Ten-Day-Old Travel Post: New Orleans

I went to New Orleans the weekend before last.  It wasn't a super-exciting trip - I was there to see people, not tourist attractions - but there were some cool elements.

• LaGuardia airport, which has been under construction for at least as long as I've been living in New York, has a new cool terminal.  At the gates, instead of long benches, there are various seating configurations (mostly some variation on what you'd find in a bistro... this is probably cool for the short-hop tourists and business travelers who are likely their bread and butter, but seems less hospitable for someone trying to sleep off the layover after a redeye), most with built-in ipads on which you can play games or order from the terminal restaurant.  There's also a high-tech water-bottle filler and a fairly cool newstand/coffee shop (although, arriving there in a totally uncaffeinated state, I was kind of hoping for something normal, like a Starbucks).
• Louisiana is apparently full of plantations-turned-tourist-traps.  Apparently they are furnished in period style and staffed by guides in period costume.  This is mostly kind of weird, like if they had interpretive tours of a concentration camp.  But also they had an art festival at one.  Possibly the most interesting part of that (aside, I suppose, from the deeply-discounted-from-NYC-prices-but-otherwise-mostly-standard art) was the food, which was half Cajun, half State Fair.  So you could have a crawfish sandwich and a funnel cake for lunch, I suppose.
• Oh, yeah, I ate crawfish.  And (inferior) hushpuppies.  And beignets, and various gumbos, and fried chicken, and pralines.  I came home craving salad.
• They really know how to do Halloween in New Orleans.  Houses were decorated, some very thoroughly - skeletons in the lawn, a giant spider covering the whole front of the house.
• There are gorgeous spreading oaks, and spanish moss, and incredible old houses in the Garden District.

• I ran on the levee, which was pretty cool, except for the part about insane late-October heat and unrelenting sun.
• Also, the French Quarter is still there.

Chicago in pictures

The second part of my trip to Montreal was a visit to Chicago with my book (/wine/gossip) club.  It entailed deep-dish pizza, a visit to the top of the Hancock Tower, a boat tour, shopping, fancy sushi, a brief visit to the Chicago Marathon, and a lot of wine.

Magic hour in Wicker Park

A cool art installation on Michigan Ave

The bean

The bean, from beneath

Bean with tourists

Boat tour

It's almost Christmas!

Deep dish pizza

A hyacinth in my drink

Today: A Summary; also Impressions

I had intended to sleep a normal number of hours (I consider normal to be about 7) and wake up at a reasonable time, after which I had planned a route through the downtown, McGill University, Mount Royal, and then I was to take stock over a peaceful lunch.  Of course it went not very much like that.

• I overslept my alarm.  I don't even remember the thing going off.  Not typical for me.
• I walked through the downtown, explored a shopping mall, finally - in desperate need of food and coffee - stopped at a Starbucks.  That was not entirely my plan.  I do enjoy going to Starbucks on vacations, because it's interesting to see the variety they offer (Montreal Starbucks is somewhat European in their beverages - they don't even have drip coffee, which they had in Paris - and largely American in their foods - in some ways, more American than NYC Starbucks, which have recently given themselves a horrifying makeover to make their baked goods fussier) but it is also nice to try local places.
• I walked through McGill University and felt nostalgic for my own university days.  Not so long ago if we count the decade of post-college university life.  In most of Montreal, 75% of the conversations you overhear are in French; on that campus, 10% were.
• While we're on the subject of French, the whole language thing has made me feel very awkward.  It would almost be easier if I spoke zero French at all; then I would have to speak English to everyone always.  Instead, I speak enough French to conduct basic transactions, transactions in which nothing I don't expect occurs.  I can say hello, ask for a coffee, understand numbers and ask to be given a bag (I can also understand about half of what historical placards say and a significant fraction of overheard conversations, if I'm concentrating - it's just that dealing with people in real time is harder).  I cannot ask for a muffin if it's not labelled, and I do not know the French for 'swipe' (apparently they did not teach us this in 1994).  So I tend to start transactions in French, and then a third of the time I have to ask awkwardly if the other party speaks English (they always do, and always better than I speak French), and a third of the time they realize how clueless I am and switch to English themselves.  But I feel bad just going in there like Anglophone Commando and expecting them to speak my language as if everyone in the free world does even though, apparently, everyone in the free world does.  And the few times they haven't switched, maybe they didn't know how to speak English, and then how awful would it have been if I'd tried to make them?  I think there is a good solution, along the lines of returning a greeting of Bonjour with Bonjour, Hello, which is what shopkeepers seem to say to convey that they are happy to speak English.  I am guessing that responding to a French greeting that way would convey "I can speak a little bit of French but English is my preferred language," in some way more graceful than asking - in what I'm guessing is overformal grade-school diction - if they speak English, which is probably like asking if they can add.  But so far I have not pulled this off.
• Anyway.  Then I went to Mount Royal.  It's, you know, a mountain.  With trails and stuff.  I'm not sure how far up it goes - I would guess far-ish, because I saw lots of people with mountain bikes and so forth.  But it seems that most of the people there - runners and tourists alike - just go up to the observatory.  This is a shortish, steepish climb (maybe 200 steps?  and some uphill walking, but not a lot), rewarded by a breathtaking view:

• After relaxing in the sun for a while, and watching a much more enterprising person go through her exercise routine (including various drills I recognized, and an impressive backwards-climbing -of-steps-on-plank-position), I set off again.  The idea was to visit two districts mentioned in a tourist book I'd picked up somewhere, one of which was supposed to be sort of the Madison Avenue of Montreal (my words), with chic shops and the best outdoor cafes - I figured I'd get lunch there - and the other of which was called The Village and was described like a Montreal version of the NYC village.
• The Madison Avenue district seemed kind of down at the heels, relative not only to the real Madison Avenue but to Montreal's own downtown.  I did find a fussy food shop and bought some cheese and bread for dinner (including raw milk cheese, which you can't get in the States, and a baguette far superior to what you'd get in Fairway or Zabar's).  I found a frozen yogurt shop and a couple of fancy restaurants, but not the adorable outdoor cafe serving crepes that I was hoping for.  I nearly went into a couple of fast food places to eat the poutine that seems to be all the rage here (why?? it's french fries - already debatably not good - with gravy poured on them.  gravy is disgusting, and it would make the fries soggy and therefore inedible.  and then cheese curds or meat on top?  now it's just weird.) but the idea of the amount of work it would involve put me off.  I get nervous about unfamiliar lunch places at the best of times - they all have different rules! - and the language barrier and my increasing fatigue and hunger were certainly not helping.  So I found a lovely park, sat by a lake, and ate some bread and cheese.  I've had much worse lunches.
• The Village area was a disappointment.  I suppose it is a bit like what the NYC village may have been like in its heyday - back when it actually was edgy - but it didn't really feel safe, or even terribly interesting.  I made my way back toward downtown.
• On my way back, I stumbled into Chinatown.  This instantly reminded me of the last time I was in Montreal.  It was in March of 2004, for a conference.  One day, at lunchtime, I went with two groupmates - one a native of China - to Chinatown and had a very good, very inexpensive meal.  Another day, I walked around the old city, thinking about a boy I liked who was also at the conference and who, I was beginning to think, did not like me back as much as he sometimes seemed to.  Yet another day, an ex-boyfriend who desperately wanted to rekindle our relationship left fancy pastries at the front desk of our hotel, among the most romantic (and least appreciated) gestures anyone has ever performed for me.  Now, nearly a decade later, we are all in different places.  The guy I liked turned out to indeed not like me back (his stated reason being that I was not thin enough), and he eventually quit his job and moved away; I believe he lives in London now, earns a great deal of money, and - conjecture - dates a succession of beautiful and annoyingly-not-vapid women.  The ex-boyfriend endured a series of tragedies of all sizes before meeting his final and greatest tragedy; his story is sad, but I am reminded of him from time to time - we were close for years after our breakup - and I feel okay about remembering him, because he was a really good person, and not enough people knew that about him.  The groupmate from China finished his PhD and, after some amount of postdoctoral fumbling, found a prestigious research position in China, married, had a couple of kids, and as far as I know is living happily ever after.  The other groupmate also finished his PhD and became a sort of permanent postdoc for a professor who was later jailed for crimes of a sexual nature.  None of this is to any point, really.  I just think it's interesting what happens to people over time.  
• I am writing this from Starbucks (yes, again... I am very ashamed of my evilness, etc.), where I am about to start cheating on Nanowrimo by starting it early.

