5/31/2014

I was in the middle of Central Park, giving the place a proper wander, when the rain started.  At first, it was just teasing.  It was playful, baiting the tourists into pulling out oversized umbrellas before yielding to a patch of sun.  But eventually it got its point across, and I was drenched at the Central Park Zoo.

I had started, oddly enough, with plans.  I was going to get a haircut and head to a picnic with a couple of roommates.  But in a move that will surprise exactly none of you, I decided against all that, instead choosing to meander my way south, in the vague direction of a bookstore or maybe a theater.

I took a zig-zagged enough course through Central Park to defeat the grid system.  I took a lap around the Jackie Onassis Reservoir, I climbed up rocky hills, I cut down paths less travelled.  I contained myself within the limited infinity of the island Manhattan for a couple of hours without orientation.  For the first time since I’ve been here, I was actually lost, or at least misplaced.  I came out on 5th Avenue where I’d expected 59th Street, and I was pleased to discover my mistake.  

The rain started about halfway through the park, but a wonderful thing about rain is that it’s actually just water, and if you choose not to let it bother you then it won’t insist.  I found 59th Street and exited the park with a vague intention on the Empire State Building.  I let the sun dry my shirt and hair as I walked at a tourist’s pace--not that I had a choice, what with all the tourists.  

There is a Starbucks on 5th Avenue that has a department store inside of it, and that should be the other way around, but I promise it isn’t.  The Juicy Store was closed and this was disappointing to a number of people.  There were more people in line to go to Baby GAP than went to Andrew Jason’s high school.  Finally, I arrived:  The Empire State Building was hard to get a good luck at, but I was able to confirm that it is tall.  Men in bright vests halfheartedly hawked tickets to its top; I wholeheartedly refused them.  

I continued south, the sky now confidently sunny.  I passed a Shake Shack with a line longer than Baby GAP.  I passed the Flatiron Building, which was the shape of a triangular prism but produced no rainbow.  I reached the bookstore I’d had in mind, and it was okay, but I wasn’t in the mood to buy anything.  I am missing public libraries so desperately right now.  

I plotted a route to a sandwich place with a chicken tender and mozzarella monstrosity called a Dennis, but it was closed when I got there.  I wandered toward another couple of restaurants, but the Yelp pictures of Dennis had stolen my heart, and so I took an unnecessary number of trains home, toward a full refrigerator and a waiting bed.

5/30/2014

list of people i’ve met (partial)

• The woman who thanks me effusively for filling out her paperwork, thanks me to the point of tears.  She used to be--still is, in fact--a dancer, a performer, and she’s no good at paperwork and she’s just so thankful that someone like me--a left hander, no less! it seems to her a lot of people who have it all together are southpaws--that someone like me is there to talk to her.
• The man who says “oh, that’s interesting” after everything that is said in conversation, and then follows it up with, “oh, now that’s interesting” when the next thing is said, and you know what, he genuinely seems to mean it.  Everything is more interesting than the last thing.
• The woman who is an extraordinarily stressed government employee with bags under her eyes the size of Montana definitely runs the whole show and lets her, let’s be honest, pretty sexist and dismissive boss take the credit.  She would, if given the option, unquestionably murder someone for an opportunity to sleep for more than five consecutive hours.  (Note:  I have met several of these.)
• The man who ran that newsstand who could not for the life of him understand my Midwestern enunciation of “The Atlantic.”  Sorry, friend, I shouldn’t have let my t’s slip into d’s, that was my bad.
• The woman asking me for directions I almost know and I hope I didn’t send her to Queens on accident.  I think I sent this woman to Queens on accident.
• The man who bags your groceries for you at Pioneer who is frankly very good at his job and I don’t know if I am supposed to tip him but I say thank you very earnestly and he smiles at me, so I think I am not actively offensive.
• The man who coaches soccer and is very good at coaching soccer and is not shy about letting you know about it.  When you take the elevator to the fourteenth floors, he says, “Too bad it’s not fifteen.  That’s the number of championships I’ve won” and smiles like Joe Biden.  Then he asks if you can help him get an apartment.
• The woman who scooped my ice cream at this very hip coffee shop in Brooklyn who looked exactly like the kind of woman who would work at a very hip coffee shop in Brooklyn, and I’m fine with that, it’s good to know when things fit together.  Also the woman who sold books at that hip bookstore in Brooklyn, she made sense, too.
• The man who is the world’s saddest fruit vendor, so you have to buy three bananas from him for a dollar, and he greets this news with the world’s saddest smile.  The bananas are ok.
• I have not yet met Donald Trump or Regis Philbin, but I hear good things about them both.

