Lilit in Stereo

I almost never do memes, but I couldn’t pass up a fun one from Kendra over at A Million Paths. The meme was to write five “remarkably unremarkable” things about yourself.

1. I love onions. I don’t just put them into every recipe where it’s even remotely appropriate, I eat them plain, like apples. I’m sure other people find onion breath to be offensive, but I find it quite sexy.

2. As a kid, almost all of my stuffed animals were all named after Greek gods and goddesses. There was Aphrodite the hippo, Poseidon the polar bear, and Pan the monkey. I was a weird kid.

3. I watch the last episodes of TV shows, even if I never watched the rest of the series. There’s something calming about couples finally getting together, couples who have been desperate for a child finally getting pregnant, people moving away from home to start new lives and at their going-away party finding out how much they meant to everyone. I don’t think you need to have followed the whole show to watch the last episode. You can tell the whole history of a couple in what happens when they unite or reunite. It’s a wonderful feeling, the senses of finality and resolution and peace and purpose all at once.

4. My middle name is Helene. I was named for my great-aunt Helen, who died one year to the day exactly before I was born. She and my mother were very close. As a kid, when I knew I was going to end up changing my name someday because the one I was given didn’t fit quite right, I considered just going by Helene. It’s a great name. I should have stuck with it. Also, one of my favorite–if not my favorite–characters in Shakespeare is Helena. She was not the Hermia, torn between two suitors, but the lovelorn girl who didn’t even have one and would have ended her life alone if not for the intervention of mystical creatures. I always identified with her. And therefore is love said to be a child/because in taste he is so oft beguiled.

5.  I never learned to ride a bike. My parents bought me a bike, and it ended up going to my sister because I refused–flat out refused–to learn to ride it. I don’t even rememember why. I think I hated the loss of control. I was also not really an outdoorsy kid, and I grew up in suburbs that were not terribly pedestrian-friendly. Then by the time I realized it would be a really good idea to learn, I was embarrassed to be a teenager who didn’t know how to ride a bike. Every summer I swear it’s going to be the summer I learn, this one included.

I don’t spend as much time in the West Village as I’d like to. First, I only went there when B. lived there. Then after B. left I couldn’t walk west of Broadway without mourning him in some way. But it’s been three and a half years of me in New York, and now when I take that walk up Sixth Avenue, I can think about the last time I bought lip balm at the C.O. Bigelow Apothecary instead of turn my head shamefully at the French Roast and remembering how I went there with B. and got the notion in my head that he loved me.

Sometimes I love this city and sometimes all I want to do is shake myself free of it. My head is filled with trinkets that clink against each other. I need a new job. I need a better umbrella, even though I always lose them. I need more bylines. I need a pair of sandals and a straw hat and a way to get to the beach, a photographic memory and a vacation and a haircut. But then nights like this one come along, when the rain has just finished and the trees are soggy. They do not drip on me.

But my bounty is as boundless as the sea
my love as deep; the more I give to thee
the more I have.

You are what you love, and not what loves you back. - Jenny Lewis

About six months out of the year there is no place in the world I would rather live in than New York, which works out conveniently since I happen to live there. Spring and autumn are the best times to walk lazily through the streets, for drinking tea and wearing flats and dreaming with the windows open. The office where I get acupuncture is in the East Village, near Stuyvesant Square. After the session I’m always so airy and hopeful that I just want to walk for awhile.

There’s a saying: when a door closes, a window opens. Recently a very big door slammed shut for me. My book was rejected. By every editor who looked at it. What this means is that my book won’t be getting published, at least not anytime soon. The comments were all some variation of “we like your writing, it was so interesting, you have so many stories to tell, but you have no arc.” At twenty-five, it seems, I have no arc. After all, how can you not take criticism personally when it’s your life story they’re criticizing?

And then a window opened. A piece I’d been working on for the New York Post came out and, to my surprise, got a three-page spread with color photos. After that, I started getting phone calls and emails from other places who wanted to write about the site and about me. This morning, I taped a really fun segment on NPR.

Just because I’ve rebounded doesn’t mean the feeling of emptiness will ever go away completely. Finding out my book wasn’t going to sell was like finding out that someone had died. I kept checking my legs to see if thick purplish-black streams were running down. I wished I’d never told any of my friends about the project, much less written about it in such a public forum as this one, just so I wouldn’t have to politely respond to follow-up questions about how it was doing. Rushing into any new writing so soon after losing this life-devouring manuscript would be unfair, like jumping into a new relationship immediately after ending a long, significant one. All the adornments coming my way as of late won’t be able to totally soothe the pain of losing this thing I worked hard on. And I worked so fucking hard on it, this book that no one will see.

