Simultaneous Photo blogging

So, just try to envision a man and woman's face in dark silhouette, one on either side of your screen, sputtering out the first few and last few letters of a word: one half from the silhouette mouth on the left, the other from the right. The halves move towards each other, slowly, and eventually come together in the middle to make a word. (You know, like from The Electric Company, and that skit, Get It Together?)

That's kind of what I'm thinking of when I post these photos, taken simultaneously in both New York and Portland. Because one day N and I are going to take one photo together! From the same spot!

Nick: West Village, 7:45pm, Thursday, July 26Me: East End park, 7:45 pm, Thursday, July 26
Sorry it's sideways, again. And that this text is blue and underlined.

The Avon Lady

There were a few resolutions I made before moving to Maine. I swore I would not start wearing Tevas, or begin buying my clothes at L.L. Bean. (Well, at least not regular clothes. Outdoor stuff, maybe.) I also might have resolved not to drink microbrew beer exclusively. But there was one danger I didn’t foresee. The Avon Lady.

When I started my new job, I was supposed to get an office. But, ironically (and I think I’m using that word correctly here, not Alanically), even though I work for the planning department--no, because I work for the planning department—my boss, (the VP of Planning) didn’t want to give the appearance that he was pulling rank by giving me, his new hire, my own office in a building that was short on space. So instead I got stuck in a little outcropping of cubicles. Two other women share this no-man’s land with me. (And there really are no men in there. Just us three women.)

The two women who share space with me are middle-aged suburbanites with husbands and children. Lord, spare me from their fate. The main topics of discussion revolve around amusement park rides, chores, and how expensive or not expensive things are. One of the women, who moved up from central Massachusetts for the job she has as a cost accountant, constantly puts down Portland, and can’t understand why I ever would have left New York City for Portland, Maine. One of her chief complaints about Portland is that she never wins the scratch ticket lottery up here. In Springfield she won “all the time—$50 here, $10 there.”

The other woman in my office (I’ll try not to give any identifying details here) is much less of an overt Debbie Downer, but she’s got her own crosses to bear. Like, calling her 12-year old son twice a day to ask if he’s done his “chores.” Just the word “chores” gives me the creeps. When co-worker #2 found out that I’d moved up from New York, her first question was whether I’d had “any trouble down there.” She’s got a southern and/or mid-western accent that’s so strong, I sometimes wonder if she’s imitating a hick accent just so her words will have emphasis.

They’re both very nice people (I think), but try as I might, I just can’t find anything to talk about with them. Given their somewhat envious, somewhat snide tones when they ask about it, I think they think it’s completely extravagant that I fly down to New York every month. And they both looked perplexed when I said I walked up the hill from the somewhat distant parking lot rather than wait for the shuttle provided by the hospital.

So when the Avon Lady showed up one day, and Debbie Downer helpfully offered me a catalog, I figured the least I could do was browse through it. I remembered something about how several years ago Avon customers realized that their Skin-So-Soft lotion happened to work really well as a natural bug repellent, and it became a runaway hit product. Since then they’ve reformulated the lotion into actual bug sprays. So, I bought two bottles. Two weeks later, a tall, tanned and leathery woman, with a raspy, loud voice delivered my little bottles in a paper bag. Co-worker #2 bought some press-on nail polish. Debbie Downer bought bug spray for her daughter. And for once, we had something to talk about.

"The" apartment

I looked at the apartment again today.

“The” apartment is a beautiful, large one-bedroom with cathedral ceilings, skylights, a spa tub, a huge bedroom, a deck, and, last but not least, a panoramic view of Casco Bay, the Portland Head lighthouse, and the ocean. N and I LOVE this place and want to live there. I’m able to go back again and again because the key to the place is under the mat outside the door.

The rent on this gorgeous place is less than what N pays now for a 1BR in Brooklyn a bus ride away from the nearest subway. If we lived there, my half of the rent would be the same as what I’m paying now for my 1BR just a few blocks away in the same East End neighborhood. Yet I hesitate somewhat, because it’s a lot of money for around these parts. Compared to New York, sure, it’s a bargain. But up here in Portland, for less than what we’d pay for this rental, we could get a 2 or 3BR in the same neighborhood. Scratch that, we could be paying a mortgage.

Yet so far we haven’t seen anything that even comes close to matching this place in terms of space, light and views. And neither of us is planning on putting a down payment on anything anytime soon. So fingers crossed that this place will be ours come September.

