Jobbing in Schlockston, the Sequel: Bunheads Revisited, Revisited

If you have been an avid reader of Writer's Schlock since its inception (or have creepily perused its archives at any point in time [yeah, you think I don't know, lurkers, but I DO]) then you may realize that the title of this current entry is, like, so self-referential, as in it's a riff on a post header from last summer. Wherefore the extra dose of meta? Well, I think that I have officially earned the right to cite myself because, as of now, my blog is a friggin' YEAR old! Whoa! This means that if it were to assume a human form, it would be eating solid foods and learning to crawl and maybe even uttering a few adorable preliminary syllables; it would also have been removed from my care by Social Services because I have been criminally neglectful, feeding it on average of once a month and often being verbally abusive, calling it schlocky and narcissistic and derivative and all kinds of other things that will nestle into its subconscious and eventually land it in a shrink's office when it reaches its mid-twenties, whereupon it will stare at an invisible point in the air and say, "It's like... I'm realizing that I just don't know how to love anyone else because... I never learned how to love myself and there's just something missing inside of me..."

But my blog is, in fact, inanimate and will almost certainly not exist twenty-something years into the future-- therefore let the abuse continue! SO. If you have kept up up with this erratically updated, unreliably narrated, occasionally-written-whilst-intoxicated little schlock-blog of mine from the very beginning, then you deserve some kind of metaphorical effing gold star. Or even a material award-- maybe I'll send you a cupcake, a trendy disgusting one with a caramelized bacon topping or a blueberry-balsamic buttercream frosting. You would like that, wouldn't you? Cupcakes are "in" forever, or so I hear, and hey, I believe it, because cupcakes will be in as long as the female portion of the population wants to keep infantilizing itself via cutesy, not-even-particularly-tasty designer desserts, which then serve as bite-sized consolation prizes for the fact that the patriarchy continues to oppress womankind, which has in turn made itself easy to oppress and impossible to take seriously because it is so fucking busy cooing over individualized indulgences and crowing that we should treat ourselves! because we are GODDESSES and we RULE and we are BEAUTIFUL just as we are and we should CELEBRATE ourselves all the damn time so let's plop down some money that we don't have in exchange for a refined-carby bomb that will go straight our asses. But I don't want to talk about this anymore. Can we change the subject already? Why are cupcakes always taking over everything that's good in the world? See, they've taken up a whole paragraph of my blog already.

"Ummm, Alana, that's the thing-- this is your blog. You're the one who brought them up." No! I-- oh, well, yeah, true...  "And actually it seems like the cupcakes are symbolic of a deeper issue that might be troubling you."  What? No, I am just morally opposed to cloying buttercream and dry, uninspired cake-matter as a national trend: it's a criminal waste of calories when I could instead have a gelato or a boozy truffle or a wedge of baklava or a Viennese quark cheese strudel doused in warm vanilla custard sauce. That's all I'm trying to say, so back off. "Well, Alana, it kind of seems like you have some pent-up hostilities toward other women, especially those who have been socialized to be more feminine than you." Wha--? No. No, I am just tired of these girls who are always pampering themselves without first asking themselves if they have accomplished enough intellectually or professionally to merit the constant pampering. I am tired of these effete pixies, cute as cupcakes, with their doe eyes and their vocal fry and their non-threatening giggles and their mysterious power over the men-folk, who time and again flock to these cupcakey girls because said girls are adorable and innocuous and make the men-folk feel re-masculated and back in their gender-mandated place of AUTHORITAH even if they might be unemployed and adrift and/ or living with Mom and Dad. "Okay, NOW we're getting somewhere. What you're really communicating here is that you're feeling passed over. The failures that you have experienced on the battleground of lurrrve seem to have caused you to doubt your strong personality and to resent others who have fared better in this arena by playing to their gendered attributes. It seems to be a sore point for you. Maybe you should bring this up to your therapist." Okay, GREAT, except I don't have a therapist. Do I look like someone who could afford a therapist? Come on.

But I do have a blog! And it was almost exactly one year ago that I had just started a short-term job in Schlockston and was about to move away from Shroomington forever to do a PhD in Schmanhattan in a subject that was new to me and was feeling a leeettle on the hot-mess-totally-unstable-headcase end of the emotional spectrum. One afternoon, as I was engaged in a typical navel-gazing session, I suddenly thought, "Damn, that's a pretty fine-looking navel-- you know what, I should show it to the rest of the world!" and I went to Blogger and with a few keystrokes created Writer's Schlock free of charge, thus setting up a nice cyber-toilet bowl into which I would occasionally heave my guts for all to see. And now I've completely lost track of all of the bizarre incongruous metaphors that I've introduced ("wait, now the blog is the therapist? a few paragraphs ago the blog was a patient in therapy... and what's up with the navel and the toilet-bowl puking in the same sentence? that's disgusting...") so I'm just going to stop.

Anyway, as the mysterious cyclical nature of the Universe would have it, I am back in Schlockston for the summer to reprise my role as Accompanist Extraordinaire for legions of aspiring young ballerinas (and the occasional male danseur). Earlier in the year I debated whether to take this job again-- life is too short for reiterations, so maybe I should try something new, maybe a music festival, or maybe I should go back to Bleep U to resolve some lingering bureaucratic bullshit (which I am not going to bother explaining here because it is so incredibly stupid that it makes me want to hijack a demolition truck and tear down the shiny new faculty building that they are currently erecting). But then I watched a Sassy Gay Friend video on YouTube, the one where he justifies his use of product placement in his skits, and he says, "Hey, I have options too. I can not make money or I can MAKE MONEY! ... these scarves don't pay for themselves," and I realized that I, too, covet more scarves to add to my already-impressive collection and should probably suss out a source of income to support my scarfy habit (and also to pay off my evil scumbag NYC landlords, who live out in Crooklyn and whose specialties include the raping and pillaging of the checking accounts of young people, but again, let's not get into that).

And I am actually incredibly glad to be back here. I know that I kind of dissed Schlockston at some point on this site, calling it preppy and white-bread and the square older brother of hip crazycool Schmanhattan. But by God, Schlockston has come through for me when I've needed it. Last summer I was just really Emotionally Frazzled for a number of reasons (some of which are mentioned above and others of which are unmentionable) but my stint in Schlockston was a little utopian window, an escapist dream in which I played music for ballet dancers all day and wandered around the red-bricked neighborhood on my breaks, flopping down in grassy courtyards to imbibe sunlight (and enough iced coffee to kill a cat, caffeine being an absolute must for six-plus hours of ballet class/ rehearsal). I saw old friends and extended family, I went to the beach, I read pretentious literature in independent cafes and attracted the attention of a hipstery silver fox who asked me out (I obliged, but it turned out that his idea of a rollicking good banter was to talk about the differences between 3G and 4G wireless for a fricking hour-and-a-half. Yawn.) Oh, and I started a blog. It was a beautiful summer, a deep circular breath-- at once a slow exhalation, a letting out of the tensions that bound me to my old life, and also a deep gulp of fragrant serenity to hold me over while the chaotic Schmanhattan chapter roared into existence.

