i have for the last several weeks been trying to write. i have lots of ideas. character sketches, plot outlines, emotions, memories, ennui, pork chop sandwiches. i have detailed plans in my head of what i’m going to explain and how i’m going to explain it. there’s just this one nagging thing keeping me from doing it.
i’m suffering from a complete and total lack of confidence. i sit and i sit and nothing comes out. i turn on music, check my email. sit some more. and what is my result? i get pages and pages of crap like this: “There once was a young man who rode the subway with the same unrecognizable, pale-faced businessmen every morning.” or this: “whoever wrote that is condescendingly smitten with his or her own level of intelligence, he thought.”
nothing is clicking. it’s all garbled nonsense. nothing i’ve penned in the last six months has made me genuinely excited about my own writing. which sucks. you have to be your own biggest cheerleader and fan because nobody’s going to make you sit down and do it. so my confidence is gone, and i have absolutely no clue why. shit even writing during the brain injury was easier than this.
work has finally calmed down from its summer levels of ridiculousness to something more manageable. i make it out by 6 p.m. almost every day, only had to work one weekend in the last two months, and only really have to stay late on a weeknight once a week, if at all, as opposed to every single boring tiring monotonous day in august and september. so i now i have something i didn’t have this summer: free time. not tons and tons of it like college. i seriously have a hard time remembering how i filled an entire day with shit to do in college. and it seems ridiculous to me now that i would spend at least an hour a day sophomore year working on that silly book. sometimes i’d blow off papers and exams to spend 3-4 hours in caribou, sipping coffee, as i rewrote over and over a single chapter, or hell sometimes even a single paragraph. im especially anal retentive when i get to the editing stages. 230 pages and two semesters later, i had something that — despite its completely unpublishable and not to mention unshowable status — i was pretty damn proud of. and i think i learned a few important lessons, but its possible that it was a completely narcissistic exercise of self-indulgence. (the working title was, after all, “an ineffable journey of perpetual astonishment,” which was meant to be funny because of its overwrought sense of importance, but now just makes me cringe that i would give a book such a silly name).
when you’re working on something that long, you’re going to have unproductive days. that’s okay. what’s important is that you make yourself sit down, every day, with a block of time set aside, and just see what happens. what dreams may come. sometimes i’d sit down and write a completely unrelated short story inspired in all likelihood by nothing from the book whatsoever. blogging and journaling were good outlets as well. nothing calms the nerves or soothes the soul like a solid, quickly written, self-absorbed rant about what’s going on in your life. what you’re excited about. what’s making you anxious. what you’re hoping for.
i think i’m sucking at writing because i’ve fallen out of the habit. i used to write at least once a day. i’d be upset if i didnt get at least an hour somewhere to let my fingers loose on a keyboard. now i sit down to do it maybe once a week if i’m lucky. i just get distracted doing other things. or i come home from work and i’m tired and i don’t want to do it. i watch too much tv. i eat out too much. my life is getting cluttered with nebulous peripheries. time just seems to disappear into bottomless black holes.
will and i talked at the bar about senior honors last night, about how we were just dialing in our stories by the second semester, that we both stopped caring. i’m not really sure why. in advanced fiction, every story i wrote for durban i wanted to make perfect before i showed it to her. i would have been embarrassed to give her something i hadn’t put my full efforts into. i knew no matter how good it was she’d tear it apart and i’d have to restart. so it goes. i went through 19 drafts of cinderella’s castle before i turned in a “final” copy, and durban swears my first novel is going to be a continuation of that story. i wish i had tried harder in senior honors. taken some risks. really put some writing together that was worth a damn and not so run-of-the-mill. but instead i studied my ass off. i wanted a 4.0 semester, which i’d never had before. mock trial also ended up being double the commitment i had planned on. when did we start going to so many tournaments? being on exec board didnt help. i ended up quitting the dth unofficially because something had to give. i may have been dialing stories in, but i think i’m still happy with how my thesis turned out. what i intended to write and what i actually wrote were two very different things. i failed miserably at writing what i wanted to write, but i still liked the results. is that success? i don’t know. sunday morning was okay. and i think imperfection of faith is pretty good, but maybe only when i read it out loud because otherwise it’s just incoherent stream of conscious nonsense without a resolution or a plot.
