Life is hard. Here is someone.

Let’s play a game called, “Which Soup Should I Make?”

1. Parsnip soup.
2. Broccoli soup
3. Garlic soup
4. Carrot soup

If I make the soup you voted for, I will send you the soup.

(Not really.)

an email I am about to send:

Did you open up a Word doc on my computer, a sort of embarrassingly poem-ish thing actually, about DYING, and change the title to, “Don’t You Eat All of My Leeks”? Or did I call it that myself, for some reason I am no longer in touch with?

Plz advise.

2011

There is a bobby pin on the ground outside of the front door of our apartment building. It’s sitting on the concrete steps and what’s notable about this bobby pin is it has been there for at least a month. At least! I remember seeing it in its earliest days of being there and smiling to myself, thinking it probably came out of my hair when I was putting on a winter hat on the way out the door. Now I check for it most times I come in the door. The very fact that I haven’t stopped to pick it up all these days, all these trips to and from the apartment, fills me with a little thrill. I smile to myself wondering if D has noticed it, if he’s also figured it was mine, if he laughs too that no one has picked it up, and also if he, too, is a little thrilled by his own  refusal to bend down and grab it. Why has it not blown away, or been kicked away, or carried away by that stray cat that sometimes walks with another cat, side-by-side, tails intertwined, through our backyard?

I didn’t look today. Maybe it’s gone.

I also have this situation with the soap in our shower, wherein we had a tiny circle left of our last soap, and it was bright yellow, and the new soap is white, so I have been trying to make it so the yellow disc of soap will become one with the big, white soap, that it will meld in and stick in the  middle, and that this big soap entity will look like an egg with a yolk. I’m sorry to say, though, that it isn’t working. Every time I’m in the shower I run it into the water and sort of pet it gently hoping they’ll melt a little and combine, but then as soon as I go to use the soap they come unglued and I have to start over.

But I do start over. And those are my goals for 2012: continue to see the bobby pin on the cement steps and laugh; one day realize my dream soap amalgam.  

I feel like sitting with small, important things like this are all I did this year, day in and day out. I thought a lot about writing but did not write. I read a lot, but nothing I need to recount here besides sitting up in bed reading next to each other before bed is all we usually need. If I am having a particularly bad go of things (ie, I saw Drive that week and was thinking too much about Death), we read out loud. Or sang, in the middle of the night, what we remembered of 69 Love Songs. I continued to be terrible at music but we now have a record player that makes our house feel more like a home and feels meditative and right. During the same week that I thought to myself that I missed living alone and singing in my apartment, he told me he liked to hear me sing (I’m laughably bad). So I have tried to forget myself and do it anyway. We cooked. I even brought my lunch to work a few times (bringing my lunch to work is pretty much the primary aspiration of my life). We made cookies and smoothies and oatmeal and pesto and pizzas and thanksgiving dinner for our families and popcorn for our Christmas tree. We learned to not really cook together, because we are controlling know-it-all’s. We learned I’m terrible when I’m too hungry (“hangry”) and he’s terrible in the morning. I taped Jolie’s list of how to keep your apartment clean on our fridge for months and we really almost did it. We become decent, dish-doing people in spurts. And then things go to shit and we decided that’s okay. That is, I cried a little, facing the idea that yes, I’m not a Clean Person even though I’d been trying to keep up appearances every since we met. But this is us and how we live, and that’s okay. At some point this year we became a family. I stopped drinking coffee, which was a bit of a betrayal (I got him to come home with me the first time by telling him I had an espresso maker). I started leaving the wrappers for tea bags on the butcher block every day, without really noticing (so I’m told). I drank so little that now my face gets red with half of a beer. I bought a bike that was too big and sold it on Craigslist to a woman who wanted to pay me more than I was asking for. Then I got another one. I didn’t really go anywhere, besides Michigan with his family and Florida for Christmas. I only blogged 20 pages worth of posts this year. We started two different zines and never finished them. I started paying off my student loans again. I exercised my stock options. I lost 10 lbs. I started writing copy for work — holing up in a little room and going to the Good Place, at least there if hardly ever at home. We spent the night in a boatel. I made dinner for friends every Sunday night as a rule, and then decided I was being a little crazy. We found an apartment together and the old woman who lived there at the time refused to leave. “Two weeks,” she said. We put our stuff in storage and stayed at friends places, and then his dad’s, and the day before we were set to move in the broker said she had good news and bad news. There really was no good news. I walked over the Williamsburg Bridge, often with Cassie, often talking about anxiety and the vain ways I try to “earn” happiness, to Be Good as a type of insurance, instead of living. On my birthday there was a rainbow. Then I came home and we watched You’ve Got Mail and I cried, not because of the movie but because I hate my birthday. Not because I’m getting older but because everything is not perfect and I want it to be, even when I try to make it no big deal. And we’re all going to die. Coming to terms with this is probably most of what I did this year. Better to do it, to see it, to notice it, and let it be what it is and not be afraid to enjoy it. I hate the word “enjoy” so much, but my boyfriend uses it all the time. And this is what this year has been for me. I have had to learn to sit with it and trust it and take it in of all its bare earnestness, without distractions, and without laughing or rolling my eyes.

