If you're looking for me....

I am HERE.

Several people claimed I never put my new link up. I think they're just lazy.

Moving Day

It's so weird to sit down at the keyboard to write for a second time in the week. It feels like it's been ages since I have done that. I don't want to overwhelm you...

Ok, so earlier this week, I talked about how I'm leaving New York. And today is moving day. Well, we're packing the truck today; driving out tomorrow. It has been hot as Hades this week in New York and I've done little but sweat like a whore in church. To put it into idioms. I hired a couple of guys to come load my stuff into the van this morning and thank the good lord I did that. I am rarely bratty about things, but if there is one thing I am willing to pay people to do, it is pick up my heavy heavy things and take them places for me. I just hate it. And I was sweating just watching them, so I know they were miserable.

It's been kind of weird looking around my apartment the last couple of days because most of the wall hangings belong to me. And I took them down to pack them, and I just keep thinking of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, about how he takes all the knick knacks and trimmings off of everything, and there's only dirt rims from where the stuff hung and wall tacks. Being a vegetarian, I left behind the Roast Beast.



It was a little depressing to wake up in a bare room this morning; even my alarm clock was packed. I love my apartment, and of all the places I've lived in New York, I've resided there the longest. I also love Roommate, with whom I've lived for over three years. I never covered this here, but she left last fall, only to come back this summer and New Roommate (also a great gal) was away for the summer so Roommate moved back in. And there she'll stay to help take over my portion of the lease. I have joked with her that the apartment is so wonderful and the rent so great that it can never leave La Familia. She jokes with me that I'll be back by January, just in time for when New Roommate moves out to move to NC herself. I think we are both secretly serious about our respective jokes.

Anyway, it has been really fantastic to have her back here this summer in my last few weeks as a New Yorker. I haven't actually seen that much of her, because the program she's been doing has had her very busy. But she took some time out last night to help me pack up the kitchen and she was so sweet this morning to go run errands on my behalf (coffee! bagels!! my shoes that needed fixing!) that I didn't realize how much I'd miss her until right before I walked out of the living room. She was sitting on the couch and I was gathering up all those last minute little things that somehow never find their way into a box, and I stopped for a quick minute. And I looked down at her and we both just started to cry. Still, I can't really seem to wrap my head around the fact that today is my last day in New York.

And speaking of last days: I will no longer be writing in this space. It's been a good run, but it's a New York chapter. Fear not, for I'm starting a new blog here, Southbound. Sadly, some lame-oh like two years ago got his chops on the link soutbound.blogspot.com and yet hasn't ever used it, so I had to add "blog" to the url. But whatever, you'll just put it in your Favorites. I think the way this thing works, I'll still be "ORF" on all my postings, but I wanted to sort of keep all this stuff separate from the new stuff I'm doing down South. Oh yeah, did I even mention where I'm going? North Carolina. It's a personal policy of mine to only live in states that have a qualifier in their names. (Next stop: South Dakota!) A lot of the content will be the same, but I'm preparing to have a lot more "alone" time on my hands, so I'll undoubtedly publish more stuff that the non-political side of the blogging world does: i.e. "personal shit no one really cares about, but reads anyway because everyone involved probably has better things to do with their time, but no ambition." I'll also, of course, be commenting on what it's like to go from a state so blue it's electric to a state so red it practically requires an NRA membership to get a driver's license. In other words, what the world outside NYC is like. (Yes, Virginia, life outside New York DOES exist.) If you're staying behind here in NYC, just consider me a foreign correspondent!

See you all on the flip side.

Goodbye To All That

Many thanks to Ms. Didion for letting me crib her title. Because, really, that is what this post is all about. I am leaving New York. And I've written a bunch of words on it already and thought them over and decided them unsufficient in saying what I'd like. I then went and re-read Joan Didion's essay on her own departure from the city at the end of an 8-year stint in her twenties and there was so much that I identified with, I considered just plagiarizing the entire thing. But I think that would be obvious. So read my piece, but if you really want to know what I'm thinking, read hers.