The Great White Warmer North

Today I am in Montreal.  (Yes, I'm doing a lot of traveling this fall.  No, I didn't really intend to.  It just kind of happened.)  I'm spending a couple of days here for no particular reason and then heading to Chicago to meet up with some friends.

The trip in took the entire morning but was uneventful.  I was very proud of my maturity, at first.  In my young and foolish days, I would have booked the first flight, at e.g. 7 a.m., so as to arrive as early as possible and get as much as I could out of my first day.  I would then have had to wake up at 3 a.m. and would have spent the entire day in a miserable, exhausted haze.  Now I am older and wiser and took a flight that allowed me to sleep to a reasonable-at-least-for-a-weekday hour, and I arrived at my hotel in the early afternoon.  After putting my bags down and eating a mature-adult lunch of trail mix, I set out to do what I typically do when I travel on my own to a new (or in this case, mostly new) city: walk until I physically cannot stand up.

(Side note: I have been attempting to train for the Philadelphia Half-Marathon and struggling with plantar fascitis... I could not decide whether to (a) bring my running shoes and try to get a desperately-needed long run in (I was doing very well until three weeks ago, when I ran almost ten miles at a good pace and felt okay the day of, but later felt I might be slipping into injury... I ran a much shorter long run the following week, and the plantar fascitis began after that... I replaced my shoes and skipped last weekend's long run, but things haven't improved and in fact my running has been short, slow, and sparse, my calves are sore and tight, and I feel weak... possibly the resting is the issue?  At any rate, it's becoming a pretty serious issue as far as my ability to run this race properly goes, although, (a) my ability to run this race properly is hardly a serious issue in itself, and (b) typically every time I train for a race I run into an injury, and illness, or burnout about halfway through, miss the third quarter of the training cycle, and spend the fourth quarter panicking and worrying about my under preparation... seems like I should by now accept it and not fuss too much), (b) bring my running shoes and do a short run or two, or (c) leave the running shoes at home, enjoy my vacation, rest and recover from whatever is wrong with me, and resume training next week.  I ultimately chose c.  Perhaps walking for 4.5 hours straight this afternoon was not the best thing for me and my now-extremely-swollen foot tendon.  Also, it would appear I am getting old, because several other body parts, e.g. hips, back, neck, are also unhappy about all the walking (not that I can remember a time that they wouldn't have been.  But clearly I am meant to be invincible and this deviation is a sign of moral weakening.).

So, anyway, what did I see in my walkings?  I saw the Old Port and the Old City, which are pretty much right next to each other, but which seem to be very different ages (at the very least, the Old Port has been redone as a park, while the Old City has been preserved as a tourist ghetto).  I saw oldish buildings, statues, park-y areas, art galleries etc.  It was very nice.  My only moment of unhappiness was trying to find a dinner spot, for which the only options available were overpriced tourist establishments with mostly-unheated patios (the weather was beautiful today, but not really sitting-outside-after-dark beautiful), all guarded by dragon-girl hostesses who were too busy greeting me to let me look at their menus.  In the downtown area (outside the Old City) there are many coffee shops and lunch spots but, as in apparently every city that is not New York, they all close in the middle of the afternoon.  So I have ended up with cheese curds and granola bars, which is not a horrible dinner as dinners go, but tomorrow I must try to do better.  Or at least to eat a proper lunch.

Prequel

Quick roundup of the last week or so, because I am a good and faithful blogger, really I am.  And because a life unrecorded seems an awful lot like a life entirely spent at work.

• Had a laid-back Sunday night dinner at Noi Due with my fellow traveler, a kosher Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side.  It was good food, and a pretty standard level of pretension for the area.  (I was going to call it "unpretentious", but then I thought a bit more and realized my bar for pretension has risen dramatically in the last few years).  I thought it was pleasant enough, with a diverse clientele (some very Old World types, mixed in with young JCCers on girl dates, plus a couple of multigenerational families), and would have been happy to add it in to our (highly informal) rotation, but apparently - according to FT - the point is to not have a rotation, but instead to visit a different restaurant every time we go out (or, at least, many of the times we go out) in order to experience the diversity of the city.  I am all for diversity, at least in the abstract, but to me the excitement of living in New York is not going to a multitude of different, unusual places, but having a small assortment of these places which become familiar.  This is partly, I believe, due to our differing experiences with small towns (we have both lived in what we consider small towns - but his was five times bigger than mine.  so to him, it's exciting to have an infinite number of restaurants.  to me, it's exciting to have more than one restaurant.) and partly a dispositional difference.  
• Had brunch twice in the last few weeks at Arte Cafe, another Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side.  I concluded that, although I do not like Eggs Benedict or Crabcake Benedict (because of the tartaryness of the hollandaise), I do like Salmon Benedict.  But I like it much better at Josie's, where the sauce is vegan and (I assume therefore) less creamy.  Really, I could do without the sauce at all.
• Attended the ballet.  It was a trio of small ballets, which I prefer to the longer ballets, in part because there are more of them and in part because I have a short attention span and like the contrasts.  I probably had some deep thoughts about the ballet while I was attending, but I can't remember them at the moment.

Actually about Canada this time. Really.

Quebec City, to be precise.  I was there this week for work, and I had a bit of time to do some wandering.  Because it is now getting rather late, I will put my observations in bullet-point form:

Quebec is cold.  I expected it to be slightly colder than New York, but it was much colder, probably in part because of its situation on the St. Lawrence River, which means the touristy Old City gets a lot of wind.

It's expensive, too.  I didn't expect that, because while it's a tourist destination, it's a fairly small city without any particularly noteworthy attractions.

Aside from the complaining, it does have an attractive and nice-sized (eminently walkable, but big enough to explore for a few hours) tourist area, with fortified walls, historical signposts, old buildings, public art, a surprising number of ice cream shops for somewhere so cold (I was interested in, but could not bring myself to actually eat, the maple-flavored ice cream), and lots and lots of shopping.  I was particularly impressed by one Canadian(?) clothing store called Roots.

I had a "traditional quebecois" meal, consisting of split pea soup, meat pie (I thought this would be a pot pie or a shepherds pie but it was an actual slice of a pie, filled not with fruit but with meat, and it was served with french fries), and maple tart (another pie, filled not with fruit but with an exceptionally sweet and mildly maple-y substance).  Fresh fruits and vegetables don't seem to be a big thing there.  They do, however, seem to like their dead animals - my other two meals in the city were a fettuccine-with-duck dish and veal ravioli.  I am not a big meat eater; most of what was on offer was far more carnivorous than that.  I suppose there is not a word in Canuck French for "vegetarian".

The city, in particular its airport and restaurants, seemed very European to me.  Aside from the French-speakingness, everything was very leisurely and everyone was very pleasant.  Nobody made me take off my shoes or inspected my toiletries in the airport, and nobody tried to take my food away in the middle of a meal (I'm a slow eater, so this happens all the time in New York).  It was quite nice for a change, although if I experienced it all the time I would probably find it slovenly.  

I suppose it is a bit too obvious that I would find Quebec to be a mash-up of Paris and Anchorage, but I did.  Small historic downtown with moose souvenirs everywhere + French-speaking and full of overly fancy meats.

Some photos:

The Promenade.  More picturesque than it looks, although if something is picturesque it should probably look presentable in pictures.

Starbucks!  Sadly, they were closed in the evening.

