DATE ARCHIVES : August 2021

Coming Alive Again in 2012 and 2021

Coming Alive Again in 2012 and 2021

In June 2012, I was coming to the end of the worst two-year span of my life outside of junior high and high school. I was slowly recovering from being broke, close to paying off more than $6,000 in medical debt (thx, endometriosis), starting to see a therapist who’d change my life, and a few months from freeing myself from a deeply shitty social existence. But I wasn’t at any of these things yet and didn’t know how close I was. On top of all of that, a couple weeks earlier, there’d been a mass murder in a cafe I spent a lot of time in. I didn’t know the people who died well, but I admired a couple of them very much and had seen them perform many times. They meant something. So it was broad horror and specific horror, and it’s the only time I’m aware of that I played the role of “crying girl hugging friend outside crime scene” on local news b-roll.

In July 2021, I was coming to the end of one of the worst years I’ve been alive (probably number three or four on the list, all told). Unlike June 2012, I wasn’t broke and had a fair amount of agency derived both from finances and from that good therapeutic work. However, also unlike June 2012… well, you know how 2020 into 2021 went. It was very, very bad. I found some beautiful things in all of it, but mostly I spent a lot of time figuring out what part of myself was compartmentalized into stasis this week. I had long periods of time where it felt like half my abdominal cavity was just this static, dense mass, unmoving where all the feelings used to swirl. I’m not typically given to numbness, but that and escaping into my imagination were the two ways I found to survive.

Fresh with so many layers of grief, which piled heavily on top of stinging disbelief around how I’d allowed my life to get to the state it was in, I agreed to go to Honkfest West. My general feeling about music is that I like just about anything live, and I especially like a big band with brass instruments (one of the reasons I’ve loved ska since high school). It was inexpensive and within city limits. Everyone I knew felt basically destroyed; why not be destroyed and listen to some music?

In the possession of a little more morally allowable movement and of money and a break between jobs, I went to New York for two weeks. I tried to figure out some extracurriculars ahead of time. I’d been wanting to go dancing at home and managed it once before delta variant feelings made us all need to reconsider our definition of freedom. So I knew I wouldn’t want a large club (I’m mostly too old and sober for that anyway), but I wanted some culture. I wanted to go out and feel the physical force of sound in my body. I wanted something bigger and broader than the sound from my beautiful shitty headphones. I found that a brass band I’d listened to online played in Brooklyn every week. Sold.

I’d gone to Honkfest before. Bands in Gasworks Park, bands in associated clubs, bands upon bands. I took the buffet approach: I knew I’d like enough of it so didn’t need to do much research. I’d show up, probably like what I heard, and be content. Good enough.

I look up the show again a few days out and find that the regular Tuesday night entertainment is canceled, and instead, a selection of bands through Honk! NYC is playing. You know what? Sure, that’ll do too.

I go to a venue in Georgetown. I’m wearing, in a way that feels incomprehensible in later, warmer times, a sweater dress with a thick cowl collar. I get a Large Can of Rainier, the drink of both happy times and sad, broke-as-fuck ones. I enter the performance space and get no further than the door, because it’s crammed.

I find my way to the bar from the subway. I show the bartender a picture of my vax card. I show the guy at the door in the back of the bar a picture of my vax card. I stand and listen to the DJ and drink my pilsner, texting with people back west. A couple people come in with drums. Then a couple more. Soon the number of people with drums outnumbers the spectators still filling in at the back of this small room. The drums are not small drums. The program promised samba-influenced drums as the second act. Excellent.

The band playing when I walk in, large can in hand, is a samba-influenced drum troupe. I have felt like something left in the sun lately, like all the softness has gone hard and all the flexible things crystalline in a hideous, sharp way. Everything feels vulnerable and terrible. Anything can happen anywhere, and it’ll probably be bad. Everything tastes like salt, even the sweet things. I stand there for a little while, a largely inert thing, drinking generously from my beer. I finish it and go get another. And when I come back, I feel something that’s taken its leave of me for a while: an urge to move.

After a bit, the audience finally outnumbers the band, but the band commands the space. One song blends into another, enough that they have to prompt us to applaud sometimes, too busy are we being mesmerized, being absorbed. I see stiff-spined white boys who I suspect aren’t all about dancing at shows start to move at the hips. I did immediately. It felt so good to feel percussion in my body again, to feel it at all angles and across frequencies, not a flat recording of something. It’s large, and I feel part of it. It’s so good to feel a part of anything with other people again.

After a bit, I end up with my half-full beer shoved into the top of my dress, cold against my sweaty skin, and I just move. I’m there with some similarly traumatized friends, and we all begin to dance, first like badly tended marionettes, then like people who might feel something good again someday. We get a little bit of it that night, that feeling of oh yes, I still have a heart, I’m still connected to something around me. I’m still alive and might even be glad of it again someday.

I find myself teary at odd moments. The synchronized movements of the drummers. The solos of the band that follows, the culmination of an untold amount of practice. All this effort just to make something transient and lovely. I missed that the most. I have plenty of days of being kinda over humanity, but all along, all throughout our shared isolation, I so badly missed the things we do when we come together: theater and music and that particular feeling of people coming out for a similar purpose. Dancing and conferences and all these gatherings toward a single goal. We do such fine things together, and I missed them terribly.

Life doesn’t get fixed on that night in 2012, but it was the first time in a long time that I felt like there might be something bigger and better yet to come, that putting effort into unfucking my life might yield something wonderful. That some things ended, sometimes terribly, but I wasn’t done yet. I was still capable of being surprised, and the world was still capable of surprising me with wonderful things.