in new york city, everyone is an exile, none more so than the americans
new york is such a strange place. i think the subway exacerbates this. you descend dirty concrete stairwells and step inside giant metal trains that screech like dying animals as they pull into the station. nevermind my ipod, the MTA-issue brakes are more than enough to turn me deaf by the time i’m 25. so you descend, and when you come up, you’re someplace else. it sounds simple but it’s really quite remarkable. cobble hill to midtown. midtown to the west village. upper east side to columbus circle. gramercy to chinatown. tribeca to chelsea. these very diverse neighborhoods are connected by an emotionless, uniform system of tracks and trains, differentiated only by colors, numbers and letters. you travel in a system of sameness through a varied and nuanced world. and so in the process, the city feels disconnected. everything is 5, 10, 15 minutes away from each other, sharing borders you never see, because you traverse them by subterranean teleportation. from the train you’ll never see how chinatown blends into little italy into nolita into soho into the village, where the neighborhoods and their styles fold and bend together into one. everything is jarring.
that’s why one of my favorite things to do in the city is take a car home. they let us do it when we work late. if i’m not too tired, it’s relaxing to stare out the window and watch the buildings change like seasons. tall to short, back to tall, to brick to cement to glass. sometimes i tell the driver not to take the FDR even though it’s ten times faster. sometimes i just want to see new york. the absolute best is taking the car to work early in the morning. usually it’s the last 30 minutes of calm you’ll have all day, because you only really go in early when it’s going to be crazy. but as the car takes you over the brooklyn bridge, the sun hits all the buildings at just the right angles. i like to crack the windows and smell the air. the east river actually looks blue in the morning, full of tiny ripples from the wind and boats. but my favorite part might be when the car drives right past the front doors of the UN with all those flags. it’s like holy shit, i work in midtown manhattan, which might as well be the center of the universe. or the parts that matter, at least.
last night they lit the tree at rockefeller center. i would have wanted to go except unc was tipping off against michigan state at the same time they were going to plug in all those little lightbulbs. i left work at 5:30. the lighting wasn’t happening until 9. and yet, three and a half hours before anything was going to happen, enough time to watch a lord of the rings movie mind you, the two-block walk to the subway, which typically takes two minutes, took me almost twenty. people were packed into the sidewalks, which were barricaded and patrolled by cops. everyone stood shoulder-to-shoulder, shuffling their feet, not really moving much of anywhere. they weren’t really people though. they were tourists: doe-eyed creatures better suited for a petting zoo than city streets. they stood and gawked at the buildings, or at their maps, or at each other, or the lint in their bellybuttons — whatever. i’ve never seen a group of people look so clearly like they didn’t belong. it was an odd feeling to be so facelessly surrounded and disconnected at once. i wanted to sympathize with them, to help them get where they needed to be. shoo them along with a soft pat on the back. but in actuality i just didn’t care. no time, no patience, they were obstacles, annoying the hell out of me, keeping me from getting where i wanted to go: home.
home. where is that? if it’s not a place… an idea then? an idea untethered to a pile of bricks.
i had, by all objective standards, an awesome thanksgiving. went to the macys parade and had a big dim sum lunch on the day of. called my dad to wish him happy turkey day and make sure he was going to watch the cowboys play (they won). then on friday my mom, grandma and sister all came into the city — three generations of women in my life. someone call the producers of ya ya sister pants: they want their sequel back.
