Lilit in Stereo

“New York rain is a rain of exile.”- Camus 

Every once in a while, when I’m in a “pruning” mode such as this one, I go back through old writings and journal entries. I did this a lot during my first New York year, when I was mostly broke and miserable, to remind myself about all the reasons why I’d been so determined to come here. And now, feeling somewhat staid and motionless despite finally having cut off my hair, I’m going through those old writings again. I found the journal entry I wrote as I came back from the two months in Italy and Spain. I was trying to make sense of things, piecing together scraps of poems I’d written on buses or in train stations, like pebbles picked up from a life in transit. I’ve posted that entry below, because it reminds me of what I was like when travel was my life and not something I was permitted to do two weeks out of the year, because it brings back memories of a period when I was not just growing but somersaulting and catapulting forward. This was when I still write poems, because I don’t anymore.

August 16, 2004

I spent twelve hours in Barcelona a month ago, between a train from San Sebastian and a plane to Rome.  I couldn’t see what the big deal was.  I went to the Sagrada Familia, an amazing cathedral that is going to take one hundred years to finish, features a black Jesus, and is partly made out of Coke cans and recycled aluminum foil.  Otherwise, I couldn’t see why everyone thought Barcelona was so much better than Madrid.  This time, though, I cracked the city open like a proverbial nut.  I stayed in one of those dorm-style hostels ten minutes from the beach and just across from the huge covered market.  Fell in with some Belfast blokes and a music journalist from New York.  Drank boxed sangria (not as bad as boxed wine, and it cost one euro twenty)  in the middle of the street at two in the afternoon.  Watched the Chelsea/ Manchester match in a crowded pub full of UKers and took part in the screaming and profanity.  Went to the Picasso museum, and realized Bilbao has spoiled me for life.

It was the first time I’d ever been in the Mediterranean.  I usually hate getting my hair wet, but I couldn’t help but go all the way in.  Even the rocky shore was no deterrent.  I have been in the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Dead Sea, and the Bay of Biscayne.  I measure time in bodies of water, and the next phase of my life involves the Hudson River.  At the Hebrew Museum in Florence, I signed the guestbook Lilit Sofer, New York, United States.  Toda.  In Hebrew, the word toda means thank you; in Spanish, it means all.  I meant both.

So I stayed in Florence longer than I planned because I liked it better than Rome, and I met a guy who is the assistant to a painter doing a commissioned portrait of Andrea Bocelli.  We got to see David for free, those perfect sinews and veins, saving my non-EU ass ten euros, which I promptly spent on cheap wine.  I hung out with British chicks and watched the meteor shower.  I “earringed” my way through Europe: pink glass in Venice and blue swirls in Barcelona.  I kissed a guy on the cheek and we both turned red as thirteen-year-olds.

On the train from Rome to Naples, en route to Pompeii, I pointed out the window and asked the English speaking man in the compartment across from me, “what river is that?”  He smiled and said, “it is the sea.”  The only thing Greensboro could not give me was water.

Everything that’s not growing is dead.- Lauryn Hill

One of the most important lessons I ever learned was this one, distilled: flowers are not blooming all the time.

Even a so-called perennial cannot bloom constantly. They have to be pruned, parts die and fall off, and then they grow again. As an avid student of my own life, I begin to worry every time I am not obviously growing. A lot of things in my life are in happy stasis right now: my apartment, my friends, my relationship. And when so many crucial things are in a placid state, it’s easy for me to veer off and start thinking that I need an earthquake. How many times have I threatened to quit my job and move to Argentina (or Paris, or Santorini, or whatever) and not done it because reality stepped in?

For a few months now, I’ve been pruning, particularly since the loss of my book. And you know what? It’s not only allowed, it’s what I need. For awhile I was like a weed, shooting in every direction I could. Invariably, I had to stop growing for awhile so that I could cut back and refocus. I have a couple of ideas for what I want to do next (can’t give away all the details, but basically involves me trying to make Save the Assistants bigger and awesomer).