And in late July 2021, we are still in the shit. In the 24 hours before this night in Brooklyn, I saw a lot of the bars in San Francisco switch to the model I see fairly often in New York, the “must be this vaxxed to ride” rule, and it gives me hope: both for going out and for incentive for people avoiding vaccinations for anything other than very specific medical reasons to reconsider. I just want us to have this together again: the call of brass, the impact of drums, and a bunch of happy nerds dancing in rooms again. I can hang in there for this. I feel something blossom again within me: to do things, to know that doing things is worthwhile, to know that taking this trip was the right thing for me.

And in the meantime? All we can do is keep dancing.

How to vacation during a pandemic: week two

How to vacation during a pandemic: week two

Previously.

Day eight

The day of action. I get up, pack my hotel room sprawl, and leave my bags with the front desk. From there, I head across town to the American Museum of Natural History. I’ve been here once before, back in 2008 or so, but that day I came straight from a red-eye flight, needing to kill time before my friend was off work and could take me and my stuff back to her apartment. So I dragged ass for a couple of hours, and I remember little except for looking longingly at empty corners, thinking I could sleep there.

Today was better. If my phone and feelings are right, I walked more than three miles inside the museum; their app is good and helped me see just about everything, but it led me back and forth so many times, through the gift shops one way and then another. I stared up at a Titanosaur, gazed at so many skeletons, felt strangely moved by the blue whale (and the covid vax clinic still happening by it), and learned that there’s such a thing as an effusive volcano eruption. I stayed there for more than four hours before beginning the biggest trek: to the hotel for my stuff and then to Brooklyn for my second location for this trip. I took a car across the bridge because, despite my well-earned reputation, I do take it easier on myself sometimes than I could. Sometimes.

I picked up my keys from the neighboring deli and checked in. After flopping on the bed for 20 minutes, I set out for the comedy show I’d bought a ticket for a couple of weeks ago, a local place with Janeane Garofalo headlining. I get there too early and circle the block for a while, talking to Sean and taking in the sights. I immediately feel more at ease than I did in the Lower East Side. I fit in the continuum of people here. The houses are beautiful, and so are the residents.

The comedy show is mainly local folks, which was what I wanted. I am one of maybe 17 people in the audience, which meant a lot of crowd work. I sit separately, hidden in a shadowy corner to stage right, drinking palomas to meet my two-drink minimum. I avoid the crowd work and am pretty much the only person who does. Not present in the evening: Janeane Garofalo, who had a scheduling conflict. Hey, ok. I saw comics I wouldn’t have otherwise, I laughed, and I got out. It’ll do.

a stencil of Robin Williams and patterned tile on a wall

Day nine

The day of friends. I wake up to drop laundry off for fluff and fold, and then I get a veggie-cheese wrap from the bodega and take it to Fort Greene Park to read, think, and eat. I watch people play tennis and am amazed that people make the same sort of quasi-sex grunts that they do with weightlifting. I had no idea. After, I head to Greenpoint to meet a friend for lunch. We have Mexican food in the restaurant’s robin’s-egg-blue outdoor structure. It’s wildly good to see her. We used to work together and still have tales; I think that, every time we talk, we both learn something new and weird about our shared experiences.

After, I walk an ambling path toward the water, through neighborhoods and past so many cafes. It’s overcast, the clouds thick and low, and the wind whips around me. I love this; I feel so alive in this kind of weather in a way I never do in the eternal-72-degree tepidness of northern California. I find a bench under a building’s overhang and write in my journal as I stare out at the grey-tinged water, waiting to see if the rain will come. It doesn’t until I walk to the subway, and I pull out the umbrella I brought mostly for sun and use it to dodge mist instead.

That night, I head to Crown Heights to meet another friend. (I am very fortunate in people.) Our intended lobster roll shop is closed for renovations, so we end up at a seafood soul food shop run by a man who’s a pure ray of sunshine (and the grilled seafood platter’s pretty great too). We go back to her apartment to eat our riches, including perfect tins of peach cobbler, and we just… catch up. It’s always felt like a miracle, connection and finding people I like so well, but after the worst lockdowns, renewing that connection feels like its own compounded miracle. How did I ever get this lucky? I stay late, talking about everything and nothing, and take a late train home. It’s gone cool and gentle out, and the considerable sweaty murk I build up waiting almost 20 minutes for my train begins to recede. I’m tired but happy.

A stone on a wall with the caption "vulva or hoofprint engraved on limestone"

Day ten

The day of ordinary living. I sleep in (after the last two days, I badly needed it) and wake up by eating a leftover quesadilla in bed along with a pint of blueberries. I find I do this every couple of days, this making a meal out of the odds and ends I’ve collected along the way. Around two, I head to the subway and go north to meet friends to climb. I got into a short routine of climbing again back in May, keeping at it for more than a month, but scheduling stuff put a pause on it for the last six-odd weeks. I don’t have to remember how not to be afraid of heights and falling the way I did back in May, but I’m shaky. My borrowed shoes are too big and make me feel unsteady, so I have to swap them out after the first climb. The harness is an unfamiliar model with a single loop. They use a different belay device than I’m used to. The holds aren’t what I’m used to, the route setters have different mental models of things, it’s actually air conditioned: it’s just a lot of change for my brain to chew on. But my friends are good climbing companions, and I climb until the skin of my hands hurts. Perfect.