Because it's about how easy it is to think of living in New York in 6-month increments, at the end of which you will board a plane and be gone forever. Except that the end of that time comes and you stay; and you stay some more. People used to ask me if I'd remain in New York after college and I honestly never knew what to tell them. "I'll probably stick around a couple years, see what it's like, then go back to school," I'd placate. I was still too in love with the idea of living here that I couldn't fathom being elsewhere, but I'd already started growing weary of the hum. When I studied in Spain my sophmore year, I hated it. Mostly, that was because it wasn't New York City. I used to come back from holidays or vacations, hail a cab at the airport and breathe like I was a smoker who's been trying to quit, but just keeps going back because it feels so goddammed good. I felt alive; I felt important; I felt high. And then some Christmas or some summer vacation, I started to feel the opposite as I'd board the plane to leave my destination for New York City. I felt terrified; I felt anxious; I felt unfulfilled.

Living here is like being in an unusually high-maintainance relationship. You do most, if not all, of the work and often just wind up say, losing power for ten days (I was fine, fortunately), or stuck in a subway tunnel with no A/C, or soaked because you forgot your umbrella and even though rickety scaffolding is almost always everywhere, there is of course none to be had when it rains. And you pay $7 for a box of cereal, $10 for a movie (no matinees), triple that for a decent entree, and sometimes 50% of your take home pay for rent each month. What is more, you almost never get what you want, because there is almost always someone smarter or quicker or prettier or has looser morals or more money or knows a guy who knows a guy. A lot of putting out for not necessarily much return, BUT, sometimes the proverbial sex is fan-fucking-tastic, and that is why you court to begin with, and it's definitely why you stay. (Ironically, I suppose, if I had a nickel for everytime I've had someone say to me, "New York is a great place to visit, but I could never live here," I'd be that smarter, quicker, prettier, loosely moored, richer woman who knows a guy and has three more in her back pocket, including one named Bloomberg, and maybe I'd only be spending 40% on my rent a month too.)

My parents brought me to New York for the first time when I was 11. By the end of the trip, it seemed a foregone conclusion that I would one day live here. It was the first time I really had an aspiration in my life that existed outside the realm of my adolescence. I didn't know what I wanted to DO in New York, exactly, but I knew it was the place for me. And eventually, it was, when I hatched my ingenious scheme to attend college here. I won't dwell on my collegiate experience, but it was probably less debaucherous than your average frat party and more gallery-ridden than your typical campus, and I met all the usual suspects in my dorms and classes and it was just plain tragic when the Trade Towers came down, but the days following it were some of the most beautiful I'd ever experienced in the city. All of that already seems so far away.

After I graduated, I suffered from a considerable amount of nostalgia, yearning for a return to the late nights I spent in my friend's rooms because the opportunity I'd had to hang out with people that just by being around them I felt my cool quotient increase. I think I wanted to go back to it, because I knew that I wasn't cool, but they'd made me feel that way and that was optimal to being myself. In short, I had an identity crisis, that had probably actually started when college did, in an effort to just get by in New York and make it look easy. As I recovered from this crisis, thanks to ending a bad relationship and hiring a fabulous therapist, I realized that everyone does this here. Everyone pads their personal resume to make it all look so easy.

After that, I stepped outside my high-maintainance relationship with the city for a moment to collect my thoughts about my lover. I began to realize that it wasn't getting any easier, but I was starting to get exhausted. And I also recognized a certain sense of paralysis from all the overstimulation of the city; I had plans and ideas that I didn't know how to realize as I watched time slip by. But it was another two years almost, before I could admit to myself that I really wanted out. Before I really paid attention to the anguished returns home in the taxi cab. Momentum is an extremely powerful force. Coupled with the lure of the City, it's practically kryptonite.

Once I did make the decision to leave, I then had to start admitting it to other people. At first, I was hesitant, because everyone sort of judges you for throwing in the towel. But I noticed a funny trend: people were jealous; some even admitted it. I realized that everyone was exhausted as I was; everyone dreamed of owning-not-renting as much as I did; everyone detested pretending so damned much just to impress the next guy. I gave myself a little credit for being strong enough to say no and to walk away and realized that I'd been judging myself for wanting to leave.