5/29/2014

I was turning onto Lenox, staring at my phone, choosing which group of whiny midwesterners would fill my commute, and Abby Conklin popped a balloon.  “Sean!” she yelled, looking exactly shocked.  “What the hell!”  Her question went unanswered, she went to work and so did I, but the word “Facebook” was promised as we parted ways.

I was for some reason not surprised at all.  Abby was an RCAH student, a year ahead of me, who left MSU abruptly before the start of last fall, to pursue some sort of something I, to tell the complete truth, was never entirely clear on.  I knew she had ended up in New York, but to continue the streak of honesty, hadn’t given the idea of meeting her here even a single thought.  But for some reason when I took my headphones out at the sound of “Sean,” when I turned around and saw someone I had last seen more than a year ago--in Snyder Phillips Hall no less--I was unfazed.  It seemed perfectly ordinary to me that Abby Conklin was standing there.

Maybe this is why:  When an incredible coincidence comes to fruition, I am less impressed by the  astronomical odds than the overwhelming explanatory power of the law of large numbers.  Give anything unlikely thing enough chances and it becomes likely.  The fact that our meandering commuting patterns ended up crossing means that this first encounter was preceded by a month of near misses.

Maybe that’s not it at all:  After a month in which I had known not a soul,  seen not a friendly  face, heard not a “Sean!”, I was so ready to believe, uninterested in pinching myself or asking how.

5/28/2014

When someone finds out I’m from Michigan, I am greeted with one of two responses.

1.)  “Oh, how nice!  Be careful here in the city!”

2.)  “Oh.  How are things over there?”

If it’s 1.), which, I must admit, usually comes from old women, it’s an easy enough response.  “Thank you, I sure will try,” I say, smiling reassuringly as they smile reassuringly at me.  I am a Midwesterner who must be protected from the dangers of the big bad city, and I accept their patronizing warning without any reservation of irony.

If it’s 2.), it’s a lot less easy.  “Things are looking up,” I say, smiling unassuredly as they smile unassuredly at me.  The subtext here is that they know that Michigan has been in some trouble, and they’re pleased to know that I have escaped it.  I do not know what to do with this patronizing congratulations.

I went to New York University for a panel this afternoon, and in a way, I was home again.  It had all the beautiful trappings of an MSU panel--distinguished guests given little time to actually talk, a moderator offering partially accurate paraphrases of their responses, and a Q & A period in which the shitty handwriting of three or four old people is translated into a stultifyingly obvious question.  Yes, if it weren’t for the much nicer auditorium and competent graphic design, I could have been in good old East Lansing.

And one other difference:  The way they talked about Michigan.  Because boy, did we ever come up.  See, the panel was about affordable housing, which means it quickly became about urbanism, which means it quickly became about cities, which means it quickly became an opportunity to play Mad Libs about the urban crisis and the only correct fill-in-the-blanks are Detroit and Flint.  These are sophisticated, brilliant people, but they talked about Detroit like the only things they knew about it were gleaned from a ruin porn piece in the Atlantic five years ago.  They played compare and contrast between the problems that come from the embarrassment of riches New York faces and the simple embarrassment Detroit does.

And you know what, they weren’t wrong.  And you know what, I’m from Plymouth, and it’s not that different from the way we talk about Detroit out in white flight suburbia.  But I couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that they spent so much time talking about the unique and singular challenges of Detroit that they hardly even mentioned The Bronx, another city reeling from white flight and redlining and disinvestment and a poverty rate north of thirty.

What it came down to was this:  They were taking a 30,000 feet view of my anthill on a driveway with broad sweeping terms in order to make a point, and they didn’t have to.  In order to navel gaze about urban despair, you don’t have to schlep all the way over into flyover country.  You just have to take a 2 train a few stops further uptown than you usually do when you go to Lincoln Center.

i'm not that happy with this one, although i had a couple of good sentences and i'm certain there's some there there

5/27/2014

three paragraphs i like

Like a Big Bang in reverse, I shrink up into a single point of mass and light.  This is a new escape, prompted by crowded moments on the subway or city streets.  New York is an economy seat, and I am suddenly aware of the length of my legs.  ¶

How do you live in a place where you can’t hear crickets out of a summer window?  I wrote this line down as nostalgia, but it is now a vital ecological concern as I have tried to integrate insects into my diet.  Laura is convinced I am a vegetarian, and she is unimpressed by my consistent denials.  My claims that cereal and salad are just cheaper have fallen on deaf ears, so I pleaded guilty and am awaiting sentencing. ¶

