graduation

so, i graduated.
and i think i feel more lost than ever.


but tonight my dad and i saw a really good documentary and ate vegan cheesecake. and it was pouring rain and we ran beneath one umbrella, leaping over puddles.

sometimes, i am tired of thinking and i just went to experience and feel. instead of journaling and reflecting, i sink into a film or a song. to be in a world other than the one in my head.

books!

I love watching people who smile while they're reading.

a musical

i saw the film "once" today. it's a contemporary musical, set in dublin, and is absolutely brilliant, simple, tiny! it explores the process of music, music as a language, music as healing, music as community and communication. there's this one scene where after spending an entire weekend in a studio recording songs, the musicians all go on a little road trip to the ocean and when they get there, they run around on the sand and play frisbee and run with a dog and it's the most beautiful scene in the world. the way it was shot and then edited, with the music beneath...and you can just feel how the connection among the people is so deeply rooted in the music they made together.

don't you sometimes just feel like you're going to jump out of your body with excitement when you think about the power of music???


also! "paris, je t'aime" was amazing!!!
and coming up is a summer of great cinema! i'm excited.

new york's been a little cold lately...still the parks are all so GREEN. the trees are really living.

this morning

this morning i went on a walk in the east river park. families were having picnics, and people were sailing on the water between brooklyn and manhattan, and groups played games of basketball and soccer and baseball in the fields.

there is a bridge near my apartment that allows pedestrians to cross the FDR highway and get to the path by the river. on my way back home, crossing the bridge back over to my neighborhood, i passed a young boy walking toward the park. he was carrying a basketball and on top of the ball, he carried a silver tray with a homemade cake on it covered in white frosting. this made me feel so nice! he was going to celebrate a birthday with sweets and basketball by the river.

every weekend, my neighborhood feels like summer.

current favorites

Favorite way to kill time:
watching dogs in the dog park

Favorite conversation topic:
Murakami's Norwegian Wood

Favorite way to fall asleep:
listening to Dirty Three

Favorite place to put my hands:
on my guitar's strings

Favorite way to feel better:
long long long walk

Favorite thing to eat at night:
watermelon

Favorite stanza in a song:
We could stand for a century,
staring,
with our heads cocked,
in the broad daylight at this thing:
Joy,
landlocked in bodies that don't keep--
dumbstruck with the sweetness of being,
till we don't be.

spring is here!

today is the first t-shirt day in a long, long, long time. i actually prefer sweater weather, but today is unbelievably gorgeous. i decided to celebrate spring by putting down the book that i really need to finish reading and going on a lovely bike ride. i went from east river park to south street seaport to battery park to hudson river park up to the chelsea piers and back. tremendous!

the best part is how i feel when i ride. my mind is so free! not free to think, but free to not think. my focus is entirely on how to keep moving without hitting anyone or killing myself. i don't think about school or my future or loneliness or love or any other emotions or people in my life or people i've lost.

my thoughts consist of speeches i would yell at the idiotic pedestrians who walk in the bike path (though there is a separate walking path!) if i only had the chance to express myself to them. my thoughts also consist of random evaluations of the towering buildings and of reflections on the birds and dogs and humans hanging out on the grass beside the river.

i guess i can call this being in the moment. whatever words i am saying to myself deal entirely with the present--how to continue soaring and enjoying the moment. there is no space to dwell on the issues that haunt me when i'm trying to read or trying to sleep or when i'm walking around the city. my body and my mind are united in an effort to move forward smoothly and breathe in the beautiful spring air while the blue blue blue sky smiles at me and the day embraces me with a sweet, sweet hug.

after my glorious ride, i came back to my neighborhood and rode by an ice cream truck (it is spring!) and cheerful individuals in t-shirts on the streets (it is spring!). then i reached my building, to return to reading/thinking, unfortunately. and just as i was about to do the difficult little trick where i get my bike in the door before the door slams against it...