Which is probably why I have spent the past few weeks resisting the suggestion that I be sad about leaving. Certainly, it took me ages to realize that if I left, my departure wouldn't be irrevocable and the world would not crumble to pieces, that there IS a life outside New York. But once I ceased to suffer from the typical myopia of a New Yorker, I felt so much more confident about saying goodbye to all that. I've gotten what I'd needed from being here. An education: practical, cultural, personal. I learned so much every day for the last eight years, but I am ready to take it with me and move on with my life somewhere else. And it's been a long time since the day in August when I stood on the corner of Washington Place and watched my tearful mother and brave younger brother drive off in a taxi cab into what would become one of the most difficult autumns of my life and I would constantly question my decision to move to New York.

The Devil Wears Mock Turtlenecks

I often think about how I wish I'd been aware of this "blogging" thing long before I actually was, because the truth is that I could have beaten Lauren Weisnebgbergergr at her own game. Four years ago nearly to the day, I started a job at a place that shall remain nameless, working for a man who was a total and complete idiot, but took no less than every opportunity to tell you he was in fact "brilliant, and let me tell you why." Oh the stories I could tell.

He may have at one point in time been indeed brilliant, but I can only guess as to where and when, because by the time I got to him, his primary means of brilliance was in obfuscation and royally effing up and then royally blaming it on his royally stressed out staff (i.e. myself and a couple others...we were ever-dwindling.)

I think back on it sometimes and can hardly believe I was only there for a year and a half, because it felt like ages at the time. The upside to this tale that I have labelled "Life After Jackass" in a file on my computer chock full of anecdotes and convoluted emails, was that I met some really truly fantastic people working in this job. The organization itself was given to existing in a shambles and yet it employed some highly wonderful people to run its innards. And I got lucky enough to become friends with them. Remember the wedding in India? Well, I remember the very day I met Anjana and went to the wedding with two other people from this former job as well.

An example of the hilarity of the place was that I initially applied to work there as a nonpaid intern and wound up getting the job of the person who would have been my supervisor were I to intern. She was leaving, so they asked me to interview. And six very long weeks later, I got an official offer. Only to hire my own intern a few months later at the rate of about $25 an hour. I really enjoyed calling Kristen my "intern" because it felt so absurd because I was 22 and 22-year-olds don't have interns. And also because she was older than me, and interns are not older than their bosses. And finally, the term "office bitch" might have been a more appropriate term for her since she sort of floated around and did what anyone needed her to on any given day. Indeed, the most absurd part about the entire tale is that Kris went on to become a Fulbright Scholar in Mauritania, but only after deferring her admittance into the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

My point in sharing all of this is to link to her blog, which she has FINALLY started. She began her outlandish travels from our offices in the spring of 2004 and sent home hilarious emails and photos. And she's gotten around to starting a blog this summer and has posted all of her past musings. She seems to manage to get herself into some rather entertaining predicaments and then get herself right back out. My personal favorite to this day is the one titled "Fuck Oliver North," about her trip to Nicaragua last winter during her holiday break. But there is loads of other good stuff in there, particularly about African airlines and their ideals about customer service. Kristen absolutely puts my own adventures and itineraries to shame.

Which reminds me. One of the last things I did before leaving the aforementioned Job From Hell was to book a trip for Jackass to a conference in South Africa. He was always very concerned about finding the fastest route home and woould spend hours on the phone with Delta trying to upgrade himself when he thought my (often more cost-conscious) itineraries were not suitable. (Funny, he could never seem to sort out how to dial the phone any other time...) Booking this trip was last minute, and the shame was that the absolute ONLY route lasted about 23 hours and included a stop in Nairobi, then a several-hours layover in Cape Verde (islands off the coast of Senegal) on to Atlanta and finally to JFK.

July 4, 2006

Happy Birthday, America!

You'd think I was obsessed!

I had this really weird dream the last night and I woke up with a sense of sorrow/admiration for President Bush. It was bizarre. Having generally maintained a sensation of distress/disgust at each thought of the Man and His Minions, feeling anything otherwise, particularly amnesty, was practically an out-of-body experience. I don't really remember what happened in the dream, but I think the upshot was that I was a Republican. Perhaps I should say this dream was a nightmare?!?

