Quote of the day: On past love stories.

"When love leaves us, may we not revise what happened.  May we read our love like a favorite book, and shelve it next to all great love stories.  Let’s always tell the world that yes, yes I loved that book.  And while I won’t remember every plot change, the minor characters, the conflicts and resolutions–I’ll remember that our love moved my heart to another part of my body.  If you put your ear to my ear, you’ll hear it there still, skipping like a broken record." --Jenn @ Choose Our Own Adventure

I learned recently that an ex-boyfriend is engaged. I read the news on Facebook. The news made me happy; the fact that I learned the news via Facebook did not. It makes me unbelievably sad to think that he--someone who once meant a great deal to me--and I have grown so far apart. 

But so I guess it goes. You don't get to choose what you mean to people. You can only control what they mean to you. And I suspect this is one I am just going to have to let go. You win some, you lose some. Not everyone is going to want to be your friend forever, Mayumi, learn this lesson and then don't forget it. 

All of these thoughts were swirling around my head when I read the end of Jenn's blog post. I am so thankful for her timely words, although I hope she and Ryan don't get to the point where they are reshelving their love story between ... well, I don't know what between but certainly before Romeo and Juliet, Sampson and Delilah, and Tristan and Isolde, if we're worrying about reshelving alphabetically. Which we do worry about on this blog. Anyway, Jenn, thanks for being on the same wavelength as me unwittingly, even to the point of worrying the holes into the fabric of your life, cutting your hair short, struggling so with writing, and having a crazy bitch dog. I really appreciate the solidarity.

Happy second anniversary to us / F-U Prop 8.

Today is the second anniversary of one of the best and most "duh" decisions of my life: marrying Dave. 

It's a lazy day here in the south bay. I'm happily esconsed in the happy home of Surfrunner and her lady, I've had my requisite multiple cups of fresh Kona coffee, and Surfrunner and I worked out this morning, then followed that up with prepping some ribs for a dinner party tonight (I assisted but the deliciousness is all her) and eating a lunch of leftover crab manicotti and fresh summery salad with strawberries and candied walnuts. Meanwhile, the Californian weather is doing its best to reseduce me, and it's totally working. Life is good. Way good. Tonight, dear friends L. and J. will come over to eat and talkstory, and it is everything I could want an anniversary to be . . . 

with two major flaws: my husband is at home in New York--whoops--and fucking Prop 8 was upheld by the California Supreme Court today. Wheee, happy anniversary to me. 

I flew into California last Wednesday but spent six days in Sacramento, doing the family rounds, before making my way back to the SF bay area to prepare for Sidewalk Monkey's wedding this Saturday. I am SO pumped for this wedding. Having been chummy on the details as they developed via the bride to be, it is going to be such a meaningful, beautiful, and intimate ceremony. Not to mention that Sidewalk Monkey is going to be such a ridiculously gorgeous bride. But let me tell you, folks. That whole get-married-on-a-holiday-weekend-because-then-you-will-always-have-a-three-day-weekend-on-which-to-celebrate-your-anniversary idea? Well, it's good in theory, anyway . . . but what you forget is that you're not the only one to think of such a great plan, and so you spend your anniversary each year toasting other people's nuptials.

Come to think of it, though, what better way to celebrate than to be with the one you love and promised to love/respect/honor/cherish/the whole shebang et al., watching others take the same step?

Which is why there is a second major flaw to the day: the CA Supreme Court ruling to uphold Prop 8. You know, that's a deeply fucked-up thing to happen today. I want to be reveling--nay, gloating even--in my good luck in wrestling down the rest of the bitches who would have liked to end up with Dave but instead I'm thinking about all my friends who have such beautiful hearts and beautiful relationships with others who (so what) are of the same sex but who are disallowed to have the same rights to revel and gloat in their good luck in love, too, and officially. 

I feel stupid for even bringing up my anniversary at all, or complaining that my husband isn't with me on this day, or commenting that everyone likes to get married on three-day weekends, because, of course, not everyone even CAN get married.

Just . . . fuck traditional definitions of marriage. Shouldn't we also uphold "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," purportedly the "inalienable rights of man"? In fact, this is the exact argument used to finally overturn anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia, wherein  Chief Justice Warren wrote: "The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men." (And Justice Warren? Word, yo.)

