I had the day off today! From both jobs! I can scarcely believe it! Shaun is off covering the NYC comic convention, so I had the whole day to myself. I went to the optomitrist (I’m fresh out of contacts), walked in the park, read in the sun, bought fresh bread at the farmers’ market, and napped. It was extra warm outside today–in the 80′s easy. To the great amusement of the Spanish-speaking men in my neighborhood, I wore shorts for the first time this year.
I also whipped up a new blog about a weekend escape to Connecticut. Check it out at Naptime in the City That Never Sleeps. Last, but certainly not least, I answered burning questions posed by my Xanga peeps. Answers are below. Follow-up questions welcome.
Q.) ThinLizzy17 asks: Where do you hope you’ll eventually land? If you close your eyes and think about “home,” where will that turn out to be?
A.) When I close my eyes and think about home, here are a few things that leap to mind, in no particular order:
1.) The dead of winter 2003. 6pm. A weekday in our second Chicago apartment, a truly horrible one. There’s no insulation and an upstairs bathtub will fall through the sagging kitchen ceiling any day now. I’ve been home, bundled in about ten sweaters to keep warm and using the same tea bag to make countless cups of tea; I am writing. Everything is quiet. Dusk settles. Shaun comes home from work. “Hey,” he calls. I take my teacup to the sink and meet him in the hall. I kiss his face in greeting. His skin is cold. I am warmer than I thought. The cat meows, underfoot.
2.) Tail end of July. Hot. Swagger-some. I’m home for the summer from my first year at college. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was to be the last time in my life I would live at home, near my family, in that Michigan town. It was also to be the last time my family bore any resemblance to the structure I’d grown accustomed to. I was working two jobs to save up for the school year. A sandwich shop clerk in the day and a waitress at night. My legs and lower back were always sore.
I drove a hot little red sports car. I always kept a bikini and towel in the back-seat, just in case the opportunity of lake swimming arose. My diet primarily consisted of soft serve ice cream cones. I was working on a short film and reading a lot of Hemmingway.
One day, I had enough time between shifts to head up to our family’s yellow cottage on Big Lake. It was only about 20 minutes away from my family’s home. The key sat perched on a rafter above the front porch. I let myself in and changed into my swimsuit. I perched a boom box in the back window and blared a Travis cd. I headed down to the water with a yellow inner-tube and a library copy of Garden of Eden. Carefully perching the book atop the tube, I swam out to the end of the dock. With one foot anchoring me and the other left to the nibbles of minnows, I laid back on the tube and read the afternoon away. When the canopy of leaf shadows stretched long and met me in the water, I swam in and went to work. This was before cell phones, before unplugging became a hard thing to do.
3.) An itchy, too-tight, short-in-the-arms, gray woolen sweater that I stole from my mom.
4.) The way the altitude of my grandparent’s Colorado mountain home pushes the lids from half gallon cartons of ice cream; bursting columns of Tiramisu-Swirl. Also in their home: racks of snowshoes. Shelves of hiking boots. Whipped butter in a countertop pot. A hallway photo gallery of family history. A crouching, almond-eyed African fertility statue made of wood. Apricots.
5.) Biking to work on Chicago’s lake shore path. Morning. Lake. Glorious.
6.) Lake Michigan sand dunes, friends, and campfire.
I look forward to having a home that includes/provides feasible access to 90% of the elements I’ve listed above. I look forward to living in a place where my mom, brothers, and best friend are no further than a short-ish Amtrak ride away. I can’t wait to settle down in Chicago. Theres an attitude, economy, and cultural sector there that work for us. Best of all: it feels good to be there.
When I’m teaching someday, and a mother, I look forward to spending big chunks of summer in Michigan. Shaun will either do his writing from there or visit us on weekends. Because July should be spent with family, preferably by a lake.
Q.) Secret Life of Pandas asks: If you had one image of yourself that you would have people remember, what would it be?
A.)
Q.) mydogischelsea asks: Where is your favorite place to write?
A.) Mainly, my kitchen table or desk. No music. No bra. No makeup. Phone off. Crunchy carrots and ice water on hand.
I also love the library-feel of Alliance Bakery, although it has the misfortune of being in Chicago’s Wicker Park (a poor neighborhood, turned artsy-hip, then promptly overpriced and yuppified). But the WiFi is free and they bake fresh mini-loaves of whole-grain and give you a whole tub of hummus to dip it in. Great coffee, too. The staff leaves you alone to write, even if you only buy one cuppa and stay writing for ages, which is what most people there seem to be doing.
Journaling takes place outdoors, in parks, on subways, on boulders I stop to rest on during a hike. Multi-media stuff (I like to make collage/text thingies) is strictly at my desk, with a cup of tea nearby.
Q.) Boowasborn asks: Has your and Shaun’s experiences with NYC been different? If so, how has it been different?
A.) Our experiences are always different and expressed differently. Shaun is a brooder; I’m a giant exclamation mark. Words fly from my mouth, accessible and loud. Shaun chews on words for longer, savors them, is careful and conservative with them. He often takes longer before judging a situation–its an internalized process that unfolds in his head. I feel any given situation with my entire body and my gut knows in an instant what I think and feel about it. There is bad and good in both of our approaches. Its a yin-yang thing.
So does Shaun hate our life here in NYC too? Yes. But our reasoning is different much of the time.
For example, while he thinks everything is gray and uniformly hideous here, I think everything is a vomit of circus color and grotesquely disturbing in very unique ways. Ultimately though, we both can’t bear it here because of how wholly unsustainable it is emotionally and financially. Plus, while Shaun’s had great success working the connections he needs to for the business of writing, he really struggles to find the time, energy, and comfort to generate new fiction in NYC. This is a problem unique to the pace a person needs to keep to survive in this town.
We both take huge comfort in knowing that we’re doing what we came here to do and leaving. All the freelancing that he’s been doing, he walks away with. The agent, the editorial contacts–he keeps those. As for me: I get to walk away with a whole new cast of characters, a whole new setting. I get to walk away with all the things I’ve learned about myself during our time here. I get to know exactly what my limits look like. I get to know the intimate details of the NYC behind the town’s grandiose myths. We took what we could, a midnight raid, and soon we’ll be back in a place comfy enough (emotionally and finically) to create new work again. Plus, we’ve made cool friends here. And we both need all the friends I can get in this world.
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Don’t forget to go to Naptime!
