sorry i'm not home right now, i'm walking in the spider webs, so leave a message and i'll call you back.

i used to be the kind of person that answered my phone. all the time, i mean. i used to be the person who woke up in the middle of the night, got out of my warm and comfortable bed, and crossed the room just to answer the phone. it never really mattered who it was. i never liked the idea of screening calls. i didn't think it was fair. i think it has to do with some deep rooted hope that if i answered everyone's calls, everyone would answer mine. or maybe i just really liked to talk? who knows. the point is, i was reliable. i was the girl who answered her phone.

however, i've found that i've become increasingly the opposite. i let it ring until it eventually goes to voicemail. i stare at it as my friends or family members names come up on the screen. is it a sign of growing up and finding discretion in who i talk to and when? 

or is it a sign of depression?

i aim to be intriguing.

a girl just ordered a coffee with a beanie on top of her head. not on her head- merely resting atop her head. it's downtown manhattan- i've seen weirder.

the men at the table next to me have been having a rather loud conversation for the past hour about life and philosophy and the other typical musings you tend to hear on a thursday afternoon from clearly unemployed "artist" men who gather at a bookstore coffee shops. as is the way with unemployed "artist" men who sit musing at coffee shops, one of the men stopped the girl and asked her why she was wearing her hat like that.

her response: because i had no where else to put it. i was too warm with it on, and i had no where else to put it.

"artist" man: hmmm... intriguing. 

girl with hat: well, i aim to be intriguing. 

there couldn't have been a more perfect response. 

first of all, don't we all "aim to be intriguing"?

 i once read the following in a wonderful little novel called Tolstoy Lied:

don't most of us wait for the surgeon to tell me: "you were not in the least bit normal, not ordinary and invincible flesh and blood at all. inside you are exceptional. inside you are guilt... frescoed. you are driven not by the muscle beating in your chest, but by a pump of alabaster, quicksilver."

don't we all secretly hope that if nothing else, people are intrigued by us? that if nothing else, we are as different and as special as our parents told us we were?

secondly- shouldn't she just have began with that? wasn't that actually the reason she placed the had on her head in the first place... so that someone would ask? aren't we are a generation that has forgotten the art of subtlety in exchange for some sort of confirmation of identity? we go to great lengths to forgo privacy and disregard boundary for the sake of intrigue. we dangle information about ourselves into cyberspace, hoping that someone will be enchanted. it has become our driving force.

we, collectively, aim to be intriguing. 

borderline personality disorder.

being alone in new york begs the question: are you ever alone in new york? in a city that constantly reminds you of it's crowds... the subway rumbling under your feet as you sit alone in the angelika, the people brushing up against your shoulders as you try to shuffle through soho, the sirens that wake you up while you spend another night sleeping alone... is it possible to be alone? the city itself is like a glowing sign constantly flickering "you are not alone". "you are not alone". but one of the letters missing. the neon is buzzing only to burn out. is it cliché to be lonely in a city of 6 million? is it cliché because everyone is actually alone in new york?

ever since i moved to the city, the city itself has been described to me on multiple occasions as being full of people without peripheral vision. everyone is looking straight ahead. all the time. never looking to the side. we are all on some sort of track- some sort of destination in mind. it's autopia at disneyland and when you are a kid it is the most exciting ride in the whole park. when you are a kid- you are driving... you actually believe you are in control of the car. when you are a kid you believe that you are aimless-- you can turn right or left as your heart desires. the reason the car is going straight is because you are choosing for it to go straight. only, one day you discover that you have lost the ability to turn the car. or maybe that it never existed in the first place. one day you realize that being alone in the car has lost it's appeal. when you are a kid you don't want the car to crash. if you are in new york city long enough, crashing seems like the only viable option.

that's why we make messes of our personal lives. why we sleep with people we don't care about. why we smoke more cigarettes than we know we should. it's the source of all our hangovers.

we need to feel like we still have the ability to crash the car at any second.

it would be much simpler, much less messy, much less dangerous for our lungs if instead we just looked around every once and a while.

to start from the very beginning. a very good place to start.

as humans we seem to feel the need to talk: to find words and images, to organize shaking experience into narrative, to bring the extra-ordinary back to the ordinary, the 'unspeakable' to the spoken. typically we do this spontaneously, naturally, and in company. we contrive to bridge the gulf between language and experience.

- inga clendinnen

the first words are always the hardest. i never know where to begin. i don't think anyone really ever does. endings are clear. they are definite. there is a moment when something stops. "now you see it, now you don't" kind of moments. beginnings, though, are much more subtle. much more amorphous. ambiguous. rarely in life can you point to a moment and say, this is where it all started. even birth is ambiguous. the heart starts beating long before we see the light of day. there are huge political battles fought to define when it is that we begin being human. to define when it is that life begins.

i am no good with beginnings. i'm not really sure that i'm good with endings either, but i am sure that that is not what this is about. this is about the middle. the wandering and meandering and winding down the crooked path of life. the realization that one day you woke up and realized that life doesn't exactly look like what you thought it would. you did everything right. you went to college. you had ideas. you had ambitions. you had dreams. you are going to make a difference. but things no longer look like they used to. being a grown up doesn't feel like you thought it would. 

no one's life really falls into place at 23. or at least i tell myself that because mine hasn't. college ended and instead of a path i was left with only possibility. so here's to turning the possibilities into realities. the ideas into words. the unspeakable to the spoken. here is my ode to possibility.