There’s an important difference between contentedness and boredom, and between contentedness and regression. I am not moving backward, but I am learning the value of taking deep breaths and standing in one place. It’s like warming up before going on a run.

But it’s summer now. And in the heat, we expand.

Random thought of the day: I don’t know when New York went from being NEW YORK to being This Place Where I Live.

So, writing-related things:

I’ve taken over The Cleaver column at the Neal Pollack-edited family/parenting blog Offsprung. Yeah, I don’t have kids, but this column deals with misadventures of celebrity parenting, a topic I can cover more than adequately. I already did a post about bad celebrity baby names (which, honestly, may have enough material to be a weekly feature) and one about Ashlee Simpson.

I’ve also been blogging about the awesome finale of American Idol, which actually made me tear up a little bit. You can see the post on John’s blog, My (Re) Views.

I almost never do memes, but I couldn’t pass up a fun one from Kendra over at A Million Paths. The meme was to write five “remarkably unremarkable” things about yourself.

1. I love onions. I don’t just put them into every recipe where it’s even remotely appropriate, I eat them plain, like apples. I’m sure other people find onion breath to be offensive, but I find it quite sexy.

2. As a kid, almost all of my stuffed animals were all named after Greek gods and goddesses. There was Aphrodite the hippo, Poseidon the polar bear, and Pan the monkey. I was a weird kid.

3. I watch the last episodes of TV shows, even if I never watched the rest of the series. There’s something calming about couples finally getting together, couples who have been desperate for a child finally getting pregnant, people moving away from home to start new lives and at their going-away party finding out how much they meant to everyone. I don’t think you need to have followed the whole show to watch the last episode. You can tell the whole history of a couple in what happens when they unite or reunite. It’s a wonderful feeling, the senses of finality and resolution and peace and purpose all at once.

4. My middle name is Helene. I was named for my great-aunt Helen, who died one year to the day exactly before I was born. She and my mother were very close. As a kid, when I knew I was going to end up changing my name someday because the one I was given didn’t fit quite right, I considered just going by Helene. It’s a great name. I should have stuck with it. Also, one of my favorite–if not my favorite–characters in Shakespeare is Helena. She was not the Hermia, torn between two suitors, but the lovelorn girl who didn’t even have one and would have ended her life alone if not for the intervention of mystical creatures. I always identified with her. And therefore is love said to be a child/because in taste he is so oft beguiled.

5.  I never learned to ride a bike. My parents bought me a bike, and it ended up going to my sister because I refused–flat out refused–to learn to ride it. I don’t even rememember why. I think I hated the loss of control. I was also not really an outdoorsy kid, and I grew up in suburbs that were not terribly pedestrian-friendly. Then by the time I realized it would be a really good idea to learn, I was embarrassed to be a teenager who didn’t know how to ride a bike. Every summer I swear it’s going to be the summer I learn, this one included.

I don’t spend as much time in the West Village as I’d like to. First, I only went there when B. lived there. Then after B. left I couldn’t walk west of Broadway without mourning him in some way. But it’s been three and a half years of me in New York, and now when I take that walk up Sixth Avenue, I can think about the last time I bought lip balm at the C.O. Bigelow Apothecary instead of turn my head shamefully at the French Roast and remembering how I went there with B. and got the notion in my head that he loved me.

Sometimes I love this city and sometimes all I want to do is shake myself free of it. My head is filled with trinkets that clink against each other. I need a new job. I need a better umbrella, even though I always lose them. I need more bylines. I need a pair of sandals and a straw hat and a way to get to the beach, a photographic memory and a vacation and a haircut. But then nights like this one come along, when the rain has just finished and the trees are soggy. They do not drip on me.

But my bounty is as boundless as the sea
my love as deep; the more I give to thee
the more I have.

You are what you love, and not what loves you back. - Jenny Lewis

About six months out of the year there is no place in the world I would rather live in than New York, which works out conveniently since I happen to live there. Spring and autumn are the best times to walk lazily through the streets, for drinking tea and wearing flats and dreaming with the windows open. The office where I get acupuncture is in the East Village, near Stuyvesant Square. After the session I’m always so airy and hopeful that I just want to walk for awhile.