There is a new roommate whose name might have been Camel but is actually Camelle or something like that.  He is French and polite and shy in the normal way, not the I just got off a plane from another continent way.  He had not heard of Michigan, which is a forgivable offense.  He is here for a horrifyingly dull internship in supply-chain management in Westchester, which might not be. ¶

5/26/2014

I ended up in Montauk like this:  As a resident of the Great Lakes State, I like to pretend I don’t care about oceans.  Superior, Michigan, Huron, Ontario, Erire--those are bodies of water enough for me.  But I am not sure that I mean it.  There is something about The Ocean, capital t capital o.  There is something about the idea of looking out at a horizon and seeing a mass that runs uninterrupted across the entire planet, something that maybe can’t even be matched by a mass that runs uninterrupted until Milwaukee.  Whatever the something might be, lakers and oceaners can agree:  It is something that the Hudson River simply cannot provide.  So I headed east.

I took the Long Island Railroad and I misjudged which way the train would be heading.  I sat facing backwards, so instead of watching new scenery appear I watched old scenery disappear.  I successfully staved off motion sickness until I had the opportunity to switch seats and then I could pay attention to the new:  From the Koch-era graffiti of Jamaica Queens to the deadmalls and pawn shops of inner ring suburbs to the backyard tennis courts of the Hamptons.

I got off at Montauk, the last stop on the line.  I got off the train and I started walking.  The train would not take me all the way to The Ocean, so I would have to do it myself.  With the modern day compass Google Maps, I wove through a neighborhood on my way to a parkway on my way to The Ocean.  Six miles later, I was close enough to smell the salty air poking its way into the trees.

I had lived up to my end of the bargain, and The Ocean lived up to its.  If you can look at the Atlantic and avoid a broad grin, I don’t want to know you.  The immensity I sought was there.  It was 70 degrees and party cloudy and mostly windy, and it was a moment worthy of a three hour train and a six mile walk.

I circled along the beach, reaching the tip of Montauk Point, on broad rocks and fine sand, in doing so pleasing my eight year old self who loved lighthouses and my fifteen year old self who loved Brand New references.  The water’s collisions with the rocks were cyclically violent.  It would start quiet, reaching the shore almost apologetically and retreating silently.  But each new attack brought a new sense of urgency until the pretense was dropped entirely and a cannon shot created ocean spray.

I had seen what I came for.  So I walked back.  On the way, I passed another walker, one heading toward the park.  It was the most validating interaction I have ever had.  “Hi!”  “Hello!”  “How much further?”  “About a mile.”  “Right on.”  Walking is easy.  Sure, biking is easier and driving easier still, but walking is easy.  But it helps to know that someone else gets it.

I am writing this on a Long Island Railroad train headed west, west from Montauk back toward New York City.  I was not certain how I would do, travelling alone.  But here I am, writing this on a Long Island Railroad train headed west, west from Montauk back toward New York City.

5/25/2014

I got sunburnt on Staten Island, which seems about right.  The day was a pleasant kind of mess.  I woke up too late but recovered quickly.  I made good on my intention to go to Governor’s Island, which was pleasant enough.  Dodging goose shit along the edges of a fort’s outer wall has always been a pastime of mine, and Fort Jay provided that opportunity.  My plan was to find a shady spot on the island and sit and read, but the island’s lack of drinking fountains sent me to plan b.

This is how I ended up on Staten Island, from a ferry chock full of teenaged girls ducking into restricted zones for the sake of better Instagram angles to the s44 bus in search of what Ahmed swears is the best pizza he’s ever had.  The waitstaff at Denino’s seemed surprised to see me, and I was surprised to see them. The pizza was served on a paper plate.  It wasn’t the best pizza I’ve ever had, but I’ll believe Ahmed when he says it’s his all time high--not all of us are lucky enough to live within delivery distance of that juggernaut Goomba’s.  The highlight was the guy on the bus, on his way to a grocery store job, trying to give away coupons to a coffee shop while talking up how much he loves coffee.  “Don’t even bother me before I’ve had my coffee!” he said, and the thing is, I’ve never heard anyone so earnest. I'm not going to bother him before he's had his coffee. He told me not to.

5/24/2014

The rain held off for as long as it could.  I was pregnant with sweat not quite ready to burst, and so was the sky, but the sky came to term.  So I had to head back from Brooklyn.

