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I’m sitting in a little coffeeshop in the neighborhood I used to live in. I come up here to work sometimes: it’s one of the few places in DC where there is both decent wireless and a good croissant. So I don’t mind particularly the long-ish trip through Georgetown and up Wisconsin Ave. There used to be a good cafe within walking distance of my apartment, but it closed a few months ago, much to the collective dismay of all the people like me who used to go there and spend $2 on tea so we could sit in a bustly, not-too-loud, sufficiently “indie” place for six hours and stare at our laptops.
I don’t like coming to this shop as much as I used to. After about 9 in the morning it fills up with people doing the normal coffeeshop things, by which I mean they are talking to friends, buying muffins for their kids that are too young still for school, reading, participating in some kind of physics study group, etc. Only one other person here is on a laptop, and I find I resent this a little. The vibe here is not what I want it to be. It reminds me that I’m taking up a whole three-person table with my computer, that if I’m laughing it’s because I read a funny xkcd comic, and that I have headphones in. Why come to this public place and sit alone?
I mean, I have reasons. Counter-intuitively, the noise helps me focus. Like I said, the croissants are pretty good. And if I spend too much time trying to write/work in my apartment, I will eventually be tempted to take a nap, which is impossible here.
I could extend this post into some kind of comment on modernity (aided by the literal name of the shop, up there in the title– that’s not fiction) and it wouldn’t surprise you one bit, I bet. But I’m not sure I have anything more to add right now than that I’m sitting in a place full of people but I’m very much isolated even as I send out a blogpost that you are reading, and that doesn’t seem like a very modern complaint at all. So, you know. Carry on.
Alicia was down from NYC this weekend, and we finally got a break in the rain.
Most of the leaves are down, except for a few gingko trees and maples.
Alicia IS, in fact, that excited about this leaf. Liz, not so much.
Liz said, “I don’t think you could ever be unhappy if you lived next to a river. You would always be able to think clearly.”
I think I would vote for the ocean, but looking at this, it’s hard to argue.
“That first night I opened my window on the bus into town and watched for the skyline, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed remarkable and exotic, for I had come out of the West where there was no summer rain), and for the next three days I sat wrapped in blankets in a hotel room air conditioned to 35 degrees and tried to get over a cold and a high fever. It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.” — Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That
I’m sitting on the New Jersey turnpike right now, on my way back from my super-awesome best weekend ever in New York City. Across the aisle, a middle-aged woman is talking on her phone about what must have been her first trip. Here’s her catalog: She went to Chinatown. She saw Chicago for half-price. She ate the best soup of her life at that deli from When Harry Met Sally. She bought a hot dog! Off the street! And she is just so, so happy about all of it. She’s gotten a few eye-rolls from the cool kids on the bus, but her husband, sitting next to her with his eyes closed, smiles every now and then as she gushes. I can’t tell if he’s remembering the deli, or just loving the sound of her voice.
I was 14 the first time I came to New York City, somewhat misplaced in my high school’s business club. There was some kind of “youth business leaders’ conference,” and everyone else on the trip was an upperclassman that actually had an interest in some of those words. I was taking a Keyboarding class at the time (how quaint does that sound?), which meant I could go, and my mom had prepared by buying me a blazer that was fully three sizes too big. I carried that blazer exactly the way one carries a train ticket, checking every now and then with a brush of the fingers to make sure it’s still there, still offering passage.
The day we got to explore Midtown– which to us WAS the city, the only part of New York that mattered– everyone paired up to leave me the odd number out. I didn’t want to make a fuss, and I didn’t want to stay with the chaperone, so I turned and struck off alone. It was the most vivid moment of my life thus far, and my list of accomplishments looked a lot like this woman’s, who is still on the phone in the aisle across from me. I bought a pretzel, I wandered in and out of t-shirt stores, I got turned around in the bustle, I found Chinatown. I knew New York was “dangerous,” so I did what you’re supposed to: walk fast, don’t gawk up at the buildings, look people in the eye if they seem dangerous, keep a hand on your bag, act like you know where you’re going. I was determined to pass as a New Yorker, having no idea how laughable that would be. As if a tiny blonde girl wandering 7th avenue in an oversized Casual Corner blazer on a weekday afternoon pretending not to look at things could possibly be a native.
But no one blinked. In the eleven years since, every time I come back to NY, no one blinks. No one questions my right to be here. Yesterday, while I was waiting to cross Broadway at 149th, a man turning the corner in his car yelled out the window, “I hope you have a great day!” This giant city remains the single most welcoming place I’ve ever been– a phrase I just stole from my busmate.
Last night, Julianne and I stood between two bridges, looking over the Hudson towards Manhattan, with the sun setting through the cables and the water glittering in a way that SUCH DIRTY WATER has no right to. We talked about every movie about the end of the world where the Statue of Liberty is swept over by the towering waves of God’s wrath or our own selfishness. We talked about the dragons of this particular city and about that ridiculous blazer I kept in my closet until I went away to college. We talked about the millions of New York stories being told so loudly that they drown each other out, and how I always like the schmaltzy ones where people take care of each other because this place is too bright and too tough to do otherwise. We remembered to each other the passion fruit macaroons we just ate– how the bright, orange cookies cracked in our mouths like shells.
It’s good, you guys. Really, really good. Also this one.
Allison Arieff’s By Design blog at the NYT is one of my favorites because it combines the one thing I really loved about working at the magazine (being able to spend lots of time looking at beautiful things people make, like George Sherlock couches and Rathbone rugs) with the best of sustainability (thinking about how those things shape the world we live in).