After, we meet friends of theirs for late lunch, and I have genuinely excellent vegetable pho and a jar full of bubble tea. It feels good to just sit and talk to new people and remember how to trust myself to relate to other humans as a fellow human, to remember what it is to actively find other people fascinating while also having useful stuff to contribute to the conversation. By the time we’re done, it’s past six, and I realize I might be done for the day. I leave the option open to take myself out to dinner, but I find I’m content to write in bed, catch up with friends online, think for a little while, and talk to no one. It’s been a wonderful day and a half of catching up with people I adore, but like my forearms, my socializing muscles are out of shape. Best to go easy as I learn to use them again and trust the strength will return.

a tree-lined piece of land meets the water, the cityscape behind it

Day eleven

The day of uncharted territory. I get up and have an excellent brunch, sitting outside and watching Brooklyn walk by as I write postcards. Fortunately, plenty of restaurants here define “brunch” the way I do: anytime until dinner. After I’m full of eggs Benedict with salmon, I head into the city and seek out the PATH train. I have story research to do, and that means… Hoboken.

Which is like any other second- or third-tier city I’ve ever been to: pretty, with nice restaurants and the kind of old buildings I like a lot. It reminds of me St. Louis or Tacoma or Albany, any of these places that would be known as a nice place to go if they weren’t overshadowed by another major city in the vicinity. I walk along the waterfront until the path runs out and then turn back, and then I roam through downtown. I verify some of the things I made up and figure out which ones need to be adjusted. I walk through the old train station, which also serves ferries. My dinner plans fall through, so instead I go back to Manhattan, where I swing by Stonewall to take pictures for a young friend. I get a cup of Big Gay Ice Cream and wander around while I eat it.

After that, I return to Brooklyn for the important writing I punted until the end of the day. It’s the last day of the Clarion West Write-a-thon, and I’m going to finish a first draft of a fantasy novel. I write a bit over 1,600 words, and then I’m done. I intend to celebrate by going out to dinner, but I realize that a pre-pandemic weakness of mine has only gotten worse: I cannot tell when restaurant kitchens close. It’s not when the restaurant closes. Is it 30 minutes before? An hour? Something else? I inquire at a couple of places that the internet told me would still be open, but they are not. Instead, I go to the bodega by where I’m staying, and miraculously their deli is still open. The guy in front of me turns to me when he finishes his own order. “Sister, you’d better order fast. They’re almost closed,” he tells me. I thank him and then do exactly that. I celebrate finishing a novel with a Nantucket Nectars orange-mango juice (an old favorite from college), a falafel wrap, and a pre-packaged chocolate-dipped waffle. Very well, then.

a mosaic on a sidewalk reads "I ain't no goddamned son of a bitch"

Day twelve

The day of the depths of Brooklyn. I wake up a little early and head out for my 12:45 reservation at the City Reliquary, a suggestion from a friend who lives here, whose mom loves weird little museums. This is an excellent one: all ephemera, the pointillist approach to museuming. A wall of Jackie Robinson, cases of World’s Fair souvenirs, handles from many eras of subways, pieces of rubble from demolished buildings of note. There’s just so much packed into one room, all staffed by a volunteer. I am utterly charmed.

glass domes cover rock samples; the one in the foreground has a card that reads "Flatiron Bldg."

After, I grab a very heavy slice with large blobs of ricotta on it. I’ll need it; it’s going to be an active day. I stop at Quimby’s (but not Desert Island; they won’t be open again until Wednesday, too late for me). Among other things, I buy a fanzine for The Cure that was published in 2020. Bless. I also buy a copy of We’ll Never Have Paris, which includes an essay from the owner of Quimby’s NYC that explains, among other things, how he came to open this one after the original Chicago location. As I had no idea there was a second one until I walked by it, this is pleasingly full circle.

I take the subway to Park Slope and, instead of transferring to another train for the last 15 blocks, I just walk and see what things look like. I stop at a bodega for a water and ask the cashier how he’s doing. “Not great,” he says. “People today.” I ask him if he thinks the problem is him or everyone. “Everyone,” he sighs. “A lady started yelling at me for not wearing a mask while I’m unvaccinated.”

I thank him and vacate the bodega quickly, just short of levitating backwards out the door.

After, appropriately enough, I go to Green-Wood Cemetery. It’s been on my New York to-do list forever, but when you have three days or five or seven in New York, it’s really easy to focus on Manhattan. Two weeks gave me the chance to finally get down here, and it’s wonderful. California cemeteries are intriguingly weird to visually parse because things don’t age the same way they do elsewhere; graves from 80 years ago look like they could’ve been put in place last year. Not so here; there are graves going back to the early 1800s, and all manner of extensive aging. They’re beautiful and sometimes strange.

I have a rough plan to walk across the cemetery to emerge and point myself toward Prospect Park, but the combination of following my bliss and Google Maps being like “I dunno” when I check my location means that, after two hours of walking, I see the same entrance I came in. Dang it. I reposition myself and try again; 30 minutes later, I’ve looped around yet again. The next time, I stick strictly to specific streets, following a deliberate route, and I finally get to the other entrance.

