I love Pride and Prejudice and I liked Bridget Jones so I really have no excuse for what I’m about to admit:
Only in my current re-reading of P&P did I finally realize that although all of Bridget Jones isn’t an homage, Fielding did pay tribute to the love/betrayal triangle between the Heroine and the Charming Cad/Boorish Good Man. To put it geekily, Bridget : Carver/Darcy :: Elizabeth : Wickham/Darcy. Really, Fielding couldn’t have made it any plainer to me. AT ALL. And yet I never made the connection until yesterday, even though I knew all the other elements of homage that she included (because, um, who could miss them).
I’d like to attribute this to the fact that whilst I’ve read P&P very seriously and studiously and with admiration, I read Fielding’s book the way I read all other chick lit: on the beach or on a plane and without much attention to detail. Even when it’s good chick lit, which Bridget Jones was, I didn’t pay that much attention to it.
But still. Seriously. I have never felt so bad about myself and my usually-stellar comprehension and retention of literature before in my LIFE.
The more I think about it, the worse I feel about myself.
… I have a problem. I think I have a caffeine addiction.
Stop not falling over in shock like that. It’s not like I mainline coffee. In fact, I drink about one cup of coffee a week. So when I get these weird headaches about once a week, even after eating well and drinking lots of water during the work week, two things happen.
At first, I completely refuse to take headache medicine. Who am I trying to be, some sort of samurai warrior? Tom Cruise? Tom Cruise with a samurai sword? It’s not the taking drugs that bothers me. I have no problem with drugs. None. Drugs are ace. Go doctors go! But something about this particular headache makes me think if I’m just tough, and ignore it, it’ll slink away out my ear or something.
And then when the headache gets to the point where I’m squinting because it hurts less to squint and also trying to decide if I can take a nap under my desk (I can’t), I start totalling up what I’ve eaten and drunk that day. What usually happens is I realize I haven’t had my two to three daily cups of tea.
Tea! Sweet innocuous anti-oxidizing tea! Nectar of the intellectual, the liberally-inclined, and the dotteringly old! Tea! …. rammed with caffeine. Tea has as much caffeine as a cup of coffee, and while I save the coffee for weekends and special occasions, I absolutely drink buckets of tea.
Except on days where I get these splintering headaches. And refuse to take anything for them because not only should they go away on their own, taking medicine and brewing a cup is tantamount to admitting I’ve got a problem.
But now that the Tylenol Rapid Release and a cup of Twining’s Prince of Wales is coursing through my various systems, I’m less inclined to care. Oh sweet merciful relief.
Look, I live in Astoria. Which, for those of you who don’t know it, is in Queens. For all the bottoms of Manhattanites’ noses that I see when I say that, I can proudly claim to live in the most diverse borough in the city and certainly one of the most diverse concentration of people in the world. And that’s a source of pride, because, hey, I’m a diverse peoples too. How many people do YOU know who are second-generation Irish-Belgian/Greek by way of Brazil, Egypt, and Africa? Oh, and Argentinian, if you want to get place of birth in there? If I belong anywhere in New York City, it’s in Queens.
This is my caveat, then. I appreciate diversity as a quality in a neighborhood, I love Astoria because of it, and I usually don’t mind the graceless clumsy dance of language that happens when people try and speak to each other in this common ground we call English. Usually, someone either speaks English well or they don’t, and I adjust my responses and expectations of clarity accordingly.
But this was just weird. I called my local Post Office to get a firm quote on P.O. box sizes and prices, and to find out what ID they needed, before I headed over. The gentleman that answered the phone was certainly foreign, but very clear and precise.
At first.
As the conversation wore on, it was like his comfort with the English language was fading right before my very… ears. When we started talking, his accent colored every fifth word, maybe. By the end of the conversation, all I was catching was “Fnummphh Sninsnin Gblarr PHOTO Tweennnk”. This isn’t, like, a phonetic translation of what he said, mind, but you get the general idea. And the more I politely misunderstood and asked for him to repeat himself, the faster he went!