Modern downtown through a gap (like those chinks for arrows in medieval castles, but probably for guns) in the fortified wall.

It was cold and dreary.  Somehow I thought that looked good in pictures.

Building on top of the wall.

Really awesome mural of the city, populated with historical and modern figures, plus ruins in the foreground.

This man walked into my picture and ruined it.  I took another one without him, but it turned out to look much better with the intrusion.  I'm sure that has something to do with symmetry, or serendipity, or both.

also...

We went to Dumbo.  The neighborhood in Brooklyn, not the cartoon elephant.  We walked around the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and the Dumbo (DUMBO?) waterfront, went into a bunch of little stores (mostly bookstores and fussy gift shops) and watched a dog play in the river.

Manhattan skyline

Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges.

The Great White Freezing Cold North

It would be nice if I maintained a regular habit of posting here.  Then, when I did something cool but not so exciting that it merited dusting off the old blog, I might post a short remark about it.  I hear that elsewhere in the blogosphere, people are not so wordy, and that blog posts can be just a paragraph or a sentence, or even a picture.  I am dimly aware of a type of blog called a "tumblr", although I cannot pretend to understand what this word means or how it is pronounced.  It seems to be a blog made up of pictures whose wit and relevance is far too subtle and intellectual for me to understand.  So I will have to stick to mundane and tiresome words.

Fortunately, I have no shortage of words.  Before we get to the Land of Freezingness, here are some:
- I have somehow, more or less by accident, planned five trips in a ten-week period, of which the Arctic Circle was #2 (okay, that's probably enough jokes about the cold).  While I like to travel, this schedule may be a bit to frenetic for my taste.  But, at least there is no danger I will be bored.
- The first trip was to my parents' for my semi-customary early-fall beach visit.  It was a pleasant weekend of barefoot surfside runs, long afternoons on the beach, a craft festival, crab legs, and my mother's special secret-recipe triple-chocolate bundt cake.
- I saw my first theatrical production of the fall season, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecological Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City.  It is, as the name indicated, a comedy about cancer.  It's a small cast and a low-budget theater, and while there's some mother-daughter stuff and some cancer-and-mortality stuff and a very well-done portrayal of the straight man of the show by Michael Frederic, the whole thing really rests on Danielle Slavick's tour de force as the main character, who is by turns funny, furious, and vulnerable.  It's not a subtle portrayal - subtle isn't in the script - but she's in full-intensity mode for the duration of the 90-minute play, even when someone else is talking, and her character is utterly convincing.
- This morning my Fellow Traveler (as I am meant to be calling my boyfriend-turned-roommate now that he can no longer call on me as a proper Gentleman Caller would) went for a run by the water.  This is unusual for us; usually we run separately, sometimes at the same time but on separate routes and paces.  I like morning and evening runs and hills and dislike tourists; he likes sunny runs and does not take a very creative approach to direction of travel.  But today we really made an event of it.  We took the train to Fulton Street and walked to South Street Seaport with the plan to head around the southern tip of the island and north up the West Side Highway toward our apartment.  A couple passed us while I was still getting my headphones set up, and since they seemed to be going only slightly faster than I wanted to go, I decided to follow them.  Fellow Traveler had to point out to me a couple of times that perhaps we could not keep up with them for the duration of the run, but having other, pushier runners to follow came in handy when we ran into a half-mile-long tourist scrum around the ferry terminal and had to weave through the crowds.  We survived the first couple of miles but eventually lost the other runners, and we had a nice few miles until the sun and heat and lack of water in the vicinity of Chelsea Piers began to get to me.  I finished the run in decent form, but it seems like my hoped-for half marathon pace may be out of reach unless I become significantly faster / stronger / more able to bend space and time in the next six weeks.

Okay.  What were we talking about?  That's right.  Canada.

Summer Wanderings

Today's adventure was a visit to the Cloisters.  I decided to bike there, which entailed a certain amount of anxiety because I didn't know precisely how to get there or how long it would take, and I was meeting a friend who would be arriving via subway.  But it worked out okay: I biked on the Greenway to 181st St., stopping to walk up a few of the steeper GW Bridge ascents (I've become much less bold on the bike since my spill in Ireland a couple years ago... I would prefer to keep all remaining teeth intact, thank you very much, as well as all other body parts).  Then I was a bit confused about where to go, so I fired up the old Google Maps, which told me I was in exactly the right place to exit the park, and I made it the rest of the way on feel.  That last bit, after I exited the park, was the trickiest - it had gotten very warm, and my legs were a bit tired (the total trip is around 8.5 miles, which is hardly a massive bike trip, but I have nubbly mountain-bike tires and don't actually bike much) and the whole biking-on-streets thing is unusual for me.  We do seem to have a lot of new bike lanes, but once I got away from the park nobody was using them.

The draw at the Cloisters was an exhibit about unicorns.  Apparently they have been around (ficticiously) for much longer than I'd thought.  We also walked around the other exhibits and gardens... possibly the most interesting thing we saw was eight nuns in white habits, opaque nude hose, and identical black sneakers.  Then we found a shady spot in the grass and chatted.  I saw a woman who works in my office and met an adorable orange-red poodle puppy who climbed all over me and licked my face.  On the way out, we stopped at the ice cream truck for sprinkly cones.

I felt shaky at the start of the ride home - I'd had a lot of sun, and the ice cream cone hadn't kicked in yet.  I had a harder time finding the Greenway than I'd thought I would - every road seemed to be one way in the wrong direction, and there were giant buses and people parked randomly in the middle of the street and kids on too-small bikes cutting me off.  Finally I found the road to the park entrance, a steepish hill that I'd ridden up with only moderate effort earlier in the afternoon, and halfway down my fear of flipping over the handlebars or losing control of the bike overwhelmed my desire to not look like an idiot, and I dismounted to walk.  The rest of the trip back was filled with similar bumps - a twenty-block party around the 160's featuring small children playing in the middle of the bike path; an accelerating wind that made the Hudson choppy and meant I had to pedal furiously even though I was going downhill - but I got back safely, surprisingly tired and rather dehydrated.

Before even heading out on my adventure, I had a breakfast picnic at my spot in Riverside Park.  My spot, where I've spent many summer afternoons and the occasional weekday evening over the past few years, is a grassy hillside in Riverside Park.  It's a five-minute walk from my apartment; rarely empty but never loud; and there is sun and shade and often puppies.  And now going there is a little bit sad, because I am about to move away from it.

Not far away from it.  I am moving a grand total of 0.7 miles, in the direction directly away from it.  My new apartment will be very close to Central Park, so I can find a new spot.  My new apartment is also about five time the size of my old apartment, has many more bathrooms and bedrooms (my current apartment has 0 bedrooms so this isn't hard) and a superior kitchen, and I will be acquiring a roommate of whom I am already fond*.  So, in addition to being a geographically trivial move it is a good one, but I am still full of nostalgia for my tiny, semi-infested apartment, my West End haunts, my dwindling bachelorettehood.

* My future roommate is the man who for the last two years has occupied the post of Gentleman Caller.  Since he will obviously not be calling on me any longer when we occupy the same residence, I am retiring that position and creating a new one for him, that of Fellow Traveler.

Tribeca Film Festival so far, and then some

The first movie I saw was the world premiere of Stand Clear of the Closing Doors.  My brother worked on the film, so I'm filialy obligated not to criticize it, but independently of that it was quite good.  It had high aspirations - it was about a thirteen-year old boy with an autism spectrum disorder who runs away from his home in Far Rockaway in the days before Hurricane Sandy and spends several days on the subway while his undocumented mother tries to find him without attracting unwelcome attention - and it seems to meet them fairly well.  But I thoughts its real successes were in the details: the cinematography; the uneasy, argumentative, intense relationship between the boy's mother and his teenage sister; the matter-of-fact portrayal of the thousand mundane indignities (a bedroom just big enough for two twin beds with a curtain between them, a toilet lid wet with urine, a long bus ride to a menial job) that attend this family's life even when things are going well.  

