Sunday Top Ten: You Pack Your Bags You Say I Love You But I Cannot Stay [City Girl: The Sequel]

So! Here we are in the clear -- that promised no-L Word land where Sunday Top Tens drop on Sundays ('cause of the Lord, obvs) and other blog posts appear more frequently. Yet I've spent four days attempting to write a fantastic mind-blowing blog post to initiate this new era, and now it's Sunday, and this is what I've accomplished: about two solid hours of staring at the wall, ten separate and equally unfruitful attempts to begin cleaning my room, twenty re-applications of eyeliner and/or blush (v. important when sitting alone at one's desk all day), approximately 300 check-ups on the youtube uhhatsxsw group boards, twentysomething sitemeter checks and subsequent track-downs of referring forum message posts, about two solid hours of staring at the floor, maybe 20 emails max, serious analysis of my hamstring/glute/cellulite development (and subsequent thoughts about my possible insanity), 60 changes from sweatpants to jeans and back again, massive french fry/cheeseburger/chicken fingers/eggs consumption, the installation of my new printer software and! This sentence! -- written (I believe) almost entirely in the passive voice (big no-no).

'Cause I think I've gotten to that point ... the point where when you take "all potential material" and then subtract "material I've already blogged about," "material I'm using in my book" and "material I can't talk about" ... you get ... um. Not a whole lot left to say. Let's say this is a sequel to this.

I keep ditching blogs after a few hours of work on them, which's exhausting. So I'm gonna go ahead with this one, despite urges to delete it and start over. This blog has no cohesive thought pattern. It's mostly a memoir, and it goes from nowhere to nowhere by claiming to be about somewhere. Next week I'm gonna use one of your topics.

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Here's the idea; I'm doing a reading on April 17th at Happy Endings -- I'll be reading, with Stephanie Whited, "Fucking Around" (the original -- I did a "Fucking Around 2: Local Edition" for the reading in September), which appears in the new book Dirty Girls: Erotica for Women. Are you COMING TO THE READING? Buying the book?!!! If you don't, I'm never talking to you again. Put it on your calender STAT.

So when I re-visited the story -- which personifies cities -- before sending it to Stephanie, and also when I was doing the interview, I was thinking about Place. Travel. And so on ... 'cause I've been a little jetsetter in '08 ... and, I'm looking for good travel essays to read, do you know of any good travel writers? Gimme some leads ... I'm trying to figure out a good angle for a piece about an upcoming trip and I don't know where to begin.

Usually too much traveling stresses me out (see; last year in which I didn't even board an airplane). But during my Agoraphobic Zen Meditation Gestation Period last fall, I became a monk with no attachment to this home and therefore I'm freewheelin'.

At the same time ... Haviland's gonna stay in L.A. for a few more months; she loves it. When I met Carly she was aiming to relocate to L.A. within a year -- instead, she's moving into her first Manhattan apartment this week. A;ex and Natalie are both looking for more permanent Manhattan residences. After many months away, Heather's back in the city, stage managing on Broadway.

And for the first time since moving here four years ago; I'm taking a serious break -- I'll be out of the city for most of the next two months. I will return like The Shining.

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"New York fucks me. New York fucks me so hard that I cry."
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I'm thinking about why I'm still here, and where else I've been. I'm thinking if I could be anywhere else, and if so when and how. I'm thinking about my friends settling in here or moving, and about every landscape I've resided in besides New York -- places I know not by choice but by circumstance -- and how different it feels to be where we want to be instead of where we've been born, or schooled. I'm wondering when my number one attachment to the city stopped being the city itself and started being the people living here.

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"Here I arrive there."
(Galway Kinnel, "The Road Between Here and There.")
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Me: I told New York I was going to start seeing other places.
New York: You'll come back.
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SUNDAY TOP TEN: WHERE I'M CALLING FROM
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10. Presently: New York As a girl; I believed everyone -- literally, everyone -- wanted to live in New York.

It seemed inherently better; brighter lights, bolder songs, deeper & more dramatic love affairs, loftier careers, sharper children, more dramatic art. I didn't think everyone would move there -- or even try to -- only that it was, like a tropical beach w/palm tree or Prince(ss) Charming -- something most everyone enjoyed dreaming of.