This year, by contrast, I am not undergoing any massive life changes nor am I even anywhere near Emotionally Frazzled-- try Cold and Dead Inside. Ha! However, I am considerably Intellectually Frazzled, and even more Physically Frazzled. The Intellectual Enfrazzlement stems from the fact that not only did I finish the first year of my reading/ writing- intensive degree, but I also decided to undertake an extra-special PUNY exam requirement in the first weeks of summer. This process, a strange hazing ritual concocted by my department, works like this: you walk into the administrative office, whereupon you are presented with circa ten envelopes, one of which contains your fate. You select your envelope/ fate; inside is a sheet of paper that list two topics drawn from anywhere in the history of music. You have twenty-four hours to commit to one topic, and then you have exactly two weeks to research and write a term paper on the subject. So I decided to knock out this little exercise while I was fresh off the first year and not irreparably jaded yet. I resigned myself to spending the first part of summer indoors and swiftly set up camp in the student lounge slash the library. I chained myself to a computer, stared at books and articles and dissertations as if to suck the text off of the page, frantically digested the information, churned out prose that maybe (?) made sense, and monopolized the swanky new coffee machine that my department had bought recently (this was a powerful incentive to come in to school, I must say). Somehow I completed the paper, spurred on by my classmates and my roommate and my friends from afar (sample late-night inspirational text: "u better be on page eleven and a half now. Go go GO!"') So, in short, the unpleasant exercise is DONE, KAPUT, out of my sight, but as soon as I submitted it I felt as though my brain had been transformed into mushy peas and I never wanted to read anything again in my life unless it had a picture of a Kardashian on the cover.

As for my Physical Frazzle Factor, I am fairly certain that it is rooted in my prolonged exposure to Schmanhattan. Now of course I adore my adopted city, the energy, the diversity, the sense that anything could happen, and all of the other usual praises that are heaped upon the Big Schnapple. Initially I seemed to adjust to the environment rather easily despite all of the chaos and the noise pollution and the bad air: I was honeymooning, running on adrenaline, shouting to the heavens that I'm here! I've arrived! But sometime around February I started to notice that I was not doing so well. I was clenching my teeth and balling my fists while I slept, which resulted in chronic facial pain and general muscle soreness. My migraines were becoming more frequent. My complexion, normally on the clear side, started behaving like that of a horny teenaged boy. (Whether I was exhibiting any other characteristics of a horny teenaged boy is open for debate). And all of these discomforts were accompanied by a constant low-level anxiety that sometimes erupted into panic. It would spike when my hood-rat upstairs neighbors forgot how to play the Quiet Game, which was most of the time; it flared up every time that I descended deep into the bowels of the earth to ride the subway with its rattlescreeeech while standing wedged between some thug deejay wannabe who was blasting music from his iPhone and some broad who was smacking the living hell out of her three screaming kids. And sometimes I would experience these panicky episodes when I went to class, too, because whoever designed PUNY ordained that the seminar rooms would be windowless and low-ceilinged and poorly ventilated and lit with dingy fluorescent lights (half of which were burned out)-- can you imagine discussing Immanuel Kant or post-structuralist anthropology in such a dismal environment for three hours at a time? You would go mad. You would lose all sense of the outside world. You would want to blast a hole in the ceiling and build a skylight just to remember that the sun is still smiling upon the earth and that you're not in a bomb shelter waiting out the apocalypse, after which you would then be left to re-populate the planet with your grad student cohort and create a master race of Schmoozicologists. Shudder.

I don't mean to imply that I was having a bad time. My department was great, my apartment was great, my roommate was great (she is probably my best friend in the city, and we didn't even know each other before we moved in together! WTF that's not supposed to happen; roommates are supposed to leave passive-aggressive post-it notes on the bathroom mirror, not go to Lincoln Center together and send each other funny links and share food and spontaneously watch The Mummy on a laptop at 1 AM). Things were damn good. I was given many opportunities to keep playing the piano, and I took them. I had plenty of entertaining misadventures in Not-Love that left minimal emotional damage. And yet by the end of the year I was just a bit battered in mind, body, and spirit, a little anhedonic, somehow incapable of scooping out the tension that had burrowed deeply into my bones and muscles. It physically hurt me to laugh; my smiling apparatus spasmed painfully when too much happiness was required of it. What to do? I tried changing my diet-- more leafy greens and quinoa and #whitepeople superfoods-- and I started running, and I slept with ear plugs and a face mask to blot out the environment, but still the symptoms persisted. And then suddenly I knew what would cure me, what would cut through the chaos and restore me to my full capabilities: WASPS. And sailboats. And lobster rolls (not that I eat lobster rolls, but somehow I thought that their proximity and availability would be comforting). And town squares teeming with college students who had been on the debate team in high school and who now aspired to misguided world domination. Of course! It was so simple, the panacea to all of my mysterious ailments!

So I wound my way up the Least Coast to Schlockston and felt my body un-knot itself instantly, and I took up my old spot behind the piano in the ballet building and relished the half-moon windows that allow all of this summer light to spill in, and I dashed outside on my breaks and wandered through community gardens, stopping here and there to pluck a basil leaf, a fennel frond, an oregano bud, a mint leaf, and I crushed them between my fingers to breathe in the essential oils and to reacquaint myself with the simple sensual pleasures of things that grow. And last Friday I was released from balletic duties early, so I sat in Schmopley Square with my feet in the fountain and I ate a whole pint of raspberries one at a time, dark juices staining the crevices of my hands, seed-shards lodging themselves into my molars-- there was not a bum berry in the box, and I thought, "Seriously, cupcakes can suck it: this is decadence, the living fruit of God's Green Earth "-- and these two twin Chinese toddlers were playing in the fountain, alternately splashing and hugging one another, and sometimes they ran over to tag my knee, shrieking with laughter, and the granite of the fountain ledge was sun-baked and warm on my bare legs but not unendurable, and I could smell the grass on the lawn, which had taken on this unbelievable hazy gold-green late-afternoon cast that says the day is winding down, yes, but stop and listen for a moment because whatever you think you need to run off and do doesn't actually matter as much as this. And I thought, oh, if only I could make a draught of this day so that I could have it on tap, keep it in a flask to take a swig from in some bleaker time when the fine wiring in my head is primed to snap and I kind of want to annihilate humanity (this time will come again, of course-- cyclic, cyclic, always it goes) but we don't have the technology for such distillation yet, so maybe I will just attempt to record a perfect palliative day in words-- words, those inadequate stand-ins for experience, those pale imitations, and weblogging is of course the palest of all wordy forms but hey, it's something, still a weak stab at the preservation of life, and maybe that's what I was really thinking when I started writing here a little over a year ago.