a nice young man said: "lemme get dat sweetie" (and held open the door)
me: "oh thank you! thank you!"
nice young man: "is der anotha one?" (and he looked in to see the second door. then he entered my building and opened that door for me!)
me: "oh thank you! thank you!"
nice young man: "sure, mama"
me: "have a nice day!"
nice young man: "you too!"


i love it that his simple gesture brought me such great joy.

current obsessions

1. grapefruit
2. bike paths
3. will oldham (my constant obsession, indeed)
4. making and receiving mix CDs
5. the village voice on tuesday nights

!!!!!!!!!!!!

cleaning

Sometimes very simple steps can help me breathe from a healthy, clean place.



This photograph is my newest friend.

the grass is always greener on the other side

since forever and ever, i've been thinking in "what if"s and wondering incessantly about what i do not have (though i realize that this is ridiculous). today i am thinking about this path i've taken that's brought me here, to new york city, and how this chapter will soon end. and it was one simple decision that placed me in this world and not another one.

i don't think i believe in regret. but for the last three years i've wondered what form my life would have taken had i chosen a different place to spend the four years of this chapter of my growth. when i was in the middle of nowhere, in bennington, vermont, all i wanted was to get out. to be in the city where things were happening, where i could interact with people other than just rich, white, 18-22 year old college students. i wanted diversity and culture and all the magic that is alive in this terrific place. so one day i just made the decision, and that was it. i left the rolling hills where autumn was so beautiful you'd cry just looking out your window, and i came to this island of concrete.

what if i'd initially picked any of the other schools? what if i went to bard or hampshire or friends' world? it is pointless and stupid to think in this way because i cannot go back four years and re-decide. but i do think this way, and it's very painful.

there are days when this city swallows me whole. when the anonymity and loneliness are oppressive. when the buildings are all i see and there aren't gardens with organic vegetables or sunsets over mountains or silence. there is no silence here.

today i am very upset because i feel like maybe i made a mistake. new york city will always be here. it isn't going anywhere. almost every person i've met here whom i've enjoyed has been in his/her late-20s or 30s or 40s or 50s or 60s. in other words...not college students. people journey here after they experience the chapter that i decided to live here. i feel so foolish! like i've missed out on something that i will never be able to gain...because i was in a rush to meet this place.

i'm sure this makes no sense or seems like a pointless stretch of complaints. i am simply mad at myself today. i am thinking what if what if what if. what if i'd gone to the countryside of massachusetts.

i can answer the "what if" to some degree. if i had not come to nyc, i never would have experienced living with nick for a year. i probably wouldn't have made the kibbutz documentary. i probably wouldn't have gotten closer to my brother.

but right now, i am thinking about how lovely the trees smelled in vermont and how quiet the mornings were when everyone was asleep. i'm thinking of that academic freedom that is coupled with all those middle-of-nowhere liberal arts institutions that i'm what if-ing about.

ok, enough.

dancing up boulders

I'm having a terrible week.
I want to dance up a mountain like the characters in Jack Kerouac's story.
From The Dharma Bums:


...it seemed that I had seen the ancient afternoon of that trail, from meadow rocks and lupine posies, to sudden revisits with the roaring stream with its splashed snag bridges and undersea greennesses, there was something inexpressibly broken in my heart as though I'd lived before and walked this trail, under similar circumstances with a fellow Bodhisattva, but maybe on a more important journey, I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Ecstasy, even, I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass. As we got higher we got more tired and now like two true mountain climbers we weren't talking any more and didn't have to talk and were glad, in fact Japhy mentioned that, turned to me after a half-hour's silence, "This is the way I like it, when you get going there's just no need to talk, as if we were animals and just communicated by silent telepathy." So huddled in our own thoughts we tromped on....Pretty soon we got to the top of the part of the trail that was a trail no more, to the incomparable dreamy meadow, which had a beautiful pond, and after that it was boulders and nothing but boulders.