I walk through Park Slope and get to Prospect Park, where I begin another wander, past elaborate barbecue setups and volleyball games, flocks of joggers and cyclists. I end up at an outdoor concert, where I hear an opera singer and catch a Marina Franklin set. I move at one point to avoid being hit with a piece of wood as a consequence of a certain whimsical style of parenting. Ah, Park Slope. I may have moved out of Berkeley in 2019, but it’s a bit like Hotel California: you can check out, but you’ll never really leave.

molded copper gone green in the form of pine branches and roses

As I start walking out of the park to catch my 8 pm dinner reservation, I end up on a path and stop short as I understand what’s happening in front of me: they have lightning bugs in New York. I didn’t know that. The last time I saw them was probably 20 years ago at my grandparents’ house in southern Illinois. The population steadily diminished as I grew up. I try and fail and try and fail to take a long exposure that captures them, despite not having a tripod or a cable release, and so instead I end up staring into the woods, utterly entranced.

a dimly lit scene of the woods
Note the tiny yellow swirl in the middle bottom. Lo: a lightning bug in the best of a meh set of pictures.

But I do have to get going. I make it in time for dinner, and I have the celebratory meal I didn’t manage yesterday, as I made an actual reservation at an Italian restaurant. I eat a brick of polenta with creamy mushroom sauce, black spaghetti with kale and shrimp, and panna cotta with a cherry sauce. I’m stuffed but very happy.

I’ve walked ten miles, so I come back to my Airbnb and promptly flop onto my side for an hour, waiting to get the energy to shower. It comes eventually. It usually does.

Day thirteen

The day of low motivation. I peel myself out of bed just before two and go to a restaurant the friend who pointed me to Fort Greene recommended. I tried to go on day eleven but came by just as their kitchen had closed. Blessed art platters of cold hummus and chickpea salad on a hot day. After, I read in Fort Greene Park for a little while, watching people go by, listening to tennis players grunt again.

I have generally tried (but often failed) to keep from becoming a giant sweatball while on this trip, but today has a special need for it: I am going shopping. I’ve had a goal to go to Trash and Vaudeville this entire trip, but between energy, sweatball status, and not wanting to accumulate more stuff before my mid-trip location change, I waited. And mentally, today doesn’t feel like a great day for it. Shopping for clothes requires a certain force of will, which I’d say I have about half the time. It requires the mindset that something not working is the fault of the clothes, not the wearer. And today’s just been without that force. If I hadn’t bought a ticket for a 6 pm museum slot, I might not have left the house at all.

But it turns out it’s… great. They’re playing Peter Murphy when I walk in, which I appreciate. I talk to one employee about shared California backgrounds, about changing mask mandates, about how cute my hair is. (Telling me my hair is great is a wonderful way to get off on the right foot with me.) And then I try on things and they’re… really good. A couple things will be good for work, once that’s a thing again and I once again get the chance to be the resident Office Character, but the silver vinyl zip-up top and the black one with boning and a couple dozen hooks and eyes will probably be only and exclusively worn out dancing. (Probably.) I am reasonably sure I’ve never deliberately bought clothes specifically for clubbing before. It took me a while, but here I am. When I check out, I have a fun conversation with the other person working there – about hair dye being discontinued, about what you can and can’t depend on. I walk out with a bag of fancy new things and a smile.

I go hang out in Tompkins Square Park for a little while to kill some time, just listening to people and reading. When it’s time, I head north to Fotografiska NYC, a New York location of a photography museum in Stockholm that I loved. This one’s great too – they’re trying to straddle Serious Museum with “you can get a drink from the bar and take it with you” (which is what I was told when I walked in). I see Tom of Finland’s photographs, some with the sketches they inspired. I see wild, bright, surreal, and rather wonderful photos from Miles Aldridge, which I love, but alas, his books are expensive – the one I pick up is $420. (I put it down quickly and carefully.) Stunning photos from a famous Houston strip club by Adrienne Raquel, beautiful explorations of a relationship and gender roles from Pixy Liao, and an inquisitive look at the collision of international fashion from Hassan Hajjaj. I loved it, and it was worth leaving the house for.

I hang around Madison Square Park for a while after, on the phone, watching people eat Shake Shack. After, I walk to the Peter McManus Cafe, a suggestion from my friend who used to live near it. Not McSorley’s, he said – go for the real thing. Since I’m only eating outside, “real” is relative, so I order my cider and veggie burger at the bar and get them at the al fresco dining shack across the sidewalk. But I see it, and I like it, and I learn it was the bar in Highlander. The bartender has that serious air about him that I like in people who do his job; he genuinely just wants everything to work well. He’s very earnest when he asks me if everything was ok. And it was.

After, I walk back north, intending to finally get that shake… but Shake Shack closed early tonight for building work. Oh well. I go home instead, still carrying my bag of new clothes, via a trek that includes four wrong subway entrances before I find the single correct one and then get on a train that goes only one stop before going out of service. But I get back to Fort Greene eventually, and I get a cookies-and-cream ice cream bar at the bodega on the corner before I go back to my Airbnb.

Tomorrow is my last full day. It came fast and also took a beautiful forever to get here. I’ve already decided I’m coming back here for a couple weeks in the spring. I think I decided that on about day two, really, wordlessly and deep inside of me, once the initial OMG PEOPLE terror began to wane, and dormant parts of me started to come back to life.

trees wrapped in red cloth with white polka dots

Day fourteen

The day of public transit and infinite pumpkins. I put today’s outing so late in the trip because I wanted to build up to long journeys across public transit and also because it was the first day the infinite mirror room was available. Today, I went from Brooklyn to the Bronx to see the Yayoi Kusama exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden. It’s not the worst trek, but it’s a long ride on the 5 and then a bus, and if today is any indication, buses in the Bronx are a whole thing I’m not excited to do again.