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.

Anti-Tepidity

You couldn't pay me to go back to middle school. Oh God it was the WORST, a viper pit, a gladiatoral ring, the absolute nadir of my existence, the Eleventh Circle of Hell-- yes, thanks to middle school, Dante's levels of hell now go UP TO ELEVEN! It all got better, of course, as they (the grownups) promised. Each passing year applied a little more aloe vera to my wounded psyche, drew out the angst and replaced it with perspective; I came to understand that during the Dark Days my peers had all been undergoing just as much of a rocky internal shift as I and that their horribleness was mostly a side effect of crippling insecurity, invisible circumstances, unnavigable new bodily dimensions and crazy-making hormones. Eventually I turned into a luminous font of beatitude and forgave them all (of course never pausing to reflect, with a glimmer of superiority, on those erstwhile cool-kid little shits who flamed out early and never amounted to much while I, perpetual late bloomer but BLOOMER, goddammit, bloomed lately and attained something that, at least on paper, resembled success). I accepted that prepubescence was a universal hazing ritual, one that we ultimately transcended en route to becoming more thoughtful and compassionate adults. We were better for having passed through the crucible.

Still, I repeat that you could not pay me to go back there. I am content these days to maintain healthy and supportive friendships, to care about what I do and not fear ridicule, to wear whatever I want and feel okay about it (and what I want to wear these days does NOT include such sartorial missteps as platform flip-flops or saggy khaki cargo pants or blue eyeshadow or metallic rainbow butterfly hair clips by the dozen: good god, the lowest point in my personal life really coincided with the lowest point in all of fashion history, didn't it?) So you might be confused to hear that I recently paid someone else for the pleasure of going back to middle school, and that "someone else" was, um, James Cameron.

Yes, readers, you don't misunderstand: I ponied up seventeen dollars to see Titanic in 3D.

And why would I freely admit to this on the internet? Have I no shame? (Rhetorical question!) Well, given the name of my internet venture here, this space is actually a rather appropriate forum for discussing the towering, definitive Schlockbuster of my youth, because schlock is supposed to be, you know, my recurring blogmotif or something!  ... although in retrospect I think that I just found this Yiddishism to be pun-susceptible and phonetically funny, and that the real pervasive theme of Writer's Schlock is, "I have a lot of work that I'm avoiding," or, possibly,  "I wish I had literary talent." But no matter. If my blog is to live up to its titular schlockdom, then I am pretty much contractually obligated to write about Titanic. Also, the PG-13 rating of Mr. Cameron's schlocksterpiece is in line with the unofficial PG-13 rating that I have accorded to this site (see: judicious use of four-letter words, naughty situations implied rather than overtly described, and I'm still figuring out how to handle nudity but I DID just use the word "titular," so we're getting there).

A bit of background: I, like most every screwed-up pre-adolescent female in 1997 (and probably some reticent preteen boys as well), was unhealthily taken with Titanic. I saw it thrice on the big screen; I read every behind-the-movie publication or historical study of the wreck that I could get my hands on; I begged my parents for the VHS and watched it incessantly after they had finally acquiesced and given me the two-volume tape for my twelfth birthday (ohhh, they rued the day). And my behavior was the norm, not the exception! We were all universally mad about this stuff-- finally the popular girls and I had some common ground, because the movie tapped into some essential truth about us all. Many things, actually-- our fear of death, our nascent awareness of the transience and arbitrariness of life (an awareness that would shortly blossom into full-fledged sullen teenaged existentialism). And then there were Leo and Kate, of course. Who didn't identify with Rose? She was all, "I'm a free spirit and nobody understands me and everyone around me is so boring and superficial and my mom is a total raging bitch WAH." Such a fitting allegory for the middle-schooler, and Leo/ Jack was the perfect imaginary counterbalance. We all dreamed of some artsy, footloose-and-fancy-free love interest who would swoop in and see us as we really were, rescue us from the oppressive inanity of school/ family life and put us on a path to vibrant self-realization, and possibly also touch us in a special sensual way in the back seat of a car because oh yes, around that age those kinds of things were suddenly starting to seem enticing rather than icky. We were a demographic obsessed.

So when the film returned to theatres fifteen years later all pimped out in 3D, I couldn't resist. (I did not go alone, but to protect the reputations of those who might possess a gram of self-respect, I shall not disclose the identities of my companions). It had technically not been that long since I had seen the movie-- a few years ago during the Bleep U grad school phase, it came to my attention that my then-roommate had missed the boat, so to speak, and had never seen Titanic, so I sought to rectify this unfortunate situation by inviting my Masters' cohort over for an emergency showing on my ancient clunker of a TV set with its pithy, laptop-like screen dimensions. We ordered Chinese takeout, talked over most of the movie, mocked the easy sitting-duck groaner terrible dialog moments, belted along to Celine with deliberately terrible intonation. It was not a sacred moment. I didn't count it among my multiple reverential middle school viewings. But now, in the year 2012, I was going to do this thing and do it right, i.e. make my pilgrimage and also fully apply my sophisticated, PhD-level critical judgment to this cinematic work. So I went, and winced at the appropriate moments because wow, there is some undeniably wretched dialog in that script, and I thought of 9/11 and all of the obvious parallels, and I made the very clever and topical observation that the class distinctions depicted on board the ship rather resemble our current social hierarchy, and then suddenly my critical faculties struck an iceberg and suffered a system failure because I was stupidly, predictably swept up in the visual grandeur and the drama! and the passion! and the core human values! and it was as though my impressionable, deeply-feeling preteen self had jumped across a chasm of nearly fifteen years to possess my twenty-something body. I had been hoodwinked, taken in, manipulated by the same old schlock, and thank God for the 3D glasses which concealed a certain puffiness around the eyes, a certain evidence of crocodile tears. Oof.

I stewed for days after, sifting through these familiarities. Imagery and dialog had been re-seared into my mind's eye; snippets of synth-y score, having once been lovingly encoded into my musical memory, now played on infinite loop in my head, reactivated. And accompanying this was a sense of loss that was hard to articulate: it did not have so much to do with the actual subject matter, the great loss of life (fictional and nonfictional alike) which was certainly sad to behold, but... no, it was more self-specific (self-involved?) than that. Here is the thing. My feelings weren't real and I knew it: they were feelings about feelings, echo-feelings, resurrections of past emotional states that were more intense than anything that I seem capable of experiencing these days. I was mourning nothing more, nothing less than the gradual loss of my ability to feel that strongly. There I had been, young, poised for life-- confused and miserable, of course, but also fervent, fresh, and obsessive. And then the years accumulated and with them the settling of the dust, the necessary equanimity.