It was touch-and-go there for a second when I forced myself take a deep breath to avoid laughing. I couldn’t help but imagine that somewhere on this hardworking, gracious gentleman’s person, there was a meter like on a camera battery, that was running very quickly from TOTALLY INTELLIGIBLE to GARBLED PANIC. RED! RED! RED! I had managed to literally exhaust his supply of English! Not bad for an afternoon’s work.
Going in to pay for the box and secure the code should be fun! And before you get all bitchy and self-righteous, I do mean FUN. Towel of Babel, AHOY!
We traveled light, with just a camera and a notebook and keys and wallets in my little messenger bag. We took the subway down to QB Plaza and walked west along Queens Plaza South and then down 11th street and over to Vernon Blvd.
I took pictures of a strange abandoned building and we kept going down Vernon amidst shuttered warehouses and factories with names like “Scapucci and Sons” and “All Windows, Inc” until we started seeing signs of life, like churches and schools.
Vernon quickly became this pretty neighborhood-y stretch of road with shops and bakeries and even an abandoned old Knights of Columbus storefront. We walked down to see the old Pepsi-Cola sign, we had delicious espresso at Brasil Coffee House (now with real Brasilians!) and decided to grab a bite to eat. Cafe Henri just presented itself, right there at 50th avenue and Vernon, and it didn’t disappoint. I had a delicious croque messieur and a much needed coca-cola glacee.
We started back up Vernon and had a sundowner at the LIC Bar which I’ll be lobbying to revisit on lazy Queens afternoons this summer. We walked all the way home, flagging so much at the end that I was getting a little loopy. And hey, we even found where they’ve been keeping the 18th century these days!
As always, we asked for adventure of Queens – and Queens, she did not disappoint.
Dear Guy Who Talked Really Loudly Next To Us at LIC Bar Today:
Hi! You’re a twunt. It has to be said, I didn’t have the set of brass ones to tell you that at the time. There we were, enjoying our Tetley’s Bitter and Sauvingnon Blanc in the sunny fresh air of an absolute gem of a bar find and you started talking! A lot!
First you talked about how you and your friends would drive donuts in parking lots and other friends would shoot at your car! And then you talked about how you like to buy guns illegally from some vagrant man in your neighborhood who has a basement full of them! And how you buy a couple a year, and once you almost forgot to take one out of your bags before getting on a plane to Shanghai! And you also talked about a pimp you met at a McDonald’s!
I got the feeling like your two beering companions were perhaps politely listening to you. Maybe they were starving film producers and you had deep stupid pockets. Maybe they were looking for guns. For whatever reason, you completely dominated the conversation! I bet you loved that, because you have a small penis.
Oh, Man at the Bar, I really didn’t hate you that much at this point. I thought you were annoying, sure! Even your mother thinks you’re annoying! But no, rest assured, I didn’t hate you until you started TRASH TALKING THE ENTIRE NATION OF GREECE. Some key excerpts:
“That fucking country, man, I’ve been there twice and I’ve got no time for it. Full of fucking Greeks.”
“They all drive like assholes because they’re frustrated because their country hasn’t accomplished anything remotely useful for 2,500 years.”
“The Acropolis is a bunch of crap, man, I didn’t even go in.”
Oh! My! God! Stuart said he’d never seen my body do what it did, sitting there next to your twunty diatribe about my people. Wait – I’m sorry – your twunty INACCURATE DIATRIBE. Let’s visit this together, shall we, Twunthead? The Acropolis! Is! A! Hill! You can’t GO IN A HILL! The Parthenon, on the other hand, is less than 2,500 years old (roughly, it’s actually 2,444 years old from relative completion!) and is on TOP of the Acropolis, which is, again, a HILL! Way to not go in, though, bastard moronhead!
Also! Greece hasn’t contributed anything useful to society since 2,500 years ago! You wouldn’t be forgetting Alexander the Great, would you? Or The Greek Empire? Or Socrates? Or even Plato? Or Eurypides? Or hey! Let’s skip forward a little, shall we? Jeffrey Eugenides? NIKOS KAZANZAKIS? Hey, what about this guy? What a useless frustrated GREEK.