The exhibits, however, are just right. All joy and sparkle and brightness and color and whimsy and untethered imagination. Setting them in the garden worked perfectly. The way they managed access and crowds worked perfectly. I don’t think I could’ve picked a better finale for this trip.

On the way back, I sit next to a gentleman in a beautiful war bonnet, all black and teal feathers. Sharing a bench on the train, I felt like we could’ve been another “this is the future liberals want” picture. I love New York.

That night, I go to one last brass night at Barbés, a last hurrah before I go home and quarantine until I get a clear covid test. On the way home, I order an omelet online from the one-block-further bodega, the one open 24 hours. When I walk in, I join two cops, a guy talking fast about how the cigarettes weren’t for him, and another guy just loitering in the way people sometimes do when it’s one am and you’re in a convenience store. “Hello, lady!!!” the cashier greets me. He has my omelet. I speed home. Late dinner or early breakfast? Or maybe just both.

Day fifteen

The day of endings. My flight isn’t until seven, so I have some time to go do things. My hosts are kind enough to let me leave my stuff at their apartment, so I fly untethered. First I go to the Museum of Chinese in America, which I didn’t make it to last week. It’s good and dense, and a friend gave me a couple things to look for that figure into her family history, which added a lovely dimension to things. I walk around reading for an hour and emerge to a protest, which I learn is scheduled twice weekly, that has to do with management and funding. More dimensions. From there, I wander around a little before taking the subway north to Madison Square Park, because I really want that shake. Alas, the line is predictably long, and it’s not to be. (This is not wildly upsetting; Oakland has a Shake Shack now too, and this is more reason to make myself go there.) Instead, I walk across the street to Eataly and get a pizza, which I eat back in the park as I write some last postcards.

I am aware (and have it confirmed later) that I could stay another hour there, but I also know how I feel on travel days; going to a museum and having lunch out without feeling out of my mind is enough achievement. So I get back on the subway, go collect my stuff, and take the LIRR to JFK. I considered taking a car, trying to be nice to myself again, but the price would have been over a hundred dollars – no thank you. Instead, I end up on the train, listening to three guys who have a look of construction or maybe electrician to them talk. Deep New York accents, jokes about cramming themselves into Priuses when they get rides between jobs. I’m travel jittery, but they’re a joy to listen to.

JFK is kind of my least-favorite airport, largely because of a really terrible international connection there in 2013, but it’s… fine. I get incredibly dodgy pad Thai for late lunch. I try to mentally prepare myself to go home but realize I kinda can’t, and that’s ok. Mostly, I just wait.

After the flight, I encounter a bunch of weird SFO problems in trying to just get to BART and then have the single worst BART ride of my life on the way home. It’s a hell of a thing to spend a couple of weeks feeling very independent and steady (though that’s mostly just money; I have money, therefore New York is of a manageable scale to me) and then to reenter the familiar and find myself terrified of one shitty dude. But I make it home, and I wonder what it’ll be to reacclimate. Remind myself that I don’t actually believe in signs. Remind myself that I’ll probably be just fine. I most always am.

But I wonder, once again, where home is now and what that means in this era. To be determined.

a yellow sign reading "END" in front of a waterfront, with the New York skyline beyond it

How to vacation during a pandemic: week one

How to vacation during a pandemic: week one

There are extremely valid reasons to not do this kind of travel in this era. Here’s why I did.

  1. I booked it when things were a little calmer, before infections rose again and we had Delta Variant feelings. So it goes. I also paid extra for direct flights in the interest of less exposure (and potential exposing).
  2. I was particularly cautious about what I did in the two weeks before I left. None of this stuff – only necessary errands, carried out in exactly the same way I did in, say, October 2020 and other similarly dire pre-vax periods. I wanted so badly to go out dancing, but I couldn’t justify it when I knew I’d be crossing the country soon, when other people would be in proximity to me without the ability to consent to the risks I’ve opted into.
  3. I was going from the Bay Area to New York, which have similar vaccination rates. This was very important to me both for my own safety and for people I’d encounter.
  4. Even so, I was, if anything, even more zealous with masks while I was there. Sometimes, especially late evenings in the Lower East Side, I was the only person wearing one. I reasoned that the biggest benefit of a mask is specifically to protect people from my California cooties. I don’t mind looking paranoid if it keeps other people safer. I’ve been the dork in a room before and will be again.
  5. A lot of my activities and all of my meals were outside.
  6. I gravitated toward Official Tourist Activities where masks and vaccinations were required. These let me relax. Bless you, Tenement Museum.
  7. If I didn’t do something other than existing in north Oakland for another several months, I was absolutely going to lose my entire fucking shit.

I’m a security engineer and believe in harm reduction over goals of perfection we’ll never live up to. I took the trip.

a painting of a Dala horse on a building in the Lower East Side of Manhattan

Day one

I arrive at JFK in the early evening, just in time for a sudden rainfall to reduce the west coast smoke that preceded me here. I had hoped this trip might help me duck some of the fire and smoke back in Oakland, so seeing those hazy pictures ahead of my arrival was a disappointment. But when I arrive, the air is wet and fresh and heavy. Alive.

I’ve only slept for 4.5 hours, so my subway ride into the city is a little surreal, my rumpled self draped immobile and sweaty around my bags as my brain begins what will be a constant practice during this trip: seizing on all the small details of the people around me. I’ve always done this, and in fact love it, but after so many months of not being able to immerse myself in other people, my brain starves for this in a way that makes it not an entirely voluntary activity.

