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The Me Decade

August 16, 2014 in Age Matters, City Matters, Language Matters, Sabboytical, Snapshot, Style Matters

I was having one of those glorious Brooklyn Saturday mornings. I was all gussied up in my Brooklyn Saturday morning finest: a floor-length geometric Meg skirt; an enormous blue-beaded Senegalese necklace; sloppy silver Birkenstock knockoffs (Birkenstockoffs); dirty hair piled high with blue extensions and an orange zinnia; and a bright purple bra visible through my cropped tee. It was a punk-rock homage to the ’70s moms I’d wished were my own–the kind of outfit I really can’t wear to film screenings or Talking Pictures tapings or Ruby Intuition sessions. The kind of outfit in which I feel most myself.

So was I ever feeling grand as I buzzed through my Brooklyn Saturday morning routine. It had been a week of good, hard work in this Summer of Reckoning, and I was relishing a rare day off. I drank Americanos with my Muppet Critics; fetched produce and flowers at the Greenmarket; fed the birds and myself over at Red Hook Fairway; read my book about ’60s directors by the water. I drove the long way home, following the river with my left arm dangling out the window, Biggie and early Mariah pouring into the air. At a red light, I said—Admit it. You love your friends to bits but you are your best friend. You trust yourself. You always want to do the same things as you, you find the same things funny, you have the same values, you like the same music, and you want to be quiet at the same times. You may be impatient and messy and even occasionally imperious but you dig you. It was an odd but not unpleasant revelation. Knee-deep in my early-middle age, I finally appreciated my own company enough that I’d avoid others before I’d ever avoid myself.

To cement the moment, I smiled cheekily in the rearview mirror–hey, good-lookin’!–only to notice I was wearing a crazy-lady, half-lipsticked grin. The universe’s sense of humor being what it is, the world’s most beautiful man picked that moment to bike by, and as he gave me the world’s most beautiful eye-fucking, the light changed. Flustered, I stalled my car, and everyone behind me began honking. I had to laugh. I knew that, as my best friend, it was now my duty to make fun of myself–pride do goeth before a fall! I didn’t mind. I knew I still liked me.

I Wonder, Woman

August 9, 2014 in City Matters, Feminist Matters, Sabboytical

I was waiting on line at Fairway when this couple ahead of me started fighting. They were in their 60s–both clad in sensible footwear and baggy tees emblazoned with lefty slogans. You know: doggedly grey hair, spectacles, humorless facial expressions. They were of a piece. If I had to guess–and guessing is my favorite part of people-watching–I’d say they lived on the two top floors of a Park Slope brownstone they’d bought in the early ’80s. I’d put money on the fact that they didn’t have kids. They’d have been too busy fighting the good fight for such frivolous pursuits.

Anyway, they were fighting now. Boy, were they fighting. The man was yelling so loudly at the woman that it penetrated my headphone cloud. I hadn’t heard a man yell like that since I’d left my father’s house, and my fists started to clench. The actual words were inconsequential–I asked if you got skim! You know I can’t drink 2 percent!–but the voltage spoke an entirely different story. The voltage would’ve made more sense if he were calling her a stupid cunt.

I knew the type: He was a bully. A self-righteous bully who, if confronted, would never cop to how much he hated women, including his wife. A bully who would instead point to the money he donated to Planned Parenthood, to the campaigning he did for the ERA, to the volumes of feminist political theory lining his office. He was a bully all the same. Continue Reading →

The Church of Plato on a Rainy Afternoon

June 10, 2014 in Church Matters, City Matters, Sabboytical, Weather Matters

Yesterday, my friend B and I were having a long talk at Chelsea’s Cafe Grumpy. Because it had just rained, we had the backyard to ourselves and were using that rare private outdoor space to discuss topics that basic NYC etiquette prevented us from inflicting upon others: healthy grieving, ethical dating, spiritually conscious fucking, the heteronormative construct known as marriage, the queasy fundamentalism known as atheism. We were going off. If you saw us through a window, you might have concluded we were on a date, and a good one at that. A man and a woman of roughly the same age, talking animatedly, not touching but paying close attention to each other. She in a sheath dress; he in a tweed jacket.

In the middle of our second coffee, a man poked his head into what by then felt like our turf. “Helen?” he called out tentatively and looked at me. Rather than shaking my head, I grinned, and he raised his eyebrows, mistaking my glee at not being Helen for interest. After a beat B began talking again, and the man—who was peaked but not bad-looking, with a lanky frame and a long, pale face that bore the scars of a rough adolescence—disappeared. A bit later, while standing on the bathroom line, I noticed him again, this time looming over a woman placing an order. She was wearing a brown shirt and what we used to call slacks when we were mocking our parents in the ’70s. The outfit was so drab that it took a minute to register her bright face and surprisingly good figure. “You have nothing that is dairy-free that also does not have nuts?” she was saying with a grave, almost scholarly precision as the barrista searched the pastry case. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy