Isn't she Beautiful?

The new issue of 400 Words has been sent to the printer. They have my digital files, they have my money, this thing is ON.

I am now accepting pre-orders here, so blog it, shout it from the rooftops, send it to the friends you've been meaning to write a letter to, etc.

Also admire the loveliness below.

3am, the Telephone Disease

Kurt Vonnegut has a great few pages—in the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five, I think—where he talks about his late-night dialing disease. He describes draining a bottle of wine or so, late at night when everyone else is sleeping, and he describes how against his better judgment his hands begin to dance on the telephone dial, and how they summon the operator, and how he gives the operator names of people he hasn’t spoken to in years, wishing and hoping that she will have the oracular power to put him through, to convey to him the voices from a lost world.

There is something quaint about this vision, something telephone-age—and yes, we still use them, but it is hard to imagine someone sitting up late with a telephone as I imagine Kurt Vonnegut sitting, half-drunk in a pool of lamplight, in eerie cricket-punctuated silence, calling the operator with hope and trepidation, like a fisherman casting a net into the deep and hoping to bring up something good.

We don’t use the telephone for that anymore, we use computers; but I’m thinking, as I sit here in a pool of lamplight, with the quiet of 3am outside my bedroom window, that Vonnegut’s wistful, half-wild nostalgic feeling is still possible, and also that for all computers give us, for all they put us in control so we no longer have to rely on the connecting Sibyl at the other end of the line, they don’t give us everything.

To wit: I’m trying to find someone who can’t be found. Really, really can’t. My dance through the internets turns up pieces of things I already know: co-authorship of a scientific paper in 2001, the names of relatives, a list of places lived, the towns and phone numbers of other people with the same and similar names. Offers of more detailed reports for $7.95, $39.95, an extra $20 for “rush delivery”; I find the traces of an industry devoted to late-night tappers at keyboards, an industry growing rich or at least making a living off the human inclination to suddenly, urgently miss someone, late at night.

But I don’t find what I’m looking for. A person whose subsequent history seems likely to hold inchoate clues and messages that are necessary to make sense of the world, RIGHT NOW. A person who disappeared. A person who had the audacity to so something as old-fashioned and in fact, I’d come naively to believe impossible, as disappearing.

On Tuesday, I Was Obsessing

over Cat Power's album "The Greatest," again. I used to drive around and around Berkeley listening to it on repeat, loud. That was a rough time and I'm not so sure my "The Greatest" listening was quite healthy. But it is a hell of an album. This time around, I like to start with the song "Empty Shell." It's so over-the-top romantic. It's like spinning around alone in a big dark room with disco-ball lights whirring. It's like slowly running a piece of dark blue velvet over your skin. I love it.

Hated Despite of Great Qualities, Part 2

This is a continuation of something I started ages ago, back when Meg and I were thinking of moving to a new apartment. We decided not to, but our decision has now been rendered moot because our landlords, who live below us, have decided to commence the renovation they've been threatening for a while.

They dropped the r-bomb on Thursday. We have to find a new place by November 1, or maybe December 1, they're equivocating. The point is: we have to find a new place. But back to the story from before:

...So imagine, if you will, Meg and me ensconced on two barstools at this bait-and-tackle-y place in Red Hook. We ordered hefeweizens with a twist of lemon; they were delicious. The bar had invested heavily in the thrift-store-furniture and taxidermied-animal-heads lines of kitsch, but with likeable results. The bartender, as he washed and dried glasses and moved up and down his aisle of motion, possessed a certain quiet gravitas. The woman seated at one end of the bar seemed to know the man at the other; a guy two stools down from Meg, or so, scribbled in a notebook. Being in there was like heaving a sigh of relief, only it was sad relief, because the bar reminded us of Portland, and because the house-hunting had made us both a little sour on New York.

So, Red Hook: Van Brunt is a thoruoghly likeable street. More than just likeable. It has the right inftastructure to support main-street perfection. It is a street of which Jane Jacobs would approve, and I've no doubt that it will keep getting busier and more popular as the years go by. Still, one walks for twenty long-feeling minutes from the nearest subway, crosses a very large highway in the process, and arrives, in our case, at a building without qualities where the apartment in question is only fifty dollars a month cheaper than the place we're in now.

In the bar, our talk turns to New York City and all the things that it is and isn't.