Next, I saw Farah Goes Bang, about a trio of women just out of college - including the title character, Farah, the daughter of Iranian immigrants - who combine their idealistic desire to prevent George Bush from winning a second term in office (the movie is set in 2004) with their youthful need to drive cross-country while making crude jokes by joining the Kerry campaign.  Trying to win Democratic votes in places like Texas and Kentucky exposes them to some fairly predictable confrontations, but also to some less-stereotypical moments that challenge the characters' assumptions.  Amidst all this, a bit nonsensically, is the movie's other plot - Farah's desire to lose her virginity, and her fear of sex, both of which stem from her frankly antagonistic relationship with her body.  These issues are portrayed in a way that is realistic and sensitive without being preachy.  But ultimately the movie is more concerned with being fun - by which I mean funny - than with making its own point, and Farah's bang is more literal than figurative.

Later that same day I saw a set of shorts.  There were seven of them, all set in New York City.  I thought at the time that half of them were good and half bad, but I can only remember three of them now, and the one that sticks out the most was unenjoyable while I watched it.  It's very hard for a short film to be medium-good; they tend to be very bad, forgettable, or amazing.

Around this time I finished the book I had been reading and started a novel called Mercury Falls, which is truly horrible.  It seems to be aiming for a combination of Douglas Adams and Piers Anthony, but it lacks originality, subtlety, and humor, which means it's mostly just literal interpretation of fairy tales with an awful lot of sarcastic apocalysm.  In an attempt to dilute the early phases of the book - sometimes it simply takes a while to get into something - I began alternating it with Something Borrowed, one of the novels I keep on my kindle for literary crises such as this.  I never quite tire of this novel or its sibling, Something Blue, because of the author's stunning command of narrative voice and her Austenian attention to detail.

The next movie I saw was A Case of You.  I had really high hopes for this one.  It was billed as a hyper-modern and highly original love story, but it turned out to be a very old-fashioned love story with some postmodern flourishes.  Justin Long plays a writer of movie novelizations (this is my dream job, or one of them) who longs to become a serious writer (which is way too hard to be my dream job).  Instead he spends all his time gazing longingly at his barrista, a standard-issue Manic Pixie Dreamgirl.  When he accidentally learns her name, he uses her Facebook profile to turn himself into her dream guy.  The relationship is going well - and, better yet, he's writing a book about it - until he decides pixiegirl doesn't really know him.  As with Stand Clear, I thought this movie's successes were in its details - the well-shot scenes, the wardrobe choices, the Sienna Miller cameo and Busy Philips' and Vince Vaughn's small roles.  Even Rachel Wood, as the pixie, had very little to do, and Justin Long's major function was to look confused.  I am writing such a long paragraph about this movie because I can't seem to arrive at a conclusion.  It wanted to be more than a Friday-night chick flick, and in some ways it succeeded.  It had things to say about art and authenticity.  But the core of the movie - the two main characters - felt empty.

My most recent (but, rather alarmingly, not final) viewing was of Adult World.  This has been the sleeper hit of my TFF experience so far.  It's about a recent college graduate who fancies herself a poet but ends up working at an adult video store to make rent.  She develops a one-sided mentor-protege relationship with a semi-established poet and a surprisingly authentic friendship with a transvestite while navigating her shifting relationships with her parents, her best friend from college, and (of course) the adorable manager of the video store.  So this movie had some of the same serious-ish themes as the other movies I just talked about - notably young women coming into their adulthood and the unglamourousness of the artistic life - but it handled them with impressive lightness.  It was, flat-out, funny, in exactly the sort of way I like.  I laughed at the protagonist, all the time, because she was so ridiculous in exactly the way that a 22-year-old poet of course is ridiculous - but I also cared about her.  The other characters, too, were well-drawn, and even the smaller roles seemed multidimensional.  John Cusack was in this movie, and he was as entertaining as he always is, and he was far from the best thing about it.

When I came home from the movie, I found what appears to be a book about the apocalypse in my mailbox.

2012 and 2013

So, blogging is apparently something I do on a semi-annual basis now.  Or, once per Blogger software update.  As is customary in this sort of I-haven't-posted-in-ages-and-probably-have-no-readers-anymore post, I'll start with a roundup of my activities over the past few months and then zoom in on my current state. Spoiler alert: it's pretty much the same as my state six months ago.

• I had a pleasant summer.  I ran, I worked, I sat in Riverside Park and read.  It was very nice. 
• I went to Lake George for a couple days, where took bubble baths, hiked, and walked around quaint tourist towns.  It was lovely.
• I went to Alaska, where I hiked, kayaked, canoed, walked on a glacier, and (primarily) wore five layers of clothing at all times and shivered all night in my double layer of sleeping bags as the freezing rain pelted my tent.  It was awesome.
• I saw some plays.  Mostly Roundabout productions.  I was not terribly impressed by this season's offerings.  I also saw some ballet, at Joyce and New York City Ballet, which I liked better.  Most recently The Nutcracker, which was exactly as great as it always is.
• I changed jobs within my company.  I'm still doing the same sort of work, but on a different product.  So there are a bunch of new ropes to learn.  It's a challenge, but I'm learning a lot.
• I went to my parents' new house at the beach twice, once in September - for outlet shopping, birthday cake, and the actual beach - and once in November - for Thanksgiving.  I returned from the latter trip with the now-traditional gingerbread house, which I photographed for my Christmas card.  Possibly a new tradition.
• I participated in Nanowrimo for the fourth time and won it for the first.  Which means I completed a 50,000 word novel in 30 days (actually, in my case 24 - I knocked out the last few thousands words in the car on the way back from Thanksgiving).

Heading into the holiday season, I'm more or less free of plans.  I've completed the Annual Family Holiday Gathering, my shopping, and most of my cards.  I'm looking forward to a couple of long weekends in which I will clean my apartment (maybe), watch the last two seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (assuming I can hold off for the next five days), and think about 2013.

Which means, first, looking back at 2012.  I'm inclined to say initially that it was a year of stasis.  A relaxing, fun year, in which I really enjoyed my current situation but didn't really make any progress.  But in January I made some goals, and it seems appropriate to revisit them now, to evaluate whether I've met them and whether they're still important.

• Work.  The goal here is, really, to figure out what my goals are.  Well, that's a vague and amorphous goal if I've ever seen one.  I certainly wouldn't say that I've figured out what my goals are.  Although I have made a change, which has kept the challenges fresh, and I've started thinking about this a bit more seriously.  Obviously this is an important area to keep on the table, but perhaps I should refine it a bit, no?
• Running... I do plan on running several half-marathons, and I'd like to work on whittling down my time. If I were just 10-20% faster, I wouldn't be slower than practically every other person who runs in Central Park.  I ran two half-marathons and bailed on a third.  But I re-took the running course I did in the winter of 2011, and I ran several shorter races this summer and a 10k just this morning.  I haven't run any of the same races this fall as I did at the end of 2011, so there's no easy way to measure my improvement, but I'd say I'm about 3-5% faster than I was a year ago.  I didn't expect to get 10% faster inside a year (although I've definitely gotten 10% faster in the four years since I moved to New York) and will continue working on this; while I don't expect to see rapid gains, I think I can still improve.
• Travel.  I did some, mostly small trips.  Alaska was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  But I didn't do much of visiting friends in other cities, which I'd planned and hoped to do.  A partial fail.
• Social life.  This year I want to focus on strengthening my connections.  When friends are just people you talk to once in a while, it's easy to drift apart.  When they're people you do things with, you have a more vibrant bond.  This was my big failure for the year.  Several people wandered out of my life this year for reasons not connected to me, and while I've worked to stay in touch with them, it's clear my friendships with them will not continue at the same level.  I've had a hard time replacing them with new friends, in part because I don't feel a terribly strong desire to make friends so much as a general sense that I'd be happier if I had more.  And some of the friendships I do have are beginning to feel rather diaphanous.  This is, of course, related to my no having traveled to visit my friends.  I think this goal will be a recurring one requiring continual effort; maintaining a healthy social network is important and not always easy.
• Cultural engagement.  I'm satisfied with my effort here.  I haven't been to the opera in 2012, but I've been to the ballet and the theater several times each, I've read a fair amount and started documenting my reading on Goodreads, and I've made an effort to balance my intake.
• Writing.  Although I had months on end of not doing any of it, this was a big win for 2012.  I published a novel written several years ago as a kindle ebook, which was exhilarating, and I wrote a (very rough) novel in November.  I hope to capitalize on this progress in 2013.  

