Midnight Bike Ride

Say good-bye to your friend at Grand Army Plaza; the grand piano is gone from the stone gazebo. You've been to see the neuroscientist speak and there are things to think about that can't be properly considered indoors.

"Imagine a football field, filled with a rainforest. Each branch is the width of a hair. That is something like the complexity of your mind," said the neuroscientist to the crowd.

Later he said, "the data we will compile will be more than the project to map the skies."

"Your inner starscape is quite complicated," he said.

A word like "starscape" can't be brought indoors, so you say good-bye to your friend by the absent piano and bike off around the plaza.

Cruise out down Vanderbilt and gain momentum; rolling stops at the lights. Then ratchet up the gears and push your way back up to speed as you descend past the shuttered shops.

It takes 10 minutes or so to gain the ascent to the Manhattan Bridge. The slope begins blocks away, by the apartment houses that always have a group of people howling around a set of speakers. Once, someone threw a basketball in front of your tires, but tonight they laugh and no one pays you any mind.

The men in the fancy biking gear pass you from time to time, calf muscles sliding up and down beneath their skin along tight tendons. Let them pass.

The bridge begins to lift you gently out of the city. The Jehovah's Witnesses' Watchtower goes by, glaring. Parking lots slide beneath you.

Slip the gears down and settle in to the pulse of moving up the bridge. The air cools and the East River opens up beneath you. Every pedal gains you a broader view of the city skyline, measured and complex. Lights on and lights off. Signifiers, some whose significations you know -- this building, that building -- some which are mysteries. Some which may not signify anything except to the people within, with their hands on the light switches.

Up this high over the water, this late, it is possible to feel both alone and together, each in the most satisfying way. The lights blaze out from the rooms filled with thoughts. Every small spot of light reaches out to you and repeats, "I am here, I am here."

The cars rumble on the raised roadway above you. If you stopped for a moment, you could feel the bridge shake. But you don't.

The D train clatters along beside the bike track. Returning to Brooklyn, you can race it to the land. Once, you kept pace for nearly three quarters of the bridge. There was an old man in a fedora leaning against the window, and you kept your eyes on that hat as the speed brought you closer and closer to giddiness.

In this direction though, towards Manhattan, you meet the trains head on and they pass quickly, screaming vessels filled with ruminations, and newspaper articles, and shopping lists, and conversations whispered and yelled.

And as the bridge lifts you up, you are lifted by this tide: the lights on and off, the heavy cars, the minds on rails.

On the bike path, though, you are alone with the air, and your starscape mind. The East River moves beneath you. From this height, in this darkness, it seems stately and silver.

As you pass the apex, you move up through the gears and push the bike faster. Soon you catch the descent and your momentum grows.

The overhead lights are spaced a few meters apart. As you pass under and beyond each one, you see your shadow appear before you, poised as if jumping, delicate, one leg raised. And you move faster, and the shadow self lengthens, and fades. You, dancing larger, leaping further, until suddenly you disappear; mirror self pulled back to substance, only to appear again, as if drawn back like Peter Pan's needle-pointed shadow, to begin growing and pulling away again under the glare of the next light.

Coast down. Gain speed. Ignore the bumps, take them bravely. Square your shoulders and curve your back, and feel the wind filling your torso like a sail. Keep your eyes on the skyline.

If a single mind is like a rainforest, what is a city like this? If a mind is a starscape, then how many universes exist here, where the lights go on and off, and each one is unique?

Swing down off the bridge and up into the East Village. Catch the snippets of conversation on the street. Sit down at a cafe, order a beer, and pull out your notebook. Write down what you can of the feelings you've had -- keep what you can. Time looks slow and stately, even silver, from afar. But when you're in it, it's far too fast and far too murky. So catch what you can, there in the middle of the night.

Sardines

I was at the Monterey Aquarium a few weeks back and decided I really, truly love sardines (the live kind):




Schools of fish are fascinating and beautiful to watch. Certain kinds of fish have an instinct to school, but it's not entirely effortless. Changes of light affect their ability to school, so vision is involved. But the most interesting aspect, to me, is something called the lateral line -- a sensitive area on the sides of the fish that allow them to detect heat and pressure changes from their neighbors, giving them a constant read on their position in the group. This is how the movements of a school can be so quick, with all of the fish reacting instantaneously.

The individuals within the school have two competing needs: to be on the inside of the school, where they are the most protected from predators; and to be on the outside, where there is more oxygen available. And so they weave in and out as they swim, pursuing their own goals, but with an overarching awareness of the group they are a part of and their role within it.

