I don't expect my love affairs to last for long

Maybe it's the holiday lights and the red cups at Starbucks. Maybe it's the trees for sale on the sidewalk, the giant snowflake hoisted over 5th Avenue. Maybe it's the Christmas music I heard a week too early at the DMV. . . but—since Thanksgiving—I've been having something of a love affair with New York. I had almost decided to see other cities, but I think I am ready to commit.

Thanksgiving was almost perfect: the food, the company, the impossibly primo view of the parade, the drunken singalong to follow. Something about hanging out a third story window on a crisp November morning watching float after float, marching band after marching band make its way down Seventh Avenue from the park makes me realize how much this city feels like the center of the universe on occasion. And how lucky I am to live here. Not to mention how lucky I am to have made the friends I have, to be stirring lima bean casserole while holding a glass of champagne, to be presented with a candle-laden carrot cake and a room full of happy birthdays. It really is all in the details.

Those moments, you forget the rest: the commuting, the noise, the ever-elbowing glut of people to fight through... It all disappears and then it's just you and the city and your perfect moment.

Saturday I went on a date—a real one—warranting a dress and eye makeup. And it was lovely. Does it get any better than the Gramercy Tavern tasting menu on your 26th birthday? (Answer: no, it does not. I'm still swooning over the warm Maine crab egg crepe.)

So yes. I love New York. (This week anyway.) I love coming home to my little neighborhood, even if that does mean walking past the drunken hobos outside the OTB—even if someone did steal my newspaper this week. I love the Sunday morning subway ride. I love having to get to the movie theatre a half an hour early.

Most of all, I love the kind of place this city becomes every December. So who cares if I get dumped come January, come February, come Boxing Day . . . I'm gonna love her today as long as I'm up for the task.

view of the parade

Yes, this is Spiderman's butt.

november, twenty-six

Ah, Thanksgiving. Feast day before the long, cold lonely winter. Fraudulent holiday of subjugation and cornua copiae. Enforced family bonding experience. Apex of the afternoon nap.

Who can begin to explain what a holiday means—or how to catch one in the ether of American commercialism. In the racks devoted to canned pumpkin and cloves? The pushers and shovers in the Whole Foods shit show, elbowing their way to crown roasts and pre-reserved turkeys? The resurgence of the Starbucks holiday lattes?

Truth be told, it doesn't matter. We change, the world changes; nothing stays the same every time around the calendar. Your place at the table varies from year to year, and the only constant is that hidden place you prod around for in your chest, the one in which you keep your secrets, the catalogue of all your holiday histories. Find that button and press it—and suddenly you're eight again, unwrapping a baby doll over Black Forest cake, wearing bright white tights and an idiotic headband.

It never hurts to dress up and sit down together like this, to walk into a kitchen and remember the smell. The people change from year to year, but you keep them in that place all the same. One smell in one kitchen will bring back another. And no matter who you're with, it's always a little lonely. For all of us.

How fancy for me then, to have a birthday that perpetually coincides with such a day . . .

What I will say is this: no matter how isolated I make myself, sometimes Peter Pan is my life raft. Here I am, only twenty minutes into my twenty sixth year, and already he has presented me with a gift and a windowsill full of flowers. Not to mention the emergency grilled cheese night at Sanford's. We should all be so lucky to have such a friend. The kind who knows what you need without having to ask.

So, Happy Thanksgiving. I wish you all a warm and pleasant turkey coma. And, one of these days, I will hope to feel whole and not just full come Friday morning.

official business

Well, now I've really gone and done it.

Effective this morning, I am officially a resident of the state of New York (at least according to the Department of Motor Vehicles). Somehow surrendering my little state of Vermont farm girl license makes this real to me. As if the last four years were merely a fluke.

Anybody can live in this city, but hustling through the early morning crowd at the Herald Square DMV for that official piece of paper makes it serious.

New York and I are no longer casually seeing each other. We've been bumped up to "dating" or—at the very least—"it's complicated."

partial retraction and a note on tone

My apologies if I come across as less hopeful than I intend. You see, I am prone both to hyperbole and melancholy in constantly overlapping cycles. There's obviously more to me than that, but those forces tend to override the quieter aspects of my nature.

I will say this: my philosophy of late—of reading the road map on the fly (and damn the consequences)—means I sometimes have to act first, process later. If ever you think I'm about to stick my head in the oven, chances are I'm merely readjusting to the new earth beneath my feet.

I am learning to love the journey more than the destination. But, by no longer training one eye always on the bigger picture at the end of the arc, I am more likely to stumble on a knot in the road. And I will talk about that knot for lack of a better perspective. Bear with me. I'm resilient as shit and I'll nearly always make it back up the hill on my own overlarge feet.

Since yesterday afternoon, Peter Pan told his parents. Unspeakable relief. No piece of the sky or the mountain fell on my head, and this morning (despite the obvious efforts of the evil Chase Bank Credit Card Services people and the meddling douchebaggery of my friend's boyfriend) the world is once again up the flagpole, flapping optimistically in the breeze.

I'll most likely abandon my genius plan to spend Thanksgiving in bed alone with a bottle of Wild Turkey. Instead I'll bake an apple pie in a borrowed oven and make a holiday offering to the family I have come to love so much.

net regrets still zero

With the sick thrill of change comes the knowledge that certain things will never be the same. You cannot overthrow your life, go barreling headlong into newness, without sacrificing some things you may have previously taken for granted.

Exhibit A: Although Peter Pan and I have come to tender terms with our transition, his brother very pointedly left me off the list for Thanksgiving preparations this year, a fact I realized only after speaking to his mother (who, to the best of my knowledge, still has no idea we broke up).

I think we expected most everything to stay the same and, for the most part, it has. But maybe I was naïve to think I could still be a part of his family.

Exhibit B: When you kiss a man you've known for eight years and then he disappears on you, your feelings will be bruised. You will no longer know how to interact with his standard wall of silence. You will act out to counter your feelings of powerlessness. I am acting out. (Hence all the dates and distractions and my feet-first leap into the "world of men" as that little Nazi prick once sang to Liesel in The Sound of Music.)

Summary Judgment: I am not the same for all this.

You don't get to run through the sprinklers without soaking your clothes. So here I am, cold and wet. But I'm alive and aware like never before. The only trouble is, someone has closed the sliding glass door and now I can't get back into the house.

Every sign in the Universe seems to be shouting its approval from the rooftops. My choices of late have been dead on balls accurate and I hesitate to apologize for them. So I will not.

But there is a sadness to decisions, to choosing, in taking the other path as just as fair. I am learning to live with not knowing what will happen when the road bends in the undergrowth. You're not supposed to know before you get there.

pretty in PG-13

Must remember this: Martinis on Tuesday night sap the perky straight out of Wednesday morning.

Must also remember this: a date can be a riotous good time.

Where did that girl go who was living her mother's 50s instead of her own 20s? Perhaps the big Two Six looming on the horizon (with all those turkeys condemned to die) has lit the fire under my proverbial tailfeathers and inspired me to go out and boldly live this questionable period of my life. Perhaps I just need to believe that I am desirable.

Regardless, I have taken Peter Pan's very good advice and gone after that missing 33.33%. Stop me at your own peril.