Look, I understand why New York is the city of so many dreams; I understand why people dream of running away to the big city to become stars. But when people disparage their cities in favor of some flowery idea of New York, I want to scream. I would love to live in a city that’s not New York. Not New York sounds so good so much of the time. I’m from a not New York, and the second I graduate, I’m leaving for another not New York (probably Boston, but Philly and DC are also in the running).

And whenever I get back to New York from another city, I think to myself as I walk out of Penn Station, Dammit, it’s New York. And I hate having to wait to leave again.  So the next time someone says, “Well, Boston is nice, but it’s sure not New York,” I’m going to grab them by the shoulders and tell them, “That’s why I’m here.”

1) Breaking Upwards (a charming indie rom-com/break-up movie with a killer soundtrack)

2) Maus (the extremely popular graphic novel/memoir by Art Spiegelman, which I’ve been reading in a class on image and text studies)

3) Registration: I got all the classes I wanted for next semester!

• Dante’s Divine Comedy (with an entertaining professor who really loves Dante, so the class will definitely be fantastic
• Reconsidering the Marriage Plot (this is the one I’m most excited about, but also most worried about because there are only four people registered for it so far! But it’s offered through NSGS, not Lang, and their registration is open until early January, so I still have hope.)
• Intermediate Fiction: All in the Family (I’m nervous for this because fiction is just my secondary genre and I’m paranoid about my ability to produce good, compelling fiction. BUT the class sounds good and it counts for gender studies, too!)
• Contemporary Literature: US Realism (This sounds entirely incredible, and will give me a chance to read lots of important contemporary literary fiction that I’ve never gotten around to–i.e. Franzen, Roth, Munro)
• Urban Forestry (I get to become a certified NYC Tree Pruner! How cool is that? Santiago and I are taking this together because we decided that we wanted not only our respective useless bachelor’s degrees, but also a useless license to keep in our wallets…also, interesting resume tidbit? Hah.)

4) Philadelphia (It really looks like fall there, which is something you can only really get in the parks here. Also, my parents have a wood stove, and on cool nights they’ve had fires going.)

5) Hot spiced cider in Union Square. I bought cider and cinnamon sticks to make it at home, but it’s not nearly as good!

6) Nirvana–I’m revisiting my early teen years, when I was absolutely obsessed. I remember that “Something in the Way” was my favorite (I still know all the lyrics…), which probably says something disturbing about my 15-year-old state of mind. When Santiago isn’t at home, I’ve been plugging into the speaker system in our living room and, presumably, making our neighbors crazy. (They have yappy dogs, so I don’t feel terribly bad about this.)

7) The numerous gender studies/feminist analyses of popular culture “texts” I’ve had to write lately. I had a field day with the creepy Burger King “Breakfast March” commercial, and, more recently, The Ugly Truth. Up next, I think we have to write about music videos (I’m not even going to touch the Rhianna/Eminem video. I think I’d have to gauge my eyes out after watching it even twice). And for my final paper, I’m writing about all the creepy ways fathers manipulate and control their daughters’ sexuality in Secret Life of the American Teenager (the worst show on television, that I secretly can’t stop watching. Also, I loved/hated 7th Heaven. Phew! Nice to get that off my chest…)

8 ) Charles Bukowski. Another perfect example of how fucking deranged I was as a teenager. I even replicated his face in wax in my metals and jewelry class as a freshman! I have both the wax part and the (extremely heavy) metal result in Philly…maybe I’ll upload a picture of it later. Santiago and I have been wanting for some art (our apartment is super boring and blank, except for the cutesy silhouettes I made last year and the Cold War-era paper towel ad, “Are your washrooms breeding Bolsheviks?”), so maybe I should haul the thing back with me.

We managed to see most of the pond (is it a pond?) before our hour ran out, with some bonuses: a tiny turtle on a rock, a creepy, almost hollow-looking twig standing straight up in the water (Santiago thought it looked like someone might be underwater breathing through it, though he isn’t enough of a dope to really believe that), and a boat full of children singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” to which Santiago and I quietly replied, “pedal, pedal, pedal your boat, gently on the pond, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, I really hate this song.”

After finding our way to a subway stop (difficult even with an iPhone), we went to Manhattan to run some errands. After a stop at Best Buy (I needed a portable external hard drive), our errands were derailed by the street fair happening on Broadway between Union Square and Washington Square. We bought too many DVDs, I had a pink lemonade, and Santiago got a chicken gyro. We then decided that we’d already spent enough money for the weekend (especially considering yesterday’s visit to the Ikea in Red Hook) and headed home.