In my experience, New York isn't an easy place to take for granted. I mean that living here is an active pursuit. New York is like a manic lover: it spits in your eye regularly enough that you never stop thinking about leaving it, and it says or does the perfect thing often enough that you are always re-telling yourself that life would be flat and dull without it.

Living here is such an odd mix of easy and not-easy.

Easy: I don't need to own a car. I am at the center of a web of the best transportation system I have ever known. I can get everything I need by just making a short walk from my house. I can get anything I want by making just a short walk from the place where I work. Work is a simple half-hour train ride from here; I can drink my morning coffee and read a novel the whole way there. Repeat in the evenings for home. I regularly run into people I know on the street. Everywhere I go, there are pedestrians. I seldom feel unsafe. Street life entertains me to no end.

Not easy: I spend about 40% of my take-home income in rent. This entitles me to live in a pleasant but tiny apartment where I enjoy an uncomforatble relationship with the landlords who live below. Luckily I really like my roommate situation, because living alone is not a financial option for me. That seems pretty un-American, given that I work a full-time job with a decent salary. New York City levies special taxes for the privilege of living here. And is *is* a privilege, I think, at least I truly enjoy it most of the time, but sometimes that enjoyment runs sour as fast and as nastily as an afternoon blood-sugar crash. New York City never lets you forget that some people have more money than you ever will. And that a lot of people have less money than you expect to ever have to make do without. And it never lets you forget that you give up some things that a lot of people take for granted, in exchange for what you do get. Like yards. Like front porches. Like enough space to entertain your friends. Like the kind of "hey hey, the gang's all here" mentality that can only prevail in places where the social and recreational options aren't unlimited. New York energizes you when you're in a good mood, but it can frazzle your nerves when you're in a bad one: there's always something you're not doing, not taking advantage of. Some friend who lives just a few miles away that you're not seeing because you can't cope with the subway again right now, because you're in a deadlock about who will go to whose neighborhood. New York is the ultimate humbling experience, as you're never far from someone smarter, younger, more successful or more influential than you. Also, while we're ranting, it can be weirdly hard to meet people here. It's one of those odd "water, water everywhere..." feelings -- eight million people, but you wish you had more friends or knew more eligible bachelors or -- why is this? Everyone's so damn busy all the time, or something. You meet someone once, there's no guarantee you'll "see them around," and that reminds me there are about five people I'm trying to re-connect with, whom I daily tell myself to call, and then am too tired or tapped-out to. People are dispersed enough that you really have to fight to see everyone.

That's a partial list. I love it here, but it's not the kind of love that can proceed on auto-pilot. There are too many bumps in the road.

So every morning since Friday, I wake up. I look at the nice brown color that I painted the walls in my room (it's called "Wilmington Tan," but my original idea was "Cocoa" and I now like to call it "Nutter Butter"), and think: fuck. I painted these walls. You know what painting walls is a symbol of? Wanting to feel settled down. And then I think: I don't want to move. I don't want to paint other walls. I don't want to have to move to a different neighborhood because I can't afford anything else in this one. I shake my mental fist in the air and say Damn you, New York! And later I go out on the street, and fall in love all over again.

Farm Life

Labor Day weekend in the Blue Ridge:

Bloggin' the Day Away: Sunday

A rag-tag grab-bag (can you say that ten times, fast?) of Sundayness.

1. Am I falling apart? For some time now, I've been noticing this occasional stifness in my left hip. Today, as I am walking around Cobble Hill, I notice another thing. Every time I take a step, there's this *pop* as I move my leg back, a pop in my hip, as of bone on bone. WTF?!?! Am I a hundred years old? Is there some kind of physical therapy I can do for this? I practiced different kinds of steps, walking around Cobble Hill with my right hand over my left hip flexor like a weirdo. No help. Merde.

2. Yesterday I went jogging again on my favorite Big Symbol Of America. Thanks to Google Pedometer, I now know that my house to the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge and back is exactly four miles. I plan to do this more often, now, because of a brand new belly I chanced to notice on myself at work on Friday. You know: more running, fewer treats, more vegetables, less wine; go go, Gadget Metabolism! Lame and boring, but necessary. The sedentariness of a white-collar lifestyle is really a bad deal sometimes. Anyway. Now I hope that the running isn't causing the hip weirdness, and that the hip weirdness doesn't prevent the running.

