Unlocked

I.
It was about a month ago. I was sitting in Starbucks-- my Starbucks, the one across the street from my apartment that, in truth, is exactly like any other Starbucks in the known universe as far as product and decor, but has somehow managed to worm its way into my heart due to its proximity to my home, my haven, my resting place, and also due to its little idiosyncrasies (yes! a corporate chain can still have its idiosyncrasies: scruffy chubby barista and his half-wink of recognition, row of benches under the scaffolding outside on which roost the neighborhood characters with their dogs and children)-- and I was staring at Microsoft Word with furrowed brow, trying to knit together a few thoughts on the delectably gloomy Haydn F minor piano variations when suddenly, like an iron crowbar to the tenuous bell jar of my concentration, came:  "... and I am doing my wedding registry at Bed, Bath and Beyond and NOT Pottery Barn because it's like, NOT his mom's decision to make, I mean, this day is about US and what we want, am I right?"

Oh god, it was one of those girls with one of those voices. When she said"not" it sounded like "gnat," and each individual clause swung upward to a staticky drawl, never truly cadencing, and even in my peripheral vision I could see that her body language was so gesticulative, so declarative, that she believed every word emanating from her person to be of tantamount importance and deserving of a raptly listening audience. I swiveled my gaze away from my laptop screen-- from a bad, tortuous musicological sentence of my own creation involving the words "narrativity" and "end-weightedness"-- in order to identify the source of this vocal production. She was on the fleshy side, probably about five years older than me, wearing yoga pants; she had a female companion who, in a non-speaking role, nodded sympathetically at each re-occurrence of "gnat." As I surveyed the protagonist and her emphatic arm motions, I noticed that she had a small tattoo of a snake on the inside of her wrist. Of course she did! And of course this edgy, counter-cultural aesthetic statement was indicative of her inner edgy counter-culturalness, her  nonconformity, her special snowflakeness, all of which were further evidenced by her unique, mellifluous speaking patterns and her well-articulated, compelling opinions about world issues of great significance. Of course she was in no way a cringe-inducing stereotype of a yappy entitled materialistic yuppie wench, because she had a TATTOO.

Ouch. I was in a venomous place, even for me. It had all started earlier that day, when I had tried to write down my Haydnesque observations in the tranquility of my own living quarters, but said tranquility had been shattered when the two-year-old child in the unit above me commenced his usual routine of endlessly running the length of the apartment. Am I really so heartless, you ask? Do I really have it in me to despise toddlers and their abundant energy? No! I am all for childlike exuberance, for the pitter-patter of little feet. But when these little feet seem to have bowling balls strapped to them, and when the abundance of energy is so extreme and so unyielding that I start to imagine that the child is being raised on a diet of crystal meth dissolved in Red Bull, and when the leaden pitter-patter stampede is only occasionally punctuated by a crash, a wail, and a mother's vituperative stream of Spanish-- when these things happen, I grab my swiffer and bang it on the ceiling (to no avail) and my roommate and I indulge in creative but completely implausible revenge schemes involving fake eviction notices or tranquilizer darts, and, to make a long story short, I am in no state to write effectively about the subtleties of Haydn's phrase rhythms. 

So, seeking peace, I fled the upstairs meth-toddler bowling-ball blitzkrieg and went to Starbucks, only to fall from the frying pan into the fire. The tattooed yuppie had moved on from discussing her wedding registry; she was now offering an authoritative rant on the relationship situation of a friend. "And, like, it is GNAT okay the way he treated her, she does GNAT deserve that, and we all deserve the best, you know, we have the right to ask for what we deserve." What I deserve is to not have to listen to you anymore; can I ask for that? "I mean, he cheated on her, that would be, like, the ultimate dealbreaker for me, I would GNAT listen to any apologies because I know that I deserve to never have to be apologized to..." Funny thing, if I were your fiance, I would probably be cheating on you right now because you seem like you're a control freak and a bridezilla and not nearly as free-spirited or sexually adventurous as your inner-wrist tat would make you out to be.

Oh, this was bad. I was really on a caustic tear; my inner monologist was actually condoning infidelity. Why? all just because some stranger was annoying me with a sense of pseudo-feminist empowerment that seemed unearned? or just because her vocal timbre had the quality of a duck with a respiratory ailment? Clearly I needed to escape the Starbucks. It was no longer a benevolent space; it was no longer drawing the best out of me. I sucked down the remainder of my caffeine, folded up my laptop, and stalked out into the street, contemplating the notion that most of the time people don't actually deserve to get exactly what they think they deserve, and even in the rare case that their level of deserving-ness aligns perfectly with their expectations, it is still no guarantee of much.