We are planning to go back to Prospect Park again before the pedal boats close for the season, and I’m sure we’ll go again when the ice rink opens.

In June, I went to Ecuador with Santiago. I stayed at his dad’s house in Guayaquil for two weeks. There were some things that were really fun (visiting Malecon 2000 (the waterfront park) with Santiago and his friend Adrian, eating fried plantain puffs with cheese in the middle, playing skeeball and pin ball at the arcade, drinking sangria (too much wine and not enough fruit) with Santiago’s dad’s girlfriend and Julio, Marlan’s soup and tortillas, watching Dexter until 4 AM, visiting Quito for the weekend), some things that were awkward (having not one but two very kind maids who wanted desperately to help me even when I required no assistance (it’s supremely strange to reach to pour a glass of water only to have said glass filled for you by a woman twice your age while you stand, in shock, directly next to the water cooler), listening to my boyfriend’s dad tell vaguely racist and sexist jokes while holding my tongue because he paid for my trip and was feeding me, leaving my suitcase against the wall in my boyfriend’s bedroom every day and coming back (every day) to find that it’s been moved into the closet for no apparent reason (more funny than annoying), attempting to explain “gender studies” to Santiago’s brother), and the downright unpleasant (returning to Guayaquil from Quito at the end of the weekend and spending the entire evening vomiting due to food poisoning (this happens to me way too much), being unable to eat most of the food that was prepared for me (I’m allergic to garlic, onions, and peppers and I’m a vegetarian, all things that are generally unheard of in Ecuador) and feeling guilty for turning down what was, in all likelihood, perfectly good food, leaving Santiago behind without knowing when, exactly, he’d be coming back to the States). Obviously it was “a learning experience.”

In July, I did very little. I returned to the States and spent the entire month in Philadelphia with my parents (save for a weekend with my mom at my apartment in Brooklyn, spent cleaning and organizing, visiting the MoMA, shopping at Pearl River (I want to live there), eating tasty pastries at Fay Da, and making vegetable tempura). My friends from high school M and S performed as The Something Society (they’re fantastic) during open mics at M’s parents’ wonderful coffee shop. M and I hatched a (failed, due mostly to my social incompetence) plan to make a literary magazine as a summer project. My tentative title was “Dead Platypus,” a (more than) slightly bitter reference to the Springside literary magazine, which both M and I worked on throughout high school. M and S also hosted a night of musical performances featuring chocolate covered strawberries and everything from Ke$ha and Rufus Wainwright covers to S’s original compositions. There was also a family reunion/birthday party, but I hardly remember it (I’m no good at parties anyway).

During this uncomfortably hot August, I rediscovered a bookstore I used to love (The Book Trader), came within pages of finishing two very long books (I feel a bit like a failure for not reaching their final pages before classes began), was reunited with Santiago (AT LAST!), and went to Cape Cod for ten days (so relaxing). We also visited my dad’s college professor Gene and his wife Brenda in a town just outside of Ogunquit, Maine (we haven’t visited him since I was in 4th grade or so, which was ten years ago). Gene is hilarious and provocative, and he made us all nervous when he insisted that Santiago explain and defend his position on Israel.

My summer was mostly about reading a preposterous number of online articles, getting riled up about documentaries, watching Dexter, and avoiding being a grown-up. Success. On my last day of break (yesterday), I watched three movies: Sunshine Cleaning (two thumbs up), Up (<3), and The Ugly Truth (dreadful but ultimately entertaining, like most of Katherine Heigl’s films).

I had my first day of classes, starting with an 8 AM (which would suck if it wasn’t a class I really want to take). Thankfully, Santiago just signed up for an 8 AM, too, so I don’t have to make the 7:20 trek to the L train all alone. I will make an honest effort to update more frequently during this semester.

P.S. I somehow never made the connection between Katherine Heigl’s name, “Katherine,” and mine, “Catherine.” Since I have never gone by “Catherine,” I rarely hear it pronounced–I’m so unaccustomed to the way it sounds that it seems sort of foreign to me. Weird.

I am leaving for Ecuador with Santiago on Friday. I’ll be staying at his dad’s house in Guayaquil for two weeks, and probably visiting Quito one weekend. I am entirely unprepared for the equatorial/Ecuadorian climate, so we’ll see how that pans out. I am looking forward to eating lots of beans, rice, and plantains! There will absolutely be updates with pictures of the sights and foods and anything I buy there. So, loyal readers (if there are any who I’ve disappointed with my far-too-long absence), check back!

Jenny and Elise

Jenny liked to learn about new people without getting to know them first.  She’d never met Elise, the girl across the hall, but she’d watched her for months, ever since she moved into Paul’s apartment.

