Two Things

1.
I'm not really a skier. Too much equipment, too much boots and poles and gloves. Too many layers. I like all the things that surround skiing. The whooshing sounds the other skiers make in the powder. The slow, swaying ascent to the top of the lifts. The warm fires in the lodge--though I've really only been skiing in places where the lodge looks like a cafeteria. I like the way your body feels spent and accomplished at the end of the day, and the hot shower that accompanies the exhaustion when you arrive back home. The Frito-Chili Pie that you eat to replenish the energy that you spent, the wine you drink and the champagne bottle you put out on the porch to chill and forget to open.

But the skiing itself--ostensibly the point--is another story. I'm scared of it. I'm afraid that if I start down the hill then I'll never stop. I'm afraid of the uncertain motions that the earth feels like its making underneath you. I don't like that the green circle trails at one mountain have no resemblance to the green circle trails on other mountains, and that you don't get to see the elevation changes in the trails when you study the map they give you. I don't like that your friends tell you that you can "do it," and you believe them, and then you nearly expire of frigid disbelief in what your body can accomplish on its own.

I think to really enjoy skiing, you have to be a little bit outside of your body, or, rather, you get the most benefit, the most pleasure from the skiing experience when you are willing to let go enough that you feel like you're flying. You want it to feel effortless. And so, paradoxically, in order to feel those real moments of effortlessness, you have to really be grounded in your body--you have to let your body make thousands of tiny movements and adjustments as fast as your body can make them. The movements have to be totally instinctual, unconscious.

Earlier this week, while I was at the top of the second section of a blue square trail--Fox Tail at Mountain Creek, in Vernon, New Jersey--I started thinking that maybe the only way to be outside of your body, is to really become it.


2.
The B61 bus is now the B62. Well, actually, they have split the line into two lines--the B61 now runs from Red Hook to Downtown Brooklyn, and the B62 runs from Downtown Brooklyn to Long Island City. Apparently, the Red Hook section of the line kept making the buses late, and then they would all stack up and make for a line of five or six buses all hitting a single stop at once. Or, they would all sit around at stops waiting to get back on schedule--and this makes the riders late.

I'm not sure where a person finds out about this before it happens. I found out when I was standing on Bedford and South 4th Street and the B62 arrived, which was a bus I'd never heard of. And I take buses a lot. There was a sign inside the bus that explained their thinking. I'm on board with this--ON BOARD, get it!--but I'm curious to see if it actually changes anything about how long it takes to get from one end of town to another, or if it actually makes the buses less late. What they should really do is stop that dumb curb installation at the intersection of Classon and Flushing Avenue--THAT'S why the bus uptown from there is always so dang late, because to squeeze all those lanes of traffic into the one within a single block is absurd. But I know why they do what they do. They do studies, right?

All this is to say: changes are happening.

This Week

Part One:
One of the (many) benefits of living in the great City of New York is that cultural events happen here on a very large scale. The downside of this is that everyone wants to attend these events, and when something comes around like Lady Gaga at Radio City Music Hall for two nights only, way more than 12,000 people clamor for tickets at 10:00am on that fateful Friday only to discover that, surprise, you are too, too late. Even the presale tickets were gone at 12:00 noon the day before. But somehow, StubHub was selling tickets throughout each section, orchestra and all three mezzanines, days and days before even the date of sale was announced. People on Craig's List were selling Orchestra pit tickets weeks ago. This speaks volumes about the terrible truth of how the music industry and its cronies and friends-of ruin the music business for fans. But then, after it became clear to me that I was not getting tickets, and no one I knew was able to get tickets, I realized that maybe this wasn't such a big deal after all. Everything Lady Gaga does is about visibility, about being seen. So, I figure, whatever she does those two nights, I'll see it. It will be on YouTube, or all over the blogs, she'll Twitter her thanks to all her fantastic gay fans, and perhaps this monopolizing of the imagery and webwaves, maybe this is what Gaga is all about.

Part Two:
Tonight's dinner turned out terribly. Does rice expire? Even when you have it in the fridge? I guess it does--it sort of fell apart, like puffed rice does in leftover cereal milk. I was trying to re-create this leek and white truffle risotto that I made a few weeks ago when some friends were over to watch the Emmys. That night is was spectacular. I was actually surprised it came out so beautifully. But, like other things, and like a lot of people, I need a little reason to shine. So, when it came time to make this big pot of dinner this evening, I felt half-assed about it, and the results are hideous. If I weren't alone, I'd throw it out.

Part Three:
The new Margaret Atwood novel is intriguing, as one might expect. I'm having a weird reaction to it--I'm loving the writing, the specific sentences. But the overall narrative isn't that compelling to me. And this is odd, considering that this one, The Year of the Flood, is kind of a continuation of a thought, a sort-of sequel to one of her books that I loved, Oryx and Crake. I sit on the B61 and read and read, and I keep wondering when the story is going to start. In fact, today I skipped ahead and read the first two pages of a later part of the book to see if there was something maybe I wanted to get to. The good news is: There was. So, I continue on.

