The Life Peripatetic

I took my first crosstown bus last week, but I only had the patience for two avenues. I got on at 1st and got off at 3rd, knowing full well that I could walk to Riverside Drive faster than that bus could sputter along. I hadn’t walked up Broadway since what I can now honestly call My Summer of Unbridled Insanity. That was the summer I walked from Bushwick to NYU, sat for an hour in a science lab, then walked from NYU to Columbia, sat for an hour in a screening room and then walked back to Bushwick EVERY DAY. I spent that time listening to LSAT podcasts, the content of which I remember zero.

This was clearly overdoing it, but I do miss walking quite a bit in the winter. If you live in New York, you must (sheepishly) admit that your choice of city -and its struggle and expense - says something about you. It’s bizarre and alienating and sad to feel so physically disconnected from the place for which I sacrifice the beach, good Mexican food, decent weather, clothes that don’t itch and the possibility of a superiority complex.

This is why I walk: for the physic version of a dolly shot – that sensation of expanding and contracting against a similarly pulsating background. A life of subway transfers and devising ways of staying inside as much as possible lends itself neither to ecstatic largeness nor revelatory smallness. Those are the only two existential reasons to live here and also the feelings I miss most in winter.

NAPAJ?

I rarely take the F train. By employing a combination of more convenient lines and bit of walking, I can usually avoid it altogether. It's slow, old, ugly, crowded and most of the seats have gummy deposits from long-ago removed stickers.

Yesterday I was forced to take the F though, and I now have another grievance to add to the line's already miserable roster of faults: It is the chattiest train ever!

People audibly excusing themselves rather than silently shoving, people entering and chirping for everyone to make "a tiny bit more room for me," people claiming municipal propriety ("I've lived in New York for 20 years, and I've never seen anything like that!"), people chastising other riders for not being vegan.

I was dazzled. Dazzled and annoyed. It felt like public transportation from another country, a nation where such garrulousness in such close proximity to strangers is normal and OK. Basically, I felt like I was in the opposite of Japan - wherever that it.

An allusion to a pun on a mnemonic

To be charismatic is to be attractive in the literal sense, to be appealing to all. Knowing that, I still always worry (know) that I, in particular, am susceptible to charismatics. This is a primary bullet point on my list of Qualities That Bring About a Sense of Self-Loathing.

They seem like types that should be taken as objective specimens of personality perfection; to get involved with such people directly is dangerous. They bring out the best in you, but they bring out the best in everyone. Because of this, they are never bored (pro), but neither are they very discerning (con).

They like everyone! But why wouldn't they? Everyone likes them.

The impossibility of self-proclaimed charisma boils down to a Lewis Carroll-like rule: You know you're charismatic if you never think like this.

En garde!

I love those transcendent moments in otherwise blah articles about blah topics in blah sections of blah publications:

This was a painful moment of self-realization, like when you hear your voice on a tape recorder or look at your face in the mirror when you’re a teenager, and suddenly you see yourself the way you appear to the rest of the world. And you wonder: How can I ever go outside again, with a nose like that? But you do.

Of the bells, bells, bells, bells-

This will be the last college reference for a while – promise.

Through the Twittosphere, I came upon a link to a Facebook group called “Bard in the 80s,” to which some 2000-odd pictures of, yes, Bard in the 1980s have been uploaded by fellow alumni. The degree to which these pictures look EXACTLY like ones taken last year is uncanny. Experiences like these make me want to go all Amy Heckerling on the Edgar Allan Poe archive.

It’s always shocking to come upon geographical features years later and to find them unchanged. How was the hedge by the library the same height last year as it was in 1983? Were those odd, triangular bulletin boards really there in 1988? But of course, the really haunting part is how the students look EXACTLY the same – identical clothes, glasses, poses. Of course this can be attributed to the cyclical nature of vintage revival, but the similarity is almost grotesque. I doubt this is a universal phenomenon though; it seems very specific to Bard. Not much to analyze here… more like visual material to pore over for the perverse repetition of the same feeling it elicits: “you’ve got to be kidding me."

Albino monk!

For someone with an objectively weird face, I get told all the time that I look like other people. For someone with relatively delicate features, I get told all the time that I look like men. A friend's dad told me in high school that I looked just like a midfielder from some African soccer team.

When I saw a reproduction of this painting hanging in the elevator at work, I gasped out loud, so striking is the likeness. There could be worse guys to look like, granted, but then again, resembling painted peasants (clergymen?) is not quite ideal.

Wanton withholding

Last summer, when Molly and I still maintained Salad and Candy, we had a convenient repository for all of our food/ trompe l'oeil food/eating/not eating thoughts. This was a nice way to compartmentalize trains of thought that threaten always to reveal my most boring and least healthy preoccupations. It felt redundant to talk about food here as well, so I tried very hard not to.

But I think I was too successful! And now that we no longer post to Salad and Candy (though we’re considering lifting the hiatus sometime soon? Maybe?), I have nowhere to record my gustatory dabbling… Like the Eureka! moment I experienced upon reading this article in The Atlantic. Or the intensity of my disappointment when I took the first sip of a much-anticipated Diet Coke that must have been 99% seltzer at a Vietnamese restaurant on Baxter. Or what about this apt analogy: composing a proportionate salad without allowing it grow to 10x its necessary size// trimming a symmetrical valentine without allowing it to shrink to the size of quarter?

These are important things. Enough of this restraint.