But didn't you fight hard for that stability? Isn't that what you wanted? Extreme polarity is exhausting. It is not conducive to functionality, to meeting deadlines or paying bills. And so tepidity becomes the name of the game, and it seeps into everything. You shrug a lot. Somebody breaks up with you via text message and you snort in derision and joke about making a voodoo doll and then you shrug. You go to your graduate seminars and you shrug, too, because it seems like you can say anything, any empty thing, and it might provoke a minor reaction but soon all is forgotten because the stakes are so, so low and everybody just wants to escape the stuffy little Skinner Box room and return to creature comforts and watch HBO. Nothing really makes a dent. Not even the tearjerker Schlockbuster of your youth can jolt you into wakefulness: it comes close, it tempts you, but you know better.

Then, about a week ago, there was something different. I decided, in preparation for a performance, to play piano for a friend, a brilliant and dedicated musician. I was so, so nervous because my inhibitions don't lie in the usual places-- I will speak publicly, blog ad nauseam, spill out whatever is on my mind, my childhood traumas or whatever, I will undress, it's nothing, easy-- but to play is to truly give away secrets. It is to expose your throat and the undersides of your wrists as an offering to your receiver. So I played for him, for my friend, and the performances were guarded, a little tepid. Especially the Schubert. Sorry to come back to Schubert again and again; I do play other music, I promise, but you must bear with my fixation for now. So we worked on the Schubert (the big A major sonata) and he pushed me off the piano bench and started tinkering around with the piece himself, and he came to this place in the second theme that I might attempt to explain as such: you have wandered, strayed very far away from your center and you don't even know it, you are remote, room-temperature, and you keep repeating the same perfunctory things to yourself but then, for reasons unknown, one repetition becomes imbued with deepest significance and it unlocks your return-- you are restored, full-blooded and tingling. My friend played the section, shouting out, "And here, rapturous!" and then he just stopped, staring into space, and said, "God. It's extraordinary." Lucky that I was standing behind him and could hide my sudden tears, because in that moment something like love rippled through the both of us. Not between us-- no, NO! not like that-- but through us, straight from the thing that was spoken in the music, and we both loved the thing back in the same way, three poles, a dynamic triangulation. And I had been working on this piece for months, and desiring to play it for years, and at the outset I had been so smitten with this particular passage-- melting, opening, wondrous-- but after a certain saturation point of repeated exposure and careless handling, the music no longer retained its meaning. Now, in my friend's apartment on a lazy Friday morning, I sobbed a little with joy and fullness and I thought, "How could I have forgotten, how could I have just stopped noticing?"

... and alas, I'm far afield from where I started-- like the second theme of a Schubert sonata! bam! wandering rhapsodic vistas--  and I fear that I don't have the skill to bring it all around again in some ingenious way to middle school, or James Cameron, or neon blue eyeshadow but I'm just not there yet; I can see it, I know to where I must return, but I can't always find my way back exactly when I want to.

All the Schlock that has been Blocked

Apologies, faithful readers: I know how it feels to be stood up, and I never meant to disappear on you, and by now you have probably decamped from my schlockspot in search of someone who knows the meaning of committment. Serves me right for being such a flaky tease. But rest assured that this was not the original plan. I had big visions for this blog; it was supposed to be the hottest thing on the internet, the Platonic Ideal of self-absorbed twenty-something verbal vomit that all other self-absorbed twenty-something verbally vomitrocious blogging endeavors could only aspire to. Back in January, when I was home on vacation and testing the outer limits of boredom and inertia, I would lie on my bed staring at the light fixture dangling from the ceiling of my childhood bedroom, and ideas for new blog posts would bloom freely in my imagination like...  polyps! yes, polyps on a mucus membrane, and these thought-polyps were scintillatingly clever and a smidge poignant and highly specific to my own life yet so masterfully executed that they would resonate with a universal readership. They demanded to be brought into this world; some serious polyp-actualization was in order. I sat down to make it happen, buzzy typing fingers at the ready, and what followed over the next few months was a series of valiant but ultimately aborted blogging efforts (I think that this condition has a name and it is Writer's Schlock). So in place of a coherent, unified entry, I give you this: shards, the Sparknotes version, the Blogs that Might Have Been.

First, I was going to write about that time when I was browsing the foreign language section of The Strand for a German phrase guide for my sister and then, boom, there was an used copy of that book that you love. That book, which I had also read (because I am always expanding my literary tastes, blah blah, but really I just wanted to understand you better, even from an oblique point of entry) -- there it was on the shelf, askew and out of place between two standard German dictionaries. It had the unmistakable quality of having been shoved there in haste, as though someone had been sitting in that corner for hours, nose buried in the edition, until a staff member gave this delinquent reader a death glare that said "Buy or GTFO," whereupon the reader wedged the book in the nearest shelf and fled the rapacious maw of capitalism. The longer I stood there staring at this aberrant paperback, the more I became convinced that not only had my imagined scenario taken place, but that the reader had in fact BEEN YOU, and that I was now occupying the exact same physical space that you had taken up at some earlier point in time to page through your old favorite. Such a situation was not even remotely probable. You lived far away. We weren't even speaking-- there had been a protracted silence, unfortunate but for the best, just one of those things that I had eventually come to terms with-- but in that instant I didn't care anymore, grabbed for my iPhone, was going to call you and tell you about the book because it was a SIGN. But then my phone battery was dead and that was a SIGN too, or at least it negated the chance that I might contact you at that very moment, so I left the bookstore with a collection of funky German dessert recipes from the '80s and took the long subway ride home, by which point my self-preservational instinct had decided to show up and bitch-slap my generosity of spirit, ensuring that the phone call went forever unmade. 

I tried to write about this non-incident. It seemed rife with symbolic significance-- literature as a binding force between people, the connotative power of objects, unacted-upon possibility for resolution. Maybe I could even include a paragraph about how the whole thing never would have occurred if I had just done my shopping on Amazon, had found everything I needed algorithmically and not by foraging around in a physical space where other human beings could also leave evidence of themselves, where real objects could be incongruously shoved together so that some overly analytical, see-something-where-there's-nothing creature like myself could infer an elaborate narrative from their juxtaposition. But every sentence that I began to craft quickly choked to death on its own emo-ness and self-importance, and after a few tortuous attempts, I had become emotionally disengaged from the original situation anyway and saw no reason to document it. So I resolved to LIGHTEN UP, dammit, and moved on to my next idea.                  