If I had to guess, I'd say this dream stems from various musings I've been having about the impending House resolution on our withdrawal from Iraq. And the death of Zarqawi. (Just a quick question about that one: didn't we, like bomb the H.E.DoubleHockeyStick out of him? How come his face was freaking flawless?? He was totally assassinated and THEN bombed. I'm just sayin'.) And the discovery of those two lost, now dead soldiers. And the article the Times published over the weekend about the alleged civilian massacre in Karbala that took place 18 months ago. In short, I've become obsessed with this conflict. My summer reading list is more "themed" than ever, and it's all non-fiction, which is a definite first for me. The stack on my nightstand is entirely related to Islam or the Middle East (perhaps that is redundant).

Last week, the New Yorker published their summer fiction issue, titling it "Life During Wartime." And while the cover was a somewhat whimsical sketch of WWII-era soldiers scribbling furiously in the trenches smoking cigarettes, the content was far from laughable. In fact, it was some of the most moving writing I've read in a really really long time. In addition to several short stories and first-hand accounts from various conflicts, the part that was most meaningful were excerpts from pieces by soldiers, marines, officers, et al. that have been part of the conflict we're currently in. I'm rarely moved to tears while reading, but this did it to me several times. None of it was embellished, none of it was particularly sophisticated, but every last word that I read was palpably real in sensation. I made my roommate read it. I'm waiting for her to finish with it so I can read it again. It's only increased my obsession with the area.

The other afternoon, I rode the subway with the little boy that I babysit for. And when we transferred onto the 2, we encountered a car full of middle schoolers. He watched them with rapt intimidation, but was relieved when we got off, as if they'd not only fascinated but terrified him in their mystique. Children are curious about other children, often in spite of themselves. Next time you're around a toddler, watch him encounter another toddler. They stare and ogle with abandon. Over time, this behavior is socialized out of us, but kids are great at doing it without feeling self-conscious, and those on the receiving end are equally intrigued. I think this is the phenomenon I'm experiencing with respect to wanting to know more about what is going on in Iraq. Because the people over there are my age and younger, and out of fascination of that, I cannot help but ogle. Fortunately, I can do so safely from thousands of miles away.

And what I've most been trying to understand and come to terms with is not only that people so young are responsible for determining the future of an entire nation (granted, it's on the orders of their superiors, but at the end of the day, they're the ones on the ground) but that there really are no rules over there. And in the end, that lack of rule affects those young people more than anyone else and there seems to be little done on this end, when they come home, to really help us understand why we want to ogle them. The incidence of Abu Ghraib is the perfect example. When the lights came up on that, commanding officers, those who give orders, scrambled like cockroaches and the ones left behind were the enlisted soldiers. No one in a position of authority claimed it. I'm not saying the soldiers are above reproach, but they were left high and dry by an agency to which they swore not only an allegiance, but their lives. In truth, there is never one single individual to blame in an instance like that. What most likely ocurred was that someone suggested one mildly kinky or distressful form of punishment and the boredom, frustration and fraternity-like atmosphere of the place just snowballed it into pyramids of naked prisoners and a hooded man with electrical wires attached to his genitalia. Sherman was right: War is hell.

Last summer, after visiting Vietnam, I came home and read A Rumor of War by Phillip Caputo. Caputo was one of the first Marine platoons to put in a Danang and he spent nearly two years in Vietnam. What he wrote was mostly re-assemblies of various battles and fights he'd been in. He wrote the book over a decade after he came back, and he confesses to having blocked out a lot of it. At the end of the book (serious spoiler alert) Caputo and several other marines are tried for the murder of a civilian. Stories were inconsistent, lies were told, things were left out, honor was lost, and yet, as you read his account of exactly how the Vietnamese man dies, you come to understand that none of the men who killed him were really responsible for where they were, or what they were doing or what ultimately happened. You have met the men he's in this fight with; they are ordinary people who have unfortunate karma. I cannot do Caputo's description of what happens justice, so if you really want to know what I'm talking about, you should just read the book.

But what I took away then, and what I've taken away from the New Yorker pieces, as well as the writing of Tim O'Brien, is that the stress of combat is really not anything anyone can fully understand without experiencing it. I imagine my trying to understand all this by reading about it is a bit like someone trying to imagine what the waves in the ocean feel like by just looking at pictures of it. As for the distress of war, you cannot prevent that from being encountered. The military can strategize and formalize and order and rank and file as much as they like, but combat doesn't lend itself to any of these things. In the end, all hell breaks loose, because war is no longer the gentleman's art it was once conceived to be. If it ever was; did you see Troy? Ok, the fact that the film was terrible aside, the brutality in that film was well, brutal. But that was acceptable back in Homer's day. Indeed, it was expected of war. Today, war is not expected in the first place.

