Tag Archives: Real Life

The Great NYE: Developing a New Routine

20 Feb

For those who haven’t been following me on Twitter, #thegreatNYE is a hashtag I’ve been using to chronicle my experiences moving and adjusting to New York City. NYE = New York Experiment. Coincidentally, NYE also reminds me of Bill Nye, who rules. Like science.

For years now, I’ve been planning and fantasizing, watching movies and television shows located here and wondering what it’s really like and how I can just get there already, and now it’s actually happened: I’ve moved to New York City.

Moving here, halfway across the country and away from everything I’ve ever known, was an ordeal.

But I’m rapidly discovering that while the move itself was, yes, an exhausting, terrifying, and exciting experience, what comes after the move itself is even more so:

Developing a new routine.

I now live in a place that is completely unlike anywhere else I’ve ever lived. I grew up in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas. I now live in Harlem (which, according to Google, many New Yorkers consider to be “up in the suburbs,” which makes me LOL AS I HAVE NEVER LOLED BEFORE). I live in a huge, crowded, noisy city. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a beautiful city, too, and I think my neighborhood is awesome. But it’s still huge, crowded, and noisy. I knew that it would be huge, crowded, and noisy. But it’s one thing to know something and quite another thing to live something.

Little luxuries that I enjoyed my whole life and always took for granted — a dishwasher, a washer and dryer in my house, a garbage disposal — have disappeared. Is this shallow of me to care about these things? I don’t think so. It’s an adjustment, being used to one lifestyle and then suddenly having another one. I can’t just pop in my laundry one evening while writing and watching 30 Rock. I have to go down the street to the laundromat and adjust my schedule according to the laundromat’s schedule, to the other patrons’ schedules. I can’t just hop in my car and drive around to do all my errands in one fell swoop one afternoon. No, I have to walk everywhere, and then lug it all back up four flights of stairs. Granted, I will be in killer shape by the time all is said and done, but STILL. The convenience factor is way past gone. (Yes, I am totally thinking “#firstworldproblems” as I write this.)

Now, I don’t mind doing all these things; far from it. I’m incredibly lucky, to live in such a dynamic whirlwind of a city, to have achieved my dream of living here and doing exactly what I want to do (writing). I love walking, and I’m certainly enjoying the exercise, and exploring my neighborhood is so fun.

It’s just different. And I’m feeling a wee bit intimidated. And flooded with things to do.

The actual act of moving in, comparatively speaking, is easy. You box everything up, figure out a way to get it here, get it here, and unpack. Easy peasy.

But then what?

Then, you have to figure out the best place to do your laundry. Find a new gym. Find a new doctor, dentist, hairstylist, grocery store, pharmacy. A new sandwich shop, a new hardware store. You have to decipher the rhythm of your neighborhood, find the shortcuts and the places to avoid.

I can’t tell you how close I came to crying when I realized there was a Subway sandwich shop at the corner of my block. Yes, a cheesy Subway sandwich shop, which most New Yorkers would probably turn up their noses at or something. But that’s what I grew up around. And it was so nice to see even that cheesy slice of familiar in the middle of . . . everything else.

I had my cheesy Subway sandwich. And it was GOOD. And now, after a relaxing weekend of writing and recovering from the move, I’m putting together a list. Every day, I will write. And every day, I will go do one or two things in my neighborhood and then cross them off my list: find a branch of the library and sign up for a card; find the gym I like best; figure out the laundromat and wash my towels.

I already did one thing, the other day. I found the post office and mailed a couple of things. It felt like such a TRIUMPH, let me tell you (even though, in my fluster . . . ment, I put the stamps on the wrong way, and the postal worker had to take them off and put them on the right way while there was a line building behind me, and I was so embarrassed I thought I would either DIE or start screaming I PROMISE I KNOW HOW TO MAIL THINGS OKAY, and I have never in my life felt more like some stupid spoiled girl from the suburbs, even though I am sure this incident will soon be surpassed by many others, and even though the postal worker was perfectly nice about it and called me “Honey”.)

And each of these little triumphs, each little task that I complete, no matter how intimidating and terrifying they may at first seem, will take me one step closer to developing a new routine, a new life. Each task will be like a little handshake with a different part of my neighborhood, and soon I will have gotten to know all of it, and soon everything will be okay.

Living the Kobayashi Maru Test

9 Feb

It is almost 2:00 in the morning. I lie here, fumbling for a comfortable position, waiting for calm to find me.

I’ve been waiting for hours.

The thing about life is, it’s one giant Kobayashi Maru test. You know what that is, right? It’s this test from Star Trek, which sounds funny — haha, Star Trek, cheesy special effects, nerds in basements — but first of all, if you think that about Star Trek, we can no longer be friends, and secondly, the Kobayashi Maru test is not funny at all.