So, all in all 2012 was a success.  There are areas I don't feel compelled to push myself on in 2013 (travel) and areas I think I need to be a bit more aware of (socialization), but on the whole I expect my priorities to remain similar.  That's not a very exciting conclusion, but it's nice to think I'm headed in more or less the right direction.

on writing, mine and others'

This evening I experienced something truly phenomenal, even by New York standards.  I went to an event at Barnes and Noble, a "conversation" between the authors Judy Blume and Tayari Jones.  I'm still not clear on the motivation for bringing these two together - Jones' third novel just came out in paperback, but Blume wasn't promoting anything in particular, and of course has no need to promote anything, and they have such disparate audiences and styles that the attendees were a very mixed group.  But as they talked, I realized that they both write about the same thing, the thing that virtually all serious modern fiction is about: what it means to be and become yourself, what the voices of the silent sound like, and - as Tayari said - what the real secrets are.

I stayed to have books signed by both authors, and spoke to Tayari briefly.  She recognized me but couldn't place me, and I told her I'd taken her fiction class in Illinois.  She remembered me then, and she was surprised and pleased that I'd moved to New York.  When I took her class - years ago, and it seems lifetimes ago - I was lost in my own life, displaced and misplaced and confused about who I was or whether I was anyone at all.  In her class, I wrote story after story with different details but all about the same thing: young women who had lost the person or the thing who made their lives make sense, as I'd lost my own best friend a few years earlier.  I wrote about these women breaking out of their lives, but in my stories they never seemed to go anywhere.  Tayari told me two things: that I should never write about New York until I'd lived here, and that the problem with my stories was that I wrote silent heroines.

It took me years to move to New York, but I realized quickly that she was right about my heroines.  Over the years, I'd written at least a dozen stories about women who, discarding a few details, could have been all the same person.  Deferential, recessive, invisible women.  Deeply unhappy women who told nobody - not their misunderstanding friends or their unsatisfactory boyfriends or their critical mothers, not their therapists or their deities because they typically didn't believe in either, not even themselves - what they wanted in life.  Women who drifted, who wound up in situations that made for interesting stories but difficult lives.  These were the characters I wrote because they were the only characters I really understood, because this was the only way I knew how to be.  My heroines were silent because I had lost my own voice.

After the class ended, I put aside the short stories.  It was summer and I wanted something light and fun.  I began reading children's literature - Harriet the Spy and Anastasia Krupnik and A Wrinkle in Time.  Books about girls (there are so few about women) who spoke out loud.  And I read the Harry Potter books for the first time.  I started imagining a girl, part Hermoine and part Harriet and part Anastasia, and a quiet prepubescent life of reading and solitude, and what would happen to that little girl when her life developed a mind of its own.  I started writing, not the kind of drawn-out and heavily wordsmithed writing I'd done previously, but just writing.

I wrote ten pages, took it with me to the Iowa Writer's Workshop, came home inspired, and started writing faster.  Every Saturday I'd sit in Barnes and Noble - I'd bring a sandwich and buy coffee and snacks and stay there for hours, reading children's books and typing - and write another chapter.  I'd write fast, switching settings when I ran out of ideas.  I published the chapters on my university web page, and some of my friends and family read them.  I wrote for a season - eighteen chapters over four or five months - and then it was finished.  I'd written a novel.

The novel was called The Library Cave.  It was a short novel, really more of a novella.  Since then I've revised it, lightly - the project of seriously editing a work of that length is something I don't quite know how to embark on.  I started writing a prequel and a sequel, but neither of them had quite the same magic, or maybe I was just in a different place.  A few months ago, I realized that The Library Cave, which I'd been telling myself I'd finish - revise or expand - for years, was done.  It wasn't perfect, but the time of writing it had ended, and I wanted to release it into the world in a format more cohesive than the list of chapters on my (now very defunct) university web page.

So I published it as a kindle book.  Reader(s), this is an advertisement.  I published it under a pseudonym because I was embarrassed, because I was afraid of putting my name next to something and not having the ability to remove it.  But it's mine, it's out there, and if you're interested you can buy it for $1 or - if you're a Prime member - borrow it for free.

40th Annual NYRR Mini 10k

I have kind of a weakness for events like this, that bring people - usually women - of all stripes together to run.  Forty years ago, the idea of women running, or participating in any athletic endeavor, was mildly scandalous, and now women run professionally, women run in tutus, women run wearing t-shirts bearing their name or their cause or the phrase "I [heart] Sweat".  Central Park West was closed on Saturday morning so that over six thousand women could run up it, and many of their male friends and partners and family ran on the sidewalk alongside the race or marshaled the course or cheered.  

As for me, I had a great race.  I had half-intended to just run it as a regular workout, since I haven't been running very much and it was 70 degrees an hour before the start.  But in the excitement of the race, my first mile - at a "comfortable but brisk" perceived exertion and up an gentle incline - clocked in around 9:36.  I slowed down a good deal after that, or thought I did, but my second mile came in at 9:46.  I was starting to feel the heat by then - I was experiencing "brownouts", where my head would get prickly and I'd start to see spots - so I kept "slowing down" and clocked in a 9:30 mile on the hills above 100th St.  

(About these speeds - I know they're not impressive for most runners, but for me, this is fast.  Very fast.  The last 10k I ran, two years ago, was at an 11:03 pace, and I typically race around a 10:30-10:45.  So paces with 9's in front of them seem fast to me.  Dangerously fast.  It's a good thing I didn't look at my watch after the first mile, because I'd have certainly psyched myself out and backed way off the scary paces.)

By the fourth mile I suffering.  This part of the course is a steady, moderate uphill with very few breaks.  I'd been walking through every water station to pour ice water on my face and neck - heat really doesn't agree with me - and had stopped feeling dangerously overheated.  But despite the breaks, I couldn't stabilize my heart rate or breathing.  My legs were getting tired, I hadn't been mentally prepared to race, and my mental game was down.  That mile came in at 10:18, my slowest of the race.  

The rest of the course was easier.  I was able to recover on the fifth mile for a 9:41, which I'm proud of because it's typically hard for me to bring my speed back up after a significant slowdown; this was a real triumph of mental game  I started to fall apart on the last 1.2 miles of the race; I was mentally in it, but my legs felt loose and heavy, and I ran a 9:59 sixth mile, probably a very uneven one.  I got a little bit of fire back at the end and finished with 0.35 at a 9:26 pace.  

My garmin total was 6.35 miles at a 9:48 average pace; and my official time was 1:01:58 for 6.2 miles with a 9:59 average pace.  For me this is... well, kind of incredible.  I'd said something, a few weeks ago, about how it would be cool to run a 10k in under an hour, but I thought it would take a long time - multiple seasons - to get in that kind of shape.  But based on this race, it would really just take a cooler day, a flatter course, and proper mental preparation.  

As time passes, I am increasingly aware of how lucky I am.  A lot of that luck is an absence of bad things; it seems like chronic physical illness or pain and persistent financial difficulty are two of the things that most readily sap away happiness, and I'm lucky to be free of both of those.  But it's more than that.  I haven't been terribly adept at arranging my life - in fact, I haven't really arranged my life at all - and yet somehow I've happened onto an arrangement so awesome that I don't think I would have dared to try to arrange it.  Not to gloat, but I live in a not-completely-awful apartment in an awesome neighborhood, I have a good job that I'm good at, and I spend my spare time attending cultural events and playing outside.  The other day, I was accidentally a complete bitch when I interrupted a semi-serious conversation with a friend in order to go to bed because - as I told her - I had to get up in six hours to get a spin bike.  I don't just have white girl problems, I have upper west side problems.