I grew up and realized that wasn't true ... but still I cannot, to this day, recall how I even got the idea that I wanted to live here, it's just always been that way. Was it someone else's idea, related to wanting to be an actress, or to the Muppets or YA novels? Does anyone remember? Do you?

I envy those with roots and inertia, those who've been someplace and stayed, or stayed close, who haven't needed to get away and reinvent and leave leave leave leave all the time, or move someplace where you can initiate a do-over without switching cities.

December 2003, Michigan, out for drinks with MacGrill friends & talking about the city to a coworker who told me she'd always wanted to visit NYC, that she envied my plans to move there ... She'd been living in the same small town in Michigan all her life, she said, and hadn't ever given much thought to leaving. I asked why, she said, "Well, I just can't imagine going anywhere else, this is where my family is," and then I thought, maybe that's the thing that separates people who move to cities from those that don't. We, for whatever reason, don't feel tethered to our family or community. There's nothing keeping us where we started from, or there's something even stronger than that (I'm thinking now of specific dreams) pulling us away.

9. Recently

Los Angeles

Over the past few months I've spent time in Miami, Orlando, Los Angeles and Austin, and though I found the weather more pleasant everywhere else, and Austin's scored vibe is probs healthier than NYC's chaotic reverb ... still, this city's made me a masochist to feel worthy of its streets, trains, secrets ... and I don't know if I could ever find a relationship this intense anywhere else. Nevertheless, I didn't want to come home when I was gone, but I think that's 'cause vaycay's always more fun than actual life, even if you live in New York.

Specifically, Miami and Los Angeles -- while super-fun to visit -- felt like skating a shiny expensive surface, flexibility relative to muscle, and everyone smiling about it, like obeying a different kind of ethos, like a sports car or a smile from a cashier or like songs about music. The sky/landscape is beautiful in those places but ... I prefer regions beneath surface: things you've burned and why, when and how you let go of pride, who you wish had never seen you cry, but did, what makes you wet, what's the first thing you do after leaving your office that you can't do while you're inside it.

Miami was one of the highlights of my year, but I knew I could never live there after that terrible season of The Real World.

Orlando

If you're a non-native New York resident who's involved in the arts, you have an implicated relationship to Los Angeles because we choose to live here, not there. But also; I know its representations better than it's actuality. The cycle of beach-going, expensive clothes shopping, and romantic drama typified in Beverly Hills 90210, The O.C. and South of Nowhere. Six Feet Under is set in L.A., but I always forgot that it was -- sometimes it felt like it could be any reasonably large city. The L Word, obvs, in West Hollywood.

Austin: will do in a pinch. Is flat and hot and relentlessly wide-open and soothing like a third drink. Reminds me of other places I could imagine raising a family: Berkley, Madison, Boulder, Ann Arbor, Burlington, Athens, Brooklyn. Seems it would be pleasant but it's in Texas, I'm not a Southern girl, I hate the heat. Also ... Austin doesn't humble me and make me want to give up every day -- like New York does -- which is how I check myself to see how bad I still want it.

8. Ann Arbor, MI (81-90) (92-97)/(00-01)(01-04)
"Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication amongst themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voice's accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place."
-Italo Calvino, "Cities & Memory 5," Invisible Cities
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The house I grew up in 'til 1994

I've lived so many lives there (divided neatly by unexpected tragedy), the town's almost amorphous to me. Most just know the University of Michigan. I'm always qualifying when I speak of my roots -- not that Midwest, you know, it's Ann Arbor. It's a college town. Not a suburb, really, no ... but no gun racks either. And going to University there; that was another town, too. I watched Sex and The City DVDs and waited to return. Ann Arbor wants you to like it, just the way it is, and however it may become.

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7. Ypsilanti, MI ('02)

Never had a chance with me. Is sprawl, is grey, feels sad or disappointed sometimes. In middle school, we'd played East and West, Ypsilanti's public schools, in basketball, they crushed us every time.

A decade later, when I started working at the MacGrill (while at U of M) out by the US-23 exit, I started hanging out with kids who lived there, mostly Eastern Michigan students, and eventually ended up living there w/my annoying boyfriend.

