6/16/2014

If my last name were Peters or Patterson or anything so pedestrian, it would have earned me an earful, but Fitzpatrick was a get out of jail free card that I quickly cashed.  A man called, hopping mad, upset by the fact of our answering machine and what it told him about the people behind it.  He explained to me all that was wrong with the modern world, with emails and voicemails and other instruments of confusion.  These are not conversations that often end.  Then he asked me my name.  “Sean Fitzpatrick, sir.”  This followed by the rarest of rarities in a conversation like this:  A bona fide pause, a break in the yelling for the processing of information.  “Oh,” came a different voice, “my name is Patrick.  That’s a fine name.”  Another pause, this one less rare, this one recovering from an interrupted train of thought.  I don’t mind if someone is angry by nature so long as they are easily distractible.  “Well, anyway, Mr. Patrick, I read in your newsletter that...”  If all Helen’s constituents were old Irish men, I think I could make a living doing this.

6/15/2014

Loris sits, a baseball cap backwards, a white v-neck smudged by the ashes of the cigarette he’s dangling in his unaccountably gloved right hand.  I am staring at him, but so are the rest of us.  We are all on the porch and he is in the path,and we are all facing him whether we choose to or not.  He meets our attention with confidence, with exactly the smile you would expect of a 21 year old French kid who has New York City under his thumb.  He is holding court, trying to prove that he is not high as fuck, a task made only slightly more difficult by the fact that he is high as fuck.  But due process must be followed:  “Ask me anything!” he demands through his grin.

Dennis does not deny that he is high as fuck.  He starts the prosecution:  “Who is your favorite footballer?”  He stares at Loris intently.  He is convinced this will be a stumper.

“Easy, it’s Evrà.”  Dennis shrinks.

“Really?   Evrà?”  This is Camelle.  He is asking because he cares about football, not to play the game.

“Yes, Evrà is good.”  With the gloved hand, he dismisses Camelle, dumps more ash on his t-shirt.  “Now let’s do capitals.  I am good at capitals.”

We cycle through the atlas and sure enough, Loris is good at capitals, but he loses the attention of the crowd.  This doesn’t bother him as he is genuinely caught up in an argument over Kuala Lumpur.  It’s not his crowd anyway.  We are gathered for a barbecue for Dennis’ birthday.  It is not Dennis’ birthday, though that only seems to bother Dennis.  For everyone else, it is a perfectly satisfactory explanation.  Dennis tries to explain to the new arrivals that it is not his birthday, but they wish him a happy one anyway, and he accepts his defeat.  After he has gone to lay down, they will sing “Happy Birthday” to him.  He will groan “thank you” from the third floor window.  

6/14/2014

okay first of all, she figured out a better way to do paragraph breaks than me and i've been doing this for six weeks.  here it is, a fantastic guest post by my sister Shannon

Sean asked me if I would do a guest post for this blog.  He said that he thought it would be a cool thing to do, but I think he was mostly just looking for a day off of writing.  Regardless of the reasoning, here I am, writing a blog entry.

While sitting next to a snoring stranger on a plane may seem less than the ideal situation for six in the morning, there was no place I would have rather been at that moment.  Looking out the window at the obviously tired and less than happy to have the morning shift American Airlines employees loading luggage onto planes with what seemed to be more force and less finesse, I was equally exhilarated and terrified about my trip to New York.  During the course of the flight while most other passengers where trying catch some sleep before arriving in the city that doesn’t do so, I found myself excitingly daydreaming about my weekend in this big, foreign city.  Of course I had an idea of what the city was and what I would do there, from my previous brief tenure there a few weeks before and images from 30 Rock, Seinfeld, and almost every romantic comedy I’d seen to fuel my imagination.  But mostly where I found my thoughts wandering to was the fact that I was traveling alone; to me that was what was most exciting and scary about this trip.  Now, when I say scary I don’t mean it in the sense of being scared of the plane crashing (I mean, I’m more likely to die on the car ride there, right?) or even getting mugged in Central Park (which I feel like is probably a pretty outdated sitcom trope by now) or just being afraid of traveling to the city of 8 million people without my parents to guide me around.  It was more terrifying to realize that I’m at the point in my life where I’m capable of traveling to the largest city in America on my own.  I did spend the majority of the weekend with my Midwestern New Yorker brother, showing me the best place to get a bagel and the best place to sit and eat said bagel.  But while he was at his work helping out citizens, being praised by his coworkers, and having his boss come up with lies about ways to keep him from leaving in a week, I was on my own to explore. It was weird being able to just go out by myself in a place so large and foreign to me that quite frankly I can’t even begin to wrap my head around it.  But I’m able to do so. I am able to wander around Central Park, getting slightly lost and passing the same saxophone player at least three times, alone (and eventually making it out to the right side, unfortunately without seeing “the dog,” much to Helen’s dismay).  I am able to weave my way through the bustling city sidewalks filled with more people than I’ve ever seen out and about in Plymouth or East Lansing without having the back my dad’s shirt to hang onto.  I am able to navigate the Manhattan subway system at three in the morning with a dying phone all by myself.  I guess it’s one of those things where I didn’t quite realize I was growing up until I was sitting on that subway train with four other strangers at three in the morning.