 II. 

A few hours later, I was in seminar, and things were devolving rapidly, as they are wont to do in discussion-oriented setups involving people who think they are smarter than they actually are and have placed their entire sense of self-worth on this presumed intelligence (not that I am among these people or anything). A certain contingent of the class was, again, averring that music has no meaning, or that it can have any meaning that anybody chooses to ascribe to it, which ultimately has the same end result. This time the target was Haydn, and the argument was that the opening gesture of the variations, the insistent repetition of a single pitch-- LONG-short-LONG-- was nothing but three notes, notes alone, and could not in any way represent something specific (say, the declamation of words, of consonants spoken/ sung with urgent inflection) because all meaning is, of course, only constructed by the listener, who need not know anything about the tradition from which this music springs because that is all one big illusion.

The coffee from earlier was starting to pulse through my temples, and I was suddenly really, really hopped up, ready to take literal swipes at these punk-ass naysayers because here they were trying to take away my treasure-- everyone's treasure-- and devalue it, strip it of the subtle revelations that it might yield with some gentle pressure, with some fact-seeking and some poetic imagination. But NO, it didn't matter that there were infinity times a billion aesthetic treatises from the eighteenth century that would speak to the notion that music is inextricably wedded to principles of rhetoric and oration, not to mention all of the more recent scholarship on the subject. NO, better to just make up your own story-- oh, and then immediately disbelieve that as well because you, too, are just a construct, haha!

This is what happened next: I went all Incredible Hulk, RAWR! veins popping and pecs expanding, and I jumped up on the seminar table, scattering papers and knocking over styrofoam coffee cups and banging my head on the projector-- the professor was stunned into immobility-- and I straightened up and proclaimed that I was about to deliver the Positivist Manifesto, and therein gave a passionate plea to not tear everything DOWN in the world that is beautiful, you dilches, but to be ADDITIVE in some way ("positivist"= positive= additive, yo) because guess what? the more you know, the more you actually know! and you just need to keep adding-- add factoids, fragments, questions, anything, even things that contradict one another-- and post-addition you need to look back and see what adds up to something more, you need to find truths are truthier than others and then say something instead of just sitting back and critiquing the nature of truth, because with this mindset you are alienating everyone (laymen, performers, people inside the field), you are shunting the humanities into obsolescence so that they will lose funding as well as respect and relevance, and in the process you are dissing my favoritest things, my bright treasure, MY PRECIOUSSSSS....!!

At this point in the diatribe I was pacing militantly around the seminar table like a little graduate student dictator, Napoleon the Fourth in a skirt an heels, and suddenly crunch! my stiletto went through somebody's iPad screen. The destruction of property, especially Apple property, shocked the classroom back into action: somebody tased me from behind (I know not who-- all PhD students carry tasers in their messenger bags, of course, right next to their moleskine notebooks) and I fell down twitching, convulsing and foaming at the mouth, until security could rush over to detain me, and somebody had been filming the whole thing on a mobile phone, and it went viral on YouTube the next day under the title "Grad Student Totally Loses her Shit!" complete with an inflammatory comments section, and thus I achieved the dubious internet celebrity that I had always secretly aspired to. The end.

Actually, that didn't happen. I would never wear stilettos just to go to class, come on-- that should have been your first clue. What really happened was that I sat there imagining this scenario (one only lightly plagiarized from a recent Great-ish American Novel, "Liberty") and then I kept imagining further ways that I could show them all, show all of these people who had kept trying to steal the Precious from me in various ways throughout the day-- the pint-sized crack-addled upstairs neighbor demon spawn, the grating bougie Starbucks chick, the post-structuralist hipster peers. I would show them. I would study the score upside down and backwards and and look at the original manuscripts and play through every keyboard work written in the 1790s and go study every compositional and aesthetic treatise of the mid-to-late eighteenth century and eventually come to a blazing, brilliant epiphany about the piece that would simultaneously wow the schmoozicological community and invite the non-music-literate of the world to no longer fear the Western Classical tradition as elitist and outmoded but to come bathe in its immediacy-- "Fear not, for behold: I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be for all the people."

I left class charged with evangelical fervor and delusions of badassitude. I strutted over to the library and busted open the doors like a rapper in a club, slow-mo, the nearby students my backup dancers, imaginary dollar bills raining everywhere, and I took one look at the looming stacks, and turned on my heel and left. All of that available knowledge had stared me down; it was just... there, waiting to be sifted through infinitely, and I was not infinite. In that moment I understood the allure of just saying that you could never know everything, so why bother knowing anything? It was so much easier, kind of like accepting the vicissitudes of Fate instead of feeling like you deserve things because you worked for them. It was easier than being obsessively additive, without limits, consuming information with no end in sight and straining yourself to fashion a meaningful truth out of it when there might be none, when all of your efforts might result in a stillbirth.