There’s a saying: when a door closes, a window opens. Recently a very big door slammed shut for me. My book was rejected. By every editor who looked at it. What this means is that my book won’t be getting published, at least not anytime soon. The comments were all some variation of “we like your writing, it was so interesting, you have so many stories to tell, but you have no arc.” At twenty-five, it seems, I have no arc. After all, how can you not take criticism personally when it’s your life story they’re criticizing?

And then a window opened. A piece I’d been working on for the New York Post came out and, to my surprise, got a three-page spread with color photos. After that, I started getting phone calls and emails from other places who wanted to write about the site and about me. This morning, I taped a really fun segment on NPR.

Just because I’ve rebounded doesn’t mean the feeling of emptiness will ever go away completely. Finding out my book wasn’t going to sell was like finding out that someone had died. I kept checking my legs to see if thick purplish-black streams were running down. I wished I’d never told any of my friends about the project, much less written about it in such a public forum as this one, just so I wouldn’t have to politely respond to follow-up questions about how it was doing. Rushing into any new writing so soon after losing this life-devouring manuscript would be unfair, like jumping into a new relationship immediately after ending a long, significant one. All the adornments coming my way as of late won’t be able to totally soothe the pain of losing this thing I worked hard on. And I worked so fucking hard on it, this book that no one will see.

But you are what you love. And that means I am New York, I am my friends, I am my apartment on Metropolitan Avenue and springtime and Argentine wine and sundresses and my dead book.

I go on these self-improvement kicks sometimes. First I started subscribing to the Sunday Times. Then I started funding the occasional project on Donors Choose. Now, I’m learning how to cook. Gradually.

It’s easy not to know how to cook when you live in New York, the city of 24-hour takeout and prompt delivery. In my case, it’s even easier not to know how to cook when I have a boyfriend who is a phenomenal cook (and who is totally never giving back that orange Le Creuset dutch oven that my mom gave “us” when we were in NC last summer). But cooking–at least adequately–is one of those things I think I should know how to do. It’s like driving or balancing a checkbook, something every adult should be able to do reasonably well. So I looked up some recipes online, bought some groceries, and dived in.

Three months after my New Year’s Resolution to be less of a complete bonehead in the kitchen, I’ve made some advancements. Sarah and I tried an orzo recipe together, and then I was able to recreate it on my own. I figured out how to use a hand blender and made a couple bowls’ worth of cauliflower soup. I’m certainly not anywhere near a professional, but I can actually prepare relatively tasty, inexpensive meals without burning my hand or giving myself food poisoning.

Part of my problem with cooking was that I found it an entirely uncreative pursuit. Like Anne Shirley, I’d get bored or distracted halfway through and completely forget about that water I had boiling in another room. Cooking seemed too precise, with its tablespoons and half-cups. But the more I’ve practiced at it I’ve learned that food has a language just like writing or music, and that once you get the basic vocabulary you can start messing around with the rules. I mean, Picasso painted a whole lot of landscapes to prove he knew the basics of art before he started going off into the new world of Cubism. I’m considering all these dishes my landscapes–once I can make rice without burning the bottom layer or saute vegetables without splashing hot oil on myself, I might feel a little more free to mess with recipes. Until then, it’s sustenance. And going over to Paul’s a lot for dinner.

What are some things you love about yourself? How did you come to love these things?

Gina wrote the previous sentence on her blog. And I haven’t done anything resembling a meme in a long time, but I thought I’d answer. This was especially timely considering my last post was about my (increasingly rare, thanks) body issues.

I love my hands. I have signer’s hands, with long, slender fingers and nails mostly kept short. I never hated my hands or thought they were ugly, but they were utilitarian, things that enabled me to talk and communicate, and finding them beautiful would be like finding a tongue beautiful. But after awhile I came to learn that there were many, many ways to talk with hands, more than just sign language. I held hands with a boy for the first time. I ran my hands through a sad friend’s hair. A needle pricked the end of my finger. A baby tried to chew on my palm.

