2002-01-15 - 10:34 p.m.
I can't flip the dial on my radio quickly enough during commutes. There's never anything on that captures my attention. I feel like I'm wasting time. I don't want music. The NPR is dull for the ride. I've decided I want to learn Spanish via tapes during the Cutlass ride.
I make decisions at a rapid pace. Learn Spanish. Sign up for Kung Fu. Consult the editor about the book. Get the book written. Fix my sister's resume. Take the dry cleaning. Finish reading those four books. Get a physical, a financial plan and an eye doctor.
This morning my bag spilled out in the car. Postcards from places I've lived instead of visited. Bills that might or might be paid given any phase of the moon. Three tubes of lipstick that are all the exact same color. I can't find my Palm Pilot. I never remember to charge my cell phone. I have half a suit in my back seat waiting for the dry cleaners and half a muffin in a white bag in the floor boards waiting for me to get up enough gumption to throw it in the garbage.
My coat has spots of coffee on it. I try to arrange my scarf to hide it. Sometimes it works. The scarf is brown. I have brown gloves that make it work with the blue coat. Mostly I can't find them and I use the black gloves.
I wonder how it is that I think. In some remote possibility of corners of my mind. That I'll actually learn Spanish in my car. Become conversant in another language.
I get tired of having the same conversations about my past. "Do I detect a southern accent?" And the name of the hometown becomes a joke that I never knew to laugh at until I moved north. I'm tired of being cynical of the first 18 years of my life. Jokes about shoes and hicks and marrying cousins. I've had this conversation before and it's not about me at all. It's about you and your ability to be witty and you know. You know it wears thin sometimes. Black and white, north and south. Pick your "other" and go with your own stereotypes.
I keep flashing back on previous incarnations of me. That mostly seem to have to do with the first months of life in New York City. I had an entire half a bagel to eat the first week I was in that city. The stress was too much for anything else. I carried that bagel around with me and would pick off pieces of it when I thought to put something in my mouth to chew.
We stayed in a hotel that I can't remember the name of now. I was desperate to find a job. I kept getting the front desk to fax out my resume. I wonder what they thought of that. We walked to Times Square and Rockefeller Center. I remember a plate glass window with luxury cars behind it.
When I moved to my first apartment in NYC, I used to walk up to Astor Place and then East to go to the movies. There were panhandlers and drug dealers the entire length of Laffayete Street. I'm not sure at what point they left. But it seemed one night that they were just Not There.
Making decisions at a rapid pace. I'm trying to learn how to live in one place. What it looks like to go to work and to come home and to live.
There hasn't been a year-long period since 1993, that I haven't moved or gotten a new job. And now I find that I can't flip the dial on my radio during the commute quickly enough. And I'm trying to rediscover. What life is like. When you're not absolutely convinced. That you're just wasting time.