Honestly? I can't even believe we're still having this conversation. I'm over it. You're over it. We're all fucking over it. It's ridiculous. If in this day and age a person can even find love--that improbable, inexplicable bit of hope--and if against all odds (supposedly up to 60% in 2008) he or she wants to try to honor that bond with another, who are we to stand in his or her way? And what business is it of ours to tell someone else how to live their life, or what will make them happy, or what they are allowed to do? 

Quote of the day: Kanye West doesn't really read but he'd like you to.

Now while I don't quite agree that people who don't read and don't respect books and their authors should be publishing (see also this great article on Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin getting book deals--!!), I did like one quote from the Yahoo News! article on Kanye West's first book, Thank You and You're Welcome:

"My mom taught me to believe in my flyness and conquer my shyness," says Kanye.

City as Beloved, City as Character: A LibraryThing Early Review of Colum McCann's "Let the Great World Spin."

Literature functioning as love letter to New York city is ubiquitous. Writes E. B. White in his famous tome, Here Is New York: “The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines” (1949:29). Walt Whitman’s verse is physically inscribed on the body of the city itself: his knighting of New York as “proud and passionate city—mettlesome, mad, extravagant city” graces the long railing of the lower Manhattan Esplanade along the Hudson, while his entreaty, “Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! Stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!,” greets visitors at the Fulton Ferry landing in DUMBO, Brooklyn, as they stroll along the old wooden dock, licking historical ice cream cones. Just to name a few, Paul Auster, James Baldwin, Michael Chabon, Michael Cunningham, Herman Melville, Henry Miller, Eugene O’Neill, J. D. Salinger, and the younger ilk crowding the pages of the New Yorker’s and New York Times’s Book Reviews sections such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Colson Whitehead—the infamously dubbed “Brooklyn writers”—have likewise had no shortage of verbiage on the subject of city as beloved. But even amongst such august company, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin rises like crème de la crème to the top.

What makes McCann’s novel so breezily fresh and new is his detailed presentation of not one slice of the city but several: he gives his readers a taste of the whole big beautiful apple. A safe remove of eight years has made it possible to write again of New York city without needing to reference the tragic events of September 11, 2001, even if just to plot one’s literature along some imaginary timeline in the sky, B.S.11. or A.S.11, coming off cold and distant for having dealt with one’s duty only by describing which buildings appear in the skyline or, alternately, resulting in a heavy, melodramatic hand in trying to acknowledge the emotion of a thing seemingly beyond words.

So the time is ripe and we readers are hungry for a book that holds at its center the Twin Towers in such an unexpected way: on August 7, 1974, Phillipe Petit, funambulist extraordinaire, successfully walked across a wire strung high and tight between the newly completed World Trade Center towers. True story. McCann takes this marvelous tidbit of truth and structures around it a fantastic fiction that has nothing to do with 9/11 and in other ways everything to do with it. His novel contains no terrorists in our contemporary understanding of the word, but there is a guerilla performance artist, demonstrating our need for rigidity and rules, flaunting the flaccidness of our national and city security, and bringing to the surface our voyeurism, our inherent instinct towards rubbernecking at car crashes, our desire for excitement and spectacle. In a place where locals won’t even raise their eyebrows, never mind turn their heads, to watch a man in his underwear singing accompaniment to his own guitar smack in the neon stretch of median down Broadway—brights lights big city Times Square—we will stop in our tracks, we will let our coffee grow cold, we will share elbow room with and talk to complete strangers when a life hangs in the balance. There is not space enough in this review to consider the psychological reasons for our obsession with death, but there you have it: how to get our attention, or, as McCann words it in the first sentence of his prologue (with considerable more elegance), “those who saw him hushed” (2009:3).

            Following the third-person, omniscient point of view of the prologue, which places us in time and space (August 7, 1974, a quarter-mile in the sky on a wire stretched between the Twin Towers), McCann gives flesh to the following: the blood brother of an Irish priest now living in New York; an affluent woman of the tony Park Avenue set; a female artist who we would today gloss as a “hipster”; a teen photographer obsessed with subway graffiti; a young computer hacker in California; a prostitute living in the Bronx; a Judge who must decide the funambulist’s case; the Hispanic woman who the aforementioned Irish priest loved; an African-American woman who lost three sons to the Vietnam War; and the young daughter of a dead prostitute. Ten disparate slices of New York that, when fit together in place and time, add up to the whole apple. In addition, threaded through these ten chapters is that single tension-tight wire: the reoccurring return to Phillipe Petit, who figures into each of these lives.