Brooklyn felt different, or at least, I felt different in Brooklyn.  It felt like the stakes had been lowered.  On Manhattan, you are trapped in an endless maze of towers.  It’s the maze aspect that’s most important:  You will only walk in straight lines, turn perpendicularly at predetermined nodes.  Central Park’s zigs and zags somehow reinforce that--planned spontaneity is still planned.  And Manhattan’s endlessness ends abruptly.  The East River and Hudson are thick black lines, nothing gets past them.  There are infinities of various sizes, and Manhattan’s is a very small one, when you get down to it.

Brooklyn was still a maze.  Brownstone streets met other brownstone streets and the network of slightly-too-narrow sidewalks were my only means of traversing them.  But there was something lush, something wrung, something contorted.  The word I am looking for is sprawling.  I got off of the station and headed down Flatbush Avenue, the Botanical Garden to my left and Prospect Park to my right.  Trees covered me intermittently from intermittent sun, idyll stinking of motor oil.  And I could not turn, I could only move forward.  But it was different than Manhattan.  I could not see nor even imagine where Flatbush ended.  I could not see where the garden on ended, where the park ended.  I felt in the midst of sprawl, splayed out on the page and stretched thin across the map.  There are infinities of various sizes, and Brooklyn’s is a very large one, when you get down to it.

5/23/2014

I’ve been talking about myself a lot.  I am going to continue to do that.  I’ve been reaching contradictory conclusions a lot, feeling mutually exclusive feelings a lot.  I’ve been starting sentences in one place and finishing them in another.  I’ve been starting paragraphs with one goal in mind and finishing them with another.  And this is just in writing, where I a free from the tyranny of linear communication, where I can go back and edit and reframe and limit, if not eliminate, the pregnant pauses and especially egregious midsentence 180s.  You can only imagine how embarrassing I am in person!

I hope I am embarrassing myself.  I hope I come across as someone who has no idea what he is talking about, because in truth that’s what I am.  I am confronted with a world that is larger than I can comprehend, larger than I can even begin to comprehend, and this insurmountability makes its presence known.  I have thoughts in a million directions, and so when I try to choose one, I hope I appear indecisive.  I am in possession of so many more feelings than I know how to name, and so when I try to, I hope I stumble.  

I like the idea of successfully hiding this confusion and wonder and uncertainty, of confidently passing it off and going about my days as if I am in command of my mind, I think I like more the idea of laying it all on the table, of naming all that I can name and pointing stupidly but emphatically in the direction of what I cannot.  That’s where this idea of being a writer is coming from.  Ta-Nehisi Coates put it like this:  “I am here to see things as clearly as I can, and then name them. Sometimes what I see is gorgeous. And then sometimes what I see is ugly. And sometimes my sight fails me.”  

If I believe in anything, it is that.  The misdirected sentences with far too many em dashes containing Carl Sagan paraphrases and Frontier Ruckus references and half-baked conclusions I’ll disagree with tomorrow if not the next paragraph--they are me, they are who I am.  Along with my kidneys and my memories of middle school and my failures to wake up as early as I would like to and my everything else.  And I don’t know what to do with me, but I am eager to find out.  We are the universe learning about itself, Carl Sagan said.  Well, I am me learning about myself.  And I don’t know what that means, but I know that it makes me feel.

5/21/2014

Ahmed is getting married tomorrow, which the woman yelling at him on the phone of course doesn’t know.  He’s also running incredibly late for a tenant’s meeting, which she does know but just doesn’t seem to care.  We’ve been waiting to enter the 86th street station for about ten minutes when Ahmed gives in, signals a cab.  It’s my first taxi ride, so I’m not displeased.

To do this line of work means being yelled at on the phone a lot.  Not just on the phone, of course--by email and in person are also perfectly reasonable options.  I have not yet seen an angry fax, but the summer is young.  But no matter the medium, this anger finds its way out.  This is the strangeness of public work.  To place yourself on the side of the people is to place yourself between them and power.  And that means to place your eardrums in the midst of the shouts.

Ahmed doesn’t mind the woman yelling at him on the phone, it doesn’t shake him at all, in fact.  He’s quickly become a friend of mine, and it’s for all the usual reasons--he’s funny, we’re nerdy in similar ways, it’s a good fit.  But it’s also for this reason, for the way he hangs up the phone, after a half hour of verbal abuse, and then picks it right back up to make a phone call on behalf of the abuser.    

Not everyone yells, of course, in fact most people, the vast majority of people, are so gracious, so graceful.  But those who do, it would be easy to give up on.  It would be so easy to say fuck off and wash your hands of the whole thing.  Their humanity is easily disguised within their anger.  But Ahmed sees right through to it.  He has placed himself on the side of the yellers.  