3. I feel as though the crux of every story I tell lately is, "So, I'm getting old." Will it be this way for the rest of my life? I'm just going through an 'I'm-getting-old' phase maybe, and in a year or two I'll get over it and find something else to be obsessed with?

4. The changing of the seasons continues apace. I've been readying myself for fall, digging on that feeling of urgency that taps an ancient impulse to store up nuts, lay in supplies, and get right with the powers that be. Yesterday I did the most elaborate cycle of laundry ever. I washed all the sweaters that have lain under my bed for half a year. I packed the summer clothes underneat the bed. I washed a jacket. I picked up two pairs of jeans I'd taken to the tailor, to have threadbare bottoms fixed. I picked up four pairs of shoes I'd taken to the cobbler, to have pinchy toes stretched, and fallen-off heels put back on. Who can tell me what it is, the deep satisfaction of taking care of one's things? It is pure and irresistable, like the pleasure of adding up a column of sums and getting a right answer. Mending. Taking care of business. Being a little bit thrifty. This is another one of those "I'm getting so old that I'm getting a kick out of banal thing X" stories, but it's true.

I wonder what the world was like back when practicing the stewardship of objects was not so rare. Nowadays, there are whole classes of objects (most objects?) that there is no point in getting fixed. Maybe not even anyone to fix them if you wanted to. Television sets. Toasters. Throw it away, get a new one. I have a real respect for the shoe-repair man. He re-heeled my purple kitten heels better than they were the first time, with six solid nails going into each one. I have always been a sucker for competency in the material world. To possess such skills seems "empowering" in a real sense, seems worthy of this possibly over-used word. Competency with the material world seems to be one of the things that the capitalist system of mass production has robbed us of. Maybe it's even the most serious loss of all.

Or maybe I'm just into saving a few ducats on shoes and pants.

5. Speaking of fashion, this season is IMO the weirdest we've had in a while. It's the first season I can remember that's not just "hey, let's all dress up like some other decade"; this time, I'd be hard pressed to describe the style in terms of any other individual time in history, though there are plenty of elements of this 'n' that. I've been enjoying the 24-hour street fashion show that New York provides. I've also inveigled myself into spending more than I probably should have on clothing, going deep into the weird clothes-buying frenzy that I work myself into, once every couple of years. I think I'm about to come out the other side of it nicely set up, though, replete with all the coats and jackets and pants and layers I need to stay warm and reasonably put-together through a New York City winter, and more importantly, ready to relegate clothes to the back of my consciousness again so I can get on with the other stuff.

6. I'm having those headaches again, yesterday and today. The lingering, maybe-semi-migranous headaches that play games with my consciousness and make me want to hibernate them away. I still haven't figured out what causes them. Feh.

On Sleep

This is an essay I started months ago. I don't know what I think of it, but for what it's worth, here 'tis. I can't over-state how much the thing that my mother says in it, about how she hates being told what to do, resonated with me. I think something more is required to do it justice. But for now:

ON SLEEP

“Sleep is where I’m a Viking,” –Ralph Wiggums

Last month, my boyfriend and I visited Washington, D.C., for the wedding of a high-school friend of his. On our way up to the hotel room, Eric remarked that after a long day of travel, he was looking forward to a sound night’s sleep. I said I was feeling beat, too, and anticipating the same.

“But you always sleep well,” he said.

“I guess I do,” I said, then paused a beat, a new thought forming in my head. “Are you jealous?”

“Sometimes,” he said.

It's true, I sleep well. I also sleep long. If there is nowhere I have to be in the morning, I can snooze for so long it almost scares me. I’ll roll over, mash my face into the pillow, and push off again, chasing tales of dream. I’m like a glutton; I’ll keep on sleeping until I can’t sleep any more. I learn the noises of my alarm clocks and grow adept at tickling their snooze buttons without really waking. I can subsist in a state of half-sleep, resetting a snooze for hours—conscious enough to be irritated by the noise, but not conscious enough to decide to end it by rising.

I used to hate my above-average need for sleep. It seemed a kind of moral failing, a sign of weakness, laziness, and determination to waste the only life I’ll ever be given. Every morning I’d awake with a jolt of self-reproach for having slept so long. I had wasted time, now I’d have to hurry, and there would be no one to blame but myself. ‘What’s wrong with you?,’ I’d think. ‘Why can’t you train yourself to get up on time, like an ordinary person?’

