The Day That I Ate Crawfish
Friday, in New Orleans. It looks like the pictures. I don't know exactly what psychological effect it has on all of us to experience so much of the world with such visual intimacy but still at a tremendous distance - through pictures or videos or movies. It feels deadening. To be in the 9th ward here and still to think only, Yep, it looks just like the pictures, feels very soulless, very inhuman. But that was my reaction. It took longer to be able to think anything else. Specifically, it took driving around late at night and seeing all of the bright orange tags scrawled haphazardly on doorframes, and endless underpasses crowded with cars that are dusted lightly, with salt residue?, their trunks still open like someone just retrieved a blanket or picnic basket and will be coming back in a minute to close it. There are places where it feels nothing less than apocalyptic. And there are places where it feels only terribly wounded. And there are places, usually surrounded by large ornate gates, where someone seems to have put on a mask as if to advertise that Things Are Okay. The distance between these places is remarkably small here.

The Day That I Left My House In An Angry Mood To Go Do Laundry And Found A Parade
I pretty much forgot about St. Patrick's Day this year, and so thought I was imagining the sound of bagpipes as I walked to the laundromat. But I wasn't. As beautiful as the music and the costumes and all of that was, the best part of the whole thing was that behind each dignified, orderly procession of oldish Irish male bagpipers, there was inevitably some dude in jeans and a green sweatshirt drunkenly weaving along, waving an Irish flag and trying to conduct the music, or the applause, or possibly something else.

This is just the latest example of New York's generosity to me. Other things that I've found since my arrival:

1. A rolodex. This was out on the curb during trash day. I haven't looked through it too much yet, but it's a big, sturdy metal rolodex that's filled with places to buy paint and carpentry supplies and tools and all kinds of other things. It seemed depressingly final to me, abandoning a rolodex. It takes so long to build a good one. Maybe all the numbers are in somebody's cell phone now.

2. A oujia board. A really beautiful, heavy one that's intricately painted different colors and drilled so that you can hang it on your wall. Which I did.

3. The statue of liberty. On the F train heading toward Manhattan, on one of the first few completely bewildering days I was here, I happened to glance out of the window in time to see the Statue of Liberty way off in the distance. Just tiny and indistinct, not in a textbook or on a postcard. It was one of the first moments I realized that I was actually in New York.

4. A computer keyboard, from which I pried the keys: control, home, esc, option, and end. With the aid of a brick. Slightly drunk.

5. A stretch of sidewalk where, just about every day, someone draws chalk outlines of the shadows of parking meters and bicycles, so that daylight seems to extend into the night, or until whenever the chalk shadows wear away.

The Day That I Heard A Kid Doing The Woody Woodpecker Laugh On The Street
I've been trying to pin down my favorite laughs lately. I know that one of them is my friend Rachael's. Rachael, I don't know if you read this, but if you do, you should know that not only did I love your laugh from the first time I heard it, but that I've also adopted a variation of it. It has a quality about it of sort of bursting forth from deep inside and surprising the laugher. I think it's a laugh that is particularly charming in generally quiet people, like Rachael.

Actually, I think I'm onto something there with the contrast thing. Because I also really like how my dad laughs. It's funny - he's as masculine as a guy can be who doesn't play sports or fix things or do any of the kinds of things that you would infer that all men do if you, say, try to buy a Hallmark card for Father's Day. But he has this very high-pitched, ridiculous, slightly maniacal-sounding laugh. Like a little kid.

So maybe the best laughs happen when you can't help but be yourself - caught a little off-guard, letting something escape that maybe you didn't mean to. Particularly amazing laughers make eye contact with you when they laugh, I think. I'm always kind of proud whenever I make someone laugh, but that makes it even better.

Behind again. Previous days were:

The Day That I First Teared Up At The Office
It wasn't an all-out cry, though that will come soon, I'm sure. What brought it on was reading letters from people who lost relatives on September 11. They were thanking us (StoryCorps - where I work) for the opportunity to talk about their dead loved ones and record something about their lives. And the letters were supposed to be fairly official - they were written at our request to an organization that provides some of our funding. So they were letters of recommendation, essentially. And some of them weren't too personal, they were very much arms-length-letters. One of them started out that way. It was the only hand-written one and it was from parents whose son died. They had lots of good things to say about how telling their son's story helped them to heal and that kind of thing. And then near the end, it read something like, "It's ironic that our son left from our home, where he grew up, and not his own home on the morning that he died." The sentence didn't really fit with anything before or after it and felt like it was a thought that had just occurred to her - I'm pretty sure the mother was writing it - and she had to say it right then. It was the letter of someone who is still disoriented, still confused, still in the middle of everything five years later. One of my uncles killed himself when he was a little older than me. My family never talks about it, but my grandma referred to it once. She said something like, "After it happened, there was nothing that could hurt me anymore. There was a part of me that has been closed since then." I do not know how we survive these things.