5/20/2014

Here’s a fun thing to do:  Go to New York and spend all your time dreaming about Michigan.  I am not being sarcastic.

I do not miss Michigan, at least not in the sense that has anything to do with homesickness.  But I am spending an awful lot of time actively loving my home.  

What does this look like?  It’s walking around Central Park with Frontier Ruckus in my ears and a smile on my face, thinking about the first time I drove outside of Plymouth, when I drove up Haggerty Road all the way to Walled Lake to buy a typewriter from that old woman.  

This does not mean that I am not loving every minute I am spending in New York City.  It does not mean I am not actively scheming all the other places on earth I want to, I need to see.

Helen admitted that she doesn’t keep in touch with Michigan all that much anymore.  This made me sadder than I ever thought it could.  

Not angry, mind you, not anything directed at her--she seems very happy with her life and she is amazing here.  But the sadness filled me.

It filled me because I don't want to lose touch with home. I didn't know that I felt that way.

5/19/2014

I asked Marie an impossible question.  She’s French, you see, and I’m going to be in France not too long from now, and so I asked her, “What is the one spot in France I absolutely must see?,” which is impossible to answer.  Marie did not know how to answer this question; understandably--it is an impossible question.  She furrowed her brow and thought hard, made audible a few umms for the sake of making time, but then she gave up.  “Let me think, I will get back to you.”  

It’s a simple question, but what I asked her was this:  To consider all the places she has ever been to in her homeland, every geotagged memory, and sift through them until the most sacred emerged.  It was phrased in the terms of a Michelin Travel Guide, but I was asking her to reveal her soul.  And I could not blame her for not wanting to do so.  I told her as much, reassuring her that it was an impossible question, that I could never answer it if she turned it on me, asked me about America.  

But the thing is that I could have.  I could have answered that impossible question.  I could have said, “Go to Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes, it’s in northwest Michigan, by a tiny town called Empire, and it is sacred there.  Drive there on a hot summer day, drive from hours away and bake in the sun, drive there with your best friends and listen to Frontier Ruckus and I promise you will feel something.”  I could have told her that it is the only memory of youth that is actually bigger than I remember it--that every other childhood location is smaller, elementary school cafeterias and little league baseball diamonds, but Sleeping Bear has actually grown up with me, and that that is the sign of a sacred place.  I could have answered the question.

But I didn’t answer the question.  I just said, “If you asked me the same question about America, I wouldn’t know what to say.”  I wasn’t about to reveal my soul to her.  And I didn’t really expect her to reveal hers to me, either.

5/18/2014

Laura is afraid of Florida, and it has fallen on me to convince her that she is wrong to, even though she is right to.  This is not a job I would have chosen, but that’s not how these things work:  The job has chosen me.  I was just minding my own business, trying to go to the bathroom and maybe, if the coast was clear, to pour myself a bowl of Cinnamon Life.  But there Laura is, sitting at the kitchen table and eating a multi-colored meal, and she asks me if she can ask me a question.  Sure.

She is considering attending the University of Florida, seeking some incomprehensible degree in international tax evasion.  It is incomprehensible not because of the language barrier--she’s saying all the right words--but because I never know what rich people attending business school are talking about.  I could write a whole post about the Eli and Edyth Broad-ification of higher education and my poorly thought-through critiques of it, but this is not what fate had in mind for me.  Instead, Laura asks me if I know anything about Florida.

How do you answer that question honestly?  You don’t, you lie and you say something noncommittal and pleasant:  “It’s a beautiful place.”   I don’t feel completely deceitful.  Manatees and sunshine and whatever--my conscience is clear.  But this does not satisfy Laura.

“Is it safe?” she asks.  She is asking if Florida, the state where a man literally ate the face of another human person, is safe.  How do you answer this question honestly?  You don’t, but you can’t avoid the truth completely, so you take a shot in the dark and appeal to a sense of adventure:  “I’d say it’s more defined by its strangeness than it is by its dangerousness.”

“What?!”  This does not disarm Laura at all.  Strangeness is scary too, it’s immediately clear from the furrow of her brow.  “How is it strange?”

It is the kind of place where men eat the faces of other men.  “It’s just very far removed from the rest of the country, sometimes,” I say.  This satisfies her for a moment.  But only for a moment, because the topic turns to wildlife.  Manatees and sunshine do not begin to counterbalance alligators and snakes.  They’re having a problem with giant pythons right now.

I’m just going to post this and try to get further in it later.