I feel like I talk about this a lot, and like it maybe gets old, and my reader(s) are tired of hearing about it.  But it really does baffle me.  How did I get here?  It feels like I spent ten years wandering in the desert of academia before arriving pretty much at random in the promised land (NYC as Israel is not actually the worst analogy ever).  Sure, the city is draining sometimes, there is stress, taxis are evil, etc.  But I don't see how I could ever stop being grateful for being here - in a city that is the setting for so many movies and so many dreams, and in a life that surprises me constantly with its variety and ability to renew itself.  Sometimes I wish I had gotten here sooner, but I think maybe I needed that decade of wandering, because "here" is not just New York; it's the state of being out of the wilderness that was my twenties, when I had no idea who or what I might be and was utterly at the mercy of every flickering whim around me.  

I'm working late tonight (in the endless, evil cycle of making bugs, fixing them, submitting tickets to test the fixes, waiting for the tickets to be picked up, and discovering that I've made some different bug), but I don't mind so much because every night this week I've left extremely early (by which I mean 6:15, 6:30, and 5:15(!)).  What did I do with these hours and hours of freedom?

1) Pilates.  I've done pilates before.  During grad school, I did exercise videos or DVDs most days, and I had a pilates-lite (crossed with aerobics, very weird) DVD that I did as a sort of rest.  I went to one or two pilates classes a couple years ago.  And I've occasionally done a set of 10-minute pilates workouts (that you can do, like, one every hour so you don't get too tired).  So I knew it would be hard, but it was really really really hard.  Like, at one point, I was shaking.  And it goes on for an hour.  What I found interesting was that the tone of the class I went to a couple times a couple years ago, which I'd thought was peculiar to that instructor, was replicated almost exactly in this class.  A sort of mocking chumminess.  Maybe it's a pilates thing.

2) No spin class.  Spin class was cancelled due to the gym being locked.  It was very sad, but I did get to go to another gym.  And starting today, I can go to any gym I want because my employer approves of fitness.

3)  Book club!  The book this month was Girl in Translation.  Three of us read it and found it thought-provoking.  We met at Bar Veloce, a Chelsea standbye, which was as I remembered it - expensive and right above the train tracks.  We talked about the fact that a fourth book club member is getting married next weekend, and what we should wear.

4) The Wall Street Run, which is, as per its name, a run on Wall Street.  Actually it's a three-mile run in the financial district, for which they have to close a number of narrow streets that are probably usually choked with cars and taxis.  It seemed like every bank, hedge fund, insurance agency, newspaper, and hospital in the city, plus Fresh Direct and the NYPD Bomb Squad, had a team.  It was kind of cool, having 12,000 people who don't usually race take over downtown Manhattan on a Thursday afternoon.  And then the race started and I realized that "people who don't usually race" translates to "people who have no idea how fast they are going to run and therefore start in the eight-minute-mile corral even though they can only run for three minutes at a time".  But it was still kind of cool, because we went all around the financial district and finished on the water, and they did a good job providing us with water and fruit and Jenny Craig snacks (I ate two of them as my pre-race snack, because I tend not to be very good about eating sufficiently when I'm at work, and probably the whole point of these snacks is that you are meant to eat only one and then nothing else for twelve hours.).  

After the race I ran home, which was 5.25 miles.  There's something really awesome, to my mind, about traversing large chunks of the city on foot, and going from one place to another when you thought of those places as being disconnected.  

My Blogworthy Spring

It has been pointed out to me that I have become a bad blogger.  In that I have not blogged in 3.5 months.  I would tell you that this is because I have not done anything blogworthy in the last 3.5 months, but the whole point of blogs is supposed to be that the bar height for "blogworthy" is infinitesimal.  So without further ado:

• I ran two half-marathons.  Yes, we do always start out with running around here.  I was injured for, basically, half the spring, and then I ran a whole bunch, and it cured me.  The first half was the MORE (women only) Half Marathon, in Central Park.  It went okay; I suffered from the hills and the heat and finished in 2:27, which is a decent time for me and a PR (personal record) for that course.  The second, a month later, was the Brooklyn Half Marathon, a much easier course.  I had basically not trained at all since the MORE so I intended to do poorly, but I ended up with a 2:18 finish, which is a PR, and crossed the finished line hand in hand with my gentleman caller runner.
• I did not actually go on any trips, but I planned a few - two short and one long - for later in the summer. Very exciting, right?  Stay tuned.
• I bought lots of sweat-wicking clothes.  My fashion aesthetic has turned into "all workout gear all the time".  This is not so much because I'm a gym rat as because the other options, as far as I can tell from stores, appear to be "my grandmother, who thinks enormous tunics and baggy pants are stylish and flattering" and "prostitute".  But there are some really adorable tennis skirts and yoga tops out there

This weekend, which I understand is supposed to be a very exciting Holiday Weekend, has been pretty low-key.  I installed my air conditioner and had my bike fixed and got my annual haircut (very short, slightly puffy, currently full of styling product).  I saw a contemporary ballet performance at the Joyce (iffy for the first two acts, very good for the last act) and Don't Dress for Dinner on Broadway (hilarious for the first act, draggy for the second act).  I ate Thai food, felafel, organic brunch at Josie's (a rare treat), and pizza.  I did not exercise except for a little bit of yoga and a bike ride, because the gyms are mostly closed and it's hot out, although apparently I am running tomorrow morning.

Anyway.  Perhaps I will come back to blogging now.  If so, there will be exciting installments... well, probably not tomorrow.  But soon.

on Valentine's Day

I have not been blogging much.  You, the reader, have probably not noticed this, mostly because you, the reader, do not exist.  But I have been doing other things, like working (surprisingly time-consuming) and running and going to the theater and attempting to maintain a social life (also surprisingly time-consuming).  Also I went to Cancun for a few days (highlight: we rented a waverunner and I got to drive it!  This is because my gentleman caller did not believe that they would let me, so he conceded the point without a fight... he didn't try to take it back when they actually let me take control of what is basically a motorcycle with a rudder, though, and he rode on the back with minimal complaint, so he's a brave man.  other highlight: snorkeling, and swimming in the ocean, and lying on the beach doing nothing, and looking at our awesome view.  third highlight: sometimes they had chocolate at breakfast.) and helped my parents move (to the beach!  my parents are going to live at the beach!  in a brand-new, very pretty house.) and attempted (unsuccessfully) to run a half-marathon in the snow (turns out snow is fluffy, like sand but way colder).

So, now that that sad attempt to catch up on things is over, I'm going to talk about what I actually want to talk about, which is Valentine's Day.  I like Valentine's Day.  I mean, I like most holidays.  I like Halloween, although I'm too old to celebrate it by going trick-or-treating and too sane to celebrate it by drinking myself half to death.  I like Thanksgiving even though I don't like turkey.  I love Christmas even though I don't, technically, celebrate it, and every year I find more ways for a nice Jewish girl to enjoy the yuletide season.  I'm middling fond of all the little holidays; nothing against them, but when you're not a kid and don't have kids of their own, half the time there doesn't seem to be anything to do.  That doesn't stop me from trying, though, by watching the fireworks on July 4th even though they make me sad, and wearing green on St. Patrick's Day, and I've been known to throw the occasional Midsummer's Eve party.

So it's not exactly out of character for me to like Valentine's Day.  Actually, as holidays go, it seems like a pretty good one.  It's at a good time - there are no other holidays near it to distract, and February tends to be kind of a yucky month otherwise - and it's not religious and its major features are love and chocolate and pretty window displays.  What's not to like?