It’s a test young military officers have to take before they can graduate. It’s a test you can’t pass, a no-win scenario. The point of the test is not for you to beat it (I’m talking to you, James Kirk), but rather to measure how you handle it.

Life is like that. No matter what trendy Internet vernacular says, you can’t really win at life. You can’t beat life. At the end of the day, it isn’t how you die or how much money you make; you can’t really compete with others and rank lives according to greatness because living is subjective. Who are we to say that someone else’s life is greater or lesser than ours? One man’s trash is another man’s treasure; one man’s destitution is another man’s boundless riches. One man’s tragedy could contain a jewel greater than the entire sum of another man’s triumphs.

And at the end of the day, everyone lives and everyone dies, and everyone goes on to whatever is next, or goes on to nothing.

You can’t get out of that; you can’t cheat the inevitability of death; even Voldemort couldn’t do that.

What matters is how we live. How do we handle the Kobayashi Maru test that is life?

Do we take the plunge? Do we try for the impossible, do we dare to love deeply and wildly? Even though the opposite of these highs are lows more bottomless than the deepest hellish inferno, even though by dreaming and imagining and striving for what others say can’t be done, shouldn’t be done, can’t be done we risk unimaginable failure, despair, loneliness?

We don’t have to; we can stay safe. We can stay stable. We can only love halfway, never quite giving away our full hearts. We can reach for only unremarkable heights, because the higher you reach, the more spectacular the potential crash; and if we reach only as far as we can around our middles without stretching ourselves too much, there’s little danger of disaster.

This, of course, is a Kobayashi Maru test in itself: Do we try for ecstasy and risk catastrophe? Or do we choose stability, steadiness, safety? Do we open ourselves to all experience and ambition, to all emotion? Or do we remain closed off, never running too fast, never flying too high?

Huge stakes or small stakes? High risk or low risk? Uncertainty or guarantees?

Either way, we are hurt — whether from action, or inaction; whether it is a piercing, violent pain or something subtler than that, more muted, less immediately agonizing.

Lots of things in my own life recently have posed these questions to me. I’m afraid of what’s coming, of what I’ve committed to, and at times, I admit, I’ve been tempted toward safety, toward the road free of twists and turns, bumps and bruises and bloody knees. It would be so much easier. It helps the knots of fear unwind, to imagine traveling down this road.

But what about those mountains over there, with their steel-slick precipices and glorious summits? What about the valleys, the bogs, the temptestuous oceans rolling to shore?

I want to see what secrets they hold. They are not kind, these places; they are shaped by both happy and unhappy chance.

But their secrets. What of those? I want to know them, no matter what.

If I must take the Kobayashi Maru test, and fail, as everyone must, I will do so not meekly, not dispassionately, not hiding behind my fears and my desire for straight, clean roads. I won’t cheat the test, either, trying to find a way out of it. I will barrel through this test with grace and verve, guns blazing, sparks flying. I will risk doom, and I will risk bliss.

Come with me?

Fear & Highway Driving

7 Feb

Y’all, I’m pretty scared about moving to New York.

I’m excited, too, don’t get me wrong. But, oh my god. The closer it gets to moving day, the more I find myself thinking, “So, you realize you’re crazy, right?”

Rationally, I know it’s not crazy, this move. People do it all the time. Even people who, like me, have only ever lived in one place and for whom picking up and moving is not a matter of “Ugh, I’ve got to get AWAY from this place, I HATE it,” and more a matter of “I want to try this. I’m going to miss home and my family and friends — DEEPLY — but I want to try this. I have to.” It’s not that I don’t like my home. No. I just want to see what else is out there.

And that’s great and all, but it also makes it much harder to leave. I’m not running from something; I’m running toward something, and that’s much more difficult to do.

So, I’ve found myself driving a lot lately, since I’m selling my car and won’t have easy access to one in the city. I love driving. Love it. I love racing down the highway (smartly, of course; I’m an excellent driver; I buy my underwear at K-Mart) and letting the wind run through my hair, or singing at the top of my lungs, or cranking up my favorite Hans Zimmer score and letting my brain percolate some story ideas. I love driving for miles under a big Texas sky.

Below are some of the songs I’ve been listening to, because the car is one of the few places I’m allowing myself to get emotional over leaving because, you know, I HAVE A BOOK TO WRITE, and also, I’ve got to get in the wild highway singing while I can:

And then, for a change of pace (and when I feel like avoiding the danger of crying while driving), I’ve been listening to a lot of Hans Zimmer’s Angels & Demons score lately. The problem is it makes me want to drive like ninety miles per hour. I cannot emphasize enough the dramatic WONDROUSNESS of this music. Add a little epic to your day:

Just . . . just go to like 5:40 in on “Air,” the track below. Just do it.

You want to go driving and crank it up now, don’t you?

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