These many points of view, in McCann’s capable hands, accomplish what they should: as Dave Jauss suggests in “From Long Shots to X-Rays,” a craft meditation on point-of-view and narrative technique, “Handling point of view is much more than a matter of picking a person or a narrative technique and sticking with it; rather, it involves carefully manipulating the distance between narrator and character, moving closer one minute, then farther away the next, so as to achieve the desired response from the reader” (2008:50–51). The effect is that the city—as lived by such different people, as seen through such different points of view, situated in race, class, age, culture, et cetera, as points of view are—itself becomes a multidimensional character, a complicated, flawed, even “human” character who, to borrow again from E. B. White, “[bestows] the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy” (1949:19) and “can destroy an individual or fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck” (1949:19) but also “makes up for its hazards and deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin—the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled” (1949:33). For the writer picking up the pen in such a place, how can what results be anything but a love story?

            It is only in the last chapter of the book that McCann acknowledges the pink elephantine events of 9/11. He has let sit for 322 pages the fact that he is writing about the Twin Towers at their beginning rather than at their end. But, in that last chapter, “Roaring Seaward, and I Go,” narrated in the third person by a young woman named Jaslyn, we are placed in an airplane, itself a poignant choice, in the October of 2006. McCann is so smart about this timing: he writes about the very thing we’ve all been obsessed with since 2001, but he does so considerably before and considerably after the tragedy that so escapes words. Jaslyn’s mother, a prostitute, died on that same day that Phillipe Petit tightrope-walked the towers, and Jaslyn carries with her a photograph of Petit walking in the air with a plane suspended in the background. As nimbly as the funambulist upon the wire, McCann dances across our synapses, making the connection we’ve waited for all 322 gorgeous pages preceding: “A man high in the air while a plane disappears, it seems, into the edge of the building. One small scrap of history meeting a larger one. As if the walking man were somehow anticipating what would come later. The intrusion of time and history. The collision point of stories. We wait for the explosion but it never occurs. The plane passes, the tightrope walker gets to the end of the wire. Things don’t fall apart” (2009:325).   

            It is in that last sentence that McCann skewers the character of New York and her people. He shows how she has grown from 1974 to 2006, her resilience, both buoyant and cold. He flays open whatever it is about her that makes her residents so alone despite being crowded by an excess of 8.2 million people squished together in less than 305 square miles (Wikipedia n.d.), whatever it is that makes them wall themselves off from human contact yet become a family during times of crisis (e.g., the blackout of 2003) and tragedy (e.g., again, 9/11), whatever it is about them that yearns to belong to her, to this place “unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled” (White 1949:33), to this place ahead of every curve and triumphant survivor of any tragedy, to this city where “things don’t fall apart.”

 

REFERENCES CITED

Jauss, Dave

2008    Alone with All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom about the Craft of Fiction Writing. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books.

McCann, Colum

2009    Let the Great World Spin. Advance copy for LibraryThing Early Reviewers’ Program. New York: Random House.

White, E. B.

1949    Here Is New York. New York: The Little Bookroom.

Wikipedia

N.d.    New York City. Electronic document, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City, accessed May 19, 2009.

Colson Whitehead on being a "Brooklyn Writer."

Why and how I missed the article "I Write in Brooklyn. Get Over It."--Colson Whitehead writing for the New York Times on that newfangled institution of the Brooklyn Writer, which does Officially take Capital Letters, I do believe--when it first appeared last year I do not know. All I know is that I am so glad to have read it now. Props to procrastination for taking me on a Google-laced trip away from my essay about New York city as a character in fiction and down the rabbit hole of results that come up when you use the keywords "Brooklyn writer." 

Six entries later ...

it is Officially time to do other things. 

I may be scarse again. This wednesday I leave for northern California, gone till June 1. I am out there for some Sacramento family time, some chilling with (and hopefully eating the cooking of) Surfrunner, some seeing friends (hopefully Iolani '97ers and my VCFA classmate and exroomie Rachel), and some fussing over and marrying off bride-to-be Sidewalk Monkey time. 

Goodbye and signing off. 

LOL @ that last entry.

You know what that last entry was supposed to be about?

How Shaun, Rachel, Belly, and I went to the Mitsuwa Marketplace in Edgewater, New Jersey. 