I promised myself I didn’t have to go out on my first night unless I really wanted to, and that was before I realized how little sleep I’d get on my travel day. I summon Chinese food to my hotel room, eat most of it, and pass out for nine hours.

feet in sandals below a blue-and-white-dress next to a social distancing floor sticker

Day two

Since I’m still getting used to this “no longer in my living room” thing, I kept my plans modest for my first full day. I do well when I tell myself things like, “Do this one thing, and then you don’t have to do anything else.” This applies for activities like preparing for job interviews, but it also applies to fun that I know could stress me out.

I order a bagel with lox from Russ and Daughters to pick up, which I eat in bed. An everything bagel with lots of poppy seeds is, I will say, an interesting choice of bed food, but here we are. I eat it while I start my work during London Writers’ Hour. After, I take a walk around the neighborhood, get a coffee, and go on a Tenement Museum tour. I chose Finding Home, which takes us into a recreation of two eras of a tenement apartment, one from when a Jewish family moved into it just after World War II, and the other from a later era when a Puerto Rican family moves in. Everything feels connected to my awakening brain, so an hour-plus of a super-informed guide augmented by tales from several older Jewish New Yorkers on the tour just makes the synapses sparkle. I feel so lucky.

I go back to the hotel to decompress a little and realize that my occasional travel problem of sorting out food in a timely way is extremely likely to be an issue on this trip. I make myself go out and get a veg burger, which I even eat outside, before going back to the hotel for my online appointment with my therapist. I stay in bed and think and write and read until I realize, again, the food thing is an issue, and I dress up a little and shove myself outside. What I didn’t anticipate was that Thursday in the Lower East Side is basically Friday. Almost all the outdoor tables at restaurants are full, and the sidewalks are crammed with the young and drunk.

This is a lot for me right now.

I wander around for more than 25 minutes, coming up empty-handed, vowing to make more reservations if I’m so hellbent on going out to eat in the future. Finally I spot a couple empty tables at an Italian restaurant with a stunning indoor bar, all twinkle lights along the ceiling, just a glittering golden oasis of possible inebriation that I cannot go into right now. I stuff myself with burrata and cheese-filled shells. I listen to the table next to me having a fairly ruthless and joyless political argument, a European lecturing an American and being what I think is correct but also pretty exhausting about it. I see people ten-odd years younger than me thrilling to their own hot vaxxed summers, coming within six inches of my sidewalk table.

I resolve that I do not need to go out for dinner tomorrow if I don’t want to.

Day three

I set an alarm and head for my time slot at MOMA. I have a Clif bar for technical breakfast and then, after saying hello to “Starry Night” and some other lovely things, I eat macaroni and cheese at their Terrace Cafe. It’s overcast and soft when I go outside, but the sky laser turns up to 11 approximately 30 seconds after I order. Like any common vampire, I cover myself in the large light scarf I usually have on me, and thus I survive to see the rest of the museum.

After, I walk north into Central Park, meaning to amble toward Bethesda Terrace in a roundabout way. I see dogs and read bench plaques. I see bike rickshaws, so many bike rickshaws, plus those tourist carriages and dozens of aggressive cyclists. And it’s wonderful. I dressed light, so I’m not dying from the humidity. I’m kind of wondering what my hair looks like, but I’m not uncomfortable. I get to my destination and sit on the cool stone ledge inside to write, listening to a guy playing the duxianqin, mixing the more traditional stuff you hear from one of those with things like the theme to The Godfather. I watch people selfie (the true theme of the day; MOMA was constant shit for the ‘gram, in a way I found more melancholy than annoying), I watch a guy making giant bubbles with one of those rope wands, I watch people living out their Real New York City Experiences, and I feel fairly content. I get up after a while and walk further through the park. A bit later, it begins to rain.

I haven’t felt soft summer rain in a long time. California doesn’t really have that: rain the same temperature as your skin, that feels like it grows things, like encouragement. My bag is full of moisture-averse things like my journal and the museum postcards I bought, so I can’t exactly luxuriate in it. I end up walking down Fifth Avenue, hopping from the shelter of one tree to another, until I end up under a Bergdorf Goodman awning and realize I’m close to the train back to my hotel. I wrap that sun-shielding scarf around my head, draping it over my bag, and make my way there, getting to the platform just as my train pulls up.

True to my word to myself, I get home and hang out for a while before getting crepes from the little shop across the street from my hotel. It stays open until two, and the crepes are exactly what I want. I do my daily writing. I do my first batch of sink laundry. And after I stayed outside for seven whole hours without having a pandemic agoraphobia-induced panic attack, I start to make more plans.

It feels safe to make more plans.

a mural of the Notorious B.I.G. on the Brooklyn Love building

Day four

I keep staying up later than I mean to. It’d be easy to blame this on time zones, but the reality is that I have a Kindle full of excellent library books and zero ability to cut myself off of anything joyful at this point, even if I know it’ll be waiting for me tomorrow. Last night, I stayed up past three finishing The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune, which was described to me as a warm hug, and it delivered. This meant, however, that getting up with my 11:30 alarm was… pushing it. I finally lumbered out of my hotel room around 12:45 (after washing my hair, because I’m rediscovering how curly hair works in humidity) and walked to Tompkins Square Bagels to grab breakfast and lunch, which I took to Battery Park to meet friends. “Meet us by the Seaglass Carousel” were the magical instructions, and I found a shady bench and devoured my nova lox bagel like any common large sea mammal. I came here to try to see what it’s like to live, and sitting in a park with friends, watching Zelda the dog roll ecstatically in the grass and try to eat mango, then walking back to my hotel with one of said friends, weaving through neighborhood after neighborhood, stopping to buy fruit at a sidewalk table, seeing layers of city give way to each other… it’s good. It’s very good. This could be your life, my soul whispers to me. I know, I whisper back.