5/17/2014

I went to the American Museum of Natural History, and it was great, a great museum, and I am something of an expert on museums.  I liked it because while I was there I was confronted with the holy vastness of the world, as documented by dioramas, and I left the place feeling very small.  You could get lost within the Museum’s forty seven halls, let alone the planet they’ve tried to cram into the model ship bottle of a five story building on the Upper West Side.  If that’s how I feel inside a model to scale--and consider the scale!--imagine the feeling when confronted with actual size.

When Andrew was a kid, he told me, it never occurred to him that there were parts of the world he would never see--he assumed that, eventually, every single person saw every single part of the world.  Learning about the rainforests of Madagascar or the steppes of Mongolia or the towers of Tokyo, then, took on a different character:  Those glossy pictures in the DK wonders of the world book weren’t anything special in themselves, just previews of what was to come, an itinerary, so to speak.  The moment when he realized that in fact the world was a larger territory that could even under the best of circumstances be covered in one lifetime was devastating, literally world changing.

So how do you deal with the vastness of the world?  Setting aside the existence of   I think what most people do, and I include myself most of the time, is we spin a fiction that makes it feel manageable.  You take your tiny little slice of existence and you call it home.  Then you take the rest of the universe, you call it over there.  Since you know home pretty well, and you sometimes take vacations over there, you can easily believe that you know more than half the world--all of home and the bits of over there that are welcoming to Midwestern tourists.  You may never make it Paris like you intended, but close enough.  And that’s all right, I think.  The beauty of living a life is that inside your own head you essentially get to be the author of your own young adult fantasy novel, with a protagonist and enemies and a narrator you find clever or grating or both, and it’s your prerogative to shape the universe however you see fit, to do whatever best moves the plot along.  This false equivalency between home and over there gets you much closer to living a meaningful life.

But there are, like any good young adult fantasy universe, a few plot holes that, while easy enough to overlook, can drive the precocious sixth grader mad.  For example, you don’t know home.  I’m here in New York City, and although I would never dispute someone’s claim to “New Yorker,” it’s quite transparent that even on this tiny, 23.6 square mile island, there’s impossibly more going on than anyone could possibly know.  And it’s wild to think about it, but the same is true in East Lansing, the same is true in Plymouth-goddamned-Canton.  The world is vast, but it’s not empty.  Every single mile squared is more full of life than you could even imagine.

So home, that one part of earth where you feel comfortable, where you feel meaningful, is actually impossibly big and complex itself.  It gets worse! Over there is even bigger and more complex than home!  Because every single other there is somebody else’s home.  There’s billions of ‘em, new ones rising up every single day.  Think about ants on a driveway, and then look down at Broadway from your 17th story office, and try to come up with a difference.  Think about how many driveways there are.  This is my best metaphor for human existence.  (I was that precocious sixth grader, and I am here to tell you that the story you love so much doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.  This is how I derive pleasure after being bullied in fifth grade.)

I’m getting off track, launching into meaninglessness when what I am here to talk about is smallness.  Let’s return to the American Museum of Natural History, for that’s what’s prompted all this.  The fact that I left the museum feeling small, feeling humbled is actually unexpected.  The promise of “natural history” is that it is possible to wrap your head around over there, to study it and understand it the same way you do anatomy:  You poke around enough, you put Latin names on things, and all of a sudden you have a taxonomy for existence.  (It’s worth noting that natural history, too, takes home for granted--there were no tableaux of important white men designing natural philosophies, for the makers of the museum must have thought they had that part of the world down pat.)  But the idea is that you can make over there understandable, reduce it to its scientific principles.  You’re supposed to leave the museum understanding over there--feeling very big indeed.*  It’s a Saturday afternoon’s means of fulfilling Andrew’s dream.

But that mission is so hopeless (and not just because the particular people on that mission were also pretty racist.)  It’s hopeless because every place is someone’s home, and not even they understand it.  And once you confront this, once you begin to comprehend the existence if not the nature of this complexity, encounters with over there--even everyday encounters with home!--are humbling.  So I left the museum feeling small.

But this smallness is not meaninglessness, as I so wisely avoided claiming a few paragraphs ago.  It’s just a different kind of story you find yourself in.  It’s not a story in which you’re the protagonist--in fact, it’s probably a story without a protagonist at all.  It’s a story of existence, existence which doesn’t have to be but for some reason is, and of one category of existence, life, which similarly doesn’t have to be but is.

Now, I’m not going to bore you by saying that you are going to make some small impact and that every little impact matters.  A speck on a speck on a speck, as Neil deGrasse Tyson has called you, does not get to be anything more than a blip.  But that’s not the point.  What this smallness means is that your adventure never has to end:  Even if you spend your whole life confronting this world head on, you will never run out of over there to discover.

