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.