In this hypothetical next post, I was going to index a number of my music-related dreams and nightmares, most of them riffs on the classic repressed neuroses of performing artists. For instance, there was the one dream where I was pushed onto the stage at Carnegie Hall and forced to sightread Beethoven's monstrous Hammerklavier sonata in front of all of the Important Musical Intelligentsia (and of COURSE this dream occurred on the night before my last Bleep U degree recital, and I woke up in a horrifying panic and it took me about fifteen minutes to remember that I was in fact only slated to perform the more modestly scaled Beethoven Op. 110 in a small university concert hall that day). There was also the dream, a few years earlier, where a spectral Johannes Brahms made a night visitation to my window like the Ghost of Jacob Marley and mournfully intoned that I had not studied my score enough and had not carried out his compositional intentions in performance. Guilt-tripped by a ghost Brahms! Oh SNAP! Then there was the dream where Artur Schnabel showed up at my apartment-- not so much as an apparition but black-and-white, staticky and flickering like a projection from an old movie-- and the Maestro convinced me to drop acid with him (I am apparently more freewheeling in dreamspace than I am in waking life) and we played through Beethoven's third concerto together, gloriously, and watched as the sound waves morphed into stunning patterns of color and light. And then there was my all-time favorite music dream, the one in which I discovered that the soundtrack to Disney's The Little Mermaid was closely based on Bach's St. John Passion-- Ursula sang material derived from the alto arias, Sebastian was the Evangelist-- and I presented these earth-shattering findings to the American Schmoozicological Society. I woke up still possessed by the idea, half-believing that some huge cryptic Dan Brown-esque cultural conspiracy had been revealed to me in my sleep; on arriving at school that day I asked Schmarvard Guy, a venerable Bach scholar, if my subconscious was actually onto something there. He gave me a searching look, as though trying to determine whether I was a pioneering visionary or a total crackpot, and then said, "The Little Mermaid?... You mean the Calypso cartoon movie with the sea creatures? Based on St. John? ... Is that true? Who knows. Maybe that's true. Actually, I kind of wish that were true."

I liked where this post was going. I was kind of rolling with it, venturing into psychoanalytic interpretations-- is Brahms representative of my father and have I disappointed him?-- and also Inception-esque philosophical inquiries-- if I have a drug trip within a dream, is it the same thing as a dream within a dream and do the same rules apply? But then my life was disrupted by a visit to Bleep U/ Shroomington to see Felix's graduating recital, and the whole prodigal daughter-goes-back-to-the-heartland sees-everyone-she-knows reassesses-her-formative-years tone of the trip seemed to necessitate an immediate blog entry, so I halted work on the music-dreams post and started to draft an account of the Great Bleep U Return Journey.

There was so much to write about that I hardly knew where to begin. My first instinct was to take a chronological approach. I could set the scene, describe how I waited at the gate for my flight at the NY airport and observed a group of lump-faced puppy-dog boys in suits who were trying to order beer off of the new touch-screen menus that had been installed in the terminal. As I listened to their conversation, they revealed themselves to be Schmindiana frat boys who had just interviewed for summer finance internships in the Big City and were now returning to Bleep U; in the past I might have been offended by their presence, but now I experienced a wave of affection at their antics (oh college days, the simple life, idyll, respite: I was almost home). If I wrote about being at the airport, then I would also have to include the flight, where I started to question the wisdom of making this trip at all-- would my cool, cultivated, citified persona crumble away on hitting the Midwestern atmosphere? Would I lose my critical distance, instantly regress to a sadly vulnerable and approval-seeking specimen? Anxieties began to stir somewhere in my lower esophagus. I distracted myself by thumbing through the SkyMall catalog and wondering who the fuck would ever pay ninety-five dollars for a replica of the Elder Wand or four hundred dollars for a make-your-own-soymilk machine (although the latter did come with a complimentary package of fresh soybeans-- hot damn, what a steal!) Finally I arrived in the cornfield state, spent the night with my wonderful friend Med Student Meg, took a deep breath and rode the shuttle bus to Shroomington.

Or was that whole expository section really necessary? I deleted it and started anew, at the actual point of arrival. Oh dear Shroomington, with its trees and clean air and little stone houses and sleepy students in sweatpants. The place embraced me as soon as I stepped off the bus, easy, familiar. To the concert hall to hear Felix, who had grown into a towering titan of the keyboard while I was away, then back to his house for the afterparty, which started slow with boxed wine and a few vaguely awkward conversations but hit its stride as soon as Teacher and Felix's dad showed up with some top-shelf liquor and started mixing cocktails for all. Before long Felix and I had accidentally kissed on camera in front of everyone, and Teacher was swooning over Felix's blonde bombshell of a mother, and a multi-generational group had formed in the kitchen to boisterously debate the merits and drawbacks of plastic surgery (emphasis was on boob jobs). It was a night to remember. And then I stayed for a few more days, wonderful days in which I had no obligations and could therefore treat Shroomington as a resort town. Which parts to include? Surely I had to write about seeing Schmarvard Guy, who took me to lunch at the supremely janky Chinese restaurant across the street from school that everybody secretly loves-- we sat there eating spicy string beans out of styrofoam boxes using plastic forks, and I told him about school at PUNY and he told me about his fabulous garage band that does covers of David Bowie and Procol Harum, and I made a mental note to try to be half as much of a badass by the time I reached middle age. And what other shenanigans warranted a retelling? Without a doubt I needed to recount the story of the impromptu latke dinner at Felix's house-- how Teacher and his son and I went on a quest for applesauce, which proved surprisingly hard to find, and as soon as we had finally tracked it down and were returning triumphantly with an extra-chunky variety, Felix called to tell us that the sour cream had somehow frozen in the refrigerator (it wanted to be extra-chunky too) and could we possibly double back to pick up a new carton? And after the Tale of the Latkes, maybe I'd have earned the right to wax nostalgic about some of the other little things, move in for the sentimental culmination, the core bleeding heart of the blog entry (there must be one, every time; it's a tenet of my blogular formula). This would probably include a description of the sublime coffee and pastries at Schitty Bakery and my joyous reunion with the staff, who all knew me well and still remembered my exact preferences (small hazelnut coffee in a glass mug, toasted everyseed bagel with goat cheese-chive schmear, and I'll be back later for a cinnamon sneagle or some carrot cake, you know it, and could you put on some Elton John?) And of course I would also have to end with a nod to the night that I walked along the quiet streets and looked at the lit-up windows of my old apartment complex and wondered who was there now, practicing and studying and worrying about the future, carrying on the music school way of life.