III.

I headed home. The train was crowded and I felt encroached upon from all sides by the sweaty masses; a few hours earlier, at the apotheosis of my gleeful malice, I would have observed that either the subway engineers had designed the seats to be too small or people were just becoming too voluminous for the allotted space, hmmmm, which one was it? But the piss had been taken out of me: I was piss-free, tired, and dejected.

Clearly, what I needed was a good meal. On emerging from the Mines of Moria, AKA Gringotts, AKA the impossibly deep-underground subway station on my block, I went to the corner store. I bought refrigerated tortellini, pre-prepared pesto, a plastic box of neon cherry tomatoes, saran-wrapped asparagus of suspiciously uniform thickness and length. The tortellini and pesto were probably from subsidiaries of Kraft or some other evil monster corporation; the produce looked genetically modified and was likely shipped, using obscene amounts of crude oil, from somewhere in the Southern hemisphere. But I would be damned if I wasn't going to do my part to destroy the planet via a foofy, seemingly-innocuous plate of pasta and vegetables. I scampered up the stairs of my apartment building, somewhat pepped up at the prospect of carby, cheesy dumplingesque delights to be boiled and sauced. I reached into my tote bag for my keys, and then I kept reaching, and then the entirety of the bag had been groped and re-groped, and I was forced to concede that my keys were probably on top of the microwave, or the coffee table, or the piano, or my desk, or some other accommodating flat surface just on the other side of this locked door. Whoops.

I slumped to the ground, grocery bag settling next to me with a heavy plasticky rustle on the mosaic floor of the hall. Of course I had left my keys at home. Of course! This was karmic retribution for my sustained misanthropy throughout the day. I took out my phone and first texted my roommate, but she needed to be at school for another few hours; next I tried my pianist friend Piotyr who lives one floor below me, but he was out seeing the Ring Cycle at the Met like a good Serious Classical Musician; then I phoned the superintendent, who did not pick up. I was officially out of options. I would not be getting into my apartment anytime soon. So I called Rav.

Backstory: before I moved to Schmanhattan, I would imagine my life there and assume that it would be nonstop entertainment and quirkery-- I would constantly bear witness to colorful incidents and collect strange characters as friends, in true sitcom style. To some extent this was true, but much of the time my Schmanhattan life took on the qualities of my former routine, with only the details changed-- just as in Ye Olde Days of Bleep U, I would stay at school late at night writing or practicing until the security guards kicked me out, at which point I would buy some jalapeno potato chips from the 24-hour drug store across the street, nom them voraciously, hop on some form of public transit, get back to my apartment, gab with my roommate, and explore strange corners of the internet until I fell asleep. But occasionally, in the New York 2.0 version of life, my familiar patterns have been broken up by some zesty, out-of-the ordinary experiences and interactions. Such was the case with Rav.

We had met a few weeks prior in that very Starbucks of yuppie notoriety. This time I had been reading, for another seminar, about the concept of "iterability," which, in my mind, kept getting changed to "irritability" (perhaps a reflection of my mood after chapters upon chapters of jargon) and suddenly this Jewish boy with a little bit of gangsta swagger jostled me by accident. Apologies ensued, and then we started to chat, and he quickly, unabashedly revealed himself to be a big pothead (in fact, he was in the neighborhood not for the sole purpose of procuring coffee) but he was wickedly funny, and our conversation was such a welcome diversion from "iterability" that I prolonged it unnecessarily. Maybe I shouldn't have; my historical soft spot for goofy, lost-soul stoner boys had never led me anywhere great, but somehow here we were, laughing and agreeing to meet again. We did, and it was all good fun-- we walked and talked, he regaling me with stories of his time in the Israeli army and razzing me for being a graduate student in an obscure, irrelevant field. But after this meetup he started to behave badly, texting me frequently and unisyllabically ("sup") and calling at odd hours when normal people should be asleep (I wasn't, but still). So-- flashforward-- as I sat on the tile floor of my hallway, locked out of my apartment and in a no-nonsense state of mind, I called Rav with the intent of setting up some boundaries for our friendship.

