the habit of being

Lately, what I really want to do is go to Antarctica. I keep saying this: when are we going to Antarctica? But I’m not sure if it’s really Antarctica I want so much as the idea of Antarctica. It doesn’t even really need to be that far away, just as long as there are hardly any people. Antarctica could be just about anywhere, except New York City, because just about everywhere feels deserted compared to here. But it’s also the idea of all that white snow and ice. To tell you the truth, after I made the switch, I never went back to liking the hot soaking tub at Osaka as much as the cold.

The other night, Saturday I think, I went to see the film adaptation of this book Into the Wild, which is based on a true story of a guy who dropped out of his regular life after college and hitchhiked all over the country, before going to Alaska and freezing to death. When I was eighteen I did something similar, minus the freezing to death, and I read this book while I was on the road. So I went to see the movie, and, in it, the guy carries the same book of edible plants my boyfriend and I had with us during our travels and used to make a few very unsatisfying grass salads. For some reason, I felt compelled to email my ex and tell him this. He read the book too, and I think he identified with the protagonist more than I did. After we split up, he went on to travel alone, thruhiking the Appalachian Trail, which was probably what he needed in the first place, and then he got married.

To make a long story short, our relationship was a big traumatic mess that haunted me for a long time afterward, and we didn’t communicate for years, until this past April, when I was in Portland, just at the beginning of waking up. I emailed him, and we wound up having sushi, me and him and his wife. Nothing particularly noteworthy happened at this meeting, but afterwards it seemed like I’d laid down an incredible burden. We pretty much hadn’t talked since then, until the other day, when I emailed him again, about this movie and the plant book. He replied, saying he still had the plant book, and rather nonchalantly added that he’d just been at Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s place when he just happened to be flipping through the friend’s back issues of a certain magazine when he found a story I wrote. The story was something I published under a pseudonym, and it dealt in part with some of the traumatic happenings of our relationship.

All of this is a little strange: the issue of the magazine in question is now about a year and a half old; I just happened to see this film and email him right after his discovery of it; and, to top it all off, apparently he and his wife have been planning to name their first son the same name I gave to “his” character in the story.

I distinctly remember being so incredibly panicked over the prospect of any of the real people in the story, which I wrote in early 2005, finding and reading it that I considered not publishing the piece at all. I finally convinced myself that that was incredibly unlikely to happen, at least not for a very long time… maybe in the very distant future, if I wound up getting famous, someone would make the connection. After all, it wasn’t that big of a magazine. Anyway, now that the dreaded event has occurred, I am much less mortified over it than amazed at how the universe must have had to conspire to allow it to happen. Things like this happen to me all the time!

I had this realization, while I was in the shower, about a week ago. The gist of it was this: I was in the shower, standing there under the water, and I was thinking about a phone conversation I had had a few minutes earlier. I was in the middle of thinking about this conversation when I noticed that I was actually in the shower. I paused in the middle of the thought and said to myself, wait a minute, I’m in the shower now.

In this split-second pause, it was clear to me that while I was thinking about that phone conversation a moment earlier, I wasn’t just in the shower, I was actually still having the conversation, right then. The conversation wasn’t some event that was stuck in the past, over and done with and frozen and unmodifiable. The conversation, as I thought about it, was just as much in the present as the shower was, and in fact no longer existed in any other moment but the one I was currently in. The conversation wasn’t sitting back there behind me somewhere in a perfected form I could only partly access, it was right there before me, happening, even though I was doing something else. It wasn’t just a static thing I was remembering, but something that was still active and changing as I thought about it.

Thinking about all this a little more, it becomes obvious that not only is that phone conversation going on right now as I bring it into mind again, but everything is.. my entire history is in each moment. And every moment, my history is changing. Just as there are many possible futures, there are many possible pasts. There isn’t just this one immutable life story I can plug into or out of at different points in time. It sounds silly, but it is literally true that every breath is a brand new life: a new past, present, and future all in one. And this is why we cannot be forever doomed by the mistakes we’ve made and the traumas we’ve suffered. It isn’t possible, because those mistakes aren’t really the stable anchors we think they are. Or, to put it another way, they are only stable in as much as we think they are. All you really have to do is let go of the belief in this false stability, and you’re free.

I take it back. New York City can be Antarctica too.