Here is what Jenny knew:

It was late spring, and Elise had changed from short-sleeved baby-doll dresses to cut-offs and tissue-thin tank tops, the kind that are a little too big on purpose so you could see her bra through the armholes and neckline.  Because the fabric was so delicate, Jenny could tell what the bras were made of—the tops would move most freely when Elise was wearing satin, little ripply bumps were visible when it was lace, and cotton and microfiber blends made the shirts stick like static.

Elise hung her lingerie out to dry on the swing-out rack over the alley.  Jenny liked the march of brightly colored, pretty matching sets, and she estimated that there must be at least thirty happy undergarment couples in Elise’s top drawer.

Elise never smiled or said hello to Jenny.  A few weeks after Jenny moved in, she and Elise left their apartments at the same time.  They made brief eye contact, and Elise looked down immediately.  Elise wore big, red headphones, and as she walked she watched her feet as though she was concerned that she might step on a nail or a piece of discarded gum, even though the super had just cleaned the floor earlier that week.  They lived on the second floor of a three-story building, and theirs were the only apartments on the floor.  Elise got to the stairs before Jenny did, because the hall was very narrow and only one person could walk through it at a time, and she went downstairs on her toes the way cats seem to, tapping down light and fast.  Jenny was only a few seconds behind Elise when she got to the door, but Elise didn’t hold it open.

Jenny knew that Elise had always lived in Philadelphia.  She went to prep school on the Main Line before moving to West Philadelphia to go to Penn.  Jenny knew that Elise was a literature major, and that her last name was Morgan, and that she had a brother two years younger, and that her parents’ names were Joe and Kathy.  Jenny learned these things on Facebook, but she didn’t send Elise a friend request because she didn’t know whether Elise knew her name.  Because of Facebook, Jenny also knew that Elise was single and looking for whatever she could get.

Jenny noticed that Elise had straight hair and that it only looked wavy because Elise tied it up in a bun overnight.  She could tell because the hair on the top of her head, down to her ears, was still straight, and the ends were curlier than the middle because the ends are held in the bun the tightest.

Elise was alternative.  The facts that she only seemed to wash her hair every three days and didn’t wear any makeup other than eyeliner were the giveaways, but her mismatched nail polish and beat-up copies of Jane Austen novels also contributed to Jenny’s assessment.  Jenny wasn’t alternative.  Jenny was in a sorority and she wore jeans and nice blouses to class and pastel dresses out on dates with Paul and to chapter meetings.

*

Paul had lived in the apartment for seven months before Jenny moved in.  Elise and the red-headed girl she lived with—maybe Tracy, but he couldn’t remember for sure—moved in the weekend after he did, and he helped them steer their mattresses down the hallway and through the door.  Both girls were slight and not especially strong, so he was surprised that neither of them had enlisted the help of a brother or a friend.

Paul had seen Elise before.  They were in the same discussion section for Introduction to Psychology their freshman year, and she always asked interesting questions about the lecture.  Paul didn’t really pay attention to the lecture—he recorded diligent notes without absorbing much of the information, just copying it all down like a stenographer.

Here it is:

I've never been nuts about Swarovski crystals (or anything sparkly, for that matter) but they mimic my birthstone (Topaz), and sort of blend in with the color of the watch, anyway, so I have decided that I like them in this case.

If you want to be a copycat, the watch is also sold at Overstock.com, but for a little over $60.  Of course, if you’re in NYC, head out to the Union Square Filene’s–they have plenty more, but this one was priced incorrectly (5 dollars less than the others, and there’s nothing wrong with it at all! HAH! Go me.)

Now I have to go get a couple of the links removed because it’s a bit too big, so here’s hoping that only costs about $10!

You will probably make more money than me. You will not hold this over my head.

You will be an equal partner if/when we have children. You will not be the “fun dad” whose only involvement is driving the kids to their t-ball games and buying them ice cream after school.

You will not pressure me to have children before I am ready.

You will not pressure me to raise our children in a religious institution I am uncomfortable with. For the record, I am uncomfortable with most of them.

I will cook, and so will you.

You will kill bugs for me.

You will reciprocate when I do something nice for you in bed.

You will not make sexual demands or guilt me into having sex when I don’t want to.

You will be a grown up and masturbate instead of whining when I don’t feel like taking care of your “needs.”

This should really go without saying, but if you ever hit me I’ll probably be driven to sever your balls.

Today, I woke up too early and rolled over to put my head on my boyfriend’s chest, but my head fell onto the bed because he’s away with his debate team.  I went back to sleep, and woke up too late, and did some laundry and reading.

