Time is really going turbo on me. It felt like just yesterday I was stuck in what was perhaps the most uncomfortable summer of my life—and now it’s November. My favorite holiday is almost here. My favorite season is a month away. And.. and..I think I’ve mustered up some sort of routine! If time could just chill out for a little while right now, that’d be cool.

As Nicole put it to me yesterday, “Dare I say we both have structure in our lives?!” I think we both made it—finally. Our lives sort of mirrored one another’s for the last five months. I went first. I spent all summer with a backpack, trekking back and forth from Morningside Heights to Chelsea to Greenpoint to Northport. I slept in a different bed each night, worked in a cubicle and wore a tie at a restaurant and lived in libraries, wondering what the hell. I. was. doing. In my head, I mapped out driving routes to Seattle. I wondered if I should have accepted my Peace Corps invitation. I contemplated building a lean-to and writing a very, very long novel about absolutely nothing.  

My oh my have times a’ changed (cue Dylan song).

When I moved to Brooklyn, (and freaked the fuck out), and got a job (!), I passed the baton off to Nicole. After finishing her Master’s and oh, just flying to Iceland for a quick vacation with friends and glaciers, she took on the role of what we like to call “the schlepper.” With backpack on, avocados and fig bars in purse, and enough clothes to get through the week, she began her full time 9-5ish job with a super-rich, ancient-old lawyer while living the bed-hopping life. While staying with friends and running around this whole damn city with some quick in-and-outs on the LIRR is often FUN, it’s tiring. And that whole “when will this stop, am I really moving forward?” thing creates anxiety. Lots of it.

All is different now. Nicole just accepted a kickass job at some environmental place doing environmental things with excel spreadsheets and apparently a good-looking boss.  (I’ll never really understand what you know and what you do). I’ve moved fulltime to Greatist, where I work on what I love with wonderful people in an incredibly healthy environment. It’s crazy, it’s awesome. We made it.

Now with having some sense of structure, I can breathe easy. We can laugh at what will always be our lives: kinda funny, kinda weird, and kinda ridiculous. Exhibit A? A month or so ago Nicole warned me that she had to Skype with someone mad early when she was sleeping over. I heard her get up and call Bed from Nepal, an environmental scholar who she found buried deep in a works cited. They talked about farming systems in Chitwan, Dhading, and Gorkha (wait, you’ve never heard of those places?). He offered to sponsor her for her Fulbright application. Fast forward to a week ago, and Nicole met Bed at Port Authority and played tour-guide for his first time EVER in New York City. Here is Bed:

I cant top that one, but I did make a new Peruvian friend who told me all about the time she put a baby shark in her arch nemesis’s suitcase before she flew to France (brilliant). I played in a city-wide startup basketball tournament only to guard a power-house from my high school that was never particularly friendly. I’ve dabbled in squash and lifted weights and wrote “poems” and roasted vegetables and wondered over and over why nobody ever smiles on the subway.  I’ve learned how to tweet (#nbd), I know what SEO means and sorta think it’s crazy cool, and I’ve become a Wednesday night regular at a bar, which comes with perks in the form of free tequila shots. (taco tacooo).

And while all this might be one long ramble, I felt compelled to write ever since Nic landed her job. Even though it’s only me writing on here, this will always be our blog. I’ll never forget writing this post when living in a door-less, window-less basement of my friends house in a DC suburb, knowing that I didn’t want to stop writing, that I had to keep going, that it had to take me places. I wanted to document what would come of our lives, what driving aimlessly around the states and moving to manhattan and dc and touring and teaching would amount to. Nic studied Climate and Society at Columbia and has now taken these skills from classroom to office. I went from swing dancing in Denver to writing about salsa. I think we’re both on to something.  

A Place 

(for nic)

2,170 miles away exists a place.

It’s 76,519 acres—millions of square feet long

and wide. An anomaly really, how beauty exists

in such measurements, in my mind. A stretch of

red fins tower into a cobalt sky, or does the sky

dive down to meet it? Heaven meets earth meets

this place where I cried as we drove, you and me,

learning that life should be this:  

becoming humbled by rocks. 