I think I learned to love my hands around the same time that I started to call myself a woman instead of a girl. There’s no exact moment when it happened, of course, but there was a day when I fastened a bracelet and thought my hands are lovely. They are a woman’s hands, a writer’s hands. I think I grew into them just like I grew into my self, into my name.

Dear X,

I know that since I’ve been out of town, we haven’t seen each other in awhile. The first thing you said to me when we ran into each other today was “Wow, you’re even skinnier than usual.” I understand that this was your idea of a compliment, akin to “goodness, you got such a nice tan while you were traveling.” However, I did not take it as a compliment. Yes, I’m aware that in our society, thinness is a positive trait, and a sought-after one, therefore someone remarking on your thinness is supposed to be a good thing. Complaining about being slender is like complaining about being rich, or white–because richness, whiteness, and thinness are all desired qualities in our society, and they all bear the mark of privilege.

That nonwithstanding, I would like to tell you about all the times I came home crying from middle school because some girl had made fun of me for being the last one to need a bra. I’ll tell you about sneaking protein shakes and candy bars and bags of potato chips, because I thought if only I could gain some weight everyone would stop accusing me of having an eating disorder. I’d like to tell you about every single magazine I have ever opened up full of letters talking about how disgusting and unnatural all thin women are, and how ‘real’ women do not have boyish hips or bony shoulders. I would like to show you every single website that posts photographs of skinny celebrities and encourages people to mock them and offer them sandwiches. I can go through the closet at my parents’ house and dig out the years’ worth of oversized dark clothing I thought might disguise my skeletal figure and somewhere I still probably have the note someone slipped in my locker that said I (the only Jewish girl in my high school) looked like a concentration camp victim.

Yes, I know you meant it as a positive comment. And at the moment, all I could do was freeze up and wish my belt were a notch or two looser. It took me all the way home to write this, because I couldn’t say it to you then. Because it is not your fault how much that little sentence dragged up inside me, and not your fault that at the time I couldn’t come up with anything to say beyond “Um, thanks, I guess.”

Skinny girls aren’t supposed to have self-esteem problems, and, honestly, it’s been a long time since I had any kind of negative thought about my body. There are definitely days when I try on a dress and wish I had a curvy figure, but I’ve gotten pretty comfortable living in this skin of mine, and as long as I’m healthy I try not to think about much else related to my weight. I don’t even own a scale. It’s certainly not your fault that your well-intentioned comment sent me off on a whole episode of reminiscing and reflection. Maybe we live in the kind of a world where even a woman who normally considers herself well-adjusted and confident is secretly insecure. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think women and men are complex beings, who are happy at some times and sad or introspective or forlorn at others. The trick is being able to pull ourselves more often than not onto the side that the light is on.

“One can live without New York. But it’s better not to.”- Alain Ducasse

It’s a long way home from Buenos Aires, fifteen hours of actual flying broken up by three hours eating egg white scrambles and reading bad magazines in the Mexico City airport. It’s a long way home and by the time you get back to where you started you’re confused to see signs in English and American dollars look foreign and synthetic.

The best word I learned in Argentina was casamentera, which literally translates to “house mentor” but more specifically means “matchmaker.” I watched the Mothers of the Disappeared march in Plaza de Mayo and ate a gourmet dinner in a restaurant where each table was in a different room of a restored mansion. In the designer boutique in Montevideo, the at-home equivalent of which I cannot dream of affording, a salesgirl called all her coworkers over to stare at me, the girl who lives in a city they’ve only seen in movies.

After tango lessons and a parade of flawless Malbecs, after flea-market antique jewelry and subpar wireless connections, I’m back in New York again. Every time I think of leaving I come back home and the wind rushes me like a lover and it starts all over again. It’s mine, this cold city still green-eyed in the winter, and I belong to it. In the cab from the airport I swore at a driver who tried to cut us off and thought this is where I am supposed to be, and there were fifteen messages on my voicemail and I was ready to live my life again.