And HECK, Twuntface, I’m not even arguing about, say, ANCIENT GREECE AND ITS ACCOMPLISHMENTS. Your Royal Twuntness limited us to two thousand five hundred years of Greek Uselessness!
Stuart looked at me, throughout the indeterminably long ten minutes where you ranted about Greece and I sat there, and said, “now would be a really good time for you to discover your super powers.” It would have been, too. I WOULD HAVE IMMOLATED YOU AND THEN DANCED VICTORIOUSLY TO NEVER ON SUNDAY OVER YOUR ASHES.
Yassou, fucknut!
Love,
Krissa
*never did a man wear MORE APPROPRIATE FOOTWEAR.
The view from our dinner table, complete with Greek baskania and gorgeous spring flowers
This weekend:
Stuart took me on a lovely date to Snack Taverna in the West Village, where we shared a bottle of Sauvingnon-esque Greek white and I indulged saganaki and a melt-in-your-mouth pork tenderloin and decent baklava (though not as good as Biscuit’s). The waitresses were all charming and gave us the best table in the house. We followed dinner with a night stroll through the Village wherein we totally walked past Kiefer Sutherland (looked so young!) and oogled in the windows of Three Lives and decided not to take in jazz at Small’s even though it the line was uncharacteristically short.
I wrote like the proverbial ink was pouring out of my fingers which for ME, means four hours of writing, okay, baby steps. There are new ideas afoot in my brain and I’m so excited by them, I can hardly sit still. Also, I wrote a new review for Gothamist wherein I resisted the urge to use either “milieu” or “echelon” in a sentence because I kept thinking of that scene in Family Guy where Brian goes to work at the New Yorker and asks where the bathroom is and the editor says, “oh, here at the New Yorker, no one has an anus”. HA.
I stayed out until 1:30 on Friday night for Barrie’s delightful and hilarious passover seder and when my Dad asked the next morning if I’d converted yet I said no, but DAMN, it’s tempting. Thumbs up for the Jews. Also, riding home in a taxi by myself through the city that I love, speeding home to a sleeping (and sick) Stuart was sort of the best of all possible worlds, in a way. I didn’t call him for my usual exclamation of “windows!” going over the QB (there are some windows I love near there, I never fail to mention it) but I thought about it.
Did I mention that I wrote and wrote? OMG loves.
I checked Biscuit‘s blog about a billion times a day for updates of his exciting and unexpected stay in India because OMG! India. Loves.
I’ve had a lot of tea, a lot of coffee, a lot of wine, but not enough sunshine. So Stuart and I are going ess-ploring through Long Island City now. Expect crappy pictures.
So I celebrated passover seder last night at Shana’s house which might strike some of you as incongruous since I will also be celebrating Greek Easter next weekend (“greaster” to people in the know, i.e., me). I’ve got to say, with the gentle (gentile!) hangover I have this morning, the Jews, they do holidays right. All the well-meaning people at the table kept saying that four full glasses, it’s more of a GUIDELINE, you know, but Noah to my right was very committed to the obligation and I took it like a man and drank (a minimum) of four half-full glasses of wine. Let’s say I stopped counting after Noah insisted that I pour him and myself a glass between two of the official glasses so when it came to pour an official glass, well, I poured another one, okay? And not Noah in the biblical sense, either – this Noah does kickboxing.
Tonight brings even more passover (2006! Now with more passing over!) because Barrie is hosting HER first seder and there will also be wine, because the Jews and passover, they love the wine, bless them for it. By tomorrow, I fully expect to be checking into Betty Ford but also maybe the JCC. My mother is reading this in horror about the Betty Ford part so let me take this moment to assure her, I will be a little more lenient with that four-glass guideline tonight. Maybe.
I don’t talk about religion on this blog because well, I don’t really talk about religion. I’m not really religious. I celebrate greaster with my father because it means a lot to him to have me alongside him in church, and it means a lot to me to be there alongside him, and I take Stuart with me because it means a lot to me that he’ll come with me to church in the middle of the night. And also because he’ll read the phonetic parts of the hymns with me and point out the words we know because we’re S-M-R-T. And he wasn’t even baptized like I was and sort of duty-bound to do this! My wonderful heathen husband, coming with me to church.