This place has a mailbox that doesn’t

deliver what I can’t put to poetry: I miss you. And

that place we placed our tent stood by the river

where we washed our faces and dishes before we 

continued to climb on thick slabs of rock into the sunrise.

We’ll go back is what we promised, to the place

with fins and arches and millions of words

I don’t understand. And with cold beer and thick socks

we’ll go back to everything that happened and didn’t,

every blink and breath.

It’s your lucky day: TWO poems.

This may be a bad idea if I can’t write one tomorrow. 

Green Shorts

Green shorts stuffed in drawers
too many, homes and houses. And bracelets found
in dirt, glittered and ironic: beautiful and trash.

Are moments just that, made up in minds? An image constructed by thoughts
hours and hours of years ago? And if I keep my
headphones on, will I not
shield sounds, but remove them from the world?

We all create reality, using free-will to craft any piece
of fine jewelry, sew any pair
of green shorts, only for them to become
a secret code for what was never
correct.

And what are you so afraid of,
wearing sunglasses on a dark morning,
on a dark subway?

Tap, tip tap, over
and over in 3:4 time,
rain conducted by clouds,
it’s not as loud as it seems.
Tap, tip tap on the tin roof,
and I’m not afraid of thunder this time.
I lay and listen to the orchestra in the woods—
there is no time for sleep in the middle of the night.
Tap, tip tap above my bed,
the gods as playful as any person
lucky enough to be here. 

 Let’s talk poems.

These, my friends, aren’t poems. Poems have hidden structure, follow hidden rules, and are often really, really confusing. When I read poems, I usually have no idea what’s going on. If I’m listening aloud, I’ll nod and “aww,” when the truth of the matter is I only liked that one line, and I don’t get the ending. (Can you include some spark notes? And who invented the whole no-rhyming-poem-thing anyway?). 

When I write poems, I try to scramble words to make it sound more confusing. Yep, I “trick” people into thinking I’m some distance cousin of Emily Dickinson or a girl with an MFA under her belt. So instead of poems, think of these as stories that can have run-on sentences and weird imagery —no theme or falling action.

Perhaps just words that skew meaning, or make us create our own.

The Other Side of the World

They met at the other side of the world,

with dust and dirt and all things pure.

Strangers foreign to themselves,

they kept secrets from themselves and told each other

everything.

At the other side of the world, people

laugh at nearly nothing, and never cry

for all things worth it. And I was dropped off

on the dirt road, where I walked and walked

south of the sun, alone and completely complete,

burning trash and syncopated rhythms.

You stayed close to home, with the belief

that all things come: 5 o’clock, completed puzzles

and rooms  filled with lovers curled around the mouth,

swallowed by the strength of skin.

And we walked to the most beautiful

place in the world, and all I saw were

buildings and wire, metal and

a longing for something better than beautiful.

I gave up writing trying to write poetry after taking an incredibly intimidating contemporary poetry class circa 2007. But I went to my first poetry reading on Wednesday, and it put me in a mood. So of course this week has been spent with late-night notebook scribbling, writing down words and phrases on the subway, and wondering if anything I pen could raise an eyebrow. I don’t do this.

But it’s a new decade, right? 

PS) Like most things, don’t read too much into this. Inspired by others, often.

Those Days Are These Days

 You asked, when did we become adults? 

August, maybe. Blurred lines,

really. Responsibility, leaving work and arriving at the

house to collapse and pause for a breathe

before going back for more.

Weekends once again matter, masking

exhaustion with whiskey, only for sleep to show its

face as we wake up past noon. Only to

stay in wool socks and warm pants, only to

greet the day today, tomorrow.

And here we are on the R train, riding wrong

into Manhattan, rememorizing subways lines

we thought we knew so well.

And time we know not either. Adulthood crept in, all at once and

not at all. And with our pencil skirts and planners, we eat

M&Ms in the car, wondering why the blue ones were such a big deal,

and when we’ll crash another wedding in Albuquerque,

and if eating pasta straight from the pot is

all right.