It's awesome. Go there (which, by the way, you totally can from Manhattan; there's a bus via Port Authority). They have a full Japanese supermarket with everything you could want, from fresh produce to delicious-looking meat, to a whole aisle of rice, to another of rice cookers, to all the different noodle sauces, to all the funky Japanese candies, and finishing off with several aisles of frozen delights like Japanese popsicles and mochi ice cream. Not to mention fresh bentos! Then, on top of all that, they also have a full food court of yummyness like hot ramen, various preparations of katsu, sushi, and sweet Japanese confections. I had a shoyu ramen and a black sesame ice cream cone; I bought white rice, brown rice, soba sauce, strawberry Pockys, and melon-flavored gummy candies--all at a fraction of the cost of the nearest Japanese mart near me. I've been paying $12 for 5 lbs. of rice that last, oh, five seconds in a house with a Hawaiian man; I paid $14 at Mitsuwa for 10 lbs. I just wish I had remembered a backpack . . . I might have gone for the 20 lb. bag at those rates.  

The silence and the noise.

On Sunday, I headed to Hoboken to meet up with my dear friends Shaun and Rachel, who are expecting a baby boy come this August. They have a car, will be renting a several-bedroom house, have between them two master's degrees and very shortly will have one Ph.D., and are having a baby. They're, like, some of my most grown-up friends who are the same age (actually younger) than me, but without being stuffy and boring.

Anyway, it is such a joy to see Rachel and the belly that contains The Boy To Be. And to see Shaun so happy, and beamy, and proud ... very, for lack of a better word, predadlike. Even though they e-mailed me ultrasounds and I've seen them a few times earlier in the pregnancy, I don't think it was real to me until spending that day with Rachel and the belly bump that has hit the six-month mark. Till I walked around with them while they made jokes about eating for two and chilled on their couch, talking story with them, while--NO KIDDING--Rachel knitted a hat for her baby. When we talk about going apple picking this coming autumn, for example, we will be doing it with their baby. DUDE. Intense stuff, yo. It made me mushy and emotional but I tried my best to keep my cool. I can't even put into words how it makes me feel to see two such wonderful people about to bring new life into the world, but it approximates the feelings I have when I see pictures of a pile of puppies napping together or commercials wherein people fall in love in coffeeshops or foreign places that use indie music as the backround soundtrack--those feelings, CUBED. 

We talked about the strangeness of naming children, that is, do you name them for personalities you hope they have, or do you wait till they pop out to see what kind of personality they already have, little "blobs" (thanks, Angelina Jolie) that they are at that point? We talked about how weird it is to have something grow inside you. We talked about the absurdity of baby (and, for that matter, wedding) registries, how alarmist those registry checklists can be, insisting on your survival being threatened if you don't get a diaper genie and both a strolling stroller and a jogging stroller. And so forth. 

But what I got obsessed with on the ride home (PATH to the L to the G) was something else entirely: the silence that pervades so much of women's lives.

From the moment a woman is old enough to seriously date--let's put this at approximately 25 years old, because any relationship before that has the probability to spoil or get screwed up because of youth, recklessness, and the naive belief in one's own invincibility--people are asking her if there is Somebody Special, which is a more tentative and slightly more polite way of saying, When are you getting married and getting on with it, already? 

And from the moment a woman decides to get married, people around her--well meaning as they might be--are full of too many goddamn, strongly-voiced opinions. And the worst part about it is that all this stressful talk comes mostly from other women (not men). Perhaps they are remembering how hard it was for them to juggle their various responsibilites of marriage and motherhood; probably they are trying to help the new wife/mother avoid the pitfalls and mistakes they themselves made. That said, why must they be all mouth and no ears? It's crazy. A woman is her own individual self, it seems, until she enters the eligibility age of those respective institutions--marriage and motherhood--and then the women around her feel compelled to shove her into a prefabricated box shape of what she must become. It is extremely fucked up. 