But then I was back in Schmanhattan and the city suddenly assaulted me with its frenetic overabundance, and I staggered from the onslaught of crackheads and overprivileged Millennials and camera-happy tourists and perpetually noisy neighbors and intimidating intellectual heavyweights, etcetera, and I had to seriously regroup and get a grip on myself, and writing about Shroomington seemed counterproductive because my visit had thrown into relief all of the beautiful details, the soft shadings and subtle intimacies that I had left behind, and if I dwelt on them too long then I would never be able to leave my apartment or face the squalid subterranean jungle of mass transit or go to school and seek advice from my current professors with whom I had not quite reached the spicy-string-bean-sharing level of comfort. So my Bleep U post languished with all the others, unrealized, trapped in Bloggatory.

Then my dog died-- Gypsy, our twelve-year-old dalmatian, our sweet spotted harlequin girl-- and it was expected, and of course this is the contractual agreement that every family enters into with pets, that their lives will flower and wither in a span that, to us, seems all too short. I thought I might eulogize her here in blogland, conjure up some memories of beach days or family trips, describe her funny doggy mannerisms. But every fragment that I evoked seemed garishly sentimental, rang false somehow, and I realized that it's because I haven't fully understood that she is gone yet: I haven't been back home to notice the missing sound of paws clicking on tile, the sharp happy bark when I walk in the front door, white hairs clinging to my dress pants. And then I thought that maybe it's a good thing that I'm in Schmanhattan now-- a place so numbing and fluorescent and self-referential that you can't even see the stars-- because it allows me to imagine that a new canine-shaped constellation might have appeared in the night sky since last I was home, up there just out of sight. And then I never finished that blog post either.

Twice-baked

I sit in the room of my childhood, surrounded by relics of the past (my past!); they are numerous, scattered all around like detritus from cookies that somebody (not me, no way) could, hypothetically, have been noshing on in bed late at night while watching bootlegged episodes of Breaking Bad, which by the way is a supremely anxiety-inducing series so I would not be quick to judge anyone who might wish to counter the thumbscrews-heart-in-throat-pulse-pounding horror factor of the show with a stash of miniature almond biscotti, okay?

Anyway, the point is that artifacts of my early-to-adolescent years are everywhere. I keep expecting them to ambush me at any moment. Those pointe shoes hanging on the wall, frayed and worn-- if I examine them too closely, will I suddenly convulse with nostalgia for Nutcrackers past? What about the Ancient Greek textbook from high school with all my notes in the margins and my smartass (σμαρτας) transliterations of swear words using the Greek alphabet? Could a perusal of this volume unearth an cache of memories, the symbols of historical antiquity guiding me to a rediscovery of personal antiquity? And dare I read through my old journals, which mostly detail my various ill-fated infatuations with some poor schlub or another? Can I bear to go there? 

Yet the objects are strangely mute on this visit, as though I interrogated them too many times in the past and they gave away all of their secrets. Now all I can remember is the ritual itself-- I am supposed to hold these things in my hands, as always, breathe them in, say "take me back, take me back." But "back" has been slipping away unnoticed while I've been out accumulating more "now," and "now" becomes the new "back" with astonishing rapidity, and the filing cabinet of my mind can only hold so much information and somebody, some sneaky ninja secretary of the Unconscious, must have been taking my outdated files to the shredder, bit by bit.

I pull a sheet of paper from the recesses of my desk: it bears a title, "Sentimental Value Bit of Graph Paper :)", in the high school incarnation of my handwriting, but it arouses no sentiment in me other than mild confusion, as in I am drawing a huge blank on the story behind this emoticonned remnant. It must have been juicy to merit such preservation-- I had obviously once taken the time to label the sheet and leave it for Future Me, expecting that she would wryly wink back across time and space. Instead, Future Me rubs her temples, looks around the room, concedes that she has not lived here for eons and that the rift has widened and it is starting to feel irreversible; more and more now her affection is contained in vessels that are elsewhere, dispersed all across the contiguous U.S. (and beyond) like so many crumbs of biscotti...

Mystic Shores

Something is off, I say. Small discrepancies have started to emerge in my existence that do not square with the reality I thought I knew, kind of like in the new Haruki Murakami novel that I've been reading lately where the characters slip unbeknowst into a parallel dimension and start to detect subtle anomalies in their world (the police officers carry a different brand of firearm, there's an extra moon hanging in the sky... ) Such a shift must have occurred in my own life as well, for I can think of no other way to explain the incongruities that have arisen of late.

The other day, for instance, a stranger smacked into me on the street and then he... apologized. Whoa. Breach of etiquette there, good sir. It's well-established that if you jostle somebody in public, you must avoid eye contact and keep walking; the recipient of your jostling likewise does not acknowledge you and keeps walking, now harboring hatred in his/ her heart that he/ she will pass on to the next hapless pedestrian to cross his/ her path. But this man looked all concerned said he was sorry and I floundered for words to absolve him of guilt, all the while feeling cheated of a chance to curse him under my breath, to pay forward the ill will, to forge another link in the human chain of passive-aggression. So that was Oddity #1, the first indicator that something was amiss. Other signs began to pile up, too. The air itself had taken on a different quality-- my nose searched the atmosphere for exhaust fumes and falafel and roasted nuts and miscellaneous human vileness, but instead came up with adjectives like "maritime" or "pine-resiny." And one night I looked up and saw a salt-sprinkling of tiny white lights across the sky. Stars? Excuse me? We don't do stars in Schmanhattan; the lights of mass civilization have long superseded the lights of the cosmos. When I crawled into bed later, I lay awake staring at the ceiling, unable to settle down for some reason. And then it hit me. My usual nighttime lullaby of gurgling bathroom pipes and clanking radiators and pulsing Dominican dance music from above was absent, supplanted by a near-silence: eerie, unnerving, blockading sleep.

The next day I decided to clear my head in the best way that I know: seeking out a body of water and staring at it for awhile until the world rights itself and I become freshly cognizant of my smallness while re-apprehending the grandeur of Nature, etcetera etcetera. I made for the Hudson River overlook near my apartment, aiming to capture that limitless sensation of being on the edge of the land even if this particular vista was blighted by the neighboring Shores of Jersey. But this time Jersey was nowhere to be seen! In its place was a silver-blue pane of ocean that stretched off uninterrupted to some misty vanishing point. In shock I pitched forward onto my knees, expecting to meet the impact of concrete, but pillows of plush soft sand broke my fall-- awestruck I buried my arms in the substance, pure white and fine as baking soda, temperate on the surface but cooler and damper as I plumbed its depths.

At that point I became certain that I was not in Schmanhattan anymore, that I had pulled a Narnia or a Down-the-Rabbit-Hole and had toppled into an alternate plane of existence. Clearly I was on a coast, but an alien coast, an inverse coast. I paused to take in my surroundings. The topography was savage, almost alive; mountains rose like massive stone vertebrae out of the sea, like the backbone of some dormant monster that might occasionally twitch in its sleep and cause mayhem on a geological scale. Pine trees had still managed to eke out a living here, roots navigating rocks, branches forming an asymmetrical dusky green canopy... oh! THAT was why the air had that smell... well, there was one aberration explained, but still the larger mystery loomed.