While I flagellated myself with these thoughts, though, I forgot the obvious answer to my own punishing self-questions, which is: I adore sleep. Not only do I sleep longer than many people, I also look forward to sleep. Sometimes when I get up in the morning, I think to myself, ‘only x many hours, and I’ll be able to be back here again.’ The paradox of sleep is that sometimes its pleasures pass unnoticed, because the loss of consciousness that is so charming about it is, precisely, a loss of consciousness. That is why I love to snooze. That is why I haven’t put thicker curtains on my sunny bedroom windows yet. I like it when the light wakes me at five, so I can roll groggily to one side, check the clock, and revel in allowing myself to slip back under for three…more…delicious…hours. Sometimes I think I’m in love with sleep. Sleep is my dusky paramour, one who never asks anything of me. I’m safe when I’m sleeping. Perfectly at ease.

As a child, I put my toys to sleep. My mother tells a story about buying me a tricycle to encourage athleticism, only to have me swaddle it in blankets and put it down for a nap. I found a box of maxi pads and fashioned self-adhesive sleeping bags for my Fisher-Price people. Once after a long bedtime-story, calming-down session, I jumped up in a panic, remembering that I’d forgotten to put my toys to bed, and insisting that I had to go do this, now. My mother asked me please to wait until the morning. “But they’ll be tired,” I cried, full of compassionate anguish.

Being tired has always been a fear of mine. I suppose I got it from my mother, who is also afraid of being tired, and also loves to sleep. She gets panicky when her sleeping schedule is threatened, and I suppose I do too. Sleep is my kingdom, my right, the place I go just for me, the place I’m comfortable in. The place where I’m free: that might be what it comes down to. The world is scary. We need sleep, and lots of it, to be up to the world. I imagine that my mom has fantastic dreams. I believe this on the strength of a few that she’s told me, which are vivid and wild. I have fantastic dreams too, a lot of the time. I enjoy my dreams. I respect the place they come from. I imagine that I have a deep self and that it’s important, wiser and calmer than the self on the surface. I imagine that it possesses everything I need to live, and is beyond disturbance. It will take care of me if I let it. I just have to give it time and space to be heard. I have to give it sleep, and sleep somewhat attentively, too. I have to keep the din of other people to a minimum.

I went home last week, and during a late-night conversation over tea in the kitchen, my mother said to me, “I can’t stand being told what to do.” This simple statement broke open in my mind like a lightning bolt, illuminating dark corners: it was true. I’d never heard her say so before. I’d never thought it to myself before. But it summed up so much about my mother, tiny points of stubbornness or uncaring that I’d once ascribed to something else, anxiety or ignorance or unfashionableness. When the fact was this: my mother hates being told what to do. And off went a smaller lightning bolt, which told me: I hate being told what to do, too. Often I deal with this by trying to do everything before-hand and well, so that I don’t have to be asked. This makes me not appear to loathe being told what to do as much as I do actually.

I think that my mother’s and my fondness for sleep has a direct connection to our dislike for taking orders. Example: I resent it when I dream about work. I resent the encroachment of the job I do for money into the space of my subconscious. I want that space to be holy and apart, consecrated to Important Things. So when I wake up realizing that I have been dreaming about the personality foibles of the CEO, or how I should have done more with the project I was working on last week before the weekend, I’m grumpy, and I feel quotidian, not special the way I like.

My mother and I both need to feel free. Enjoying a feeling of freedom is, for both of us, a struggle. Sleep is anarchy. In sleep, there’s freedom.

Sleep may not be the boldest solution to this problem of liberty, but at least it costs nothing and doesn’t hurt anybody. And it’s refreshing too!

“I wish I could be like you, though,” I said to my boyfriend. “If I could get by on six hours? I’d get so much more done!” It’s true, and yet—the first part? I didn’t really mean it. I’m a sleeper. Insisting on sleep is insisting on myself. I mean, there’s escapist sleeping and insouciant sleeping, and even depressed sleeping (“dread of the day,” as the wisest psychiatrist I’ve known once called it), but for the most part I am delighted about my ability to sleep, and to derive pleasure from it. Because I appreciate, now, that not everyone can.