A few blocks down from our wall-to-wall cream-carpeted home (in its mind-numbing housing development) was a strip mall featuring Wal-Mart AND Big Lots, and this is what I did when feeling empty: bargain hunt. Such satisfaction. Driving, picking up Subway sandwiches, taking Oscar outside, grocery shopping, commuting, getting the mail, getting yelled at. People in Ypsilanti were always saying they'd get a raise soon, were never paid what they needed, or already need.

Ypsi's not sure who it wants to be -- a hip downtown but also rows and rows of sprawling strip malls on all sides with stores like Honeybaked Ham, Ace Hardware, Burlington Coat Factory. Then there's campus and the world-famous Penis Tower, historic Depot Town. There's where I was elbowed in the eye.

It's hard to have an affair in Ypsilanti, but I did, so maybe it wasn't. There's an abandoned paper mill and a body of water, we could sit there and kiss. We told each other all our secrets while the sun set. Then I could drive him home, and then go home to my mean boyfriend, make dinner, clean, stand wistfully on the tiny balcony littered with Oscar's abandoned stuffed paramours he'd humped to death, look at the tiny yard we'd selected. That little yard, and the trees behind it ... felt pathetic. My co-hab wouldn't leave me, so I left him. I felt he'd almost fooled me into giving up New York for the suburbs, I felt like I'd been hypnotized.

Leaving him felt a lot like being elbowed in the eye. But no: that was just his knuckles, our cheap white walls.

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6. Bronxville, NY (Sarah Lawrence College) (Fall '99)

It's all hills, and then the wind like a long flat slap in the face. I was acutely sad there and so I remember the village like that too (but moreso: like the pamphlets sent by SLC) ... tired, hungry (for many things including food) -- but neatly dressed, well organized, by all appearances functional ... the scent of chlorine upon my skin. Bronxville is aggressively quaint. I wished I was in the city, hated the past for being past, hated myself and my shin splints, my overpriced education, coming back on weekends. Many of my friends stayed in their dorms 24-7, eating Rice-a-Roni in bed & watching Radiohead videos, but I explored -- running in the mornings, studying in town at night, and all the walks from the Metro-North. It was beautiful, Bronxville, but while I was there I wasn't in the habit of paying attention to beauty.

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5. Interlochen, MI (97-99)

"My present world was always, in its mildness, a little disappointing. I've never since Ault been in a place where everyone wants the same things; minus a universal currency, it's not always clear to me what I myself want. And anyway, no one's watching to see whether or not you get what you're after -- if at Ault I'd felt mostly unnoticed, I'd also, at certain moments, felt scrutinized. After Ault, I was unaccounted for."
(Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep)

Is love. Or what I knew of it: The Academy. We paid attention to poetry and our desperately important selves. Isolation breeds delusions of grandeur, which is a good thing when applied to insecure & depressive teenagers. It was cold & wooded, but we never had to walk far and besides -- we were kids dreaming of NYC and L.A. But the secure fleeting woods are magical, like Hogwarts. It was by definition temporary. My New York dreams grew specific: I only applied to schools in NYC or the surrounding area. Everyone I knew would be there, or close. It was the only place to go.

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4. Concord, MA (1990)

The Old North Bridge! The Alcott House! Walden Pond! Concord has enough past, it's not worried about the future. This town is America. People should visit Concord instead of NYC, they'd find America on the whole much more pleasant. I can't go back there. I think the first time I saw NY was passing through on our way here, the first time.

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3. Champaign, IL (1981)

September, 1981, the father & mother bring their daughter home from the hospital. Because the mother & father are opposites, their daughter will grow up as opposites (but both sides firmly within her). Outside, the leaves are crispy red & gold and in the daytime, college students in bright orange sweatshirts walk past dutifully with books and at night, they stumble past, drunk and happy. The father reads out loud to his daughter from accounting text books, employing a exciting rise and lilt of the voice. And the daughter listens and believes it. Yes, stock analysis is a fairy tale! There'll be treasure at the end! The parents are in love first with the baby and by default (also from history's account), one another. They have routines by this point, yes? Familiar kisses, the familiar motions of everything. Like everything, if you say it right (and smiling), is that kind of fairy tale.

