love is a dangerous angel

On December 9, 2011November 17, 2018 By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

This was going to be the post about going to meet the husband’s friends from work at the Gramercy and why I love the secret places inside restaurants and hotels. Not to mention that I still owe you my take on the Baker’s Dozen auction and the fate of my novel. It’ll have to wait.

I left work early tonight and slipped downstairs to the Barnes and Noble, where I did something I haven’t done in a long time. I grabbed a book off the shelf and read it. The whole thing, all of it, at once, in about two hours.

I used to do this fairly often – I’d devour a new novel in an afternoon, or I’d go into Half-Price while I was waiting for my husband to get off work and find myself most of the way through a book by the time they turned the lights off and kicked me out. I haven’t done it in a while, though, not like this. Reading this book was like a mad, desperate, frantic grasping that left me battered. Stunned.

There are two things you should know before you start thinking you wished you could go through an entire book in a few hours. The first is that you miss things. I don’t mind this, so much. It means that each time I read a book there are new details for me to find. It makes each reading new. The second thing is that my brain works differently when I read like that. It’s so busy processing information that everything else stops. Time compresses in on itself, like I’m going through life at 1.5 speed, so that my sense of time is rendered meaningless. My focus narrows in to what I am reading and only what I am reading. I don’t hear the conversations around me, the Christmas music blasting from the speaker above my head. I exist between one turn of the page and the next.

When it is over, when I have turned the last page and closed the cover, I feel as though I’m on some sort of drunk. I struggle to make sense of the real world – the stairs down to the subway, the traffic lights on the walk home. It seems far away from what I’ve read – unconnected. In the end, I’m left with a new room in the back of my head, as though someone emptied out a week’s worth of memories into me while I was sleeping.

The book, by the way, was Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall. I highly recommend it.

Wings & Glitter

On December 4, 2011November 17, 2018 By BekkiIn Pinned Posts1 Comment

I go from day to day. I know where the cupboards are. I know where the car is parked. I know he isn’t you.

Tori show last night, the first one I’ve seen since Florida. I knew she’d be in New York, but wasn’t planning to go. That part of my life feels long since over, the Florida show I went to with Liz six years ago one last grasp at adolescence. The theatre released a block of tickets Monday morning, though, and I logged onto Ticketmaster for the hell of it and ended up with a seat five rows from the stage.

The show was epic. Instead of the band she had a string quartet, and those boys played like they’d bought their instruments from the devil himself. I sat next to a little fae boy, who had been to the same show at Great Woods in ’99 that I’d been at, and who confessed that he missed seeing all the teenage girls in their wings and their glitter.

We’ve grown up, I told him, put aside the wings in favor of careers and husbands.

I am finding myself, more and more, feeling as though perhaps I made a left turn when I should have gone write. My husband told me he thought of my writing as a hobby. I tried to explain it was more, that I need words the way most people need oxygen. As so often happens when I speak, though, I got it wrong, and the upshot of the conversation was that the student loans get paid off and then we can think about leaving the city.

It frustrates me to be unable to explain why writing is unlike, say, gardening or model aircraft building, but he has something of a point. I write in my free time, in the extra hour I have when I leave work before 9 pm or on the weekends when he is working. I write on vacations, and in the odd spaces, but only when I have time for it. It’s hard to justify switching to something as a career – especially something with no guarantee of earning you a living – when you don’t treat it as such. And so, instead of spending my Sunday night relaxing on the couch watching TV, I edited.

Remniscent

On December 3, 2011November 17, 2018 By BekkiIn Pinned PostsLeave a comment

It’s been awhile. In part that’s because I’ve been working crazy hours and spending most of the time I’m not at work trying to finish the novel. (A post on that to follow, some time next week. I promise). In part, it’s because I’ve been making some much needed decisions on where to go with this.

Those of you who’ve been with me since the MySpace days remember what it used to be like, when I blogged about the crazy people I worked with and the boys I met and everything else that happens once you go down the rabbit hole into Florida. MySpace got old. I moved onto blogger and into Waitress in Paradise, where I wrote about the crazy people I worked with and the boys who broke my heart and everything else that California promised but didn’t deliver.

Then I went to law school. Where I quickly figured out that personality was viewed as a negative and indiscretions, no matter how minor, could keep you from being admitted to the bar and therefore render that $150,000 you’d paid in tuition worthless. So I took down Waitress and started a silly blog about law school that I didn’t bother to update very frequently because, let’s face it, not much happens in law school worth blogging about.

The idea behind MfB was that as the husband and I went out and explored New York and found strange and wonderful places, I would write about them. A year in, I’m not finding much to write about. There was the Night Market last year, and a few hours spent in the bowels of the Gramercy Hotel last week (forthcoming post on that, too), but not much between them. The truth is, most of New York is disappointingly mediocre. The food, the restaurants, the shows. I’ve yet to find much magic here, and certainly nothing worth writing about. Add to that the audience factor, that it’s hard to know if people are reading this or liking it without any kind of comments, and the incentive to put up posts melts away.

Except that one of my favorite people told me, in passing, that he was glad I was blogging again back in October when I put a few posts up.

So. Expect to see more here in the future. I’m still not sure what form it’s going to take, but this I do know. I’m tired of hiding. I’m tired of the person law school forced me to be. It’s time I earned those wings.

Autumnal

On October 15, 2011November 17, 2018 By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

The city has been reluctant to let go of summer. The subway tunnels are mid-July stifling, and the trains and busses are still running the AC. Even the weather cooperated this past weekend, giving us one last chance at shorts and tank tops. But the trees along my block are starting to shed their leaves, and the mercury has dropped back into the 50’s. The only saving grace is that the shorter days mean more afternoon sun spilling in through my office windows.

It doesn’t feel like I’ve been here a year. I’ve barely gotten to know my own neighborhood, let alone the city. And while I can blame some of that on the hours I work, and some of it on the immensity if the city itself, for the most part I’ve been lazy about exploring what’s out there.

I don’t want this to be my city, you see. I don’t want to claim any sort of ownership over the cracked and bleeding streets, the masses that jostle and shove into subways and busses and office buildings. When I come back from vacation I want it to be to a city that missed me, not one that flicks its cigarette butt in my direction and mutters “so you’re back again are you,” out of the corner of its mouth.

But it is here that we have landed, among the sirens and the helicopters and the occasional Mexican preacher, all blending together into the white noise that is the closest New York comes to silence. It is almost home.

The Resort That Time Forgot

On September 21, 2011November 17, 2018 By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

My husband’s parents gave us a week of their time share for a wedding gift, but by the time we’d settled on a week and a place, all the upscale resorts were booked. Instead of the all inclusive, on-the-beach resort on Nassau, we ended up at a Tiki lounge in Grand Bahama.

I’m fairly certain that this was the place to be around 1987. Now, though, the tourists have fled the island. There is no restaurant here, no bar, no snack shack. Instead they drive us to the grocery store three times a week.

There are only two other groups here: a family of about eight doctors from Chicago, and two older ladies – one of whom has been coming here for about the last twenty years.

It’s the perfect setting for an Agatha Christie type novel. One of the Chicagoans would be the victim – probably the older gentleman. The lady who’s been coming here forever would be the amateur detective, of course, with her friend helping out. My husband and I would complain that we weren’t allowed to leave the premises to go out to the nightclubs in Lucaya and be otherwise useless.

The murderer? I’ll let you figure that out. First one to guess gets a cookie.