quelle surprise

So I took a day off to recuperate from a particularly stressful few weeks at work. I spent that day walking the streets of the city with an old friend. It was one of those epic New York days that start at the General Sherman statue, span entire boroughs, obscure quests, omelets, costume emporiums, Psychic Jessica and—inevitably—stretch into the evening hours and the dramatic consumption of beer. We logged almost nine miles on foot and knit together a conversation that stretched from Thomas Paine and armchair Catholicism to Roman vacation planning. I had six pints of Guinness for dinner.

We ran into the flaming automobile on our way up Park, right in the middle of Union Square. I mean, really. How many times do you get to witness the spontaneous combustion of the family car?

We ended the evening having stumbled upon the outdoor screening of The Sting in Bryant Park, watching for a little while in the drizzle before calling it in—a whopping eleven hours later.

It was one of those days that reaffirm your personal cosmology, but make you rethink most of your life choices to date. Limitless and perfect and hard to forget. There wasn't even a game on.

Now I ask: If a minivan can just go up in flames in front of Babies R Us on a rainy Monday night in New York City, what right have we to expect rhyme or reason from the universe?

(dis)illusion

People change.

They say it all the time, don't they? (the proverbial "they," the unwashed plebes, the cliched masses) Or is it that people can't change? (which is what my mother always told me)

I wonder if time isn't stronger than all other forces, in the end, when I realize the hairpin turns life can take before you even realize you've spun the wheel. Everything begins neutral and even, but some people are left caring more—or drastically less. Suddenly Disneyworld can surprise you after years of cynicism... A grudge grows easier to give up... You've taught yourself to like olives though you abhorred them as a child... Or your dearest friendships fade to labored acquaintance.

Who knows how or when it happens, that slap in the face.

as if there were another air to breathe

Hard to believe it was only January when I dug those hideously old-fashioned dance shoes* out from under my bed, dusted them off and signed up for Basic Argentine Tango section one. I'm never sure what to expect from my more whimsical decisions, but here I am on the cusp of May and I cannot imagine myself months ago.

The shoes have improved since then. But more importantly, so have I. Not just as a dancer (I know I'm just as green as I ever was), but as a woman. It's terrifying, really, this change, because my priorities are shifting like glaciers. I want to trust these new instincts, but they pour some dangerous Kool Aid. Suddenly I don't want to be here anymore, slumping through day jobs, guilty of every spare hour passed and every audition opportunity wasted, shelling out too much to keep my head above water and waiting for that safe full of money to fall on my head (read: an acting career). I want to act. I've always wanted that. When I am on stage I cease to exist; I love the feeling of breathing through someone else's lungs, stretching someone else's limbs, but I have always lacked the drive. Not the drive to do it, the drive to pursue it. Self-promotion is a skill I lack to begin with and the cultivation of it is far too daunting. I am missing the drive to push. To pimp around for contacts and back-doors, to try to "know" people and file them in my inbox until I can tap them for favors. It's a table game in a big, sinister casino and with every drink to steel my insides, I just get more and more tired. I realize too late my lack of equipment.

If talent were rendered irrelevant, I would never succeed.

Most days I crumble under that weight, but now I am possessed of a sureness, a calm, in the face of my own nemesis. Failure is irrelevant. That is the new charm I wear under my skin.

It has to be tango—the undefined variable in the double-blind trial—that makes me want to rip my roots from the ground and get on a train, a plane, a boat. It makes me want to set my life up somewhere clean among white linens and books and trees, somewhere I'd rather be. It makes me want to study, to travel, to write, and stop trying to stuff myself into the square peg.

It is making me fearless. What can I lose that I wouldn't readily give up?

Example, Tuesday night I was sick, sagging on my feet. I should have gone home to soup and bed, but I stayed out a little too late at a very dead milonga because it was so much more important than work the next day. For those minutes on the dance floor, which may have been minutes and may have been hours, I don't remember breathing. As if there had been no need.

The high of being nothing but your own feet, someone else's arms and the beat of the bandoneon, it's unparalleled. On stage you lose the connection to your own body; you can look down at your hands and hardly recognize them. In tango you lose yourself by degrees, yet nothing steps in from the wings to fill the void; your body stays your own, only empty. It's the inexplicable freedom of being simultaneously tied—glued, chained—to someone's frame and absolutely alone. To be moving only as he moves, but not to know who began the movement.

Someday this will no longer be a surprise. The state will not be severed by my missteps or mistakes. I will not slip out of it by losing my axis. I can hardly wait for the day I can stop thinking entirely, stop having to remind myself to shift my weight, to follow his chest, to take even steps, to stay straight, to be light. But of course the shock itself of those rare moments alighting is almost enough—in these embryonic stages—to make me chuck everything to chase another ludicrous dream. What the hell am I going to do when I get good at this?**

All I know is I've lost track of what I want—unless wanting is to drift.