I can't, of course, speak to motherhood, but I well remember preparing for my wedding and hearing left and right how wrong I was doing everything. You must have a bridal shower, with the little stupid sandwiches and the somewhat demeaning games. You're not having a receiving line?! What's wrong with you, that's rude, that's inappropriate. You absolutely CANNOT serve your guests on paper plates with plasticware, that's a big No-No. You HAVE TO invite your second cousin, once removed, and his wife and two kids, because they invited you to their wedding, and it doesn't matter that you didn't go, it'd be rude not to invite them, and also you should invite their neighbor because she drives them around. Then, barely after you've said I do, people start in with the (again well-meaning) question: So, when are you going to have kids? Now, I ABSOLUTELY DO want to have kids, and so does Dave, but we are in a day and age where it is safer to assume that young couples don't want to answer that question. Either they don't want kids yet because of their career aspirations or a lack of financial stability, or perhaps don't want kids at all, or perhaps want to adopt because they feel it's irresponsible to bring more lives into this world, et cetera. So just DON'T ASK the newly married couple, and when asking other marrieds, do so cautiously and with gentleness, will ya? 

And with all that bossy talk about how to plan a wedding, and how to maintain a marriage, and when to start a family, and the right and wrong ways of doing all that and more, there is at the same time such silence around what women actually go through. 

Women don't talk about how hard marriage will be, that no matter how hard you fight it, you will fall into certain gendered roles just because it happens. How you'll wake up in the middle of your worst nightmare: you've become a stereotype, the naggy wife, because if you don't think of it, sometimes it doesn't get done. If you don't put it on the collective To Do List, you'll realize two months have gone by since you've cleaned the house. And if you don't remember to pick up more toilet paper, you get stuck on the throne. And if you don't put aside time in your day to do the huge grocery trip, you'll end up eating takeout four nights in a row, because it's easier than planning a meal and buying the groceries at the end of a long workday when you're both tired and hungry. So forth and on and on. And what about pregnancy? A mother is supposed to be thrilled, glowing, beaming, delighting in the change, fascinated by what her body is capable of, blooming, blushing, bountiful. What if she hates what her body is doing? What if it freaks her out that something is growing inside her? What if she sometimes feels like she's on a rollercoaster and it's too late to get off? What about postpartum depression? What about feeling helpless and inadequate, what about the bad days where you feel like you're doing it all wrong? What about the violent feelings that arise when people in public try to tell you how to raise your child? What about . . .*

Why do we talk about surfaces and remain silent about the depths?

And why, when we do talk about these things, are any deficiencies or difficulties viewed as neuroticness or pathology, rather than normal, everyday struggles? We talk about the Andrea Yateses of the world, in horror, but Brooke Shields still faces Tom Cruise's shitstorm for talking about postpartum depression. Why don't women talk to each other about the in-between--about feeling like Brooke Shields did--so that they don't get to the place Andrea Yates did?** 

Well. You have my vow right now to talk about how miserable any of it makes me. As wife and someday as a mother. And any bride or mother out there, if you need a listening shoulder (this is my patented expression, by the way), I will so shut up and listen.

---

* Some of these are my real, live feelings about just having a dog. I imagine my list will be longer when I have a real, live, actual child.

** Obviously, it's not like NO ONE talk about these things. That's not my point. My point is loved ones, well-meaning ones, the ones you trust and turn to, or even sometimes complete strangers on the street, these people, the ones actually in your life, they don't talk about it. They talk about surfaces. 

5/16 Brooklyn Flea roundup.

Here's the thing about the Brooklyn Flea for me. I am not a slavish devotee of flea markets, or even this one in particular, but it is pretty darn close to our new apartment. I know many a sartorial smartypants who can pull off vintage looks, but I myself lack both talent and patience in picking needles from haystacks, or making the gently worn look new, or to be blunt even feeling excited to wear something old, probably because I spent my childhood wearing plenty of hand-me-downs, thankyouverymuch. I like new shit now. As hubby put it, succinctly: "Why would I want to pay $60 for old shoes?!!" But I do love the tshirt designers, and the pretty fabrics, and the random junk shops. And I loveLOVElove the food. 

Here's the roundabout hubby and I made at the Fort Greene Brooklyn Flea, on Saturday:

Petted items at Kimono Lily, Flux Productions, Loyalty + Blood, and the vendor that has the beautiful African tunics and so forth whose name I can never remember.

Ate The Wang Ding (a beef hot dog with delicious Chinese BBQ pork belly on it) from asiadog, a guava and cheese empanada from Elsa's Empanadas, raw chocolate ice cream (w/o sugar or dairy!!) from Fine + Raw Chocolate, a handful of granola from Early Birds Food and Co., and a beer-and-pretzel as well as a toasted-almond caramel from Liddabit Sweets.

Yeah. I ate all that. And then I made myself go run 3.58 miles, okay?

Just a spoon full of Cheetos makes the broccoli go down.