Maybe we’re young, still and always, and those

days are these days. Yes, whoever they are is right: we always want what we can’t have.

Kids want pancakes for dinner,

adults want new kitchens and vacations,

and we want better love and lower rent. Even when

we spend our savings on spirits and are loved

down the road.

Yesterday, I saw an advertisement on the subway that made my heart drop: “Happiness is ordering food on your phone without saying a word.”

First of all, since when was the idea of a phone..and not talking… a thing? Oh, since texting was invented in 2005, thanks to Matti Makkonen. But what started as a seemingly harmless way to communicate dominoed into a smart-phone stampede (what are we up to, iphone 7?) that invites us to do anything but talk on the phone. And best yet, according to this ad, not having to verbally correspond with someone is… “happiness.” Not having to drive to the grocery store. Not having to interact with the burrito guy. Not even having to, oh goodness, get out your laptop to order online.

Let me interrupt to say that I’m not anti-technology. While I often believe I belong in a cabin in the middle of the woods with only a wood burning stove, a pen and paper, and lots of bourbon (there’d be no wifi, what else is there to do?), I realize that’s just me. And I appreciate technology. It changed the world. It’s changing the world. Much good has come of it.

But how convenient is too convenient?

Do we really need kindles? (Are they saving babies?)

Will our world fall a part if we have to look up movie times in gasp–a printed newspaper?

Has anyone ever thought about stepping outside to check the weather? (I know I know, there’s an app for that)

And do we really need to order our chinese food on an iphone in order to be happy?

When did the convenience of technology turn into the unnecessary? I’ve lived a pretty good life so far without knowing the exact time the subway is coming; I can deposit a check at the bank, not through my phone (creepy?); and I can look at a map before I leave home to figure out where I’m headed (I did drive around the country like this, and made it back alive).

Most importantly, I can find a myriad of ways to exude my own happiness, without it deriving from “ordering my food on my phone without saying a word.” I’ll strike up a conversation with the burrito guy, and it’ll make my day. 

Because I can’t think of seven.

1. I ran a 5K–the first one I’ve run since 2006! I had absolutely no idea what to expect, but went into it with a completely different mindset and set of legs since my hardxcorex days of Northport High School Cross Country.  It was actually relatively fun, although I definitely did not miss the feeling of utter exhaustion….. and the reminder that I have asthma. No matter–the idea of rum-glazed banana stuffed french toast got me through the last mile, which was well deserved (with a side of hard-apple cider) post race.

2. I also managed to pop in n out of Northport for a hot five-hours to celebrate my dad’s 40th (or so) birthday. Upon coming home, I saw my parent’s new kitchen! It was oddly beautiful, since our old kitchen was the only kitchen I knew of from age zero to 23. Still, it was time for an upgrade, and it looks AWESOME and makes our house 10 x’s more bad ass.

3. At work, we gave each other nicknames (including a food item) that match our personalities and what we bring to Greatist.  Apparently everyone at work thinks I’m a hippy (I swear I shower and don’t actually love the environment) ….so I was deemed Zen/Almond. Namaste?

4. Dog watching has become a new hobby of mine. It’s about a billion times better than bird watching. I sit myself on a bench and watch people walk their dogs, and I rate them 1-10. Also, upon judging their owners for approximately four seconds, I see whether or not me asking to pet their dog (if a 7 or higher)  would be deemed weird/totally okay/annoying/a subtle act of flirtation. (This dog is a 10 out of 10)

5. After that lovely 5K I mentioned earlier (see #1), I made it back to Brooklyn in one piece to go to the Lodge with some pals. Its decor is what you would expect for a place called The Lodge, which is why I like it. Even better- we ordered a ton of food, six bloody mary’s, and coffee, and our check magically came out to $17. Pays to be girls?

6. I tried Hot Yoga for the first time. Long story short, I sweat more than I thought was humanly possible, I cried, I cursed, and I will probably never go again.