Stymied, I searched the recesses of my handbag for my iPhone, which would surely answer everything: it would Google-map me, predict the weather, throw in a recommendation for a great local tapas bar, and perhaps I could even download a teleportation app to beam myself back home (certainly the Good People of Apple had come up with that by now...?) But as my thumbs got to work on that well-worn screen, a dreaded missive appeared: "Signal unavailable. Safari cannot connect to the internet." Disaster! Where the fuck was I in the known universe to be outside the scope of AT&T reception? (Actually, wait a minute, I could be a lot of places). I felt naked; my trusty device was incapacitated, cut off from its mother planet of Omniscience, and here I was, bereft, reliant on the meager reserves of information in my own mind. With Safari-the-Browser now defunct, it seemed I would have to embark on my own real-life safari, me versus the elements, [Wo]man vs. Wild.

The place was absurd, I thought, turning again to face the ocean-- the hues, the pinkish-tinged streaks in the sunset, so tacky, lifted straight from the palette of a Thomas Kinkade painting... and then I thought, How sad, I cannot experience any real thing without making immediate recourse to  representation, to a stand-in, an ersatz rendition; isn't it more likely that Mr. Kinkade once witnessed some ravishing natural phenomenon like this one and strove to emulate it in a visual medium? But now I, when actually confronted with the Thing-in-Itself, could only understand it in terms of some schlocky reproduction. This was what it had come to-- soon enough I would start meeting new people, flesh-and-blood individuals, and instead of inhabiting the sphere of their presence for a while and then drawing my conclusions about them as human beings, I would quickly pigeonhole them into fictive archetypes ("he's very David Copperfield, or maybe kind of like that guy from Arrested Development")... oh wait, but I already did that constantly, and so did everyone else. It was our only mode of discourse, the rough analogy. Were we all then so incapable of freshness, unable to see anything as though for the first time, paralyzed by our infinite points of reference?

Mournfully I contemplated the tremendous gulf between immediate experience and comprehension/ analysis, all the while contemplating the literal gulf in front of me that tossed and roiled in the Kinkadian evening light. I sat down. And then something strange started to happen. The waves maintained their rhythm, in, out, crash, silence, suspense, crash again, reporting to the moon or whatever, and they got into my head and started to bear down on the chattering stupidities that resided there. This lingering petty resentment, that circular philosophical quandary, my twitchy cell-phone-less paranoia-- all were loosened like boulders from a larger rock-mass and then methodically pulverized by the weight of the waves... only a fine, fair sand was left: it streamed smoothly from my mind, exiting, leaving a clean bright chamber... my breathing aligned with the tides, gentle cycles of brackish air moving through me... and I realized I was doing the impossible, sensing the power of the Real Thing, the Original, but of course I can't describe it here without reverting to facile hackneyed putrid metaphor, so I won't even try.

... and then what happened? I can't possibly leave you hanging here, you think, at this narrative impasse, but oh yes, I can and I will, I must be cruel and sever the story at its apex because I don't know how it ends yet either; I, too, am left hanging (on a beach, in maybe [?] an alternate dimension). I seek, always, a way to return to my homeland, to the cultivated, human-scale terrain and that great metropolis of convenience, but it seems that for the time being I am marooned on this strange coast, this other world... I have since christened it California-- I wonder (wonderingly) what it will teach me next, while I wait--

Schubert vs. Footie Pajamas

My dear friend Felix, a fellow disciple of Teacher and a very recent addition to the twenty-one-and-over-can-poison-yourself-legally-now club, came to visit me a few weeks ago. Our original plan was to destroy lower Schmanhattan together (as an Elder I felt somewhat obligated to be a force of corruption) but our activities ended up veering into wholesome territory more often than not: we shared a lemon tart, we took a jaunt through my neighborhood to see the wonderful old buildings and the steep rocky park and the silvery curvature of the bridge, we made an expedition to a Mexican grocery to purchase a piñata and ingredients for a dubious holiday punch involving horchata and tequila by the cupful... and oh whoops, already we've stepped outside the realm of Wholesome. That was fast. But hey now, the grocery store trip in itself was an innocent venture, only vaguely enabling the bacchanalian events of later that night in which a number of punch-drunk individuals, including myself, took up a Swiffer and had at the piñata. (Felix dealt the final death-blow, colored tissue paper bits raining everywhere, Dove Promises spilling onto the tile floor of my kitchen like entrails from a slain papier-mâché beast).

By the next night we were back to being good again. We had dinner with another member of the Teacher clan and his parents in their Upper West Side apartment-- just a bit of wine, the two manic family dogs figure-eighting around our legs as we sat at the table talking about Leonard Bernstein and pondering a plate of those neon rainbow marzipan cookies that are ubiquitous in this city. A Steinway grand sat in the living room. You can see where this is going; while we resisted the instrument's siren call for about two hours, inevitably there came a point where Felix and I decided that we HAD to play through the Schubert Fantasie right then and there. But alas! my score for the piece was wedged away in a bookshelf ninety blocks uptown. 

Technology bailed us out. An internet connection, a few keywords, a database with vast reserves of public-domain music, and voila, just like that we were sight-reading off of two MacBooks, fumbling through forests of notes that we had not traversed for nine months while our other friend hovered over our shoulders and frantically scrolled down for us when our respective screens ran out of music. (Welcome to the page-turning of the 21st century, folks!) We spluttered and stumbled and came unglued and fell apart, snorting laughter, retracing measures and regrouping and can we take the tempo down a little and oh shit, here comes the fugue, sorry, Schubert, sorry sorry sorry.

Yet something still came through in our very imperfect rendering, something having to do with our shared pedagogical lineage, of course, all of the Teacher tropes just flowing out of us unspoken, and also something having to do with the countless idle hours we had spent together over the years, subliminally swapping mannerisms and vocabulary, syncing up to one another. And then it was also us rediscovering the piece itself, which, as you might know, has it all. All of the Dionysian wildness of tequila punch contained in a classically viable piñata shell of structure, topic, form. First the lone voice over accompaniment like a desolate night bird, but then the stern collectivism of French Overture, but then it gets fed up with its own pedantry and busts out into dance-- supernatural waltz, earthy folky Ländler-- and then we have more plaintive sad-sack singing, and then The Fugue, communicating the deep chaos of the soul in the most learned of all musical tongues, and then the end, the kicker, sinking sweetly into Death's waiting arms or something similarly, horribly cliché but how else to describe it???

