I think I have had enough of fire.
The thing I love most and least about my apartment is my bedroom window, which overlooks the frantic, noisy, sleepless Metropolitan Avenue. I’ve always been a sound sleeper, and I can drift off peacefully to the sound of car horns and skidding tires. At my parents’ house, when the planes from RDU airport are required to stop flying after a certain hour so that everybody in the nearby neighborhoods can get their rest, I have to leave the TV or radio on just so I’m not overwhelmed by the silence of it all.
Sometimes, though - I wake up. One day last summer, my room started filling with smoke from a fire across the street. Yesterday, there was another fire - a cement truck, the middle of the afternoon, chemicals belching out into the sky. It gets so hot in my little room in the summer. And this summer I’ll be spending three weeks in Israel on a fellowship - how silly am I to get a free vacation, something nice to put on my CV, a chance to meet and work with someone in my field, make new friends who I can hang out with back in New York, etc, etc - only to be obsessed with how I’ll survive in the heat? Almost all the poems I wrote in Spain were about the heat, about sleeping in a little square dorm room with no ventilation. Maybe we are not as far from home as we think we are, he said to her. Maybe it is this hot everywhere.
I am turning in the STA book on Monday. The most surprising part is that I’m not spending the weekend frantically upping my word count or panicking about structure - it’s done, basically. I’m writing Acknowledgements. I’ve already done edits on four of the five chapters with my editor because I was ahead of schedule. It is nice to get to spend a few unencumbered months doing that thing you’ve always wantes to do, getting up every morning and settling into a routine of tea and writing and email and more writing. Even if I get a desk job tomorrow and start working 60 hour weeks, I’ll always be grateful for having had that.
After this, the book won’t be so much mine anymore. It’s off to be edited and printed and illustrated. Of course the words will be mine, and the name on the cover will be mine. But I feel as if I’ve given birth to something that won’t be born until next April. Once the little bundle of mine is sent away, I’ll still get up and look at that empty screen every morning, and the words will come, because they always have, because they don’t know how not to, because I don’t know how to live without them burning out of my fingertips.
when someone asks why i didn’t stay home
0 Comments Published by Lilit April 4th, 2009 in introspectionwords learn you
1 Comment Published by Lilit March 7th, 2009 in writing, judaism, introspection, nostalgiabefore you were my city
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About
Reading: Elliot Perlman, Reasons I Won't Be Coming; Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Deborah, Golda, and Me
Listening: Sufjan Stevens, Illinois
Eating: Walter Foods, Juliette
Drinking: Spuyten Duyvil, Radegast
Contemplating: "It's my job to be emotional. Doctors cure diseases and shoemakers make shoes. It's my job to go through emotions and describe them to other people." - Bjork
"Don't wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write." - Barbara Kingsolver
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Stuff I Wrote
- Triangle Music: Review of Ryan Adams Show The first installment of "The Raleigh Expatriate," which I hope becomes a regularish feature on this excellent blog.
- UGO: "A Guy's Guide to Bad Breakups" A list of the worst ways to dump someone. Based on, uh, my friends' experiences.
- Beliefnet- "You Shall Not Insult the Deaf" A personal- very personal- essay about my dad.
- Draft - The Boys Behind Beermenus Profile of the brothers who came up with the idea for the Beermenus.com
- NPR: Save the Assistants I got interviewed about STA, and it was hilarious.
- New York Post: "Riding the Serf" It turns out I am quite the expert on all things assistant-y.
- Newsweek- "God's Girls" Following the election of a female Episcopalian bishop, I examined how far women have gotten in other religious leadership roles.
- Newsweek- "Dead Zone" Results/analysis of a poll about whether people can talk to the dead
- The Forward: "Heads Will Roll" About Judith Regan's obsession with the Biblical Judith, and how Regan- as usual- got the story all wrong.
- Beliefnet: Interview with Ryan Gosling I am 99 percent sure he flirted with me.
- Huffington Post - How to Make Your Assistant Not Hate You Pretty self-explanatory, yes?
- American Jewish Life- "The House Without Lights" Explanatory subtitle: "How My Presbyterian Mother Made Me a Better Jew."
- American Jewish Life- "The Chomping Champion" Profile of competitive eater Don "Moses" Lerman
- Mediabistro: "Lessons You Can Learn from Your Assistant" In honor of Administrative Professionals' Day, a how-to for bosses.