I tried to get a third bottle of wine on the way to the subway but it was after eleven and the store was closed. I wound up getting tonic and lemon from the bodega and a takeaway bag full of ice from the Bageltique in Park Slope, to go with the Sapphire Calgary stole from one of the million restaurant jobs she kept losing last year when everything was shittier than it is now and we used to go to the Magician for happy hour and one of us always got sick. We took their two bottles of white and the gin and the tonic and a corkscrew and a blanket and a thermos full of ice and my backpack and a computer and a camera and sweaters for if it got cold and a book to stick in the door so we weren’t locked on the roof. They poured the wine and I poured a very strong G&T because it was dark and I couldn’t see. Calgary taught me how to do kung-fu kicks and we talked about sex. Sex we’re not having and sex are having with people we shouldn’t be and sex we’ve had and sex we want to have and how bad kissers are just not worth the effort. We laughed and laughed and took pictures with the flash and the Manhattan lights were blurry and Carrie finally gave in and peed on the roof next door. We were 23 and almost-25 and almost-27. By two in the morning I was demonstrating yoga adjustments I learned in teacher training in 2003 and Calgary took pictures of me pressing on Carrie’s hipbones and she asked when it was her turn and apologized for not having shaved in a while. I wanted to get a bagel from the Bageltique which is open 24 hours but there was still another bottle. The computer took pictures of us and there was one spot where we could check our email, especially if I used my leg as an antenna. At one point Calgary said hey we’re having a good time, I’ve never had a group of friends. And I wasn’t sure three qualified as a group but we decided it did. Tomorrow we can get a manicure I kept saying. There’s this place on Christopher Street where there are manicures for $8.50. When we went downstairs it was after four and we needed to do handstands against the wall in the kitchen and that was when we realized how drunk we actually were. All three of us got up though. It was decided that I couldn’t go back to the West Village and we were having a slumber party and Carrie said I think I might take a shower and then the water was running. I still wanted a bagel but no one wanted to go to the Bageltique anymore so Calgary made me a minibagel with soy cream cheese but at first she didn’t turn on the oven. When she got out of the shower Carrie blew up the air mattress and gave me some yoga pants to wear and fell asleep in a heap. It was five and Calgary and I set two alarms for noon because she had to leave for the restaurant at 2:30 and we both went to sleep in Carrie’s bed. We got up at 10 or 11 and we were all hungover and hungry and Calgary took pictures of me and Carrie with rashyboo hair and sleepy eyes and it was Sunday so we needed vegan brunch. We decided to go to this place in the East Village which meant we had to go on the train and walk a ways and I kept asking are we there yet and then we almost didn’t know where it was but then we did. We had a cute waiter who was slow with the coffee and we all ordered the breakfast burrito with tofu scramble and vegetables and beans and guacamole and also the virgin sangria. Carrie couldn’t eat all of hers because she has a small stomach but Calgary and I did an impressive job considering the burrito was huge. Afterwards it was raining and we didn’t have an umbrella and Carrie forgot her leftovers but didn’t go back because that would be embarrassing. We weren’t far from my new favorite bus, the M8 that goes from the West Village to the East, which I had just learned about from Calgary who looked it up for me so I could come study with her at Sympathy for the Kettle. We found the M8 and got on it and they got off at St. Mark’s Bookshop and I went home to my apartment and it stopped raining and by then it was afternoon.

Today I read “Envy” by Kathryn Chetkovich. I was supposed to be doing other things, like studying, writing, laundry, but I haven’t gotten around to those things yet.

Last night I dreamt I went to hear Jonathan Franzen read and wound up sleeping with him. It turned out he had some sort of deformity, but in the end I was still begging him to autograph my copy of The Corrections. I’m sure this means something.

Before that, I was in a black livery cab on the way back to Manhattan from Westport, Connecticut, talking about Joan Didion with an older woman who is more successful that I can ever imagine being. Before that, I was at a birthday party, for another woman who is more successful than I can ever imagine being, considering whether I should make lobster an honorary vegetable for the night, considering that I don’t get invited to lobster bakes at yacht clubs all that often.

The previous night, I was at a dance performance about “girlishness” that was billed as “erotic and grotesque.” It was sortof an interesting concept, but it didn’t come together at all. The best part about it was a survey slipped into the program. One of the questions required me to check off which out of a long list of venues in the City I’d attended performances at over the last 12 months, and I checked off about ten different places, which made me feel great about my life, temporarily.

I feel like there is something seriously wrong with me. I’ve felt this way my entire life. I’ve come to realize it’s a common element of the so-called “artistic temperament,” but I’m left wondering if I would still act the way I sometimes do if I didn’t have this sinking suspicion that I’m innately crazy or immoral or otherwise fucked up. Or is it the fact that my behavior sometimes fails to fall in line with my better judgment that causes the feeling in the first place. Is it really not worth pondering since there’s nothing I can do about it, or is that way of thinking just another symptom?

I’m whitening my teeth at home. You squeeze this sticky bleachy stuff out of a little syringe into these trays that your dentist makes and wear them a couple hours a night. It seems to actually work, though I don’t have that celebrity smile just yet.

New Years Day was vomit on the floorboard of the N and I could not stop looking over. There may have been pineapple. I watched the getters-on buckle back like horses spooked by snakes until I thought I could smell something and moved to a seat on the opposite end from which I could not see it.

I’d left the apartment in a rush that day, trying to escape the pizza boxes and the post-Times Square Canadian sleepover crowd dispersed on my livingroom floor. They were only peripheral, at best, having left much too late to have any chance of seeing the Ball, but the two girls from Toronto had taken the bus down just for this, and needed to be able to say: “I was kindof far, but I Was There.”