I could go on about my trip.  I could talk about walking around and talking in Prospect Park with Sean, eating a grilled cauliflower sandwich (which was a very big deal), the roars of excitement in Little Italy when their football team scored a goal, the incomprehensible number of cute dogs I saw.  It was only 2 days but felt like 5 (which probably was a result of not sleeping much, but the city supposedly never does so I figured why should I? (Sorry for making that reference twice in this post.)).  I guess I’ll end my little guest post by saying how lucky I am to have such an incredible older brother.  While I may have rolled my eyes quite a bit when this Michigan boy was telling me that oh, he knows what subway to take, he was just saying some other routes we could take because he knows those, too, I am so fortunate to have him in my life.  I may still be completely terrified that without my consent I am in fact growing up, having such an amazing older brother, as Sean is, to look up to makes it just that much less scary.  

6/13/2014

I am imparting important life lessons, like the right way to think of your college experience and the essential but underrated art of choosing the correct exit from a subway station.  There is something to this being an older brother thing, someone should write a book about how great big brother is.  Shannon got in this morning and it couldn’t be more fun.  It’s wonderful to have someone to show off the fact that, instead of knowing nothing about New York, I now know almost nothing.  It’s equally wonderful to have someone who calls you out on that:  “Oh, you’re such a New Yorker.”

When you get older everyone else gets older with you, even your younger sister.  Shannon ate a Cambodian grilled cauliflower sandwich, and she loved it, and this was big deal.  I’m not going to embarrass her (any further) by explaining why it’s a big deal, but trust me:  It was a big deal.  The fact is that younger iterations of her would have taken me up on my safety school offer of Pret A Manger, but no, onwards to Num Pang Sandwich we went.  

This is about more than adventurous taste buds.  It is the fact that everyone is constantly changing and shifting.  It is the fact that the contorted shape shifting I have felt within me, over these weeks and across these years--that reconfiguring dance we sometimes call “internal growth” or other smarmy things--this is happening to everyone.  And so it’s so easy to only know one single version of someone, out of the millions of possible permutations.  But isn’t it magnificent, this idea that with family, with friends, you might have a chance to change with them, or at least close enough to notice what’s going on?

6/12/2014

Here is how my day went:  I am eating a celebratory ice cream cone.  I’ll spin the yarn later, there’s a lot to say, really, about dashing across Broadway in pursuit of a rogue HDMI cable and accidental smoke signals to Helen and the feeling of being in front of 60 people stringing reasonably-articulate sentences together, of trying a potential Sean on for size in the realest way yet, I can’t wait to tell you all about it.  But I am afraid this ice cream cone and I have urgent business to attend to, so I’ll have to get back to you tomorrow.

6/11/2014

I took a different route to work, one determined less by adventurousness than by impatience:  The timing of the lights had me turn right prematurely, and into Morningside Heights I went.  The sky was gray, and it was held in suspension.  It seemed like it could remain forever, in that almost raining state, its neutral the sky's final resting point after several million years of meteorology, equilibrium finally reached.  I was greatly moved by this idea, embraced the ceaselessness.  Morningside Park seemed the perfect place to pass the impending eternity.  The scene was timeless:  The green of its oaks clashed somberly with the silver backdrop.  The steep slopes that ran down the center of the park, separating east from west, adorned with crumbling concrete stairs, they seemed a beautiful staging ground for some Sisyphean reality.  I poured my sunscreen down a storm drain and tore the skin off my umbrella.  I planted its skeleton like a Christmas tree, a monument to the simcolor sky.  I stood there for an eon, admiring my work, until gravity intervened.  The raindrops began to fall.  I wanted to be angry but I wasn't.  I recognized my eternity for what it was.  I have spent just enough time missing home that I can now imagine missing here.

6/10/2014

I didn’t leave the house.  I didn’t get dressed.  I didn’t eat lunch.  It is only a charitable definition that allows me to say I ate dinner.  I wore an RCAH t-shirt and I got to work.  

There is something wonderful and weighty about the type of focus that allows you to skip meals without noticing.  I was so lasered in on Google Docing and Powerpointing and Photoshopping and Illustrating that 11 in the morning turned into 10 in the evening without any intervening stops.  I don’t have much to say except that this feels good too, this feeling of having started the day with one objective in mind and, after an appropriate amount of foot dragging, having chipped away at it until it was done, finished, finito.  I made a map and I mapped a presentation and then I looked up at the clock and felt nothing.  This is a type of day that is hard to regret.