the habit of being

I had to reschedule my acupuncture appointment because the acupuncturist had some sort of emergency and disappeared only an hour before I got there. The receptionist, Sua, did not expect this to happen at all. She thinks my name is Kate. She used to think I was a ballet dancer, too, but this is not entirely her fault, because one time I was in there late at night and I told her I had come from a dance performance. I didn’t mean I’d been in the performance, but she thought I did, and by the time she was asking me how long I’d been dancing, and I realized what she thought I had meant, it was like one in the morning and I was embarrassed and I just said I had danced when I was young, which isn’t entirely a lie but pretty much is, because I only took ballet for a few months. I sometimes get annoyed with people who think it’s fine to deliberately mislead others as long as they don’t tell any outright lie. This is especially annoying when I’m in love with the person who does it. A few months or half a year later Sua asked me what I did for work and I told her what I actually do, and she said that to her eyes I looked like a ballet dancer. I said I was too fat and not graceful enough to be a ballet dancer. I don’t know if she remembered that time I was in there late at night after the dance performance or not. Maybe she thinks I lied to her. Maybe that’s why she didn’t call me when the acupuncturist left on his emergency. Maybe that’s why she calls me Kate. I doubt it, though. She’s really nice. She asks me if I want tea and brings me the tea and straightens my towel and sometimes she comes and talks to me while I’m in the soaking tub and it isn’t even a big deal that I’m naked and she’s not. Sua asked me if I’d even had acupuncture before and I told her I hadn’t but that I wasn’t scared. She said it doesn’t hurt and I said I didn’t think it did. Even if I thought it did hurt, I still wouldn’t be scared, but I didn’t tell Sua that. I used to hate the cold soaking tub. It is really cold. One time, maybe a year ago or even more than a year, I went there with my boyfriend and we were in the tubs together, so he can tell you how much I didn’t like the cold tub and pretty much stayed in the hot tub the whole time, even though they always tell you not to do that. He wasn’t really my boyfriend. This was already after we had stopped having sex, but even when we were having sex he wasn’t my boyfriend. Not really. He used to tell me how he didn’t really feel anything and I would cry. I think I had been crying before we went to the tubs, but then I was feeling better. I still didn’t like the cold tub though. That’s how I was. After we had shiatsu, the old man came and talked to us about how we needed to do these exercises together to help each other, and my boyfriend, who wasn’t really, said that the old man must have thought we were married, and now we couldn’t go there with anyone else or everyone would be disappointed. I never go there with anyone else. I always go alone. Now, I like the cold tub better than the hot tub. I like how if you stay still enough you don’t feel the cold anymore. I like floating on my stomach and looking at my hands under the water and feeling so quiet, counting the seconds in my head. I like getting in the hot tub after I’ve been in the cold tub and how my skin tingles all over and my counting seems to go in slow motion. Then I can’t wait until my hot minutes are up so I can get back in the cold and do it again. Now it’s the hot tub I have to struggle with patience in. It seems like there’s nothing in particular to feel or not feel in the hot tub, so it’s not as interesting to be in it. That’s just one more example of how everything is completely different now. But I know if I keep bathing, there will be no difference between the hot and the cold tubs at all. Neither of them will seem better. I can already feel this beginning to happen, right now.

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.

I am afraid of this being the year that disappeared. 2006 will be the first of many vanishing years, perhaps. Old people are always saying that time speeds by faster and faster. I am only 23, and already things that seem like yesterday are turning out to be last year, or even the year before that. It doesn’t help that I haven’t kept up my journal.

Why is that? I’m not entirely sure. In my early years of online-journalling (this was in the pre-blog days), this was something that sometimes happened: Suddenly, I was possessed to take down my site, leaving nothing but a splash page saying something about a “hiatus” and a link to email me (back then, people actually did). The typical length of such a hiatus was about six months, and I’d emerge on the other end of it with a new domain name (or at least a new design - Version 2.0 or somesuch) and what I thought to be a completely different persona.