I know, I know.  Most people don't like the love bit.  I don't really get this.  If I'm not in a relationship and unhappy about that, well, it's not like I would have forgotten this fact if it weren't for a few paper hearts; if anything, hearing about other people's romantic moments makes me hopeful that something similar is in my future.  If I am in a relationship, there is of course the danger the holiday will go poorly, but that hasn't happened to me in a very long time, with perfectly good reason - since it occurs on the same day every year for every person, since it's not religious, since there are easy and obvious gifts, at least for men to give women, at all price points, it's an easy holiday to get right.  So, really, it seems like a no-brainer - an excuse to go out for a nice meal and exchange tokens if I'm in a relationship, an excuse to buy chocolate and watch sappy movies if I'm not, and a win either way.

Apparently I was wrong.  My gentleman caller, in response to my (extremely gentle and not consisting of loading the webpage and pointing out appropriate items) hints, gave me a lovely heart-shaped box of chocolates as part of our celebration (I gave him a video game.  It was actually a romantic video game, in that it has a two-player mode.  He seemed to like it.).  I happened to still have it with me when I met up with some girlfriends later on.  I thought this would be fine.

Apparently not.  Why, you may ask?  Did they lecture me about the wastefulness of its packaging?  The indulgence of purchasing such decadent, unhealthful food while people are starving?  The evilness of sugar?

No.  Their objections were, basically, that they hate Valentine's Day.  It completely boggles my mind that they would feel this way since they are, actually, my friends, so I feel compelled to rebut their objections one by one.

1) One friend hates Valentine's Day because you should celebrate your love every day (yes, really).  I mean, yes, consistent affection is important and it's always wonderful to give and receive unexpected gestures or gifts.  But many people have a hard time being spontaneously romantic, or don't know whether it's appropriate or would be welcome, or simply forget and take their partner for granted, so it's helpful to have a day earmarked to be more than usually aware.

2) Another friend hates Valentine's Day (or maybe is just indifferent to it) because we shouldn't only appreciate our romantic partners, we should appreciate our friends and everyone we love.  Which is true, we should.  But then isn't that just extra reason to like Valentine's Day, because now it's a much bigger celebration?  Or a reason to declare a whole extra holiday just for friendship or family?

3) A third friend hates Valentine's Day because it's too commercial.  Which would be a completely sensible argument if it were made by a cloistered nun, or a new-age hippie who lived on a commune and grew his own food.  But made by a person who lives in the world it seems a bit odd.  I mean, life is commercial.  You work for money so that you can buy the things you need.  If you have extra money, you buy things you want, or things for other people.  Valentine's Day is not, by its nature, a super-expensive holiday - you can have a candlelit dinner of boxed macaroni and cheese at your home for very little money, cards can be bought for cheap or made for free, and expressions of romantic sentiment have no monetary value.  Lots of people do spend money on their significant others, but so what?  By this logic, Saturday night is too commercial because most people in New York spend a ton of money going out drinking.

4) The fourth friend hates Valentine's Day because it's stupid (her words).  And she's right, it is kind of stupid.  Frilly red and pink decorations, chocolate in funny-shaped boxes, flowers that will be dead in two days - it's silly.  But so what?  Lots of things that people do are stupid.  If we only did things that were totally efficient and productive and sense-making, we'd be boring, and worse, we'd be bored.

My counterarguments didn't carry any weight in this gathering.  They ranted a bit, I put my chocolate away, and we talked about something else.  But it saddens me that there are people (who aren't bitter teenagers) who feel this way about such a delightful occasion.  It's difficult enough that so many people senselessly dislike Christmas; for Valentine's Day, there's so much less baggage and therefore less excuse.  So what if it's superfluous or superficial or stupid?  Aren't some of the very best things in life?

why I run

I've been running a fair amount.  I did a 15k a month after the marathon and, just over a month later, I'm about to do a half-marathon.  I'm taking a Tuesday night running class and sometimes I run with a friend or a group from work and try to get in a long run every weekend, and if that doesn't add up to enough I do another run or two on the treadmill during the week.

People ask me all the time why I do it.  Not how I do it, because I'm not good at it.  I'm not the tiniest bit fast or any sort of strong, and my endurance, which is my least-weak area, is not really very good.  I'm just a regular person, a regular slow and weak person, who runs somewhat a lot.  (In fact, as runners go, I don't run very much at all.)  Non-runners ask me why I do it because they think I must be crazy to willingly subject myself to cold weather and muscle pain and the general feeling of impending death.  Even worse, sometimes runners ask me why I do it because can't understand how I could possibly enjoy it given how much I suck.

But I do enjoy it.  I enjoy exercise, I enjoy the outdoors, I enjoy numbers (there are a lot of numbers in running).  I enjoy pushing myself.  I enjoy the feeling of calm after a tough workout. 

I enjoy it *more* because I suck.  I'm good at the same number of things as everybody else, but the things I'm good at are the things that get quantified a lot.  I was good at school.  I was good at tests.  I was good at my job before I switched careers, and I'm good at my job now.  I'm good at being responsible and organized and taking initiative and following through.  Being good at these things has made my life easier and probably better, but there's not much satisfaction in being naturally good at things.

Historically, the things I suck at have been things I could avoid, or things I could decide were unimportant.  I can't sing or draw or cook, so I don't. I spend orders of magnitude less time than most women in New York (or everywhere?) fussing over my appearance because I can't quite wrap my mind around the concept of trying to be beautiful.  I was never a social butterfly, and I never tried to be.  I've never been much of one for chasing boys - they chase me, or they don't - or pursuing friendships or pushing for, really, anything.  I've actually had to be reminded that if you don't apply for jobs, you are not going to be offered any.  Generally if something doesn't come naturally to me, I just don't do it, and I'm lucky enough that I've been able to get by.

Or unlucky enough.  Because I've generally been good at things in a number and combination sufficient to my survival, I haven't been forced to leave my comfort zone.  I've worked hard, but only in ways I'm comfortable with.  I've been the person it's easy for me to be, but not always the person I want to be and, maybe, could be.

Running is not easy for me.  Being bad at things is not easy for me.  I finished in the 11th percentile of marathon runners in the 2011 ING New York City Marathon, and I'm pretty sure - aside from, possibly, other races - I've never worked that hard to be in the 11th percentile of anything before.  But I'm proud of myself for sticking to it, for going out there a few times a week and fighting - as best I can on that day - to suck a little bit less.  Running is teaching me to struggle, to fail a lot of the time and keep on trying, to work hard for no immediate reward, to do something that may never matter to anyone but myself.  It's practice, for growing into my own imperfect self.

2011 and 2012

I didn't really make New Year's resolutions - or, as it seems to be fashionable to call them just now - annual goals for 2011.  I felt like 2010 had been a very full and challenging year, in particular with finally making a much-anticipated career change, and that I deserved a break.  In 2011, I wanted to just be.

So I was.  And, actually, the year was far from empty.  Here are some highlights:

• Work.  I got settled into my (not-so-) new (anymore) job.  This is the first time I've had a job that didn't have a pre-ordained expiration date, and the first time I've worked outside of academia, so it's been a big adjustment.
• Running.  I did a fair amount of it, including a half-marathon PR in Brooklyn in May and finishing the 2011 ING New York City marathon.  I'm still very slow and very weak, but I'm hella stubborn.  
• Travel.  I went to Costa Rica and took a cycling trip in Ireland.  I also visited family in San Diego and went to a wedding in Nebraska. 
• Social life.  I was a bit worried, at the end of 2010, that with the career change I'd drift apart from old friends and not make new ones.  And, yes, I did drift apart from some friends, but other friendships remained intact or even strengthened, and I've met some great new people. 