But if I were to open myself to a hailstorm of opinions, I would say that last night was really moving, even if I wasn’t bringing my own faith to the table. People talked about the traditions they’d had growing up, what being Jewish meant to them (as far as I can tell, a lot of it involved camp) and most of all, I could see how much it meant to Shana that so many people had gathered around her table. It’s not really about my faith or lack thereof – it’s about hers, and Barrie’s, and my father’s.
Plus, all that wine! I gotta tell you, that’s more wine than I usually encounter in Holy Week. Also, more loving sarcasm and more feminism. All good ‘sms. Plus, more wine tonight! Judaism, I gotta say, you’ve got it going on there. Although I am apologizing, inside, for the time last night where someone said a prayer that starts “with every generation” and I really – please don’t hate me for this – couldn’t help thinking “a Slayer is born!” I really don’t think Judaism minded, though, because I think Judaism knows that Buffy rocks.
On a sad note about tonight, though, I really made an effort to look nice. It’s important you know this because I’m currently wearing a black tee shirt and brown cords and sneakers, but I started OUT the day wearing this gorgeous shirt with brown heels. Brown heels that betrayed me half an hour into the day and made my heels bleed. THANKS, BROWNIE.
So when I got to work, I had no choice but to change into sneakers. And that left me with no choice but to take off the gorgeous shirt because I wouldn’t debase it by pairing it with sneakers. So now I’m wearing a black tee shirt and sneakers and I look about 200% less glamorous. I feel SO DEFEATED BY FASHION.
This, in turn, is okay, because I have saved ten of my American Dollars to go get Daisy Mae’s barbeque from the barbeque cart at 50th and 6th avenue and a jar of sweet tea that will sit on my desk all day, being all tea-like and making me happy and atoning for the craptacular outfit. So if you see fit to rain on my lunch break, heavens, SO HELP ME I WILL THROW DOWN. Now with more throwing down!
So, uh, that’s my Good Friday. Good being a relative term, right?
The past few weeks haven’t been completely consumed with worrying about the MFA denouement, in case you couldn’t tell (and I know you couldn’t). We also renovated our kitchen, something I’ve had on my mind for absolutely yonks.
Before:
And after two days and two extra nights of stripping, gripping, screwing (oh you LOVE it!), painting, taping, repainting, untaping, drinking beer, eating pizza, and making silly faces for the camera with face masks on, behold the After:
And the new shelving to solve some space issues:
How’s that for time not badly spent, eh? Click here to see the entire set in all its blue and white glory.
This is what Flannery O’Connor answered when she was asked, late in her life, why she wrote. Some people might think it was glib of her, but I think it’s the simplest, most direct answer I’ve ever heard about writing. Because you’re good at it. Isn’t that why Albert Einstein became a scientist, or Picasso a painter, or Churchill a politician? We are encouraged from a young age to find something we’re good at, that we enjoy doing, and do it.
This is by way of making the hard admission that the final letter came last night, and that I will not be starting an MFA program in the fall. But I will be writing, because I am good at it. In the interest of honesty, I know that I have never had the discipline to do it regularly and with determination, but I will be teaching myself that. I will create my own twelve-step program to cure myself of lethargy and inertia, by just writing already. I don’t know how it will be received, but that will also come at its own time. All I know is that I enjoy doing it, and that I’m good at it.
I want to thank you all, because I blogged about something that was (and still is) difficult for me to discuss, to reveal. Rejection is difficult, and I won’t be caving to the temptation to play sour grapes with the goal I was reaching for. I still want a master’s degree, and I will still be working towards getting one in the next few years. I will simply have to work harder at my own work, something I haven’t done enough of. It’s going to be a lot of change, and I hope you’ll be here for me to share the successes and difficulties as they come along.
