bird by bird

So, the preview of the third season of HBO's GIRLS is out, and obviously I've watched it over 43 times. I've missed my girls and their ability to make me feel better (and sometimes worse) about my current twenty-something, urban-dwelling mess of a life. It looks like Hannah is making some breakthroughs this season; let's hope I do too.

You know that Vince Vaughn/Reece Witherspoon movie Four Christmas, in which they try to spend the holiday with each of their divorced families? Well, my Thanksgiving is kind of like that. Except, I'm not married, or visiting families split by a divorce, and it's not Christmas. Basically the only similarity is that this year I celebrated Four Thanksgivings. And none of them were with my actual family! Let me explain... Thanksgiving #1--Technically dubbed "Friendsgiving," my roommates and their gang celebrate a pre-Thanksgiving every year at someone's apartment with a family sized make-shift table, a professional camera and tripod, and a theme. This year, my roommates and I housed the denim-themed soiree. I played the background music, the L sisters provided table clothes and fresh flowers, and guests brought a dish to share, and wine, so much wine. Before eating, as per tradition, we went around the table and said what we were each thankful for. Then we cleared t...

I'm currently reading Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York. Don't get any ideas; I'm not leaving any time soon, but I recently read a review of this book, and what interested me so much about it was that each essay tells the story of someone like me who came to New York City, and who, like me, eventually left. Everyone knows the "coming to NYC" story but I feel like the "leaving NYC" story is one that is rarely told. Moving here is such a decisive event, a declaration like pioneers claiming their territory by driving a stake in the ground like the last scene of Far and Away. But leaving is more vague, less defined. "It's easy to see the beginnings of things and harder to see the ends," says Joan Didion. And I think she's right. I'll share some of my favorite quotes from various essays in the book, because if you didn't already know this about me, I often prefer pieces of things to them as whole. Finding ...

Because it's pie-making season, and I can't stop listening to Lissie!!! Skip the first minute, and cherish 3:30 because it will make you close your eyes it's so good. I promise. "You can cry, or die, or just make pies all day"

“Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.” ― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

To the woman reading this right now, probably sitting in her bed holding up printed pages of my blog even though she has both a laptop and an iPad in her school bag. She's reading through cheap reading glasses with her legs straight out in front of her, crossed, rubbing her feet together. She's probably wearing a red bathrobe, and her lap is being kneaded and walked on by two brother cats named Simon and Garfunkel who never seem to leave her alone. She pretends it annoys her, but she secretly loves the company. She has the 10:00 local news on the TV, and there is probably a pile of unmarked 1st grade worksheets stacked next to her on the bed. She's probably laughing at how accurate this scene is: the robe, the cats, the stack of worksheets. There's a chance she may be smile-crying, too. She's reading my blog (in paper form) and she's missing me, but what she doesn't know is that I'm writing for her. And I'm missing her. And I'm in NYC probably si...

Of all the poems in the whole, wide world, this one remains my favorite. W HEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;   When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;   When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;   When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,   How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;          5 Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,   In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,   Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.       --WW

What a metaphor for relationships... AMIRIGHT?! You're just bumbling around, slightly out of control, looking for someone to grab onto, to be steady. There's a lot of bumps and whiplash at first, and it is scary as all hell. Just when you think you're going to float off into space all alone forever, someone holds out their hand and says, "I've got you." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- >

I work at a hospital, but it's different from most. In most hospitals, breaks are braced and babies are born. Medications are given that make people feel better , and surgeries to remove things like tonsils and appendixes are routine and generally non-evasive. Patients are admitted with serious injuries and illnesses too, and sometimes those people die, but every day people are also born. My hospital is different from those hospitals; mine is a cancer hospital. No one walks into this hospital after injuries related to game-winning slide into first place or a sunset motorcycle ride turned accident. Patients walk into the doors of this hospital because one morning in the shower they noticed a strange bump, or while walking their dog one night, they felt a sharp pain in a strange area. Then they come here to detect what has been undetected. Often the treatment itself makes them feel worse; it makes them weak, nauseous, bald. Non-essential organs are removed, but so are essential one...

In a city of 8 million strangers, you would be shocked at how many of them I see on an almost daily basis during my commute to work, yet I never know their names, where they come from, or where they're going. Almost every single day, I wait on the Clinton-Washington subway platform with a French family consisting of a slender, bearded father, a willowy mother with hair that is tangled in a beautiful french way, and two little girls with buckle shoes and pink backpacks. Their father carries their scooters, one pink and one purple, in one arm, and their violins are strapped across his back. They stay on the train when I get off at the Fulton stop. Between the second and third flights of stairs that I climb during my first subway transfer to the 4/5 train, I walk past a woman standing by a railing shouting at the top of her Caribean accented voice about Jesus, his coming, and what's going to happen to all of us when He comes. It is not good. She hands out peices of paper, and...