I always wanted to be a fish like that: getting air, getting comfort, never straying too far. But I'm usually halfway across the ocean before I notice I've gotten out of synch. By that time it's generally best to just swim on. And I've found that if you go for long enough, you always find your way back into one school or another.

I love you, New York

There are few things as intimate as a subway ride.

In the veins of the city, we as strangers share our most quiet moments. We relax into ourselves. As Virginia Woolf described the relief of solitude in "To the Lighthouse,"

For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of–to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

The incredible beauty of a subway ride is that we all, as strangers, share a silent agreement to allow each other to be visible and invisible at once. It is an aloneness that is different from withdrawing and shutting oneself away. Instead, sitting comfortably in our own cores of darkness, we keep the world in our gaze. And from that vantage point, a deeper kind of compassion is possible.

In this shared solitude, there is little to judge in others because their being requires nothing from you. You can let them all wash around and past you: the loud, flirting teenagers; the little girl swinging from the bars like a gymnast; the little boy watching her quietly and intelligently; the nearly-sleeping woman; the man checking his phone repeatedly even though there is no signal here. All that is required of you is to be there with them, and let them be.

It is impossible to ignore the mystery of other people's lives when you live in this city. You talk to five strangers a day at the least; five more who verge somewhere between acquaintance and stranger. At every moment, you are surrounded by people with names that you will never know. It puts the wonder in you. If you start imagining ideas as clouds of words, you realize that you would never be able to move in a city this thick with human thought. If you visualize love as threads tying one person to another, you realize that you are moving improbably through the most layered cloth.

Every time you walk down the street or board a bus, you feel how deserving people are of your effort to understand them. Their faces tell you that their lives are as thick as yours, because they are, for the moment, not caught up in the effort of mirroring your ideas back at you. The way they hold themselves and the things that they hold show you how complex their worlds are, as complex as yours and probably more so.

Even the places and the objects are full of human meaning. There is nowhere that you can find that is not significant to someone, living or dead. If you start to imagine the layers of attachment, it can become unfathomable. The very same building is the spot where one person fell in love, where another lost someone, where another tripped and broke the grocery bag. In a landscape so full of meaning, you don't even need to have your own connection to a thing to feel its importance. It can be important to you just because of the surety that is has been important to so many others.

And how many others! People different in so many ways that it's like looking through a prism. Even the insecure can hide their weakness here, because you can't look at a person and tell what race they're running.

I know there are dark sides to it. There are the materialistic, and the vain, and the shallow. The man I met who I asked why he decided to pursue his particular line of work, and he looked at me like I was crazy and said, "So I could make money." The people who can't explain satisfactorily what the company they work for does, exactly. The women with the purses that cost as much as a semester's tuition at a private university. The club kids who think that social networking is a worthy way to spend all of one's time. But I love that there's room for that too, here, that there's room for everyone. I don't understand these people, but New York challenges me to try. It doesn't allow me to hide from things I find foreign. It doesn't allow anyone to hide from anything without paying a huge premium for it.

And if I had the time, I would ride the subway for hours for that crazy combination of the strange and the intimate. I would ride it in loops, just watching the people come on and get off, have their private thoughts and look out at the public world. Recently I saw a woman cry, as silently as she could, with a hand lightly over her eyes, across from me on the subway. Just seeing the way that the people around her tensed up with compassion, glancing towards her now and then to see whether they should say something or let her be, reaffirmed to me how good people truly are. It was not indifference. I watched it, and I saw that it was not. It was respect. It was a group of people present as a woman hit a sharp point in her life, and respecting her right to either visibility or invisibility. I know you won't believe me, but that is what I saw in people's faces.

Maybe I'll make the time for that endless subway ride. Because I'm going to have to leave, and I need to take my leave well. A person's life isn't just one story, it's many stories, and sometimes those stories don't fit together the way they should. Leaving here is going to break my heart, because I've never loved a city as much or as long as I've loved New York. But there's another plot line and it says I'm out of here in August. New York, I love you. I'll see you again.

A note on sad blog posts

Emotions take up space in your life, and if you let them, they'll do it without compensating you in any way. They can be loafers who hang around, paying no rent, taking up your mental energy.

I'm an emotional person, and as such I believe strongly in making my emotions work in exchange for the space they use.

For instance, take anger. Anger is an excellent worker -- you can use it to get a good workout, or to give your apartment a good cleaning.

And sadness, I find, is a good writer. I like the imagery that sad thoughts create. And I like to share them, because often I'll hear from people who had some recognition and felt companionship with my words.

So don't worry about me and my sad blog posts. If it were something truly awful, I'd be protecting it and hiding it away. If it's up in the blog, it's because I've been thinking and thought I had something to say that might make sense to others.