I collapse back at the hotel, diminished after hours of sweating, before resurrecting myself to go out to dinner. It’s month-long restaurant week here (ok!), and I found a place around the corner with a prix fixe menu that includes both shrimp risotto and panna cotta (I fucking love panna cotta; a useful thing to know about me, because now you know to keep your hands away from my mouth and dessert when it’s on the table). It takes a good 15 minutes for someone to take my order, which is five minutes less than my limit for waiting on that kind of thing. The Lower East Side, it turns out, makes me feel very on the outside. I’m pretty accustomed to feeling that way, having been a weird kid for many many years now, but I’m not accustomed to being among people again yet, so it’s a little difficult. I sit alone at a four-top with another excellent book, content enough, but feeling outside, as I’m surrounded by friend groups fueling up for a night out (with both food and, in the case of some table neighbors, rounds of tequila shots). I have no problem eating alone, but eating alone at a place that’s all about large groups is a slightly different situation. I order champagne, because yay me, but am informed they only have rosé champagne that night. Oh no, not that. I say that’s fine, but the waiter brings me regular champagne and then a bonus on-the-house glass of the rosé, with a wink of that particular kind that comes from a career waiter. It feels like extra oxygen in the room to be visible and judged worthy of a little kindness and delight. The panna cotta is excellent too.

He comps me another glass of champagne with my check. I tip well and happily. I am very happy to be seen as that woman who dines alone and warrants champagne.

mural of Ruth Bader Ginsberg in the Lower East Side of Manhattan

Day five

I stayed up late last night, waiting for the champagne to work its way out of me, and then decided at 2:30 am that it was definitely time to do a first revision/editing pass on that printed-out short story I brought with me, and so I give myself the gift of sleeping as late as I damn well please. I emerge from my hotel just before three and walk back to my favorite East Village bagel shop. The ice melts in my coffee before I get to Tompkins Square Park to eat them, but fortunately, the coffee is mostly gone by then too. I am relieved that travel’s magical transmuting quality on coffee still works for me. At home, it’d give me an elevated heart rate and a sense of vague danger; elsewhere, it provides more of that awake/alive/ready feeling that seems normal for a lot of people.

I find a place on the lawn to eat, drink my lemonade, and write in my journal a little. A cover band plays mostly Beatles songs, and excellently, with one single deviation with an Eagles song, for which I can forgive them. I smell weed and watch dogs try to chase squirrels and see everyone in their shared yard in public. I realize I’m too warm to eat more, so I stop at half a nova lox bagel. It will be the last thing I eat for more than six hours, well into the evening.

I need to get to the Upper West Side, and I screw the directions up a little, somehow missing the stop on Houston I sought. Instead, I end up walking a long, warm mile and a half, mostly avoiding the sun for all the good it did me, arriving at the next station approximately seven hours later (meaning probably 30 minutes) and certainly down a pint of the humors I need to keep me alive. Seriously, I become a freaking lawn sprinkler as I wait on the platform. I know it’s gross when my shins are sweating. The train I needed pulled away as I stepped onto the platform, so I have the longest wait possible, 13 minutes to stand in the shared sauna, breathing deeply and reminding myself that suffering is as transient as joy. The AC of the train is a balm, is an absolution, is a reminder that maybe I’ll live to see another day.

I get to my destination at least 30 minutes later than I’d intended, just long enough to talk to my boyfriend and spot a minivan with the license plate 1-HOTMOM parked outside. I’m there for a performance of Twelfth Night at a community garden on 89th Street.

“I, uh, didn’t know you liked Shakespeare,” Sean says as I talk to him before going through the gate to find a seat. “You’ve never seemed especially interested when I’ve proposed it.”

“I’m not when there are more options,” I tell him. “But I like seeing theater when I come to New York, so I like it just fine when it’s one of the few outdoor performances happening.”

It’s a lot of fun to watch. My attention span remains spotty and unpredictable after all that time in my apartment, and I watch some and drift away in my mind some, going back and forth, but enjoying the performances. I like a whimsical interpretation of a Shakespearean comedy. They do a nice job, and I’m glad I stumbled onto it online. The president of the garden sits next to me sometimes, on the edge of a planter, and we both have hand fans in motion most of the time.

After, I go get dinner at the Mermaid Inn, where I drink almost two liters of ice water. I eat a giant pile of kale, because one of my weekly goals is to try to get more salad. (My last few days were more bagel-based than is ideal.) They bring me a little surprise chocolate pot to finish things up, and I feel blessed by waiters again.

After, I wander down Amsterdam and into some of the more residential blocks. I have to figure out where a character of mine lives, and I take pictures of front doors of likely looking places. It’s interesting roaming around an area I kind of know but who someone I’ve invented knows very well. May I recommend writing a novel set somewhere else and then going there? It’s a new kind of orientation, the imagination overlaying the half-familiar.

I walk down to 60th, frown at the people taking stupid selfies in front of the shitty former president’s shitty hotel (I mean, seriously, still?), and duck onto the subway. Some deeply odious bros are being exactly as you’d expect, and I put my headphones on for the first time since the plane here. Lots of things are easier with an application of Nine Inch Nails.