Ok, so what does this have to do with my dream/nightmare about our commander in chief? Am I growing soft on him? No. No, I am decidedly not. And I never will, mostly because I find it hard to respect anyone, no matter who he is, who cannot observe the otherwise simple rules of grammatical syntax. To say nothing, of course, of his general (lack of) policies. I think what this has to do with, actually, is that I feel pretty damned ambivalent about the suggestion that we withdraw from Iraq pronto. Actually, I'm entirely opposed to it, because this isn't something like at Three Stooges episode where we can all run around like idiots, throw some pies in some faces, apologize merely for being silly and then hit the road and ultimately blame no one for the mess left behind. Because in this case, what we'd be leaving behind is a country that never really asked to be imploded. There is no money there; there is no infrastructure, no leadership that can keep from getting killed. The irresponsibility of that is just something I cannot abide. Dubya made our bed. Now we must lie in it. Where my ambivalence arises is when I read something like what I read last week and realize that continuing to ask what we are asking of our armed forces is painful. Moving forward, we must acknowledge the uphill battle we have, instead of continuing to say we've reached a "turning point," because there have literally been about five of those by now, and if my geometry is right, that makes a near circle. Which puts us back where we started. Let's hope that this time around, we've learned something.

Fleet Week Dispatch

I've long suspected that I was born in the wrong decade. Occasionally, people will tell me that I have a 1950s look that would make a casting director for a period piece nuts for my face. I find true happiness wearing girlish cardigan sweaters and lovely, feminine dresses with a hemline that doesn't suggest I'm trying to give the nuns heart attacks. Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, I am unstoppably drawn to a man in uniform who knows how to stand up straight and has good manners. I suppose between the romantic notions about being the girl of a boy who is off on some manly, patriotic mission and the simple elegance of the clean lines of a uniform itself, being around military men makes me feel impossibly feminine. If you asked a social scientist of one kind or another, they might tell you it's because the place that the military holds from a societal standpoint is historically very masculine. And what do those manly men do, but go off and protect the fairer sex from whatever threatens its kitchens? The "modern girl" in me wants to resist the suggestion that I need saving from anything by anyone. I mean, I've flown around the world all on my own, so I hardly fit the model of the wilting flower or distressed damsel by anyone's definition. But it has an appeal to it, and there I was during Fleet Week batting my eyelashes like it was my job, and as if my cat had climbed a tree into which I'd never dream of climbing.

I wrote about this last year. And when I went back to re-read what I'd written, not surprisingly, my views haven't changed all that much with respect to my impressions of the military and its role at this point in our history. Fleet Week came and went, and I made a very pointed effort to get involved this time, to see what the boys in white are all about. I'm leaving New York City, so in an effort to get my kicks in, I'm doing a lot of things that I've simply never taken advantage of. Including really actually meeting some of the adorable sailors that descend upon this fair ville on an annual basis. Oh, and I was wrong about one thing last year, well two: they stay on the boat the entire time, not at USOs, etc. and they are NOT all babies. What I encountered inevitably made me feel even more misplaced in my birth in the latter part of the 20th century, but it also corroborated my existing feelings from a social perspective about what it means to be in the military for any given member.

Myself and three friends started our "squid hunt" near Times Square on the West side of the city. My friend Alison had an eagle eye for the hats bobbing atop the crowds on the sidewalks. But we quickly realized the evening had the potential to be weird and awkward, because SO many of the sailors were obscenely young. So I called for a ground rule: officers!

I had no idea I was about to get a naval immersion when I stopped a particular lieutenant to ask after why he had a spiffy name plaque on his uniform, while others didn't. He wasn't entirely certain about that, but he was most definitely certain about a lot of other things and in spite of the fact that we were in an entirely too-fratty bar for my taste, surrounded by women who'd gained five pounds just putting on their makeup for the evening, I learned a lot. The inevitability of knowing that our political stances were probably not exactly congruent came up within five minutes of speaking to one another. Evidently, they have sattelite television on those ships, because he was smart enough to know how liberal a bastion NYC is. And that the same goes for its citizens. What I do not think he expected was that I actually DID want to hear what he had to say. Enter the perennial disagreement about whether the media is a liberal bastion or controlled by conservatives. We were of different minds about that, he and I.