It Made Me Laugh, and Then It Made Me Feel Weird

"It" is this video.

It made me laugh because it is pretty funny. Not funniest-thing-ever funny, but what can I say? I'm one cup of coffee too many into my Sunday, and it thoroughly amused me.

Then it made me feel weird, because I realized it's part of a viral marketing campaign for a new Smirnoff product called "Raw Tea." So that explains the high production values and the, I dunno, slight residue of sterility, or something.

And now, of course, I'm PLAYING RIGHT INTO THEIR HANDS by blogging it. Just like they want me to. Fucking viral marketers.

Feelin' Grubby

So I am having one of those days. Fashion crisis days. Premenstrual + change of seasons = middle-school-style awkwardness. I changed outfits several times before work today, because nothing looked or relt right, which hasn't happened in I don't know how long. If I were to write a blues song right now, it would incorporate the following elements: I'm flat broke (da-do-doo-doo-doo), there's a zit on my neck, my hippie deodorant isn't working, I think I want to eat something but I don't know what it is, I don't like my jeans, the zipper fell off my old boots this morning, I'm going to have to wait till Friday to pick up my other shoes from the cobbler/shoe-repair place because I need an infusion of cash before I can afford to, I feel both bored and impatient, I think I'm getting a headache.

It'll pass, I have no doubt. Tomorrow's long-overdue haircut will help. Laundering all the sweaters and cold-weather clothes I pulled out of the duffle bags underneath my bed over the weekend will help.

Soon, I hope.

Later maybe I'll write something about last weekend's trip to Ossining. Stef, Meg and I did an 11-mile hike up the Croton Aqueduct Trail, and it was AWESOME.

All Quiet on the Sundress Front: Last Part

I was talking to a friend a while ago about what it means to be 27. We were both precocious children, and learned early to get along on the thrill of impressing adults by what we could do at a certain young age. 27, my friend said, is the age at which you realize that precocity is no longer possible. You can be a young author, a young artist, a young entrepreneur or homeowner at 27, but your youth isn’t going to knock anybody’s socks off. Nor is the fact of your youth going to compensate for shortcomings in whatever work it is you’re offering up to impress the world. You are just…a person among people. It’s kind of wonderful and kind of terrifying.

Maybe the drive to be impressive is part of the problem. It lasts. It tides you over, through your childhood, into your teenage years, into the dreams you dream between the pages of magazines. But the conditions under which you were precocious don’t last. You aren’t a child anymore, and you aren’t surrounded by teachers and judging adults.

I’d like to find my way into a mental economy that isn’t founded on impressing others. Or maybe I have and I’m just trying to find my feet here. There are other currencies now, ones I never counted on. I’m more and more fascinated with my ability to do ordinary things, like work and have relationships and hang on to old friends. I want to do things I would have dismissed, when a teenager, as heart-breakingly quotidian and not nearly fascinating enough: be married. Have children. I want to take care of my parents as they get old. I want…to do something good. I’ve become a little bit anxious about that. OK, fairly anxious.

I had coffee today with a different old friend. A really old friend, somebody whose house I snacked, practiced the use of make-up and busted a gut at every week in middle school. We haven’t seen each other in a year and haven’t been really close in ten years, but we used to be like sisters. She’s married now, settled down in Oregon, gardening with her husband, training to be a midwife. She seems happy and super together. Clear-eyed, clear-headed, and in control. And we had a good laugh about her being a midwife, now, because that’s what she always wanted to be, I mean, it’s probably one of the first confidential things she told me when I came over to her house after school in the 7th grade, probably just a month or two after the start of the long Seventeen magazine dream. She would have spread us out on the floor of her room, post-snacks, and told me about hippies and the commune where she was born and pulled down from the shelf her copy of “Spiritual Midwifery” and told me that this was damn good stuff. And how great is that, doing what you wanted to do when you were twelve? Living the dream! And then we realized that at least a few of us, the people we knew back then, are doing what they dreamed of—Rebecca, who used to want to make chocolate chip cookies with me meticulously after school, and hold elaborate four-course dinner parties, and who interned at a restaurant during her high-school summers, really is training to become a chef, or a cookbook-editor, or something; Laura who used to sew her own underwear and everything else really is working for a fashion company that has a store in every mall you’ve ever been in, designing miniskirts and baby rompers. And me, I’m doing my writing thing, after a fashion, though I do envy Ellie somewhat that her dream-fulfillment thing seems so clear-cut. Then again, she says, it’s not glamorous. She tells me about catching babies, about blood, about 9-1-1 calls and physically holding and moving women around with the super-human strength that one gets in extremis. When she gives me a hug, her biceps are strong.