But you are what you love. And that means I am New York, I am my friends, I am my apartment on Metropolitan Avenue and springtime and Argentine wine and sundresses and my dead book.

I go on these self-improvement kicks sometimes. First I started subscribing to the Sunday Times. Then I started funding the occasional project on Donors Choose. Now, I’m learning how to cook. Gradually.

It’s easy not to know how to cook when you live in New York, the city of 24-hour takeout and prompt delivery. In my case, it’s even easier not to know how to cook when I have a boyfriend who is a phenomenal cook (and who is totally never giving back that orange Le Creuset dutch oven that my mom gave “us” when we were in NC last summer). But cooking–at least adequately–is one of those things I think I should know how to do. It’s like driving or balancing a checkbook, something every adult should be able to do reasonably well. So I looked up some recipes online, bought some groceries, and dived in.

Three months after my New Year’s Resolution to be less of a complete bonehead in the kitchen, I’ve made some advancements. Sarah and I tried an orzo recipe together, and then I was able to recreate it on my own. I figured out how to use a hand blender and made a couple bowls’ worth of cauliflower soup. I’m certainly not anywhere near a professional, but I can actually prepare relatively tasty, inexpensive meals without burning my hand or giving myself food poisoning.

Part of my problem with cooking was that I found it an entirely uncreative pursuit. Like Anne Shirley, I’d get bored or distracted halfway through and completely forget about that water I had boiling in another room. Cooking seemed too precise, with its tablespoons and half-cups. But the more I’ve practiced at it I’ve learned that food has a language just like writing or music, and that once you get the basic vocabulary you can start messing around with the rules. I mean, Picasso painted a whole lot of landscapes to prove he knew the basics of art before he started going off into the new world of Cubism. I’m considering all these dishes my landscapes–once I can make rice without burning the bottom layer or saute vegetables without splashing hot oil on myself, I might feel a little more free to mess with recipes. Until then, it’s sustenance. And going over to Paul’s a lot for dinner.

What are some things you love about yourself? How did you come to love these things?

Gina wrote the previous sentence on her blog. And I haven’t done anything resembling a meme in a long time, but I thought I’d answer. This was especially timely considering my last post was about my (increasingly rare, thanks) body issues.

I love my hands. I have signer’s hands, with long, slender fingers and nails mostly kept short. I never hated my hands or thought they were ugly, but they were utilitarian, things that enabled me to talk and communicate, and finding them beautiful would be like finding a tongue beautiful. But after awhile I came to learn that there were many, many ways to talk with hands, more than just sign language. I held hands with a boy for the first time. I ran my hands through a sad friend’s hair. A needle pricked the end of my finger. A baby tried to chew on my palm.

I think I learned to love my hands around the same time that I started to call myself a woman instead of a girl. There’s no exact moment when it happened, of course, but there was a day when I fastened a bracelet and thought my hands are lovely. They are a woman’s hands, a writer’s hands. I think I grew into them just like I grew into my self, into my name.

Dear X,

I know that since I’ve been out of town, we haven’t seen each other in awhile. The first thing you said to me when we ran into each other today was “Wow, you’re even skinnier than usual.” I understand that this was your idea of a compliment, akin to “goodness, you got such a nice tan while you were traveling.” However, I did not take it as a compliment. Yes, I’m aware that in our society, thinness is a positive trait, and a sought-after one, therefore someone remarking on your thinness is supposed to be a good thing. Complaining about being slender is like complaining about being rich, or white–because richness, whiteness, and thinness are all desired qualities in our society, and they all bear the mark of privilege.

That nonwithstanding, I would like to tell you about all the times I came home crying from middle school because some girl had made fun of me for being the last one to need a bra. I’ll tell you about sneaking protein shakes and candy bars and bags of potato chips, because I thought if only I could gain some weight everyone would stop accusing me of having an eating disorder. I’d like to tell you about every single magazine I have ever opened up full of letters talking about how disgusting and unnatural all thin women are, and how ‘real’ women do not have boyish hips or bony shoulders. I would like to show you every single website that posts photographs of skinny celebrities and encourages people to mock them and offer them sandwiches. I can go through the closet at my parents’ house and dig out the years’ worth of oversized dark clothing I thought might disguise my skeletal figure and somewhere I still probably have the note someone slipped in my locker that said I (the only Jewish girl in my high school) looked like a concentration camp victim.

Yes, I know you meant it as a positive comment. And at the moment, all I could do was freeze up and wish my belt were a notch or two looser. It took me all the way home to write this, because I couldn’t say it to you then. Because it is not your fault how much that little sentence dragged up inside me, and not your fault that at the time I couldn’t come up with anything to say beyond “Um, thanks, I guess.”