In other words, spring break has been dull so far.

But, I did find a few old things of mine that I sort of like, which has made this evening interesting.

Here’s a story I wrote in 2006. It doesn’t really have a beginning, middle, and end, but the writing, I think, is pretty solid, though occasionally grammatically incorrect and bogged down with boring details. I’m sort of impressed that my 16-year-old self was that decent:

Anna turned on the light at two o’clock AM. The smell of Cajun food from the restaurant down the street was so strong on Sunday nights, after the evening mass in the small church down the street ended, that her eyes burned and she had decided to go upstairs to bed at seven, thinking she would sleep straight through until morning and wake up refreshed. But when the light from the ice-cube lamp bled into the dusty air, Anna knew that seven hours was plenty of time for beauty sleep.

She slowly and silently removed the cover, as not to disturb the lightly sleeping orange cat in the window seat. Yellow streetlights made the dirt on the windows pop. Anna turned her legs off the bed and slipped towards the bureau, which was cluttered with row after row of well over four hundred dollars worth of cosmetics and hair products. Anna robotically chose a drugstore lipstick, expensive pink eye shadow, and her standby fragrant volume mousse in a tall purple bottle. She kicked a pair of shoes and plaid flannel boxers under the yellow chair next to the door and pulled a black t-shirt and men’s jeans in a size 27-waist from their dirty, mustard colored, pleated-cushion back.

The hall was a stump, only five feet long and crooked until it reached the bathroom’s white door. Anna washed her hair in the sink with peach-scented shampoo from one of the shower shelves and blew it dry upside-down, putting it into a black elastic just above the nape of her neck. She meticulously applied her makeup and changed her clothes in the mirror, tying her turquoise tennis shoes tight around her gray and green polka-dotted socks.

Upon finishing her early morning preparations six hours earlier than usual, Anna couldn’t think of what to do. She slid down the plastic banister of the spiral staircase and onto the hardwood living room floor, original to the two hundred year old house. The white desktop computer with a pulsating light in the bottom right corner was the only thing that felt intriguing at two fifteen AM, and so she sat down at the backless spinning desk chair and turned it on with a tap on the button behind the screen. Instantly it began to buzz in the otherwise silent house. She played the music she listened to when she needed to meet a deadline, forty minutes of songs she knew so well that didn’t have to listen to them.

Still unsure of what to make out of the free time she had stumbled upon, Anna started to think. To her, almost nothing was worse than thinking. She had run on the track and cross country teams in high school and college ending only a few brief of years ago, and when she ran she would always end a race in tears, the first one to cross the finish line because she needed to hear something other than the thoughts in her head bouncing and screaming about at the tops of their lungs. After her third cross-country season in college, Anna quit because the mental pain was becoming far too much for her to take further into her life.

Anna hadn’t thought like that for a while, and so she decided to lie on the fuzzy, old gray couch, close her wide-awake eyes, and let it take her over completely. After eating a two-inch tall slice of packaged chocolate-chip cookie dough, she put the back of her head down on a pink flannel pillow. Anna realized that she would have to cry, but she felt that perhaps crying would relieve her of the numbness in her head. Remembering the books she had read as a teenager, Anna concluded that she had the opposite problem of Kurt Cobain, who wanted to relieve the pain with total nothingness. Anna needed to relieve the nothing with pain and to feel as bad as she often had before, because nothing ever was far worse than everything all at once.

Anna hadn’t made a friend since her junior year of college, when she was named the editor of a nationally famous student paper. Then, girls had flocked to her side at social events and competed to be chosen as her senior roommate. The boys of the newspaper staff had begged her for dates not only because of her powerful position, but also her bubbly personality, intense intelligence, and good looks. Since college, when Anna had moved into the house she was raised in, just twelve minutes from the city’s hub, her social circle had neither increased nor decreased in size, and she had to wonder, now that she was thinking again, what had made her lose her open magnetism.

Her boyfriend of five years lived in a loft apartment by the big limestone museum, largely famous for its colossal fight of gray stairs. Antony could never hurt Anna and Anna could never hurt Antony, and so they remained together stoically. That stoicism in the face of any and all conflict was what Anna was famous for and why she was offered the job at the school newspaper even though she was certainly less qualified than several of the other students on the staff. Though it was the source of her success, Anna was now able to see that it was also the source of all of her problems. When Anna quit running, her soft, weak membrane built itself in a hard white shell. Her creamy yellow core of emotion, ready to spill out at any moment in her previous life, was sealed in tightly.