Part Four:
I just finished the new Dan Chaon novel, Await Your Reply. This was a totally different experience. The story itself is so exciting, so twisty and slow-to-reveal itself, that I couldn't wait to get to the end. I felt really torn about it. The writing is so beautiful, and so concentrated and thoughtful, that I wanted to take my time. But the what-is-going-to-happen was pressing on me so much that I wanted to stay up all night and read and read and read.

Part Five:
The madness of the holidaze has begun. What to do for a holiday card this year? When to schedule the tree-trimming party, in which people don't actually tree-trim but admire the tree-trimming that you have done earlier in the day? What to buy people? Whether to buy for people? How long do marshmallows keep if you ship them?

Part Six:
Can we see Levi Johnston naked already?

Dispatch from the B61

I love the B61. I am riding it from Carroll Gardens to South Williamsburg. My day job--that would be the one where we teach kids critical thinking skills through interaction with visual art--is contemplating a location change. Rather, we are being forced to location-change due to rising rents. (New York City, I love you; Landlords, eat shit and die.) So, as a tester-outer, a kind of see-how-shitty-this-actually-would-be, Nick and I are meeting to look at the possible space on South 6th Street--a lovely 4th floor corner office--and ask probably tedious questions of the current tenant. "Does this sun get too hot by this window?" "What about the radiator?" "Is it loud when the subway goes past?"

As we saunter around the chunky lucite furniture and fabulous Eames conference room chairs--the office currently belongs to a set dresser/prop house--she answers all the questions politely, encouragingly, as if she herself were the agent getting the commission. "The light is warm, but in the winter you'll really love it." I even feel the need to ask about where the electrical outlets are, and she points, "All that is plugged in back there, you just can't see it." Somehow this makes me feel secure. About the trains going by on the Williamsburg Bridge--fifty feet from the window--she says, "You know, it's New York, the subway is just there and you get used to it." This made me think again of the bus. What would it be like, I thought, to only take the subway one or two times a week, which is a distinct possibility, should things go down this path.

If you take the bus, you move at a more appropriate speed--only walking, which is clearly not an option at this distance, provides a more natural pace. The bus allows time to notice the sort of things I like to notice, or can't help but notice: the textures of the trash heaped up by the corner, the kind of buttons on the cuffs of the lady standing by the curb.

I could also decide to become a person who bikes from here to there. But, you know, I have a lot of fear surrounding that. As you well could imagine. But I am not adamantly opposed to it. It's something I'm interested in it as an idea. (I say that a lot, whatever it means. I think it means "I am scared to death of this, but it is also intriguing." Other things that I am interested in as ideas: culinary school, moving to the beach in northeast Florida, touring with Ani Difranco for a year and writing a book about it.)

But, the bus is so civilized. The people who ride it often know each other from the same long, bumpy trips they take to and from home every day at the same time. They talk, they ask about each other's children. They ask about each other's doctor's appointments and weird skin anomolies--it's sort of like hell on earth, and a writer's fantasyland, all at once.

Not that bus riding needs a lengthy defense, but I offer this, as my closing argument: If you are standing outside the subway turnstile underground, and you don't have the fare you need, you could stand there for a half hour before you have enough money to get you where you are going. And then you'd have to find a Metrocard machine that works. Or you'd have to con someone into giving you a swipe from their card. But if you get on the bus, and discover that you are out of change--I've seen it happen a dozen times--everyone in the front half will dig through their pockets as if by command, and donate what they have. It's a small thing, but to me it feels like a miracle. It's a small act of forgiveness performed between strangers, in public.

Sorry there's no closure here. I don't know what the outcome is.

Hawk vs. Squirrel

I've spent the last week doing all sorts of stuff that has shifted my attention away from the blog--some interesting, some less so. But the as-yet-secretly-named second novel has been tugging at me a bit, and for a time it was too impossible to try to do both. The language was too fragile to start working here, too. So I just didn't.

Among those other strange behaviors--not writing, that is--were: digging my van out of the snow piled up around the front end by the city's plows; writing letters to illustrious photographers hoping they'll donate something for the upcoming Circus Amok benefit performance; building a database for VUE, watching those Oscars, and riding the B61 back and forth from Brooklyn to Queens, listening to the polish women talk about whatever it is they talk about after doing their shopping.

At the market on Saturday, a hawk was having face-off with a squirrel--and after a good 15 minutes of everyone staring up at the drama in the trees, fifty or so photographers clammoring up lampposts to get a better shot, and more cell phone cameras pointed at the pair than should be allowed, they simply decided to go their separate ways, and no blood was rendered. Another farmer reminded me that those Discovery Channel nature shows take days to shoot, and include hours and hours and hours of that kind of interaction--nothing. The money shot is harder to come by. So to speak.