Hugs to you! I'm very happy these days, and I'm sure happiness will do some writing for me, too.....it's just that melancholy seeks visual expression, and sometimes I like the ideas that I find there.

Adult children of divorce

This is the way that I think of families, after a great deal of thought: I think of individuals, standing near one another, tied together with string. Great amounts of string, all different colors. From my arm, to your leg, to his ear, to her wrist, back again around my waist and curling around your ankle. One line of purple yarn; one of turquoise sewing thread; yellow macrame floss from her nose to the tips of his hair.

Each of these pieces of string and thread and rope are the stories that everyone knows but repeats anyway, for the joy of it, without someone saying "Oh yes, you've told this one before." They are the rituals and repeated behaviors that comfort everyone. They are even the teasing and sometimes the bickering, the things that can be said safely. Every little bit of shared, recognized behavior, goes into the knotted mess of associations that is a family.

There are two major losses that can occur in this arrangement. One is the worst: the loss of a person. The other is lesser: the loss of the unit. I've experienced both in the last few years, but I want to talk about the second right now.

I suppose I want to talk about it because, as an adult, one does not seem to be expected to feel very much about it. There's quite a lot of information out there about what a child of divorce may experience. There is not very much, or at least not very much that rings true, about what an adult child of divorce thinks and feels. There's even less about what all of us adults experience again and again when we lose the assumed families we create for ourselves. The fact of the matter is that the loss, though different for an adult than for a child, is there.

When a family is taken apart, the people remain intact. It's those strings that take the damage. Imagine great hands pulling the people, like dolls, away from one another. The strings snap, tear, unravel. The remnants will remain attached to whichever person was tied most strongly to them, but there's no longer anything at the other end.

When a child loses their family, we all recognize that they are experiencing something that will remake them. They have no independent agency in the adult world. They will have to change habits, routines, likely even homes. Beyond this, they have to try to apply a child's understanding of the world to adult problems.

As an adult, we have our own lives and our own agency to return to. The dissolution of a family can't force an adult to live in a city they don't want to live in, or spend half of their week in one home and half in another. It's a better deal, I'm fairly certain, and clearly a different one. But it doesn't mean that an adult doesn't feel the ripping of those threads. And an adult is acutely aware of all of those remnants tied to their limbs, the ones that were once a source of reassurance but have become annoyances, reminders of loss.

I am, of course, only speaking for myself. Blogs are not known for their sociological research. But I feel somewhat authoritative on the matter because I have had the experience of losing two families in as many years.

When my family, the real one, came apart, I happened to be volunteering with an organization in an arrangement that caused me to live with my coworkers in order to share expenses. I had already become fairly attached to the people around me, but the situation thrust me into it further. When I got the phone call from my parents, I was days away from leaving the country for work. I returned as fast as I could, but not soon enough to say good-bye to my childhood home. By the time I was able to get back, it was sold, all the family's things sorted through, divided, perhaps donated in my absence.

I suppose if I'd been thinking clearly, I would have cancelled the trip and gone back. Things are just things, but also, they're more than that. A space is just a space, but it is also a home. When I allow myself to think of that house, it's only to imagine what the floorboards felt like on my bare feet -- first, little feet, later larger. I think about what the bathroom counters felt like when I was almost the same height as them, and then later when they only came to my waist. I think about the little change in level between the different floorings. I allow myself to see the furniture, the way it was laid out, but I stop there. I don't open drawers. I don't ever think about the small, incidental things that were important to me but probably didn't make it into any storage units. And just like I don't think about those things, I try not to think about the rituals that I will no longer take part in. I try not to think about the photos that are suddenly dated. I try not to think about the stories that used to be the surest way to a shared laugh and are now somewhat awkward, melancholy.

I didn't fly home to say good-bye to those things. I don't think I realized it as a possibility. Instead I laid low and tried to do what adults do: get on with my life. In my case, that life included a large group of friends and roommates. It was like a new family to replace the one I'd lost. To help me forget those remnants of strings around my ankles, I had new ones tying me to a brand new set of people.

I won't create false suspense; of course the new strings were pulled apart, too, about a year later. It is surprising to me how the two events feel somewhat similar, despite their completely different levels of importance. I imagine that, if you are able to anticipate the change, it's possible that at least some of these threads you are able to untie, freeing yourself from them deliberately. If you don't see it coming, though, they stay knotted to you with dangling ends. In several years I know the ones that will still be attached to me are the ones from my real family, but in the aftermath of the ripping apart, I can still feel the sting from the second set.