I wish, then, that I had the same kind of certainty about writing, or whatever it is that I’m doing. I’m pretty sure that fashion magazines, like television and rich food and alcohol, are an indulgence that’s OK in moderation, and that can become an addiction in a greater or lesser degree, depending on the person. I don’t think I was addicted and I don’t think they hurt me any—just provided fodder for something that my teenage brain would have done anyway. But I am feeling this late-summer, back-to-school-time need to re-evaluate things. I work at a magazine now; it’s not a fashion glossy but a science magazine. Still, I wonder: what’s this line of work that I’m in? Do I use my powers for good? I find that I’ve changed since those Vogue-reading days: my vision of a good life has changed. I still want fabulous, sometimes, but it looks different now that it’s closer to me. What’s fabulous? Enough money. Travel. A family. A chance to express myself creatively. Meaningful work. It’s less about impressing people, though I’d be lying if I said that wish was completely gone. It’s just that I’m starting to feel that the world I’ll have to do things in is this world, not some other, and that’s scary but exhilarating too.

And these are the thoughts I’m thinking as summer browns into fall. I wish that I could think them once, reach a positive decision, and then lay them by the way, but I know that isn’t going to work. Just like the endless lists of the ingredients of the perfect wardrobe that both leads to and reflects inner excellence, the task is not as cut-and-dried as it would seem, and it’s never done. Some piece or other is always lacking. And after it all, you’re still you, a person with dimensions that cannot possibly be represented in any magazine. So I’d like to say I can ‘finish,’ i.e. decide on the plan that meets all my needs and wants, and that the bringing it to fruition will be the easy part, but I can’t and it won’t. I can only keep correcting and re-correcting and trying not to wait, too hard, for the day when it all falls into place like a fashion plate shilling a back-to-school day without self-consciousness, without nerves, without vulnerability altogether.

All Quiet on the Sundress Front, Part Deux

...It all sounds ridiculous written down, but I would not be surprised if many people went through a similar dreamy conflation of outer polish and inner peace when they think about their clothing. Fashion magazines encourage people to think that way, I believe. In magazines, consumption, style, and good grooming are the emblems of lifestyle, and lifestyle is the emblem of happiness. Right? I used to read Vogue when I was a teenager and fantasize about living a charmed life, which meant a life of beauty, which meant a life of outward beauty, such as I was able to read about in the pages of Vogue. I liked the stories about artistic menageries, Andy Warhol’s Factory and Peggy Guggenheim & Jackson Pollock, Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe, probably because it was slightly easier to imagine myself finding a place in a world such as that than in some of the other kinds of high-society/old-money scenes that made Vogue’s pages.

Anyway…magazines. I don’t know what to say about them. Are magazines bad? You can say that they are engines of lust, fodder for the neurotic obsession with one’s own imperfections, or rather the pointless, inward-looking quest to become perfect. Magazines feed the flames of narcissism, and also of self-hate, because one never compares favorably enough, never has enough money, class, prestige or brains. Magazines are a one-two punch: the whole point of a magazine is to deify people who are not, and never will be YOU, and that’s why you love them, and that’s why they hurt, but it’s the kind of hurt that always sends you rushing back for more. Reading a fashion magazine is like picking at the scab of one’s own self-loathing. Pick. Pick. Pressing the bruise of one’s imperfection. That thing will heal if you’d just leave it alone, y’know…yeah, but there’s something about feeling the soreness, the burn. Who knows what it is. It’s irresistible.

Certainly, magazine values aren’t the values I was brought up to, but I became fascinated with magazines. Maybe it was a mode of rebellion. I dreamed of glamour. To read a magazine and fantasize about the life I wanted to have was safe. Safer than actually trying anything, as if there were anything I could have tried, aside from retreating into my own imagination, away from the indignities of normal teenage life. And it was easier back then, because I was so young, and there was always the fall-back of “someday.” Someday, when I’m famous. Someday, when I’m perfectly dressed. Someday, when I dance on tables in satin shoes, and stun everybody with my razor wit…

Times are different now, of course. I’m 27 and it’s harder to imagine a someday shimmering off in the distance, a day when nothing will be as I have known it before. There’s too much ‘before,’ now; the more years of life I rack up, the less a radical change in the tone of everything seems likely.