Summer Breeze, Makes Me Feel Fine

I’m writing out on my deck in the cool, foggy air of a Maine summer. God, I feel content. I spend more time alone now than I did in New York, but somehow I feel less lonely. I think I just love being near the ocean. All the sounds and smells make me feel like I’m in the right place.

N is moving up to Portland in two short months. (Apologies to anyone who hasn’t heard this from me in person.) It will be such a change to live with someone for the first time in my adult life—I’ve been living on my own or with roommates for nearly 15 years. I’m sure there will be an adjustment period. For one thing, how do women carry out their beauty routines when they live with a guy who’s not their husband (i.e., not pledged to stick with them no matter what)? Can I wear my raw Hawaiian sugar cane mask to bed, or will N start to resent the sweet smell on the pillow cases? Can I leave the dishes in the sink for days on end? What about those times when I spend 25 minutes in the bathroom with my head swathed in Saran wrap while I try to “blend away the grays”? Speaking of the bathroom….okay, I won’t even go there, but I mean, am I going to end up more constipated than I already am?

I’m sure we’ll work all these things out. More importantly, what will happen when I have everything I want? The ocean, an adoring and adorable boyfriend, a fulfilling job, no more weekends alone? I almost feel guilty about it ahead of time.

Hot Town, Summer in the City

Went to New York for a quick visit this weekend. Saw lots of friends, which was great. Friends from college (i.e., friends from 17 or so years ago), friends from my first job in New York (friends from 9 or so years ago), and some ever-so-slightly newer friends. In fact, N and I had dinner Saturday night with a soon-to-be-married couple, one of each introduced to me by someone in each of the aforementioned groups of friends—and I, in turn, introduced the two of them. (Okay, so it was rather indirectly, and sprang from some initial Internet sleuthing on the part of the interested party. I just made the “real-world” introductions—but come to think of it, even that was by email). Anyway, now they are together, to be married in September. Friends of friends of friends, breeding little ones who will form their own tangled web of friends of friends of friends, and on and on it will go.

Photo lifted from nywatertaxi.com

One of my goals for the weekend was to do some much-needed shopping, specifically on the Lower East Side, at Dolce Vita, my favorite shoe store. I got two great pairs of shoes, but man, I was reminded why I wanted to move out of the city in the first place. There is nothing fun about trying to get around the city on a hot, muggy summer afternoon when the subways aren’t running the way they should be. If I were rich, and/or lived in Manhattan, that might not be such a problem. But since I don’t take long-distance cab rides, as a general rule, and since N and I needed to get back to Red Hook from Orchard Street on a Sunday afternoon, we had to walk through muggy air and across stinky, sticky tracts of blacktop under a hot and hazy sun to get to a train that wasn’t running on the normal route, just so we could wait for a connecting bus at the Fulton Street Mall in downtown Brooklyn. Ugh. When people talk about the good old days, or how wonderful New York is, I don’t think they’re thinking of 90-minute commutes with a stopover at the Fulton Mall in the middle of a 90-degree summer day.

(We took the Water Taxi from Red Hook to the Seaport, just to avoid the first leg of the trip by bus, but that cost $10 each for a five-minute ride. We joked that we could have swum it (swam it? Someone help.) And I sort of forgot that I get seasick really easily, especially when forced to sit down inside a boat, and not up on deck.)

But my shoes (both pairs) sure are cute.


And I got to see this mullet on the bus. (Unfortunately, I can't rotate these damn cellphone photos. N is on the case....)

We Love That Dirty Water!

N sang that song about Boston the night we met at Hope & Anchor in Red Hook. The song choice is what it gave me the courage to go up and talk to him, thinking he might be a nice New England boy. Instead, he turned out to be a nice Midwestern boy who had never even set foot in New England (my, how that has changed). And now he's moving to Portland with me. Maine, Minnesota--they're both cold, what's the difference!

Last weekend we decided we should check out the city that brought us together. After taking in the Wilco show at the Bank of America Pavillion (a name which absolutely no one in New England seems to recognize--they must all call it by it's former name--possibly the bandshell? Over by the aquarium?) we stayed at a hotel near Fanueil Hall. The next day, I showed N where I played a French horn recital in 8th grade outside of Fanueil Hall, and then we walked all around the wharves. N said Boston reminded him of Minneapolis. Ting-Tong liked the dolphins. (turn your head sideways)

Heat Wave

Ha. Everyone keeps talking about how hot it is here today in Portland. Puh-leeze. I still remember returning to my apartment at 329 E. 14th St. in Manhattan the weekend after July 4th in the summer of 1999 (shout-out to Sue F!). We lived (then-roommate Sue F. and I) on the fifth floor of an old tenement-type building in the East Village. To this day, almost 9 years later, friends and family still talk about that apartment, and how hard it was to climb up the stairs.