I arrive home and discover new blisters on my left foot in places I generally don’t get them. It’s good; it means I’ve been walking a ton, one of my primary goals for this trip. But it also means that tomorrow’s a great day to try to take it a little easier physically.

Day six

In fact, I take the day off.

I get up before 11 to do London Writers’ Hour while eating a bagel from yesterday. After I get my words done, I realize I’m still zonked, so I go back to sleep for a couple of hours, having those shallow, vivid dreams that pop up sometimes with out-of-band, uncertain sleep. Between my feet being kind of fucked and the fact that it’s somehow warmer out today than yesterday, I realize that the best, most honest approximation of living here today is… staying the hell inside. I eat longan for the first time, piercing their shells with my incisors before shelling them and spitting the dark seeds into my crepe bag from several nights ago. I write and catch up on neglected emails and responses on Slack and Twitter. I wash my hair after all the sweaty hours of yesterday and get to let it dry before I go outside. I do the next London Writers’ Hour and work on some editing.

If this were a week-long vacation, it would feel like such a massive squandering of time, but I’m realizing that this is the luxury of a longer trip: I can just veg sometimes and be a person who gets tired and needs a moment. If I’d gone outside today, I might’ve forced myself through a couple hours at the Met or some other museum that I probably would have liked well enough but which didn’t really sing to me today. Anyway, it’s Monday, and lots of cultural things are closed. Instead, I’m letting my body rest a little, limiting the push of sharp, sharp summer on soft, pale limbs that really aren’t into marching around in 90-degree heat and sweltering sun. I’m starting to understand what it would be like for me to live in New York in the summer: I’d do less some days, like you always do if you’re just home. It’d be easier if I could just go see a movie or luxuriate in restaurant AC, but I’m not doing either of those things right now, so my options for climate control are my hotel room, the subway, and museums. Instead, I stay inside, and it’s just right.

In the evening, I take two trains over to Fort Greene to meet online friends for German beer, and it’s nice to just sit and talk and exist with people who have at least a little context of who I am. I love this version of traveling: a couple of days to wander and feel only barely tethered to the world, then getting to see friends and be a person in the context of the rest of my life for a little while. We talk hacking things and security conferences and mutual friends. (It’s security; there are always mutual friends.) When I go home, I’m able to make the return trip without consulting my phone. Not the most complicated route, but it’s just such a joy to be able to figure things out again for fun reasons. A memory of letters and colors, understanding what the endpoints on the trains mean, and getting to be just another blase person on the subway platform.

I realized during dinner that I seem to have walked off the unhelpful portion of my “I am among people, oh shit!!!” anxiety, leaving only the useful stuff (masks inside, a general disinterest in unsafe indoor things and people). I book a ticket for a day at the American Museum of Natural History and am surprised at how excited I am. This kind of unadulterated looking forward to stuff has been largely out of reach for the last pandemic length of time. Always, some part of myself had to be left on the shelf in order to emotionally survive things. What a gift it is to look at even one thing without that weight sitting across my shoulders.

I learn during dinner that the place I’m staying in the Lower East Side sits neatly within what’s called Hell Square.

This explains some things.

Day seven

For my last full day staying in Manhattan, I go to… Staten Island.

I’ve meant to take the ferry for my last several visits to the city, but do you know, it’s really easy to just keep not doing that. Not until a friend mentioned the Alice Austen House did I have the double-barreled reason to actually go. I book a 1 pm tour, set an alarm, and spend the last hour of the morning making my way to the ferry. On the other side, I get a bus down Bay Street to the museum.

It overlooks the water, and it’s fitting to learn about Austen’s work there, because she documented so much local stuff: street life in Manhattan in the late 1800s, quarantine islands in the same era, and her robust social life, which seemed to be full of sardonic nerds. I like them immediately.

Lobster Newburg recipe typed on a card
Alice and Gertrude bribed the chef at Delmonico’s $75 for this recipe and never really recouped the money. You can enjoy it for free.

When I get back to the hotel, I give myself the gift of a couple hours in the AC before I go out, eating an egg salad sandwich from Pret-a-Manger in bed to tide me over before fancy dinner.

My new favorite kind of bar is the kind that wants to see my vax card. It doesn’t fix everything, as we know, but it’s harm reduction, which will do. The room at the back of the bar in Brooklyn is small, probably the size of my living room and bedroom put together. Mambembe is a ten-person ensemble (that night, anyway) that takes up between half and two-thirds of the space. I’d forgotten what it’s like to feel the strike of a drum in my bones, going resonant through my ribcage. Turns out it’s everything. New Heights Brass Band is all women, and their solos, I just… I get FEELINGS much more easily right now than I usually do, and I found myself on the edge of tears at a guitar solo during an arrangement of “Genie in a Bottle”, to say nothing of all the other actual brass solos.

I am not the same as I was, and in some ways, that’s pretty ok.

I dance and I dance and I dance, and I drink pulque that even the bartender didn’t realize was on their bottle list, and the bar staff is extremely kind, and everyone’s so glad to be there. Including me.

a lightbulb sticks out of a Supremes record

I take the subway back for my last night in my hotel, and I’m struck again at how simple it is: how frequent the trains are, how clear everything is, how stuff just works. I’ve been here enough to know that’s not always the case, but I am pretty sure it often is, and for someone who has gone through elaborate thinking to figure out how to get from Rockridge to Ashby via BART without wanting to tear things apart or wait a pointless 28 minutes for a transfer, that is everything.

Tomorrow brings trip part two: the Brooklyn-based days. I cannot wait.