Maybe I stopped writing here because I needed to grow a new ego. Or maybe it’s a combination of more mundane factors, like that I’ve been crazy-insane-busy. Back in February I was taking classes on frontal lobe functions and modern Indian history, editing the first story I’ve published in a national magazine (it came out in May, under a pseudonym), “finishing” my first scientific article (since then it’s been submitted, rejected, rewritten, resubmitted, lather, rinse, repeat), and sleeping with my best friend, among other things. The City was beginning to open up for me in big ways, and I was seeing a lot of dance and theatre for the first time. I also tend to get kindof SAD-ish in February, though this year it hit hardest in March.

I stopped sleeping with my friend and fell for a tall man with a Russian accent. I wrote manic emails like this:

I spent most of yesterday leading a gallery tour in Chelsea for the prospective graduate students, and then I went shopping in Soho and found this soft white dress that is so amazing and pretty that I spent $140 on it without even blinking, and this whole time it was freezing out and windy and I wasn’t dressed well enough. Buying the dress made me late for meeting the Russian boy at the bar in the IFC, so I called and was all apologizing and still wound up taking the wrong subway and having to walk a long way in the freezing cold and being even later, but I got there and he was all smiling at me and wanting to see the dress and hugging me and getting me some vodka to warm me up. And then we saw Manderlay which is incredibly intense and terrible and beautiful and we held hands the whole time and when it was over we were both just completely blown away and loved it and felt like the only people in the world who could see a completely disturbing film like that and come out of it excited and talking about how we’re going to make things like that someday. We went to the Belgian beer bar on West 4th and I impressed him with my knowing which beers were the best and we sat in a corner and had this whole conversation about world politics, and, still beaming about the movie, he kept touching my hair and we’d kiss and my hair would get in our mouths but it wasn’t even weird and he’s this amazing kisser. We wanted to go somewhere not so loud but we both live far away from there and it was so cold so I said, “We could go to my lab. It’s a few blocks away” and he said “Really? Okay. Let’s go.” So we stopped and got more beer to smuggle in and I took him to the Psychology building and up to the lab and he was asking all about my job and I swear to God I did not think we were going to have sex… Then we got dressed and were drinking beer and eating my Valentine’s Godiva my mom had sent which was still in the lab and a grad student I knew walked in but I just gave her some chocolate and it was fine. We talked and talked about my work and his work and I asked him why he’s not married and he told me about being engaged when he was about my age but it didn’t work out and they don’t talk anymore and if he’d married her he’d never be doing the things he is now…

And then he never called me again and I started reading The Rules and reciting them to all my friends on a regular basis. I made a proclamation — “No more telling them my whole traumatic life history. No more letting them read my writing. No more sex on the second date. Fuck being honest. I want to get married.” — and I then proceeded to stop dating altogether. I fought a war against bedbugs. My lab got a big grant from the NIH and I got a MacBook Pro. In March, I went to visit my parents, who had just moved to Louisville, Kentucky, and my mother and I had our first mint juleps and derby pie at The Brown. In April, I got my wisdom teeth pulled and discovered that The Double Life of Véronique is probably the best movie ever made. In May, I presented a poster at the Vision Sciences Society conference in Sarasota, saw my writing in Barnes and Noble, and had a birthday. At some point, I re-decided not to get a Ph.D. in neural science or psychology. In June, I landed a room in a West Village apartment owned by a 50-something Buddhist ex-dental hygeinist, but I didn’t move out of my old apartment in Astoria until July. I watched my ex-lover and his wife haul pieces of my antique bed down four flights of stairs and into a sudden rain-storm. I took a summer fiction workshop, and, reluctantly, wrote short stories. I decided I really want to get an MFA in writing. I dreamt that I took out my own heart and lungs and zipped them up in a transplant bag, but did not die. In August, my goldfish with no name died, almost exactly a year after I got it. I got a visa to Russia, where I will be giving a talk on my research in St. Petersburg next week. One Sunday, I wrote for 18 hours straight, and was incredibly happy. The next Saturday, I walked for miles and took hundreds of photographs. And then, I started to miss my website.