That weekend was so hot the Amtrak train I was on from Rhode Island apparently melted onto its tracks and was delayed for hours. After finally making it to Penn Station, I'm sure it was a relief to get on the subway (in the early years in New York, I almost never took cabs). After getting out at Union Square, wading through the sticky soup-like air of summer on 14th Street, and walking up 5 flights of stairs, I was greeted with a "Welcome to Hell!" by Sue F. We didn't have air-conditioning, and the apartment was so hot the sheets on my bed were actually retaining heat. The old cordless phone was warm to the touch. The only way to even try to get to sleep was to take a cold shower and stand naked in front of a fan right before bed. I was so broke then (working at Penguin Books) that when I did finally buy an air-conditioner, I brought it home myself and rolled it up the five flights of stairs. Why I could afford an A/C but not the delivery fee, I do not know. It was my own weird form of economics I guess.

That is what I call hot. This, with the Maine breezes still blowing through the 90 degree air, is just a warm summer evening.

Writers write!

I am going to write a few words today, even if it kills me. Yesterday I was reading my friend Sarah’s wonderfully written and brutally honest blog about motherhood and marriage (Quality-of-light.blogspot.com), and was shamed to realize how little I write in my blog, especially considering I don’t have a child or husband to distract me.

It’s shameful to think how little I write at all, really. I studied creative writing in college (both fiction and non-fiction), worked as a writer for a little while, aspired to write novels and articles and children’s stories, and still, at 35, have not produced anything that I wasn’t contracted to write on deadline.

I think about writing a lot. I outline articles and novels and short stories in my head, and occasionally even on paper. I sometimes even write a few paragraphs. But I complete nothing.

I also start a lot of sentences with “I.”

I remember being given an assignment in elementary school, in which we had to write 10 sentences, or something similar. Every single one of my sentences started with “I.” My teacher (Mrs. Bowlus, a family friend to this day, actually) gently suggested I try mixing things up a bit, try starting some sentences with a word other than “I.” I think I did then, but apparently the lesson didn’t stick.

Or, possibly, when I sit down to write after a hiatus of any length, I revert, blindly almost, to that early, solipsistic mode of writing. Maybe writing really is a practice, as every book about writing and every writing instructor will tell you, and in not practicing it enough, I get rusty, and do this, spew out nothing but “I” sentences.

Once I get going, I really enjoy writing. It’s like exercise—you know it will make you feel great when all is said and done, but it’s so hard to motivate to do it in the first place. Perversely, it feels more fun to procrastinate. To lie on the couch, clean the bathroom, run an errand. But when I really do it, when I write something coherent and cohesive, I feel great.

And yet so often I choose not to. What is up with that?

I have a few writerly friends, a woman who was once an aunt by marriage, and some friends from my publishing days, who all claim to feel completely relieved because they gave themselves permission to no longer feel compelled to write. All of them have published works of varying lengths and/or are/were successful editors. All of them are talented and ambitious. Yet they all say they felt a huge weight was lifted when they decided to allow themselves to stop feeling guilty about not writing. I’ve tried to do the same thing. But I suspect that they, like me, probably still have that niggling feeling in the back of their minds, come a lazy Sunday afternoon or free evening, that there is some task they are avoiding. It’s probably a bit like dropping out of school—it feels great at the time to let go of all the responsibility, but deep down you kind of know you’ve copped out.

Last Hour of the Longest Day of the Year

Maritime photos

I took these photos last weekend. And no, they're not of Portland! They were taken in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the neighborhood where I met N and where he lives, and which I often fantasized about moving to. It seemed a sort of last-resort-compromise on moving away from Manhattan and other parts of Brooklyn, to a more tame part of the city that reminded me a lot of small New England coastal towns--like the one I live in now. The reality of living there is a bit different, as the commute into Manhattan requires a bus-to-subway transfer, or a car. But New Englanders will be able to see why I love the neighborhood so much--it practically looks like Maine! (Sorry they're sideways.)