this weekend when i begged them not to get roses for their girlfriends, desperately trying to explain how flowers should be a thoughtful indication of the girl’s personality, not the first thing on display at the deli. living in new york, it’s easy to toe the line and take a girl to a nice restaurant, an opera, the ballet, snore, whine, bolt.
i haven’t really met the right guy yet, the guy i’ll love even more than i love this city. but they’ve got to go hand-in-hand. for instance, he’d:
…take me to the driving range at chelsea piers on a rainy day.
…know exactly how to get to that one part of roadway where you can see the planes roaring in to land at laguardia.
…never rush me when i stop for ten minutes to listen to a street performer.
and most of all, he’d:
…solve my bad day blues by picking me up at work with a flask of liquor in his coat pocket, take me to ride the staten island ferry, and play the time-honored “what’s their really dirty secret” passenger guessing game.
now that’s romance.
groundhog be damned
i believe in the power of positive thinking. that’s why pH has just gone total spring revamp in the middle of blustery february. think spring, and there’s spring.
enjoy.
update on continued hiboux empire: last week’s series and its charming design are now permanently housed over at hiboux quatre and le deuxieme hiboux also recieved a spring cleaning.
here is a small dried flower from a walk you went on, across the entire city, from midnight until dawn.
here is the catch in your throat when you hear her sing the songs she’s written, even when they’re not for you.
here is the list of places you made together, that you’ll one day visit, down to the minutae of hotel room prices and attractions you want to see.
here is the funny way she pronounces the word “crayon” and the way her eyebrows arch slightly when she’s applying lipstick.
here are his keys on your keychain, here are yours on his keychain.
here is the cup of coffee she makes you every morning, buying that gross fake creamer because she knows you secretly love it but would never admit it to your other friends.
here is the curl at his temple that simply refuses to join the rest of his hair.
here is the way she answers the phone, inflecting her ‘hello’ exactly the same way every single time.
here is the tip of his tongue, that sticks out the left side of his mouth when he’s working at his drafting table.
here is the tiny furrow in her brow, the shadow that crosses her eyes, when you make her angry in public.
here are the the truckloads of one-word exchanges that signify the important events in your life – the shorthand of your knowledge of each other.
here are the exhausting tears that come from fighting, and here is the unique kind of nauseating pain that surfaces at the thought of losing someone.
here is the moment you wake up, open your eyes, and see yourself reflected in someone else’s.
here, this is love. except, there is no perfect love. the future always looks rosier than it turns out to be, and the past leaves scars that defy the very definition of the word ‘past’. the present, that minute, is the only thing that can really live up to the expectation of perfect love. anyone who says they haven’t loved… hasn’t looked hard enough at the tiniest of movements, the simplest of actions, and found what they’re looking for.
there is no formula. no one is perfect. nothing stays the same. except your little batch of quirks, and words, and memories, and intimacies. so here. this is love. enjoy.
she’ll meet him during her off-year, when she flees to another city and lives with some crazy friends of hers in a mid-twenties attempt to recapture the wildness of youth. he’ll be dating someone else, someone completely wrong for him. she’ll know it the minute their eyes lock across the room, the two minutes he helps her with her bag. they will look into each other’s eyes and see a kindred spirit. her friends won’t believe this is possible, she who is so afraid of love. but when she says his name on the phone to them, they’ll know he’s the one.
“are you two together?” her friends will ask.
“no,” she answers, with a new depth in her voice, a new honeyed dimension to her quiet southern accent.
“so what is it?”
“we’re friends,” she’ll say. but she’ll hear his voice coming down the hall over any other din. he’ll seek her out at every party. he’ll stand next to her, dangerously close, just to smell the clean freshness in her curly hair or to see the way she fiddles with her collar, rubbing the point between her thumb and middle finger. they will not be able to divert the current of electricity between them.
she will be torn between her privacy, her natural reticence, and the lure of his companionship. he will be torn between the girl he’s dating who doesn’t understand him, and the girl he’s not dating who knows the words before he says them.
they will sit at a kitchen table together in the waning summer heat and drink countless beers. they will talk about their childhoods. they will offer to drive each other on errands, only to experience the forced intimacy of her tiny car. skin will brush against skin when they pass each other. the ticking clock in the dingy kitchen will mean more to both of them than the mere passage of time.
one night, at a concert, with the ever-distancing girlfriend a mere ten feet in front of them, he will turn to her. his hand will be on her small, firm shoulder.
“i have to tell you something,” he will say as his voice cracks under the strain of being both quiet and loud at the same time.
“no,” she will respond because she knows what he wants to tell her. she will move away because she’s afraid. but these fears can’t last long.
perhaps they will finally kiss in the parking lot. perhaps it will be at the grocery store on another contrived errand. perhaps, they will find themselves driving far away from the town they live in, distance themselves from their daily life to build up the courage to fall into each other. it will happen with the delicious clasping satisfaction of two magnets finally allowed to click. perhaps he will hold her small, porcelain face in his guitar-calloused hands and find it hard to breathe. perhaps her eyes will well up with the kind of tears she rarely allows herself to cry.
one thing is for certain in this future she does not yet know. that first kiss will be completely unavoidable. it is written the moment she walks into that room and sees the light in his eyes. the moment he saw her push her glasses up by touching the corner with the knuckle of her forefinger, a gesture which will reduce his heart to shreds in its delicacy and subtlety.
one thing is for certain in this future that none of us know. they will fall in love. it will be inconvenient. painful. complicated. emotional. but it will be the first kiss to end all first kisses and they will live happily ever after.
for beth and josh, my greatest inspiration
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