Skinny girls aren’t supposed to have self-esteem problems, and, honestly, it’s been a long time since I had any kind of negative thought about my body. There are definitely days when I try on a dress and wish I had a curvy figure, but I’ve gotten pretty comfortable living in this skin of mine, and as long as I’m healthy I try not to think about much else related to my weight. I don’t even own a scale. It’s certainly not your fault that your well-intentioned comment sent me off on a whole episode of reminiscing and reflection. Maybe we live in the kind of a world where even a woman who normally considers herself well-adjusted and confident is secretly insecure. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think women and men are complex beings, who are happy at some times and sad or introspective or forlorn at others. The trick is being able to pull ourselves more often than not onto the side that the light is on.

“One can live without New York. But it’s better not to.”- Alain Ducasse

It’s a long way home from Buenos Aires, fifteen hours of actual flying broken up by three hours eating egg white scrambles and reading bad magazines in the Mexico City airport. It’s a long way home and by the time you get back to where you started you’re confused to see signs in English and American dollars look foreign and synthetic.

The best word I learned in Argentina was casamentera, which literally translates to “house mentor” but more specifically means “matchmaker.” I watched the Mothers of the Disappeared march in Plaza de Mayo and ate a gourmet dinner in a restaurant where each table was in a different room of a restored mansion. In the designer boutique in Montevideo, the at-home equivalent of which I cannot dream of affording, a salesgirl called all her coworkers over to stare at me, the girl who lives in a city they’ve only seen in movies.

After tango lessons and a parade of flawless Malbecs, after flea-market antique jewelry and subpar wireless connections, I’m back in New York again. Every time I think of leaving I come back home and the wind rushes me like a lover and it starts all over again. It’s mine, this cold city still green-eyed in the winter, and I belong to it. In the cab from the airport I swore at a driver who tried to cut us off and thought this is where I am supposed to be, and there were fifteen messages on my voicemail and I was ready to live my life again.

Travelers tend to begin identifying the new world around them by noting what is and is not similar to home. Buenos Aires is one of the most unlike-America places I have been to, and yet both Amy and I found ways to recreate our home city in this new, unfamiliar one: ‘This must be the East Village of BA,’ ‘It’s twice as big as Central Park.’ But so far Uruguay is proving to be unlike any other place I know. This is the third world, I suppose, with trash scattered about even the most supposedly posh of streets and little naked children running along the grass as thirdhand cars clunk past.

A street band called themselves El Segundo Mundo, the second world. It’s a good Spanish rhyme but it’s also a way to reflect the status of the country. My more finance-savvy friends prefer ‘an emerging market’ or ‘a developing nation.’ I am glad I came here, glad that there are enough things I recognize to emphasize all the ones I don’t. Girls on bicycles. Muddy tap water. A man who cleans the street by filling his horse-drawn carriage with torn, swelling bags of garbage.

I have to confess that when I don’t know a proper word in Spanish I say a French one in a Spanish accent and hope it’s right. I have to confess that I was thrilled to watch the BBC in my hostel last night. And I must confess that as glad as I am that I came here, and as much as this trip helped me to gain perspective on what it really means to be poor and to struggle, I will probably forget again someday and go back to mourning my lack of expensive clothes and regular brunch appointments.

• Washington, DC
• Ottawa
• London
• Paris
• Brussels
• Jerusalem
• Madrid
• Rome
• Nassau
• Athens
• Dublin
• Buenos Aires
• Montevideo

The weekend before I left, Marcela was in town from California. She gamely tagged along while I bought last minute things for my trip: a straw hat, a journal, a pair of flip-flops, a suitcase. February is the kind of year I’m trying my hardest to shake off winter and uncoil, and the last few years I’ve noticed it’s a time of year when I travel: The Bahamas, San Francisco, now Argentina.

I am trying to ´break´ BA like I have tried to break other cities. Unlike New York, the neighborhoods here are not so obviously defined. Here, the blocks are mixes of high and low, broken down houses and recently built luxury condos. And yet in an odd way every dwelling looks alike, so much so that I have to pay extra attention to street signs to keep from being lost entirely. The city sprawls outward and outward, away from the sea. It seems like forever, one hot street after another, one more corner empanada shop and one more farmacia.

Breakfast at our hostel is when all the English-speaking inhabitants come out and recover from their hangovers with coffee and orange juice and the occasional cigarette. I hoard tea and pastries in my corner while we suggest best routes to local landmarks and figure out the exact latitude and longitude of our apartments back home in Islington and Brooklyn. It rained buckets while we had our desayuno, thinking about how far we had come to have breakfast with people who were just like us. And by the time the rain let up we were all on our way across the different streets, Guatemala and Honduras and Estados Unidos, and thought about how even when you fly fifteen hours to get somewhere it still feels simultaneously exactly like and completely different than home.