So I’m thinking about the coat, the boots, the colorful scarf and the shrunken blazer and the jeans with this year’s silhouette, not last year’s. And I imagine that I’ll feel better with these things, but not that they’ll change everything. And basically I’m OK with letting go of the notion that some day everything will change. Basically OK. Some days, letting it go feels like capitulation. Other days it feels like growing up. I am still thinking about whom I’d like to be, but I’d like to imagine that my thoughts have become a little more realistic. I’m 27 and there is no ‘someday!,’ I tell myself. I try to keep straight the obscure line between having goals and imagining the best, on one hand, and longing for a kind of glossy perfection that isn’t even human, on the other.

(To be continued, yet again...)

All Quiet on the Sundress Front

Oh, I’ve been wanting to use that title for a while! And it feels just as good as I thought it would!

The last couple of days before I left New York last Friday were positively chilly. Fall-like. Fall-like as fall is like in the Pacific Northwest. It was because of Hurricane Ernesto, they said. Probably it will get warm again for a while, Indian summer and all that. But it cannot be denied that the sky holds less light now when I come out of work in the evenings, and that a few dry poplar leaves crunch underfoot while I walk down the block towards Smith Street in the mornings.

I have dragged a couple extra blankets onto my bed, and I woke up on mornings last week at a loss for what to wear. Do you ever have this problem at the changing of the seasons? All of your wintry clothes are packed away, under your bed, but it’s not just that: when you get them out they are fusty, wrinkled, and hidden in their folds like flakes of skin are pieces of an old you, last year’s you. Last season’s you. The return to the old can be comforting, but there is also a sense of ill-fittingness. You’ve changed or at least you feel like you’ve changed, and crawling back into some of the old pieces is about as appealing as squeezing yourself back into a wet bathing suit that you left in a roll on the bathroom floor.

And that is why, even though you have a wardrobe of perfectly good clothes, you want new ones. Styles are changing. Everyone else is marching forward into the future. You hardly want to be left behind.

Yes, it’s fall, and I want some new fall clothes. The goddammer about fall is that the clothes are way more expensive than summer clothes, since they are more substantial. I’d like a pair of boots. Hell, I’ve wanted a pair of boots for years. I keep not doing it because they are expensive and I can’t find just the perfect pair. Maybe this will be the year! Or maybe this will be the year I learn to wear high heels, like I’ve been wanting to. Or the year I get a really handsome warm coat.

And a fall/winter-type handbag, I need one of those. Yeah, need is a funny thing. I have less money to spend on clothes than I have space to store them, which is NOT A LOT. Still, I’m sure I will make some sort of nod to fall wardrobe acquisition over the next couple months. That back-to-school feeling is a hard thing to shake. Every year, I think back to the time—I think it must have been the week before the start of seventh grade—when I bought a copy of the fall fashion issue of Seventeen magazine to read on the flight home from Seattle, where we’d been visiting my uncle Henry and his family. It was a red-eye flight but I stayed up the entire night, keeping vigil with this magazine, mixing and matching outfits for myself, and imagining how great I and the world would be, once all the issues of style were ironed out.

It’s a little embarrassing, but I’ve always done this. Every year around the end of summer I take a little time to imagine what I want to wear and whom I want to be. The embarrassing part is that these two areas of imagination become so fused in my mind. Is it possible to change oneself in a meaningful way simply by changing clothes? I used to think not just about what would look good on me, in a straightforward kind of way, but what sort of image I wanted to project. I’d work on the image while extrapolating how a person dressed in my ideal style du jour would feel inside. And what effect she would have on other people. Possible or not, embarrassing or not, I was strung along by the blurry fantasy that inner perfection of feeling and outer perfection of dress existed in a dialectical relationship, and that the world would lie at my feet if only I were able to gather together the ideal collection of garments, accessories, and grooming products. My tangly soul would lie straight, then, too. Once my outward appearance was made to bend to my will, or so the theory must have gone, my inner space would be rendered well-ordered and manageable, by magic association.

(To be continued...)