February 2012
2 posts
3 tags
2 tags
January 2012
4 posts
It’s deceptively springlike here in New York today, which reminds me that in early December I started writing a piece (TK) about how long fall had lasted. There was a new guy in the picture just then, so everything, including obvious manifestations of global warming, seemed of greater significance than usual. When I first steered him home through the aisles of Christmas trees on Houston,...
1 tag
3 tags
IN REVIEW
1.
I think we can all agree that December was a month of total unease and tremendous fun both. In the apartment I have lived in for six months and ideally would never leave, we had two parties: a tiny champagne-and-pastries affair on account of me turning 24, and a larger booze-and-latkes affair on account of Hannukah, a tradition imported from my mother’s house (thanks, TS, for being there...
December 2011
1 post
September 2011
2 posts
DEAR C,
When I think back on this summer, these are the parts I will remember: the sweat line my purse strap made across the torso of my sundresses, eating cherry tomatoes while I emailed with Moscow from my bed, my triumphant explorations of a familiar neighborhood that is for the first time my own, and the soft serve on Avenue A. I’ll remember how something happened — either working...
August 2011
4 posts
1 tag
MINOR ACHIEVEMENTS
Dusting the floorboards, scrubbing the stove, completing requisite tasks on the Kinko’s computers in the 10 minute/$5 allotted window, saving receipts, having on-hand in one file all the information clients need to pay me, actively deciding not to be anxious about work while out of town (and perhaps beyond), letting certain garments air dry (per instructions I’ve ignored for years),...
July 2011
10 posts
3 tags
1 tag
DEAR C,
I know you are in the air right now. I believe you are by now past China. I bet you are flying over one of my old homes in Russia, the city where I got a very good deal on a light pink ushanka of indeterminable animal source, and also where I opened the fridge one day for an after school snack (because living abroad can be like being a little kid) and was confronted with the fact that my...
SELECTED RUSSIAN BOOK TITLES FROM MY TRANSLATION...
Kama Sutra for Mickey Mouse
The Vices and Their Devotees
Versace Style Blackmail
Not Bad for a Dead Man
B*tches Aren’t Born
Diamonds for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
Dentists Also Cry
The Optimist’s Journey, or All Women Are Fools
A Lucky Streak, or All Men Are Asses
“I just thought of love as travel. In your twenties you just kind of chug along,...”
– Eileen Myles, Inferno. Hannah May has the best recap of the best reading experience of 2011.
MAY-TIME
I have recently developed something of an aversion to Second Avenue starting around 7th Street and continuing up to 14th. This is no more significant than my many other neuroses, but it is especially inconvenient, because right now I live in the neighborhood. The two closest branches of my bank are on Second, along with the bodega that has the cheapest yogurt I’ve found around here, some...
CUT FROM THE SAME CLOTH
My mother and father do not belong to that mythical group of divorced parents who love to know how the other is doing, what they’re up to, etc. It gets a lot easier to understand divorced parents once you start having breakups yourself and think, “Wow, they have to look at someone who looks just like their ex every single day and maybe has their name and definitely the worst of their...
June 2011
3 posts
DEAR C.,
Just about a year ago I went home and did this. I still remember the coolness of the early summer cement in Wisconsin, and the dry grass I laid in while I tried to work up the courage to be real through a haze of vodka. A love that takes as long to blossom as that one did, even — or especially — if it’s fostered mostly in your imagination is crazy dangerous. A month...
May 2011
6 posts
North Korean "Global Happiness Index" ranks China... →
You’ll never believe it, but I’m living in the happiest place in the world. F U Disneyland!
I forgot to tell you on the phone this morning that yesterday I woke up at five thirty and spent the day weeding a plot of organic corn a few hours outside of Beijing. Lessons learned? There’s a lot to be said for being eighty one years old, still the number one baller in the field and professing you can’t live life without alcohol and cigarettes.
(lunch break. note the bowl full...
1 tag
THE OFFICE
My plan to dress up more to go to the office lasted about two days, but I am trying to insert things into my wardrobe like “cardigans” and “scarves” to make me look more grown up even if my walk to and from the subway at Union Square is just long enough to require shoes that I can comfortably walk in. Yesterday I learned that there is a company cafeteria in the basement...
1 tag
ONCE I HAD A LOVE AND IT WAS A GAS
This has always been a blog that is above all about best friends and it probably always will be. Lately, outside of here, I have been trying to write about female friendship in a broader way. Writing about a living relationship is in some ways much harder than writing about dead ones, in the same way that it is presumably easier to draw someone from a photograph, rather than a person who is...
April 2011
8 posts
BACK TO WORK
Yesterday I went to my office in Brighton Beach for the first time in almost nine months. Everyone knows that Tom Wolfe said you can never go home again, and everyone knows that this is untrue. Going back to Brighton Beach makes me instantly regress in the way I do when I go back to my hometown, because nothing has changed — save for the building that has emerged from a year of construction...
23 IN 2011
On Friday I am going back to New York. Last time I was there I almost relished in being messy, both in my appearance and in my conduct. I literally did not own a hairbrush and I spent my commutes writing syntactically and sentimentally unbecoming emails to boys instead of reading Tolstoy, like I meant to, like I used to do. Not knowing what I wanted became my speciality, or identity, and it was...
MY PARENTS, ON MY WRITING
“It has to have taken great courage to write so unsparing about yourself without having yet reached the comfort of a secure and enduring relationship or a solid and successful vocation.” — My father, the original Underminer
“Excellent (though you know how I feel about all that drinking!).” — My mother, the Moderate
2 tags
March 2011
5 posts
1 tag
3 tags
3 tags
One step ahead, suprisingly (a personal note)
That’s the second time I’ve ever heard the term ‘LOHAS’ and all within a week, but both occasions have been courtesy of the Morris-Dintenfasses. The brosef beat you to it. Incidentally, I was trying to look-up an organic grocery in Beijing called Lohao City when I erroneously typed ‘lohas beijing’ and discovered an article by this gem of an author.
2 tags
February 2011
10 posts
2 tags
spring is coming
Last played this Gyptian song on 7/17, right before I left New York. It has been just warm enough for running outdoors and when the melting stops — when I get back from LA maybe — it could be Keds season. My computer screen is looking pretty good today. It is still light at 5:15. I am going to take up daily yoga practice when I get home. In a booth at Dutch Boy ten months ago, on the...
1 tag
1 tag
3 eggs omelett style + 2 different kinds of potatoes (+ maybe some salsa verde) = a good post-doctor, pre-Neti Pot dinner for nights when you can’t taste much anyway and the volume buttons on the computer aren’t working so “Go Your Own Way” only plays on Loud! Loud! Loud! Eat it all in bed at room temperature and think several thoughts about place, or if at all possible,...
3 tags
1 red onion + 1 bunch of kale (maybe 2) + 2 eggs, all cooked roughly in that order = a good meal to treat anemia, colds, preemptive relationship anxieties, moving geometry induced headaches, G-chat duldrums, concern that the winter salt will never come out of your boots, cold hands.