I look at the bones of pirates past, littered across the trail before me—in each impossible direction—and do not doubt that I will fare any differently. But wouldn't you rather die that way, starving and wearily searching for X, than work your whole life at a job you merely tolerate, stashing minor ducats into a 401K that one day just disappears? I could have played it safe. I didn't. Not only is it likely to be too late for me to change course, I'm not sure I could. The point being, I don't care. Right now it's enough to be alive.


*an impulse purchase from my teenage spree in BsAs, what I imagine a nun would wear to the rectory Halloween party if she were dressed as a witch.

** IF...and that's a big if...I get good at this.

love that dirty water

Yesterday was Opening Day. Or rather, yesterday the Sox played a forty degree make-up game against the sons-of-bitches Devil Rays (and, yes, I will continue to call them that until they rename the fish itself, because those rabid born-again Florida yahoos can kiss my lily-white Irish ***).

Opening Day is like a second Christmas every April. Uniforms are brand new, swings have been doctored, injuries have been healed, and even though there are 161 games left and millions of mountainous hurdles to clear, the whole season is ahead.

Teddy Kennedy threw the first pitch and Tito escorted him out to the mound. Vtek shut down the unfaithful naysayers with his solo homer, Beckett had his stuff back, and Pedroia, well, he was Pedroia (and he almost knocked Big Papi down with his overenthusiastic fist pound). We looked good and we played well and we won. But even if we hadn't, I'd still be excited. Because it's the love of the game. The game that will get you through the next six months.

I'm also quite pleased to pledge my allegience to a team with one of the last real baseball stadiums in the country—not one of these fancy bullshit corporate pavilions with waterfalls and martini bars. Which reminds me that talking smack is just as much the beloved American pastime as following the games themselves, and without certain friendships, none of this would be as much fun. You know who you are, Yankee fan.

It's a real good feeling to root for the Sox. Even when they lose for 86 year running, they never quite let you down...

To quote Fever Pitch, "They're here. Every April, they're here. At 1:05 or at 7:05, there is a game. And if it gets rained out, guess what? They make it up to you. Does anyone else in your life do that? The Red Sox don't get divorced. This is a real family. This is the family that's here for you."

born upon the tide

It snowed on the first day of Spring.

Which only goes to prove that very few things are final, since today's vernal equinox, which started out so cold and foreboding, rallied to blue skies by early afternoon. Slugabeds and slackers were none the wiser. To them the day was just a day.

I wish I could say that some things never change. That feelings never alter, opinions never grow headlong in opposite directions, that standards never shift. The truth is, the world is a traumatic and beautiful place where your every decision is questioned and your every conviction challenged. All you can really do is breathe and trust that you will be spared he cataclysmic peaks and valleys in favor of the slower process of gradual adaptation. You'll be pedaling in reverse before you know it, come snow or come spring.

and it breaks my heart

Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the vastness of what I do not know. I could suffocate facing it, or else I could leap blind into the world that is both garishly open to me and too heavy and huge to bear.

There is so much to learn in this life. And we each go around slaking our thirst for it, letting each knew knowledge bore its hole in us and light it up. In that way, we are like little darknesses, moving through the world, accumulating stars.

mi intimo secreto

I have fallen ass over teakettle in love . . . with tango.

And, no, I do not feel that this qualifies as infidelity on my part. There are those—who admittedly will never be privy to this little exculpatory exercise—who have accused me of ugly motives and, while I feel the need to defend myself here, I must say I find them crass and wanting imagination.

So what if I dance four nights a week and wish it were more? So what if I come home at one in the morning with busted feet? I am happy. I am assertive in ways I never knew to be, acquiescent in others, and—goddamnit—I'm happy. For the first time in my life, I feel like I have done something right. No matter what decisions I have made, what time I have wasted, what bruises I have borne, I have succeeded at finding this.

Tango for me is one part performance, one part meditation, one part . . . je ne sais quoi. And I needed a little je ne sais quoi in my life, let's face it; I did.

So, to those who would begrudge me this infatuation: desist. No, I am not eloping with my teacher. I am an adult and I know perfectly well how to resist the temptations of transference; I can tango with a fifty-year-old master dancer without losing my panties or my cool. No, I am not cheating on my boyfriend (nor do I intend to). Yes, I am abandoning him to his own devices on these evenings out, but he is a big boy and ought to stretch the legs of his own interests before they wither in atrophy. I have asked him (read: begged him) to come along on this lark and he has declined. If anyone is rejecting the other, it is he. So I will not say no to myself. I will not shut up about molinetes and volcadas. I will not stop practicing ochos at the LaserJet. I simply will not, so back off.

He visto mi allegría y la voy a lograr.