Somehow this conversation did not go as planned, because within fifteen minutes we were sitting on the steps across the street from my building; Rav was rolling a cigarette with tobacco and other vegetal matter ("What are you doing? you'll get caught!!" "Yo, no, you see, I'm white, the cops aren't looking for me in this neighborhood.") He told me how he had quit his job that day-- he had worked for his mother, but at almost thirty he had reached a personal impasse and couldn't deal with it anymore. "What are you going to do next? Do you know?" I asked with slight alarm. "I have no idea," he said. Not a goddamn clue." This statement launched me into fix-it mode: "Have you ever had the chance to choose your career? I mean, what are you really, really good at? What have you always wanted to do, deep down?" His reply, without a hint of bitterness: "I don't know. I'm not good at anything."

And I realized that this was so foreign to me, the notion that someone would choose not recognize his/ her attributes and capitalize on them to deserved success-- there again was that idea of deservedness, of taking what you felt was owed to you just based on who you were. Apparently I also ascribed to it to. Apparently I just was another overinflated Starbucks chick. Still, I pressed him: "No, you must have a talent. Come on. Think hard." "Well, I guess I'm good at talking to people. I can kind of talk to anybody, you know, schmooze, be comfortable." "There you go. That is a valuable job skill right there. There's PR, advertising--" "Or," he said, cutting me off, "I would really love to write comedy. I've always been interested in comedians. They're such sad, interesting characters, you know?" I got excited. "You. Have funny-man written all over you. You should go for it. That's genius!" We brainstormed a hypothetical screenplay in which the leads were based on us, because look! it was so clear that we were already comedic archetypes-- I was the high-functioning career-focused young woman who needed to loosen up, and he was the man-child with a secret heart of gold who needed to self-actualize. But it would all be kind of meta because, you see, the plot of the movie would be that we were trying to write a screenplay about the tropes of comedy even as we exemplified them. Wrap your head around THAT!

We were suddenly famished-- I had never realized my tortellini fantasy, and Rav was chemically predisposed toward hunger-- so we relocated to a pizza joint down the street. The owner, an older man of pan-Mediterranean descent, gave me a surly mafioso nod of recognition (he had once tried to charge me two thousand dollars for a piece of pizza and a garlic knot). Now Rav bought a slice for himself and also insisted on paying for mine ("What? you just quit your JOB! Don't!... okay, fine...") and we sat in the window, looking out onto the street as we noshed and contemplated our brilliant new collaborative plan. My phone buzzed. It was my roommate; she was back from school and could let me in anytime. I told her that I would be there in five minutes.

Rav was eying another slice of pizza despite an oncoming bout of acid reflux. I supported his decision and told him to take one for the road; he did as I said, and we walked out into the night, soon to part ways. A homeless man was begging on the corner. I brushed past him, per usual, but Rav stopped and said, "Yo. Do you want some pizza, my man?" and held out his recently purchased to-go slice. "Thank you, God bless," said the hobo, accepting the greasy offering. I was embarrassed; I had just been going along my stingy, self-regarding, way, but my sad, funny friend of so little ego had paused to contribute something, and again I thought "additive, be additive in some way."

Needing to save face, I rooted in my wallet for some cash, only to remember that I had dispensed it all on tortellini provisions earlier. Wait! Hold up! Tortellini! I still had the grocery bag on my arm! "Hey, hang on!" I said to the hobo, who snapped up from the pizza. "Hey. Would you also like... a pint of cherry tomatoes?" The man looked at me like I had two heads, and replied thus: "Aw HELLL NO, what 'choo playin' at?" At that point I dissolved into hysterical laughter, clutching the poor inadequate vegetables to my chest as I cackled helplessly.

Rav walked my slap-happy self to the front door of my building. We kissed on the cheek and he jetted off to wherever he was going, and I had the strong (correct) sense that we would never see each other again, for such is the way of the Lost Boys: they find you, and then you lose them, and they never really change (at least not on your watch) but maybe you are just a little bit changed by them.

I was humming the Haydn. It had just come unbidden to my vocal chords-- not the bleak main material, but the second idea, which, I suddenly realized, was nothing if not a musical depiction of laughter. Of course! Gloom was framing device of the piece, obviously, and it would win out eventually (doesn't it always?) but there were also, along the way, these wonderful shimmering patches of mirth, and they were not be discounted. I just had to get it all down in writing somehow, to convince the Philistines of the treasure trove of meaning beyond the symbols, but how to express it in a way that did not rely on my bizarre anecdotal encounters with blowhard yuppies and hyped-up leaden-footed toddlers and loveable Israeli stoners and street bums of discriminating palate? That part still needed some figuring out, I thought, as my roommate buzzed me in and I walked through the front door.