It's certainly not the massive list of accomplishments that some people post, but I don't think it's half bad.  This year I have some goals in these areas, as well as some new goals:

• Work.  The goal here is, really, to figure out what my goals are.
• Running.  I don't plan on running another marathon this year; it's such a massive investment of time and energy that I can't see doing it without severely compromising other objectives, which means not doing it all that often.  But I do plan on running several half-marathons, and I'd like to work on whittling down my time.  Not to be really fast - I doubt that's possible for me - but just to be, well, less slow.  If I were just 10-20% faster, I'd be able to run with (some of) my friends without holding them back, and go on group runs without worrying about keeping up, and my long runs would take less time, and I wouldn't be slower than practically every other person who runs in Central Park.  So I've been doing tempo runs and hills and giving (almost) every workout a purpose.  I've also signed up for weekly running classes specifically designed to target speed.  I realize I'll never be a speed demon (in fact, so far all the extra work seems to be making me slower and weaker), but I think it's worth investing some energy trying to improve myself in this department.
• Travel.  I haven't fully hammered this out yet.  I may go to Turkey in the spring.  I may visit friends in other cities.  I may visit friends in other cities to run half marathons with them. 
• Social life.  This year I want to focus on strengthening my connections.  When friends are just people you talk to once in a while, it's easy to drift apart.  When they're people you do things with, you have a more vibrant bond.  I have lots of friends in other cities - including some very cool cities, and I'd like to visit some of them.  I also plan to do more running with friends and in groups, which is part of why I'd like to be less slow.  And I'll look for other opportunities to build relationships based on something other than a shared affinity for wine / gossip / cupcakes.
• Cultural engagement.  There's only so much time in the week, and - especially in the last six months, as running and social engagements took up more of my time - I've had to drop some things.  I've been doing a lot of theater-going, which is good.  I'd like to resume attendance at the semi-serious book club of which I'm a delinquent member, which means acquiring and reading the books in a timely manner.  I'd like to go to the ballet several times and the opera occasionally.  I'd like to be less lazy in the things I read and watch at home, too - it's easy for me to come home and queue up the next episode of DS9 or scroll through the new posts in my Google Reader, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I want to make more time to engage with longer things - serious movies and books that aren't mindless-metro-chick-lit downloaded for a dollar.  In the last couple weeks I read Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs, which I thought was only okay (it was hard to get a bead on the main character, and it didn't really come together in the end), but it was nice to have something to sink my teeth into.  This afternoon I'm watching Waitress, which is not as fluffy as I thought it would be; in fact it's a little bit scary and depressing, but that's probably the point
• Writing.  This is the final and most frightening goal.  I have a lot of resistance to writing properly.  It's easy to hammer out a blog post every so often - at times I've written them every day (not here, obviously).  It's harder to write - and revise! - something of substance.  But I want to do it, or more accurately I want to stick with it.  Especially with the emergence of Kindle self-publishing, it's easy for this sort of project to have an actual end goal.  There's some good stuff out there, and some real dreck, and there's no reason my writing shouldn't join all the other writing out in the world.

The (middling incoherent) Nutcracker Before Christmas

I saw The Nutcracker twice this year.  On Wednesday I went to Lincoln Center to see the Balanchine-choreographed New York City Ballet production, and earlier this evening I trekked to BAM for the American Ballet Theater version.

I like ballet, and I love Christmas, so The Nutcracker is one of my favorite annual traditions.  I've seen the Balanchine version every year since I came to the city.  I always enjoy it, and this year it was even better than usual because I had good company.  The production is full of familiar music and beloved characters and transcendent moments, and every year I notice different little details.  I was engrossed by the first act and thrilled by the second act and buzzing with happiness by the time I left.

The ABT version had a couple of strikes against it from the beginning: I had to go to Brooklyn, my theater companion was unavoidably detained, and the theater was full of young children and, worse, overtalkative hipsters.  Still, I was excited to see a familiar ballet in a new incarnation.

The first act was odd, but interesting.  Everything was a little bit more different than I thought it would be.  I knew the choreography would be totally different, and the costumes and sets.  I didn't realize, though, just how much of the story is open to interpretation.  In the NYCB version, Clara (the princess) and Fritz (her brother) are young children - maybe six or seven - and their antics read as playful gamboling.  In the ABT production, they're preteens - at least ten, possibly older - and their furious insistence on more and more gifts and rough fighting over the presents they receive is ... well, possibly it's social commentary, but also it's disturbing.

There were other disturbing things about the first act.  The godfather, always a bit of a menace, is a much more sinister presence.  I'd always read the family as bourgeois in a comfortable, homey way, but in this production they come off as rich.  Their house is more imposing, their servants more numerous and submissive.  The parents interact with their children less.  Everyone's costumes are very bright.  The godfather's son, who later becomes the Nutcracker and then the Prince, doesn't exist.  And the whole first scene is replaced.  In the NYCB production, Clara and Fritz are napping together while their parents decorate the tree in the other room.  They wake up and took through the keyhole, excitedly watching the tree come to life.  Their parents discover them and let them look at the tree before herding them off to dress for the party.  This presents an idea of family affection and togetherness which makes the conflict that follows less unpleasant.  

But in the ABT version, the first act starts with Clara and Fritz fighting and wreaking havoc with the cooks' party preparations, continues with the discovery of a mouse in the kitchen, and culminates with a troop of mice taking over the whole stage after the humans have left.  These mice - who play an important part in the plot - are not the harmless, comical, paunchy mice of the NYCB version.  They're adult-seeming, they wear suits, they dance like soldiers, and they are scary.

So the first act was not what I expected.  There were interesting things the NYCB version doesn't have - the first scene was actually quite well done, the godfather is a much clearer figure, and there's a very nice effect involving an oversized chair - but it was a bit disconcerting.  Still, I figured the second act has no plot and little action - it's just dancing - so it wouldn't be too much changed to an untrained eye like mine.

I was wrong.  Everything was changed.  There were some characters I hadn't seen before, and some familiar characters were changed almost beyond recognition.  The costumes were different, which I expected, but I mean they were *really* different.  They were... satirical.  The order of the dances was changed around.  But worst of all, the Sugar Plum Fairy - who in the NYCB version is a sort of fairy godmother - and her cavalier are, in the ABT version, a sort of future incarnation of Clara and the Prince.  They seem to actually become these creatures, who are both in love with each other and trapped in a land that doesn't really exist.  And then, when the play ends - this is the most heartbreaking moment - what is suppose to happen is that all the fairies have danced, and the Sugar Plum Fairy gives them her special blessing, and they fly away on a sled drawn by reindeer, back home where it is Christmas morning.  But what happens in this version is that Sugar Plum Clara and the grown-up Prince dance their sad duet, and then Clara wakes up in bed, alone, and the Nutcracker is just a doll, and it was all a dream, and Herr Whatever His Name Is looks through the window and laughs as Clara sobs into her pillow, and you forget that actually it's Christmas morning.

I don't want to say I didn't like this production.  It was interesting and well-executed and never boring.  It was probably very smart, too.  I'm told ABT productions are.  But I felt like it was, well, *too* smart.  It seemed to be taking the piss out of the real (by which I mean Balanchine) Nutcracker story, and even more of Christmas itself.  I know as a Jewish person I have limited knowledge of what Christmas is about, but I'm pretty sure it's not about taking the piss out of things.  In fact, to me Christmas *is* the Balanchine Nutcracker - joy and family and, yes, consumerism, lights and snow and pretty colors and uncritical wonderment.  The fantasy that the world is, underneath, beautiful and magical, that there's a part of reality where everyone is special and loved, that every little girl can access this reality, and that when the world seems most terrifying - the tree grows, the mice stage a battle against you and your toys - you're just one brave act (throwing a shoe, in this case) away from discovering the hidden beauty of everything.  But the ABT version seems to be exactly the opposite: life may seem to be harmless parties and present-giving, but beneath this is a roiling terror of class warfare and undisciplined fears and unknown hatreds; sexual maturity and the attendant politics are inevitable; even your fantasies can provide no escape.  All of this is perhaps true, and in some ways it's very impressive what ABT has done, how terrifying they've made a ballet that I always thought was delicate and childlike.  It's not a bad show.  But it's not a good Nutcracker.