A friend told me, in the course of all this, that he thought my blog was possibly hampering my writing. That, perhaps, by writing the blog I was releasing a desire to write without directing it to a more worthy goal – my fiction. He suggested that perhaps if I were to stop blogging, my drive to write could more fully be realized in the realm of fiction. Because I take his opinion seriously, I thought about it, but I’ve come to disagree with him. I blog because it’s communication, and I am a sucker for communication. I blog here for two reasons. The first is simple – I appreciate you, I like your feedback, and I like meshing my life with your lives. The second is reminiscent of something Faulkner said about never knowing what he thought of something until he’d seen what he’d written on the subject. I blog because it helps me solidify my reactions and opinions, it reminds me to be watchful and attentive to the world around me because of how I might later craft those thoughts into words. It’s communication.
Writing fiction, on the other hand, is creation. I don’t have one valve for the two desires – if I shut off blogging, fiction won’t leap forth unbound from my mind. They’re different processes, which is why I ultimately (but respectfully) disagree that blogging gets in the way of writing. I make time to blog, yes, as I will now be making time to write. Which, really, is what I need to do before revving up any other element of my complex Plan B. I need to face the blank page and conquer it, on a schedule and with determination. Last night, Stuart made the incredibly apt analogy that what I am facing is the building of a fire – right now, all I have is kindling and building the fire seems daunting and difficult, but once I actually start building it, start feeding the flame, it will get easier. I’ll have a fire, and I’ll start to learn how to nourish and maintain it. I don’t have a fire now. But I’m going to build it.
So I’ll still be blogging, and I appreciate that you’ll still be there while I try to do what will undoubtedly be the hardest thing I’ve ever done – train myself to start thinking, and acting, like the writer I want to be. Thank you for everything you’ve said, encouraging me and telling me your own stories of the graduate process, which made me feel like I was very much NOT alone in this struggle. You are all, in a word, inspiring. So I’ll be keeping you posted.
And because I suspect the only way to salve the wound is to focus on what I can do about it, building the fire starts now. Tomorrow morning I’m going to do what I keep telling myself to do – I’m going to get up, make a cup of strong coffee, and sit down to write.
I’m still missing one answer but every place else has been pretty much a bust, so you can imagine all manner of brave faces and awesome Plans B I’ve been making. And for the most part, perhaps, I was thoroughly convinced that should the last answer be similarly a bust, I’d be okay. I still am thoroughly convinced of that. Except someone forgot to tell my subconscious.
I woke up this morning in a cold, heart-pounding sweat because I’d just had this wonderful dream. I dreamt that I was walking though some plaza here in Midtown when I realized I held in my arms a bundle of mail. So I stopped at one of those ubiquitous corporate planters and sorted through it, only to find an envelope the size of my torso with NYU written across it. I tore it open and I was crying from joy before I even read the letter confirming my acceptance. I stood there at this planter, crying my eyes out from relief and exhiliration and I was too stunned and happy to even find my cell phone and call Stuart, my parents, everyone else I know in some phone tree of jubilation. I was in! I had a plan! I’d had faith and it worked! I stood there crying and flipping through sheafs of paper, and crying even more.
And then I woke up mid-dream-sob. And it hit me with hurricane force that it’d been a dream, and also that the NyQuil I took last night hadn’t worn off. I’ve never been more disconsolate or exhausted by the sheer concept of getting out of bed. I showered in a daze. I dressed in a daze. I’m still in a daze, feeling like both hands briefly grabbed an electric current and the thunder thump of shock is still in my chest, reverberating around my ribcage. What a wonderful, terrible dream.
So I guess we can stop pretending, and by we, I mean me. I obviously still want this. Everyone I love and adore (and that includes most of you) has been thoughful and positive enough to point out that I don’t really need this to write. And you’re right, and you’re wrong. I may not need it – all I need is the perseverance and persistence. But I wanted it, because it takes about 10% off the hard edge of the road. It makes the process 10% easier, and I will admit to being weak and human and wanting that 10% break very much. The dream knocked aside all my coatings of courage and resolve and reminded me just how incredibly happy an acceptance letter would make me.
In short, today is going to be another long day.