But what? The options are to resist every tying strings again, for the ultimate protection against damage....or, of course the only real option, to go on offering up my wrists and ankles to knots. It's life, and there are no pat morals. We keep doing the things that we do, because to stop would be to die while living. And by the time we reach old age we may be entirely obscured by the knotted ends of strings that tie to nothing, but at least then we know that we lived, that we loved, that we tried.

Online Dating Part 1: Just when I thought I'd developed all my social skills

Talking to people one on one. Talking to large groups of people. Talking to people on the phone. Sending email. Chatting. Mingling. Talking to people in other languages. Talking to strangers. Hanging out with strangers.

These are all things I do pretty well, now (OK, except the mingling). Not consistently well, but let's not get into that. Just suffice it to say that I am a relatively competent socializer. This was not always the case, though. I was a shy kid, and I remember in excruciating detail all the stress and mishap I went through trying to add each of these forms of communication to my skill set. My current job in communications is undoubtedly related to this. I've been thinking about how people contact one another for as long as I can remember. One of my first memories is telling a lie, and weighing out the benefit I gained versus the anxiety I felt. I was still in diapers.

So, after 25 years + of studying the subject, I'd finally begun to feel that I could handle just about any format. Social media? Ha! I work in social media. Just try me.

Then I moved back to the States and found out that online dating isn't just OK now, it's absolutely mainstream.

For the first month or so, I held out. My roommate went through a brief fling with a guy she met online, and so the topic was often on the table. My roommate, though, is the kind of unflappable person who not only never becomes embarrassed herself, she actively puts people around her at ease. If I needed someone to negotiate a hostage situation, this is who I'd call. So seeing her, if not finding a lasting relationship at least having fun, really didn't do much to convince me that I should give it a try myself.

It was everyone else's reactions that made me start to feel like a technophobe. Whenever the topic came up around new people, they'd all tried it. People even thought my reticence was a bit strange. The consensus was pretty simple: once you're out of school, meeting people is a pretty random game. If you'd be OK with meeting someone in the produce aisle, why not meet them online?

The issue is that I wouldn't meet someone in a produce aisle. Not that I'd be afraid for my safety. I would just freeze and have no idea what to say. I once sat next to a guy I found extremely attractive for 12 hours on a plane. He actually made me blush, I thought he was that cute. I exchanged only 2 or 3 sentences with him the entire time. 12 hours and less than a half page of dialogue.

Once, my friend from Brazil asked me to clarify the word "flustered." When I started explaining, she said, "Oh, I know! It's like how you feel when someone is attracted to you."

Yep. She was dead on. For some of us, that is exactly what flustered is.

So, the topic of online dating has made abundantly clear something that I had been able to ignore about myself: my social skill set is not at all complete. I haven't the slightest idea how to date.

The one time that I ended up really falling in love, I had a crush on the guy for three years before I was able to make a(n incredibly sloppy and impulsive) move. It then took another six months of a casual relationship before I felt confident that yes, I really did want him to be my boyfriend.

The other side of my passivity is that over the years I've had more than one Accidental Boyfriend, situations that spun out of control before I really knew what was going on. About a year and a half ago I swore those off and have been trying to be more careful ever since.

So, whichever way you slice it, dating sounds terrifying to me. I'm extremely defensive about who I'll consider an emotional attachment to these days. And even when I like a person, it may take me, oh, three and a half years to be sure.

Not only do I not know how to date, it seems like my personality is at odds with it. It's terrifying and I seem destined to fail. So I signed up for OKCupid and started talking to people.

Someday I'll be able to look at my shiny, pretty box of intact social skills and say to my kids, "It was a long campaign, but eventually I took 'em all."

In the interest of balance

Following yesterday's downer post, I present to you:

10 details to love

The big things are obvious, so here's a list of the small things that make my time in New York wonderful. Not organized by weight or value.

1. It is impossible to leave the house without hearing at least 2 spoken languages aside from English.

2. The dry cleaner's by my house uses an antique sewing machine to do repairs, without pretension.

3. If I happen to be lying still in my room with my ear to the mattress when the subway passes nearby, I can hear and feel a faint rhythm like a bass line.

4. There is a spirit house in the back room at the laundromat.

5. When the train is about to arrive at the platform by my house, it causes a gentle wind tunnel. It always feels dramatic and special.

6. In Prospect Park, you can bird-watch.

7. Brooklyn has enough of a city vibe to get me to put on mascara and earrings when I go out for the day, but not enough that I feel guilty if I don't feel like putting an outfit together. A happy balance.

8. Manhattan has such a different vibe that it feels like a completely different place -- and it's only half an hour away.

9. Good music in cafes. On the whole, this is true.

10. Sometimes, you just need to see the water. It's never too far away, here.