I was not There, though I did make a bit of an effort earlier in the night, involving pink glitter 2006 specs and low-budget soft drink cocktails. I joined in, I mean to say, with my roommate and her friends, and then I tried to dress them in my clothes. “This looks kindof New Year’s Evey, don’t you think,” I said to Miss Ontario, holding up a tight lacy black top I’d gotten with my employee discount from TranquiliT Boutique back when I worked at Tranquil Space and hadn’t worn since moving here. But I didn’t want to be trampled, so I did not go out, and when they returned, more drunk, with more people in tow, I hid in my room and did not come out until morning.

Mitsu called me as the Ball was falling on my set, and I did some of the countdown, but not all of it, and he said “where is it now?” and I said “it’s over” and he said “Happy New Year!” and the neighborhood kids set off their firecrackers only a couple seconds too late, but at a wrong angle to see from my window.

I’ve gotten sick on the subway twice myself, and these are stories I am proud of because they make me feel like I really live here. Once it was too much to drink, and once it was that I had just unequivocally broken up with a man who still unequivocally loved me. Neither time did I have the gall to just spew on the floor of the train. Once it was into my purse, the other time I made it out of the car and to a trashcan in the station. Both days it was raining.

. . .

There I was. It was 2006 and I was sitting in my favorite coffee place up on the Upper East Side, where the wireless wasn’t working, or at least wasn’t working for me, and I was wearing a very New Yorky look. This was a distinctly Everything Is Going To Be Different Starting Now look, which is to say, I shouldn’t have been wearing that skirt in that weather, give or take the legwarmers, and also, that it may have contributed to my being carded at a rated-R movie earlier that day.

The movie, by the way, had been about five tall escalators above Times Square, and I was already twenty minutes late when the ticketeer asked to see my ID, but it all worked out, actually, because I missed all the real previews and walked in just as the fake cell phone ring was interrupting the fake preview just before the actual movie starts. I did have to sit next to someone, though, and the New Yorky look may also have contributed to that person’s looking over at me, several times, in a lingering way I couldn’t help but notice despite the fact that it was dark and I was thoroughly engrossed by a starlet much too pretty to live.

But, there I was, 2006, cinematic moment, coffee shop, Everything’s Going To Be Different, reading none other than Play It As It Lays, a book that could say more to a potential onlooker about Who I Really Am than possibly any other choice from my shelf. It was even an old copy, an early 80s copy at least, a $3.95 copy. Let me tell you, this was me. This was the me I wanted to actually be. This was the last day of winter vacation me, to say the least, and there were no less than three passibly attractive men with Powerbook G4’s at my table, one of whom even had a copy of Lolita next to his Mac.

I am never quite sure, when I see a person in public reading a book that is very much worth reading, whether to be impressed that that person is reading, say, Lolita, or disappointed that that person hasn’t read, say, Lolita, already. But it wasn’t like I hadn’t already read Play It As Is Lays, so I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Now, if this story had been about anybody else, I am positively sure that the circumstances I have just described would have lead to an Event, or at the very least, they would have lead to a conversation, with the man who was re-reading Lolita or one of the other Mac people or even the bar guy, whom I’d been trying to get up the nerve to ask how one goes about getting one’s art on the walls in there for months. But, new year or not, this story is still about me, and, like always, I walked back out into the City that night marginally cool but unapproached, infinitely intriguing but unapproachable.

We had been to a show, a performance. There was a girl and then a boy on a stage being more than what they were. People sat on pillows at their feet, wanting to get some of what they had. I sat in a chair next to him, wanting the same.

He had brought along his wife and two of their friends. This was the first time his wife and I had seen each other since the affair. There was that one time I came over to their loft, but she had stayed in her room. We did not speak to one another, but sometimes she looked at me and sometimes I looked at her. I had forgotten how pretty she was. She was wearing red nail polish, which made me wonder why I never paint my own. Later he said the color didn’t work for her.

After the show was over the wife and the two friends vanished quickly. It was just him saying hi to all the people he knew and me taking pictures of all the people I didn’t. Mostly just their feet and the pillows they’d been sitting on. I shook hands with the girl who had been on the stage but she wasn’t anything more that what she was by then. I was still nervous, because what she was was a lot. When it comes to meeting people I don’t know, what I am shrinks to almost nothing.

Outside it was Chelsea and it was cold and it was raining and neither of us had any umbrella. It was my first day wearing a scarf and I wrapped the scarf around my head. He put something yellow and plastic on his, something that came out of his backpack and looked ridiculous but sortof went with his cat-hair-covered fleece.

A convenience store appeared and he wanted to get the least girly umbrella but got the most girly by mistake and gave it to me. I said he could get under the other side but it was a pretty small umbrella. We went to Union Square on the L. We went to Coffee Shop and he gave the man my name. At the table I ate Ceasar salad and we kept touching hands and he said my chi was different, it was more and it was cute. I did not like the idea that my chi was cute.

He said he had had an epiphany yesterday. A revelation about who he was. At first he couldn’t say but then he managed to explain and he was still explaining when we were out in Union Square again under the girly umbrella. After he had finished telling me the epiphany he said he felt like kissing me, and I said What are you, resisting? So he kissed me and we were kissing and people were walking by but it was okay because we were under the umbrella.

We had to go home and he got on the N with me even though it’s not his train and we kissed some more on the N until we got to Lex. He got off to transfer to his real train and I took out my book and read it.