We met up to bar hop the next day as well, and I listened some more; and at several points he stopped to ask me why on earth I was even spending my time with him because he was fully aware of our divergent points of view politically. "Because you're like my personal experiment," I told him. "I'm trying to learn about you and to understand why you are the way you are, what kind of effect the military lifestyle has on you. I have to talk to you to do that; in the end, you're politics don't matter. They're self-evident. It's how you got here that interests me. And what that does to your life. You're totally abnormal!"

As it turns out, this is the entire point of Fleet Week: so that the people of New York would be able to interact with him and the 4,000 other sailors and learn more about the military way of life, etc. In essence, it's a PR thing. And while they have a majorly uphill battle in NYC, they come in the hopes of perhaps changing a few minds, finding some new recruits and making us all feel better about the (obscene) tax expenditures we're funding. The lieutenant confessed to being surprised at how nice people had been towards him, saying he'd been worried about getting yelled at or spattered with spraypaint. I have to confess that as we walked from place to place on Sunday, I felt a bit conspicuous with him at my side, and took on some of his paranoia at being on the receiving end of civilian ire, but nothing happened. To the city's credit, I accompanied my lieutenant to a lot of places and every last person who spoke to him was exceedingly gracious and a few bars even waived our bills, which was awesome. (Note to self: hang out with sailors more often!)

Unfortunately, while the military's hope in coming to NYC is to make the locals feel less squeamish about martial engagement, I'm not sure it was effective. Interacting with this lieutenant and hearing his opinions and perspectives only further cemented my own viewpoint about the military's functionality in society. It is indeed a strict and doctrinal way of life that can take the biggest fuck ups and shape them into decent human beings, but there is no way of concealing the fact that the rigidity of it also confers upon the (in this case) sailors some true oddities of personality that I'm not sure can ever be taken out once they have left. The lieutenant had a little trouble staying off the topic of combat, guns, missiles, etc. and as much as he apologized for it sincerely, I wondered what his re-entry into civilian life would be like when it came. What is more, I noticed decisively this weekend that the military often attracts a certain type of person that generally feels he's at the bottom of the barrel with respect to options in life. My lieutenant wasn't the only person I encountered that felt this way in the least.

Another sailor I met while touring one of the ships was from North Carolina, my home state. He'd joined the Navy in September. And when I asked him if he'd always wanted to join the military, he drawled out that if I'd told him two years ago Christmas that he would be enlisting, he would have laughed in my face. But here he was, standing aboard a naval ship in dress whites telling me that he'd signed up right out of high school because there was little else for him to do. He'd worked on a dairy farm all his life and couldn't see doing that for good. But that once he got out, he'd probably go back to it. That is, unless he re-upped and enlisted in the Marines once he was done with the Navy. That would send him back to basic training, and evidently, that was a better choice to what he didn't have back home. Somehow, being stuck in a dead-end job, or having no job opportunity at all, seems a worse fate than eating bland food on a vessel in the middle of the ocean with hundreds of other men and no regular access to women or your family. I swear it, the military has the best PR in the business. Madison Avenue, take note.

But what is happening here when the men that are joining up are ultimately resentful of the life they've chosen as the lesser of a host of evils? I mentioned to the lieutenant at one point that perhaps the government would do well to invest some money in creating more social programs that make men and boys of a certain background slightly less hopeless about their potential for success in life. For instance, college funding as opposed to his kingdom for a horse. As it is, the military has become a last resort, default setting for a lot of kids who have high hopes and no way to get off the ground. The word "patriot" is Red-State uncool in this city, but allow me a minute to say that this fact about such a traditional aspect of our country's history is heartbreaking to me. My grandfather served in World War II as a marine in the South Pacific and I am extremely proud of it; but it is hard to feel much more than frustration for the 18-year-olds who hit a dead end at such a young age today. It is possible that comparing those two things is entirely unfair because the causes behind World War II seemed so much more transparent and just, as opposed to the muddy mess that more modern wars have become. Perhaps this is the reason I was meant to be born in the 1950s, when the idyll of being on the arm of a military man drew pride and not pity.