This week’s post, Searching for Value in Ludicrous Things, is a great example. The story focuses on Steven Johnson, a cartoonist and inventor who likes to design all kinds of things that may or may not work, but are interesting either way: “Many of his musings are simply whimsical, existing primarily as a source of inspiration or delight. Others tackle very real issues, from environmentalism to alternative transportation to homelessness.”
Like a rocket-bus:
He’s also designed skylight ovens, self-shortening sedans, dashboard toasters, human-powered trains, and “treadarounds.” (The transit focus probably has to do with his time as an urban planner.) This one looks REALLY appealing at 2pm on a Tuesday:
But what’s most interesting is the way he describes his thought process. In order to create, he says he needs to be away from a desk, from a ‘responsible’ lifestyle. “‘I wish instead,’ he writes, ‘to be irresponsible, rash, associative, dreamy, impish, brainy, intuitive, and stupid.’”
Stupidity saving the world. How else would we get this? And these? And these (which are so simple in their brilliance that it’s insane it took us this long to think of it).
Today I want to be here (from Papa Stour's beautiful site)
“The sound of the sea is the most time-effacing sound there it. The centuries reroll in a cloud and the earth becomes young again when you listen, with eyes shut, to the sea — a young green time when the water and the land were just getting acquainted and had known each other for only a few billion years and the mollusks were just beginning to dip and creep in the shallows; and now man the invertebrate, under his ribbed umbrella, anoints himself with oil and pulls on his Polaroid glasses to stop the glare and stretches out his long brown body at ease upon a towel in the warm sand and listens.
The sea answers all questions, and always in the same way; for when you read in the papers the interminable discussions and the bickering and the prognostications and the turmoil, the disagreements and the fateful decisions and agreements and the plans and the programs and the threats and the counter threats, then you close your eyes and the sea dispatches one more big roller in the unbroken line since the beginning of the world and it combs and breaks and returns foaming and saying: ‘So soon?’”
(E.B. White, One Man’s Meat)
What do you mean, what am I doing? Just getting this little speck of dust out of my eye. Funny how those little buggers always seem to strike at the most inconvenient moments. Nothing AT ALL to do with the sweeping shots of polar ice and the first fledgling jump, and the emotional manipulation of baby animals. Don’t mind me. Just going to tear up a little and get it out. Damn pollen.
E.B. White; One Man’s Meat:
“It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet; the by-laws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the other members. A club, moreover, or a nation, has a most attractive offer to make: it offers the right to be exclusive. There are not many of us who are physically constituted to resist this strange delight, this nourishing privilege. It is at the bottom of all fraternities, societies, orders. It is at the bottom of most trouble. The planet holds out no such inducement. The planet is everybody’s. All it offers is the grass, the sky, the water, and the ineluctable dream of peace and fruition.”
Apparently, by cutting back in a financial crisis, the American consumer is to blame for the collapse of liquidity and the crisis of the American banks. Well, Mr. Bernanke, don’t blame me, I spent my stimulus check! Well, I spent it in Barbados, which totally counts, right? RIGHT?
Maybe not. But I did just order a truckload of winter tights and skirts with money I probably should’ve put into savings, so I’m totally not culpable for any of this.
Funnily enough, plenty of enviros and ‘moral minimalists’ are super-excited: “People are consuming less! Recycling! Taking the bus! Using things until they wear out! COMPOSTING!!” (I speak only from love, my friends. Rah-rah canvas bags!)
Others believe that many Americans could benefit from the recession because it will make us more gracious, politically thoughtful, and appreciative of small pleasures — authorial goddess Heather Havrilesky is one of those.
However, this may be very bad news for consumers and the environment, since the current administration has decided the best response is to joyride the deregulation train at the expense of such unecessary luxuries as clean air and water:
“The new rules” sought by the president, the Post writes, “would be among the most controversial deregulatory steps of the Bush era and could be difficult for his successor to undo. Some would ease or lift constraints on private industry, including power plants, mines and farms.” The new regulations, up to 90 in total, would ease commercial ocean-fishing activities and reduce limits on carbon dioxide-increasing emissions from power plants and pollution near national parks. Environmentalists say the rules “will force Americans to choke on dirtier air for years to come,” while an electricity lobby group said they would bring “common sense to the Clean Air Act.”
I’m so confused. If this whole mess is the consumer’s fault for not spending enough (after spending too much), then why is the better response to give more power to those corporations who have so thoroughly proven that their profits are superior to the preservation of OUR HOME? That’s a weird kind of punishment: “You ate too much candy, little boy, so even though you’ve very sensibly moved on to apple slices because the candy gave you a tummyache, I’m giving Snickers the go-ahead to put some arsenic in the Fun Size candy bars. That’ll teach you to stop eating them!”
Mr President, I am (once again) displeased with your lack of ingenuity, intelligence, and general concern for the people you ostensibly serve. Please don’t let the door smack you on your way out — I know a few people who would volunteer for the privelege.
So, I just got back from my Barbados trip, and am slowly slogging through my work emails and news feeds. Apparently, the banks all collapsed, Europe is melting, my friends’ jobs are disappearing, and the world is about to end. Geez, can’t you all manage without me for TWO SECONDS?
I kid, I kid.
Will be back to post photos and stories soon…right now I’m feeling the need for distractions from the return to my everyday life (and apparently the impending apocalypse ) in the form of cupcakes and Tina Fey.