after they arrived i showed them around midtown a little bit. here is the tree, here is the swarovski star, here are the ice skaters, here is the starbucks. we went inside st. patricks, and i told them how on the morning i got my LSAT score i excused myself from my desk, stepped inside this church, and said a little prayer before i would read the results on my blackberry. later in the afternoon we did a little shopping at h&m and other stores i forget the names of. we passed sachs fifth avenue and i asked my grandma what her first impressions of new york were. she said she couldn’t imagine how all the people got fed. and i have to admit, i tried to consider the sheer volume of one meal for everyone in new york, and it was staggering.
that night the four of us went to capital grille, a midtown steakhouse, and had a huge dinner. porterhouse steaks, macaroni and cheese with bread crust and lobster, grilled asparagus with hollandaise sauce, mashed potatoes and gravy. it was delicious.
next day i met them at 9:30 a.m. at the met when it opened. we saw the painting of the little boys drawing graffiti in the church and we all laughed. i discussed one of the madonnas with my grandma and she said it was amazing how everyone was so talented to make what was on the walls. some of the paintings must have represented years of an artist’s life, from the sketches to the training right down to the actual physical painting of the thing itself. my sister joked because her ex boyfriend was an “artist” but really he just threw paint at blank canvases, making quasi-interesting patterns of splotches, and called it”modern” art. i like the moma and all, but we didnt go that weekend, and i’m okay with that.
after the met i took them to brother jimmy’s bbq and we ate carolina pulled pork and mashed potatoes and collard greens, washing it all down with sweet tea, where the sugar is added during the brewing, so that it gets all supersaturated and delicious. the waitress made fun of me for dragging them to a southern-style restaurant in new york. they all lived in the south and could get this food any time they wanted it. i drug them there because i wanted it. i had to shamefully admit that this was true. i wanted to share that food with people i knew would appreciate it. that’s all.
so where is home. home is 500 miles away. it’s a combination of 3536 bent trace and 4355 peaceford glen drives. historically you can mix in some darden road and some fairidge drive, but mostly those two places. it’s also chapel hill and 106 cole street. more than anything it was friday nights playing poker at noel’s table, saturday nights on dad’s grill, cooking fried egg sandwiches in mom’s kitchen, walking down the hill to the smith center on saturday afternoons, the newsroom in the union or the basement of gardner, spending entire reading days in murphey preparing for mock trial tournaments. home is many things at once, all rolled up into a feeling. it has its own place in time, because home is easier defined as a memory than in the present tense.
it’s also home to cook a 16-pound turkey with your roommate at 6 a.m. to boil mashed potatoes, mixing in butter and milk and garlic and deliciousness. to send text messages to your mom at 10 a.m. asking how long the macaroni and cheese needs to bake, and if you’re really supposed to put in enough milk to float the noodles like a bowl of cereal. it’s leaving your apartment in the cold and miserable rain at 11 a.m. to pick up fresh green beans. home is surprising the hell out of your grandmother, who the night before, asked you to order pizza for lunch so that you wouldn’t be put to too much trouble. i’ll never ever forget the look on her face when i showed her the turkey in the oven. she said to me, “i never thought i’d see the day when my grandson cooked me a thanksgiving lunch.” i think i was beaming pretty hard by this point, and it needs to be said that my roommate andi is amazing. while i was goofing off at the met all day with my family the day before, she had gone to the grocery store and bought all the supplies, including the very beautiful turkey that we stuffed with lemon, celery and onions, and basted with butter and savory spices.
home is 500 miles away, but that sunday morning and afternoon, with all the laughter and love in our tiny little brooklyn apartment, as i watched my grandmother’s hands make gravy from the turkey drippings, improvised with bisquick, needing only the memory of countless repitions on thanksgivings before, a little bit of home was brought to me. and im hoping, just hoping, it can stay there. because this city really is senegal with machines. it’s big and noisy and full of people and happenings and yet somehow still one of the emptiest and loneliest places i’ve ever been. maybe that’s because it’s so foreign. new york might as well be china when you’re from high point, north carolina.
the difference is often barely noticeable.
dedicated to christine, who wasn’t there to listen to me whine, so i wrote this instead. thanks fang.