When Anna’s mind snapped what she had just realized into place, she felt the tears ready to come. She stood up quickly and got back to the bedroom before they all spilled out, and put on her old , red and blue stripes all down the long sides, and running shoes. It was three-thirty AM and it was still dark, but she went outside and locked the green door behind her. Anna sat down in the plush seat of her blue car and drove until she reached her high school, seven minutes from home, crying the whole way.

In eleventh grade, she and her first boyfriend had snuck out of a locked down dance and onto the red polyurethane track around the green sod grass football practice field. The broke the lock to the control box with two credit cards and switched the stadium-like fluorescents on. They had started their own party there on the track, and called all of their friends over until the got caught. Anna had spun circles in her black satin dress and shiny black pumps, all eyes on her as she glowed under the big spotlight, and so now she did the same. She spun in her stolen light. Then she began to run, seamlessly as if she had never stopped, and more tears shot out of her eyes and onto her long thin arms, down her loose shirt, and across the smooth skin on her stomach. Every part of her body could feel the returning life inside of it. It all started to breathe again, and Anna knew that she had wasted too much time being frozen still.

A poem I wrote when I was 17 or 18:

I want a life past 9:00,
one without cable television
or wireless
internet
access.

I want a life by foot,
without the protective,
metal
walls of a four-wheeled
motor
vehicle.

I want Sundays in the movie theater,
legs bent to chest,
in the seat just left of
center
in the front row.

I want to see that all of
this
is enough and
that there’s no need
to spend Saturdays
spending.

A line I love from a story I wrote when I was 15–interestingly, I had never been kissed at this point:

We kissed and I felt the skin on her neck, soft and clean as if she had tumbled, just recently, out of the laundry.

A line from another poem from around the same time:

It is dark, and beautiful to get lost.

A tiny poem from when I was 15. I don’t remember writing anything from this time. I was sincerely depressed and I think a lot of things that happened are just gone.

“Hopeful”

Between two pages of a book,
it is after eleven o’clock.
In a sorrowful place
at the bottom of the night,
I dance with the idea of romance.

This is from when I was 15 (again, I so don’t remember writing this, but I think my feminist was starting to show a little):

“Perfect”

Lip pumping products spell out my name in
pink and silver letters,
calling and frowning.

Switched over and
clean as a fresh slate,
the darkest green and harsh.

Water-filled pockets in a push-up bra
weighing me down,
improving upon me.

You have to be five six, five seven,
five eight.

Every girl can look like a model if she
spends money on
useless products
conceived of and sold by
ill-mannered hags.

You have to be fifteen, sixteen,
seventeen.

Stinging on my lips and in my throat,
I have spent an hour
practicing to be
perfect. Bile.

Take a little of this drug for your metabolism
and a little of this one for your appetite.

Perhaps my favorite–a memoir in seven sentences, written right after HS graduation:

I was born in San Antonio, Texas, but I never lived there. We lived two blocks from hell on either side, in an old house next to a stop on the Underground Railroad. After a shooting in the back alley, we lived in an unused part of ——– —- Academy, where my father served as head of the art department. The hallways were long and thin, and perfect for a child for two, and in the kitchen I had my own toy oven and a miniaturized broom. The days in this home were the last I spent as a woman with domestic interests—when we moved to the house we’ve lived in ever since, my attitude changed. The house was and still is unfinished, and I got used to a bit of clutter and disorder. I cannot live without the bustle of an artist’s life, the atmosphere of my parents’ studios, where there is no choice but to be over stimulated.

Written when I decided I never belonged there in the first place, and that it was okay:

For a moment I’ve been sitting in the quiet, listening to the hums and clicks of old computer systems running, turning turning sounds that translate roughly to “I am one of so many mass produced machines, sold for cheap to idiots.” The screen before me is framed in rough, gray-black plastic, silver buttons with arrows and circles adorning its base. The green-lit silver “power” button has been forced into the rough frame, debilitating the user from taking the light out from behind her words. The words are negative space, like taking a knife to a sheet of thick paper and hanging it on the window at night, when a small sliver of moonlight might grace your floor in the shape of a diamond or a heart. This is not my writing-place. It is the world of girls in short skirts pretending to need help from boys on biology or French, the world of boys pretending they know the answers, having copied the homework from the odd-numbered questions in the back of the old, torn text book. This is not my place. Here I might only scratch the skin between my fingers and consider the boy with the sandy brown hair, or the trio of young girls who have shattered my peaceful, silent considerations. The rightful owners of this place have reclaimed it, and I can no longer hear the hums and clicks and turn turn whirring sounds I’ve learned to appreciate and resent.