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2. Chicago, IL

Mom grew up here and describes an adolescence spent on street corners; all red hair, all attitude and teenage rebel scoff, cigarette dangling from unimpressed hand. We'd go see family there, sometimes, it was a default location for vacations or runaway fantasies. Now, Chicago is the home of Ingrid, my ex-boyfriend, Oprah and NPR. When I visited my ex in Chicago in the summer of '05 while passing through, I emerged from the Amtrak station onto familiar streets and realized I've been here a million gazillion times, but I've never given it much thought.

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1. East Clinton, Ohio

I romanticize the farm. I've set too many short stories in Wilmington or Sabina, exploited its heartland and the wholesome American lifestyle I imagined my family lived there (and my father had lived) until we grew up and everything fell apart. I know this place better than anywhere, have returned at least annually since birth, and write about it so much that people often get confused and think I'm from Ohio. I'm not I would've been entirely different. There were pictures like these, of my father's childhood, which he made mythical, just like I do to my own.

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New York: I haven't slept in like, three days.
Me: Do you want to do this later, then?
New York: Why? No, of course not. What are we waiting for?
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Friday night Carly was DJ'ing a party in the East Village at Beauty Bar so Alex and I pre-partied at Lucky Cheng's, "drag queen capital of the world," one of many New York attractions that neatly straddles terrible/AMAZING, which's the best way to be, because you're not too full of either. You can't hear yourself talk there 'cause the drag queens are yelling about giving fake blow jobs to bachelors and bridesmaids who're all drinking from gigantic tubs of fruity liquor. Our server reminded Alex of her alter ego, Chi Chi Rodriguez. It's like Disneyworld with drag queens instead of cartoon characters.

We even stayed at Beauty Bar after Carly left 'cause the next DJ was playing hot music too. That's right: I actually danced. "Danced." Surrounded by weirdos -- a sausage fest, some bitches, a few other homos -- but wtf, who cares, it's New York, a new layer on top of the old -- --

a birthday party there in 2000, with Sarah Lawrence friends, who I'd expected to hate now that I was living in the city but no -- out of context, I realized they were all quite lovely. It wasn't them after all, it was just Bronxville, and how I felt in Bronxville. The hulking, well-lipsticked drag queens petted and solicited and harassed, it was so gaudy, so disgusting, so tourist-oriented, so fucking beautiful.

The reason I'd gone to Manhattan in the first place in 2000 was because I needed to get over it so that I could handle going home for a more affordable education. I'd been dreaming of it since East Clinton, since before my Mom met my Dad, since before Chicago and Champaign, Concord, Ann Arbor, Ypsi, Bronxville, and before during and after those cities ... my twentysomething change-of-address forms.

But lately I've felt like claiming an allegiance for this city is like telling someone about a perverse sexual fetish, like it's fallen out of fashion (though it's always been popular to hate on).

But when I venture out of my hostile neighborhood and into the parts of the city that feel like the place I signed up for, I do still have moments of feeling like Belle in Beauty and the Beast ... like I might start hurling loaves of bread into the air ... like I've gone batshit on everyone and now I'm singing to birds landing on my fingertips.

"I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel ... and really didn't know who I was for ten strange seconds."
-Jack Kerouac
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When I left New York after my first residency here, I was tired of the city and so I spent the summer on the West Coast -- Seattle, Vancouver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Berkley. I returned to the city the next summer, then back to Michigan.

Over the next two months, I'll be spending more time away from here than I've done since moving here in 2004. I wonder how that's gonna feel.

My roots will stay here, and I don't know why really, maybe it's perverted or masochistic. But though I've spoken out against sunshine, I've never argued against perversion or masochism.

Never argued for anywhere else.

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"Here I must turn around and go back and on the way back look carefully to left and to right. For here, the moment all the spaces along the road between here and there -- which the young know are infinite and all others know are not -- get used up, that's it."
-Galway Kinnell
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"New York is three hours late to meet me, like she didn't even miss me. Her eyes are green rimmed with red. She looks sick and devastating and gorgeous. Her nails are perfect and glossy. Later, she will use them to trace the entire length of my spine with a spotted trail of blood, like I did to Los Angeles, but this time I will like it and it will remind me of hearts and love."
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downtown nyc, nov.'05
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