*You’re probably not actually supposed to feel that way, at least not now that Neil deGrasse Tyson is in charge.  But you get the point.

5/16/2014

as promised, more about the roommates, or one of them, at least

Damien is the other American--from Florida, in fact, Naples.  He’s nicely tanned, wears nice suits, is affable in a frat boyish sort of way:  Suffice it to say that I was not at all surprised when he said he worked as a junior analyst for CitiBank.  It’s all in the voice, really.  I would buy a Chevy Impala from Damien, and even though he would overcharge me, I would recommend him to friends and family.

Now for some idle speculation.  Damien is a man--a kid, really, but I am of the age where kids have started to call themselves men--who is extremely sure of his world.  He knows with certainty which way is up and which way is down and which way he doesn’t want to go at all.  This certainty defines him--he makes predictions for a living, for crissakes, his is not a career that permits second guessing or double checking.  But it’s not just a line on a resume, it really does define him.

His worldview goes something like this:  A man goes to work and makes a lot of money and, more importantly, earns praise from those who make a lot of money.  He comes home to his apartment in a fashionably shabby part of town--he could pay more to be somewhere better but doesn’t--and then he does whatever the fuck he wants.  He drinks and smokes and dances and fucks and does all of those things that get grouped together into that impossibly vague term, partying.  The fundamental lesson is this:  If you work hard and play harder, the world is your oyster.  Follow the rules of the game and you will win.  (He reads pop psychology that reaffirms this, the paperback advice columns dedicated to making rich people feel important.  Me, my pop psychology is writing shit like this.)

That isn’t that unusual, maybe, a yuppie who works a boring but well-paid job and parties on the weekends, but Damien doesn’t just play the part, he is an ideological zealot.  The fervor with which Damien believes in it is what makes this all worth noting.  He’s not especially vocal about it, no, but you can tell, five minutes with him and you can tell:  This is not a person who considers what he is doing.  I don’t mean that in a negative way, even, just that this is not a person who has crises of confidence.  The next step in any social situation, in any major life decision--it is always immediately obvious to Damien.

We are very different people, Damien and I.  I am not certain, I am at my most decisive only between crises of confidence, I am wholly uncomfortable with the rules of the game.  But we don’t look so very different.  We’re both in New York after time at a party school doing the logical next step careerwise.  I blend in all right.  So when I passed on a drink, expressed my love of museums, passed on a joint--a few flags were raised.

“So what is your vice?” Damien asked me.  I must have one.  And the thing is, I do.  I am thoughtless sometimes in how I treat friends and lovers.  I am prone to periods of self-loathing in which I am not considerate of anyone at all, including myself.  I am sometimes judgemental, shallow, self-involved.  I would go on, but my vanity doesn’t want to let me write them all down.

I have no shortage of personal flaws I fall back on again and again.  But these are not the answers Damien was looking for.  He wants hentai porn or e-cigarettes or something like that, something within the rules of the game, some proof of playing harder.  Dennis, the Dutch doctor, does not know this word vice.  Damien translates it essentially as a hobby.  At this point, I say board games. Dennis says Game of Thrones.

This did not satisfy Damien, but what choice did he have?  When pressed, he said his was that he likes to go out and drink and have fun.  He didn’t have one, either.

5/15/2014

This city looks extraordinary shrouded in fog.  That isn’t in canon, I don’t think--the tour guides don’t tell you, the city looks extraordinary shrouded in fog--but it’s true.  The term skyscraper has to be one of the best words in the English language, right?  The idea that humans have constructed an object large enough to claw at the very limits of our earth.  Anyway, in the fog you can see that the term is not a metaphor:  The Empire State Building and its ilk very literally scrape the sky, very literally place their upper reaches beyond what can be termed sky and enter a place we on the ground cannot comprehend, much less name.  The tallest trees can do this too, I suppose, and of course mountains.  But it is only our towers that do so intentionally, and so they get a term that reflects their agency:  Skyscrapers.

The more ultimately meaningful story of the day is that I had a social interaction with my roommates, but I’m too tired to get into it; I promise to write more about later.  To synopsize:  The roommates asked if I wanted to sit on the porch, and I didn’t say no.  It was a good enough time--I told the story of my summer about fourteen times, told some jokes that landed, and even learned some names.  My refusals of drink offers were greeted with conversations ranging from fine to sad to incredibly dervous.  Yeah, I’ll get into it more later.  But the point of this post is that the city looks extraordinary shrouded in fog, and that’s frankly a fine thing to write a post about.