The Day That I Watched Two Three-Year-Olds Make Friend On The Subway
I have been having lots of kid encounters lately. I will describe them in more detail when I've gotten a slightly longer list.

The First Day In Several Days That I Didn’t Cry For One Reason Or Another
I’ve noticed something about myself and crying lately. It’s getting harder and harder to draw the line between crying out of happiness and crying out of sadness. I don’t think I ever cried out of happiness until a few months ago. It was amazing. And it wasn’t that there was no sadness in it. It was that the sadness at losing something was completely overwhelmed by the gratitude at having experienced it at all. I’m sure there are lots of different ways to cry out of happiness, but that’s one.


Also, because I’ve fallen behind, the past two days have been:

The Day That I Felt, For Lack Of A Better Word, Blessed
I don't quite know how to talk about this idea. There are moments, and there have been an increasing number of them lately, when I feel sort of connected to everything, like some part of me is empty and everything I see or hear can just wash through me. The best thing to do in these kinds of moments is walk around and look at people. There are a million things that will strike me a funny or beautiful or fascinating, just sitting there on people’s faces. And I just feel overwhelmingly happy about it. The hard part is that I’ll look into all of these pairs of eyes and hardly anybody will look back at me and I’ll wish that they would, that there could be some moment of recognition where I knew that they saw what I saw, that they were amused too. I’ll keep looking. Sometimes they happen.


The Day That Albert Found Me
This weekend, you must understand, was both very good and very hard. Two friends came to the city and we went out drinking Saturday night and had brunch Sunday morning and sat in a bookstore and thought about how great it would be to live all together in a brownstone down the street. It was really really nice. And then they had to leave. And I became acutely aware how much I miss living with people that I love and being able to come home and feel like it's really home. I haven't felt that since probably May of last year. So, in this bookstore, post-brunch, I was pretty sad and just trying to keep it together, and not doing so well. And then I turned a corner and there's Albert. Albert is a slightly smaller-than-life-size wooden man holding a stack of books that is actually a little cabinet with shelves inside. I know because we have an Albert at my mom's house, just outside my bedroom door. I don't think they call him Albert at the bookstore, but I did. It was involuntary. I said, "Hi Albert!" And it was just a little tiny bit like home, just for a second.

The Day That A Little Kid Threw A Rock At Me
I was sitting with a friend in Prospect Park and we noticed a cute kid, maybe 3 years old, kind of ambling toward us with his or her father (we couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl). And we smiled, I did anyway, the way you do at cute kids. And as the kid got closer, she gave me that wary look when they don't know what to make of you but they're obviously a little uncomfortable that you're staring at them. So she walked behind us and I looked away and thought the interaction was over. Next thing I know, she's run back over to us, picked up a rock and it's sailing through the air at me. It didn't hit either of us, but it was well-aimed and the message was pretty clear. My friend fell over laughing while I sat there wondering how I must look to be deemed deserving of a stoning by a toddler.


I think I need to start a special section here, called Fun With Strangers. I had a special kind of day yesterday. I have them periodically, and I never know exactly why. They are days when strangers seem to smile at me a lot more and people seem to interact with me with unusual kindness. I'm not sure if it's as simple as being in a good mood, and having other people reflect that back at you. I don't think so. I think there's something else. Maybe I'm wearing something particularly colorful. I've never kept track. The point is that is makes me feel so good, like I'm glowing somehow. Especially if I'm not having a good day to begin with. So in honor of this phenomenon, I'm going to work on smiling at strangers, and keeping track of the best smiles I've received.

A list (remember, two constitutes a list):

#1 - When I was home in Minnesota a little before Christmas, I went to a mall with my younger sisters. They're 14 and 15. I did not want to be at that mall, so they went off by themselves to shop and I walked around listening to music and feeling misanthropic. I was surrounded by hordes of teenagers and they were, to be honest, grossing me out. As was the mall in general.* And so I was listening to Westfall by Okkervil River pretty loud on my headphones. The song is about killing a teenage girl and not really feeling any remorse. It's kind of intense and I was completely digging it at that moment. Like, there must have been a pretty serious groove in my walk, because a big burly security guard walked past me, and gave me a big smile and a thumbs up. And I smiled back, and all of my misanthropy melted.

#2 - Also involves music. I might have even been listening to the same cd. I was on a subway fairly late at night and in my car was an accordian player. I could tell he was good, and even though I had my headphones on, it made me really happy that he was playing. I was kind of keeping my eye on him and watching as he moved down the car. When he got all the way to the other end, I caught his eye and smiled, and he smiled right back, big enough to see all the way from the other end of the car. I felt like something had been accomplished, and there was nothing more to say.