I was punch-drunk off of Schubert. I was stoned off of Schubert for, like, the whole next day, man. While Felix ran around the city meeting up with other friends, I stayed in my apartment and journeyed through the D major sonata and the B-flat sonata and the impromptus and the miscellaneous short pieces on my upright, stopping to savor this or that shadowy tender delicious phrase in the way you suddenly stop to savor the complexities of a salt crystal on a pretzel when you're stoned off of... Schubert. I listened to Schnabel, Erdmann, Richter. It occurred to me that Schubert, chilling out syphilitically in 1820s Vienna, had obviously seen into the future to ME, had examined the fabric of my psyche and had taken pains to convert it into musical notation. It likewise occurred to me that Schnabel, Erdmann, and Richter had embarked on pianistic careers and specialized in Schubert for the sole purpose of expressing my innermost self via sound.

Then it occurred to me that maybe this was all a little bit narcissistic, that maybe I was the one communing with those dead guys instead of the other way around, but WHOA that was kind of cool too! Collective unconscious! The continuum of humanity! A fragment of T.S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton" suddenly floated into my mind, something about sound and remembering and children's hidden laughter in the rose garden, and I feverishly consulted Google for the exact citation. ("Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take..." ) It was all the same thing: the words spoke the music and the music sounded like the words and both pointed to some grander, more ineffable Ur-meaning that transcended representation. Duuude. And now let's just cut to the end of the scene, to me reading the whole poem about five times, bathed in laptop light, glassy-eyed, humming the second theme of the second movement of the Schubert B-flat sonata while spooning blood orange sorbet methodically into my mouth and trying not to drip it onto the computer keyboard.

Like I said, I was HIGH, you guys, High on High Culture. There was nowhere to go but down.

Felix was leaving that night, so we met at a tinselly, Christmassy Irish pub for a final sendoff. Perhaps I still betrayed some minor signs of intoxication at this point (tapping out Ländler rhythms on the table, muttering under my breath that "humankind cannot bear very much reality") but mostly I had returned to a socially acceptable state of being. We bantered about Bleep U and the sorry state of our bank accounts. Beers were ordered; Felix expressed disappointment that the waitress did not card us. Festive music assaulted our ears from hidden speakers.

"Oh no oh no," said Felix, stopping to listen. "This is NOT a Christmased-upped version of Pachelbel's canon, is it? Pachelbel meets Jingle Bells? Please tell me it isn't."

"Ohhh yes it is," I replied, "cheese on top of more cheese. Cheese squared. And there's going to be a children's choir in a second, which will make it cheese cubed. Just you wait. I've been hearing this one in department stores for months now."

Felix slumped in despair. Then his eyes widened at something over my shoulder. "WHAT is on TV? It's some kind of... sexy pajama infomercial. What? WHAT? Oh my GOD, what IS this?!" I followed his horrified gaze to the mute plasma screen on the wall behind the bar, where something called the Hoodie-Footie was being advertised. True to its name, it was an amalgam of hoodie sweatshirt and footie pajamas, available in Classic Pink, Holiday Cheer, Varsity, and Leopard. Four buxom young females modeled the various prints. Classic Pink demonstrated that the footie component was removable, showing a titillating flash of ankle in process; Leopard Print had a "wild side" and pawed suggestively at the camera; Holiday Cheer threw her arms adoringly around her boyfriend, who had presumably gifted the pajama suit to her and who would also presumably be getting lucky offscreen in a few seconds. All the while, Pachelbel's Jingle Bells continued to fill the space like a minor gas leak, not killing us exactly but still leaving a dull, persistent throbbing behind the eyes.

If I had been [culturally] high earlier, blissed out, then this was the flip side, the bad trip. I searched myself for that inner sanctum of Schubert, Eliot, essential meaning, etc. that had been so accessible mere hours before, but now it seemed irretrievably lost, eclipsed by canned music and simpering floozies in polar fleece. Talk about Schlock! I was seasick. How could these disparate elements, the sublimely metaphysical and the cloyingly material, even coexist? How was it that the two worlds did not destroy one another entirely? And then I realized that all of my elitist asshole posturing masked a shameful truth: I really, really wanted a Hoodie-Footie. I wanted fluffy head-to-toe insulation against the world, against the stultifying demands of the Western Canon. I wanted to learn about the true meaning of Christmas from choirs of rosy-cheeked children. I wanted to be placated by such things, and yet I could never truly embrace them because I knew myself too well: no sooner would I don a Hoodie-Footie than I would become disgusted, cast it off, and immerse myself in wintry, inconsolable Schubert, and THEN I would go press my nose against the window of some snuggly Hooded-Footed couple and disdain their lack of greater awareness, all the while secretly coveting their simple comfort... I, the Wanderer, banished to the Outside with nobody but myself to blame...!

Felix must have sensed me slipping away, must have shared in my spiritual malaise, because he gave up on his shepherd's pie and said, "Let's get out of here." We paid, then exited the pub and its pernicious cheer. The fumy neon New York night crooned to us, soothed our sugar-sick souls and we were much better. But Felix had to be on his way, so we walked in the direction of Penn Station."So I read somewhere," he said, "that Penn Station used to be this huge beautiful grand complex, but then they tore it down sometime in the '60s. Right?"

"Yeah," I said. "I Wikipedia'd it one day. They wanted to 'option the air rights,' which means basically that they wanted to build more skyscrapers and office space and put the railways underground. But the demolition caused a huge uproar. People had loved the old architecture. There's still a little part of the old station somewhere around here-- I think it's a post office now. Looks neoclassical." Felix wanted to see it, so we went a few extra blocks to the lone edifice, stared at the wrought iron doorways, the steep mounting steps like the Steps to Parnassus, the rows upon rows of white stone columns (Ionian or Corinthian? Doric? neither of us could remember). Across the street loomed a sleek modern building facade upon which some sultry photoshopped creature modeled H & M's latest push-up bra for only $13.95. "Look at all of this!" said Felix with a sweeping gesture. "In two thousand years, will archaeologists be excavating the remains of these buildings? The colonnade in rubble? And the faint traces of lingerie advertisement on some wall fragment? Seriously, what the hell kinds of INSANE things will they think about us and our civilization?" I laughed and had no answer.

It was time to go, so we descended into the earth, hugged, promised to visit each other soon, made our ways to opposite train platforms. I felt a slight lump in my throat that I always seem to get whenever saying goodbye to people in public spaces, no matter if our parting is completely temporary and I'll see them next week or call them in forty-eight hours but it's the whole principle of the place, the transit station, the always coming and going, beginnings and endings on display, time marked out in small parcels. And then my train arrived and I got on and found a seat, still imagining some archaeologist from Time Future (an infinitely more fractured time) who would study the remnants of our strange eclectic buildings and would dream, with a stab of longing, of the warm human connections that once might have flourished in their shadow...