impt

So I’m on this flight from NYC to Charlotte today, it’s super-delayed on the tarmac and I’m sitting next to two people about my age who did not know each other but talked so loud that I shared that ugh i know ARE THEY EVEN HUMAN? look about them with two separate people. I would give some examples of their conversation but it would be too painful for me to revisit. Okay wait I can’t help but remember: the girl kept joking about us being in the exit row and DYING and when there was turbulence she was like, “Am I going to have to pull this lever?” (to open the door!) and I had just read that fucking, fucking article about the french guys crashing the plane in the Atlantic and it was all I could think about (this plane crashing) meanwhile this unstable woman with a extra large coolatta was making jokes about pulling open the goddamn emergency exit.

Anyway so halfway through I really have to pee and I’m telling myself stuff like, “Okay, as soon as you finish this chapter, you can pee.” (along with musing about how I’d react if I found out the plane was going down) Then I realized I could pee when I wanted because I am an adult human so I put my book away and started sheepishly assessing the situation. See, the seatbelt light was on but I always forget if that means Don’t move around or, Fine move around but if you’re sitting down, put on your seatbelt. I figured it was the latter because that’s what I wanted so I found a way to justify it. Then I looked right and left. No one was up and about to reassure me I wouldn’t get “in trouble.” I craned my neck to see what the fight attendi were doing. They buckled in in the back, but I decided to LIVE ON THE EDGE and then to go to the bathroom in the front since it was closer and there was some turbulence but fuck it right? I’m an adult.

So I got up half-expecting to get yelled at (as always) but creeped on forward in my newish boots and then stopped and stood frozen under the glowing green bathroom sign when I couldn’t find the fucking door to push in and crawl inside. Ahhh. I felt the eyes of every human on the plane on me while I squinted into dark corners and wondered if I was about to walk into the cockpit . but was like whatever guys, I can do this. Then a flight attendant from the back GRABS THE MIC and says in a fluster, JUST A REMINDER THAT THE FIRST CLASS LAVATORIES ARE RESERVED FOR FIRST CLASS PASSENGERS ONLY. 

Cut to me wandering around first class like a lost puppy. This lady is basically telling me, from the back of the plane, over the loudspeaker to get the fuck out of the first class section. WHAT? So I SPIN around on my heels (rather amazingly I might add) to face THE ENTIRE PLANE, shrug dramatically and say SORRY EVERYONE! in the most teenage, sarcastic tone of voice. I don’t even know where this audacity came from. But I saw this sea of faces staring at me and rolling their eyes at the situation and laughing with me and literally like, making little comments of solidarity as I walked past. Like I just committed this brave act, crossing enemy lines to pee into a little toilet vacuum. I mean people were truly making eye contact and saying like, “Come ON!” and, “Oh like they are all just LINED UP up there waiting to get into the bathroom!” And I just nodded and shrugged and wanted to like, high five everyone as I cruised by, but instead made some kind of bad kid in the back of the class type of dramatic exhalations then sauntered, victoriously, all the way to the back of the godforsaken plane, where the flight attendants would not look at me, and peed in my proletariat toilet (proletoilet).

Anyway there was total class warfare going on in the sky somewhere over, I dunno, Virginia, today and it was amazing.