Don't get me wrong, I was glad we tried Craig Koketsu's (of Park Avenue Autumn) "Broccoli and Cheetos" recipie (originally printed in the November 17, 2008, issue of New York magazine; now available at the magazine's online website).

But I do rather suspect that, no matter how "Super" the food, letting it laise about in a heavy cream and cheese sauce and sprinkling it with smashed Cheetos may negate any nutritional value it once had. 

Still. If you are ever in the mood to really indulge, try Koketsu's recipie, which calls for not just heavy cream, not just one kind of cheese, but heavy cream and Gouda and Parmesan and Cheetos. YUM.

I miss you, blogiverse.

I'm back in that horrid mode where I feel like my To Do List is chasing its own tail. This is why I'm scarse. What's worse for me is not so much the nonblogging but the nonreading of all your blogs. It blows. I'll try to post a few more times today. It may happen. Afterall, I put it on my To Do List.

What to eat at Momofuku Milk Bar.

So, the first time I went I thought "ehhhh" about the cereal-milk soft serve, but three thumbs up to the cornflake-marshmallow-etcetera cookies.

The second time I went I thought "ehhhh" to the glazed-donut soft serve.

The next time a friend bought me candybar pie, I thought YUMMM and HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, INDEED.

And the last time I went, I thought OH MY GAWD CRACK PIE . . . and damn!! for the blueberry cookies.

In conclusion: Skip the soft serve unless it's the pistachio a friend of mine swears by. Don't question what's in the crack pie, just eat it, it's fricken delicious. And if they have cookies, eat cookies. Calories so don't count when they taste this good.

Why I need a personal assistant.

Because I forget to book trips I am going on until two weeks prior to when I have to go.

Because I have a pile of filing to do and no desire to sit there doing it.

Because I hate--HATE--standing in line at the Post Office.

Because I wish someone else would answer the phone calls and handle the call backs, and do both with more regularity and punctuality, resulting in me looking less like an asshole.

Because I'd have someone else to talk to, besides my dog.

Because maybe it would get me out of my pajamas more often. Well, it's possible, anyway.

Because I need to believe that if the little things were dispatched with, I'd have time and desire to do The Big Things.

Because what if someone else was constantly making sure I had enough coffee, oh sweet dream of mine?!

Because maybe I'd remember to eat more than three cups of coffee and dinner.

Because of Murphy's Law: just when I've sat down and really gotten going on The Big Things (balancing my checkbook, early editing an issue of American Anthropologist before crunchtime, writing my novel, revising short stories, etc.), the dog has to go to the bathroom.

Well, hello there.

Erm, sorry, fell offline for a few weeks. It's been nonstop family time with the hubby's side of things. First up was Dave's cousin Neil, who we're desperately trying to convince to move from Detroit to New York because we love him madly, because he is made for this city, because he doesn't know it, maybe, but we think he is wasted on Detroit, because he is delicious and delightful and fun and makes us laugh, and because family is important and living isolated in a big city ("On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy," writes E. B. White*) it is too easy to let the days and weeks and months pass until it's been years since you've seen someone who your life used to involve daily. When I watch Dave and Neil interact, when I see Dave's face relax into that rare fond-silly and utterly relaxed smile that first made me love him in 11th grade, when I hear Neil make him truly laugh, the kind of laugh that is more heart than throat, I understand that these men love each other more like brothers than cousins and that we could stand this kind of happiness in our lives more often.

After a few days of tromping about the city with Neil, we three headed to Pennsylvania to meet up with the rest of the gang: Dave's mom, dad, grandma, auntie, uncle, other cousin, cousin's wife, and cousin's two children. Whew. There was small talk made, there were gaps filled, there were cheesesteaks eaten and daytripping around Philly done, there was too much outlet shopping (I am Officially Broke now), there was eating, there was drinking, and there was staying up late in our hotel room, still working on getting Neil to move to NY.

After that was done, Mom, Dad, and Grandma Poe came to New York, and we walked and shopped and devoured our way through this city.

It was in all ways delightful, in all ways needed, in all ways completely enjoyed . . . but now I feel like I need to nap for three days straight. And also get some work done. Not to mention try to catch up on Facebook and all 59 blogs I read, all of which seemed to unfortunately undergo periods of heavy productivity in my absence.

Consider the sleeves rolled up.

---
* E. B. White. Here Is New York. New York: The Little Bookroom, 1948.