5/14/2014

I got to name drop Quality Dairy, so I count it as a good day.  The truth is that what I have enjoyed most about New York is being from Michigan.  That’s too specific, probably--I think it’s just not being from around here.  I love that where I am from gets to be a topic of conversation.  I love that I get to talk about how it’s different in Michigan, or how this aspect of the city surprised me, or to ask for recommendations because I am just not from around here.  There is something incredible about being green, about being a yokel from the middle of the country and having the gruffest, most intimidating city in the nation cut you a little bit of slack--he’s not from around here, you see.

There is an impulse to try to hide this, to push it down.  The first time I glimpsed this kind of independence, visiting Paul in Chicago, I tried to blend in as much as possible, to pretend I knew everything and fit in exactly.  There’s still some of that in me, sure--see:  Absolute Bagels.  And there is something beautiful about this.  There is something extraordinary about the idea that you can pick and leave and find another place to be.  I don’t disown anything I said about fitting in for a moment in the line to buy bagels.

But most of the time now I find myself playing the exact opposite role.  I find myself trying to highlight my foreignness.   I tell people--oh, I’m from Michigan, and show them where on my hand.  They think I’m some kind of farmboy, and I do not correct them.  (My hair color has something to do with this, I think.)  I must sound like a walking Frontier Ruckus record, but this too has something beautiful to it.  It is only now that I am discovering what it is that makes Michigan home.  It’s summer nights you spent wandering on the south part of Michigan State’s campus, feeling sad and angsty and whatever.  It’s the horrible kitschy shops of downtown Plymouth you went to with your girlfriend as she searched for a Christmas present.  It’s how incredibly alone you can feel on the path to the Empire Bluffs when you’re visiting your bushia.  It’s the dealerships which, even if they’re not not garishly lighting up the parish where you wore Catholic uniforms from K-8, lined the streets of so many high school memories.  It’s a hundred things like that.

I don’t think it’s fair to say I took them for granted, but I surely didn’t realize how much they mattered, to what extent they made me me.  I suppose I should have.  I was warned.  When Kevin Powers came to Michigan State, someone asked him about other war books--did he read them, did they influence him? (Kevin Powers wrote a book about his time in Iraq, it’s probably worth noting.)  His answer has stuck with me.  He said that reading Hemingway and O’Brien, he saw things that he didn’t identify with at all.  But figuring out where he wasn’t was what allowed him to figure out where he was.  It’s the idea of a parallax, a term I am stubbornly refusing to Google, trusting my ninth grade science definition--using the other stars of the sky’s distance from you to figure out where you are.

This idea is true of fiction, sure.  Some of the best most meaningful moments of my life have come reading books, understanding more about myself.  All The King’s Men has changed my life not once but twice.  But it’s true of places, too.  You can’t know what home is until you aren’t home.  This could be scary--in fact is, tautologically, it can only happen where you don’t feel at home.  It is uncomfortable and difficult to adjust to.  But the only way you can grasp the full influence your home has had on you is to leave it and see what comes with you, to see what sticks.

5/13/2014

IF SEAN RAN THE COMMUNITY BOARD PERMITS COMMITTEE

a play in one act

ACT I, SCENE I

in a cramped hotel conference room. SEAN sits at a long committee table, completely alone. enter ANNOYING CAFE OWNER.

ANNOYING CAFE OWNER: Hey, can I build this thing on my property?

SEAN: Yeah, I don’t fucking care.

ANNOYING CAFE OWNER: Cool.

SEAN: Now get outta here, Cabrera is up to bat.

exit ANNOYING CAFE OWNER.

FIN

5/12/2014

The point of an internship is to learn things for doing, sometimes referred to as "skills." Here are things I am better at now than when I arrived in New York ten days ago:

• Convincing old women with terrible handwriting to let me fill out forms for them
• Maintaining an impenetrable facade of gruff indifference while riding the subway in the evening
• Using the copy machine, with whom I have developed a rapport and I may even go so far to say a kind of mutual understanding and respect
• On a related note:  I can collate a fifteen item packet faster than you can
• Making friendly conversation with my foreign roommates
• Working my state of origin into conversation, which is really difficult in Michigan but very easy here
• Pushing in front of baby strollers, weaving between elderly couples, and leaping over the short or crouching in order to make a light
• My Twitter game has been pretty good
• Conserving phone battery even while navigating to a mischievously-located Potbelly Sandwich shop
• Coming up with bullshit ways to avoid writing something meaningful about my day