*I am not averse to mass culture on principle and I tend to disdain those who are. I immensely enjoy the occasional quarter pounder with cheese, Twinkie, soap opera, celebrity magazine, summer blockbuster, etc. And to believe that these types of things are the downfall of our culture is to take them far too seriously. However, on this particular day, I absolutely did not want to be surrounded by commerce and hormonal teenagers.

The Day That They Started Asking Me Questions At Work And I Felt Useful
Note: I can't decide how much I'll talk about work here, "here" meaning the little tiny bit of cyberspace that is this blog. For now, I'm not too concerned because I'm pretty sure I am my own audience. But in the future, lines might have to be drawn. For now, I will say that I started an internship a week ago at a place that I worship, and to have people asking me questions and assuming that I know things makes me feel very, very good.

Here is what I really wanted to talk about: default settings. They're the places that your mind automatically conjures when confronted with a piece of writing (or talking) that takes place in a familiar yet undefined locale. Like a house, or a restaurant, or a park. Usually, I forget to notice these things. And then I'll realize, halfway through a paragraph about a creek in the woods, that I am picturing a very specific creek in a very specific woods, and it's not the creek I would have guessed I would picture. It's a very basic idea, we do it all the time, but it's hard to catch ourselves doing it. I encourage you to try. Sometimes, you can get a friend to say random settings and if you let yourself react quickly, you can figure out what you're conjuring. Usually, though, I think you just have to notice them in the moment when you're reading or listening to something.

Here a list of some I've noticed lately.

House: this one I noticed a while ago (it was my first recognizable default setting) and I'm not sure it's true anymore. But for a long time, my default house was one that I only lived in for a few years when I was about 5-6 years old. It was the first house my mom lived in after she left me and my dad and probably the first place (aside from some unfortunate months when I visited her in motels) where I stayed with her regularly. It was a great house, and the backyard was the biggest sledding hill in town. It was called Handke Pit (Handke was the elementary school next door, but I didn't get to go there because my school was determined by my dad's address, not my mom's.) My favorite photo of me was taken on the stone path next to the flower beds that my mom and I planted. In it, I am wearing a purple dress, a red cardigan, brown leather shoes, and saggy white tights. The house isn't there anymore. They moved it to a neighboring town. I don't know where it is, and it's the only place I'ved lived in that I couldn't find if I wanted to.

Hotel room: this one makes me feel incredibly literary, which is special because I always felt like a poorly read English major. For whatever reason, my default hotel room is the room where the last part of The Dead takes place. I haven't read it lately, but in my mind, it is dark, there is a four-poster bed to my right, a large dresser in the corner in front of me and to my left, and windows all in front of me. Outside of them, it is snowing (of course).

Creek: I've only been there once and it was a few months ago, but there is a creek somewhere near New Haven that managed to become my default creek.

Baseball diamond: this is a weird hybrid one, because I first noticed it was my default baseball diamond when I read the fatal baseball scene of A Prayer for Owen Meany. And ever since then, I feel like Owen Meany is still there, that it's my diamond and Owen's diamond. Little bastard snuck right in there. Before it was his, it was one of the diamonds in the NW corner of the fields by my junior high where I used to play softball.

City: my default city is still Chicago, where I lived before New York. I think it will take a while for NYC to rise to the top.

The Day That I Decided To See How Long I Could Stare At A Stranger Without Being Noticed
He was reading The Elements of Style, which I thought was funny, because when do you ever see someone reading that for fun? So I stared. He made funny faces. He flipped around in the book a lot. He frowned and looked surprised. He seemed to take it all very seriously. I counted to 60 and then just kept staring without counting. I'd guess I made it to at least a minute and a half. I always think that I need to be subtle with my observing of people, but I probably don't. We're all so oblivious. I think I'm the opposite. Frequently when I'm in public, I'm either convinced someone is watching me, or I'm pretending that someone is watching me. I don't know why exactly, except that it gives me a different way to see myself.

The Day That I Got My First New York Library Postcard Back
For several years now, I've been enamored with the idea of putting a stamped, self-addressed (but anonymous) postcard in a library book, along with a dollar bill. The idea is that someone will find the dollar, be happy, and write to me about their discovery. I have meant to do this in Chicago and Maine (the last two places I lived) but never quite got around to it. But I did it last Wednesday at the Brooklyn Public Library, and got my first postcard today. It said,
It was kinda funny how i found this, I was looking for Love Medicine by Erdrich and this was next to it and boom. I found this thanks for the dollar I needed it badly to get something to eat thanks write me back, this is a real cool idea u got here i wanna know what made u think of this
And then there's the return address. I feel a little bad for not writing back, but that's not how this works.

Background
A few weeks ago, I started naming my days. Usually around one of the more memorable events that happened, or interesting thoughts that I had. I can't tell if this actually helps me remember the days any better, but I think it's made me go through each one a little differently, listening a little harder, paying a little more attention. Which is the idea of this blog.