Scars

Sometimes life leaves scars, bludgeoning our fragile bodies with dense, immovable, sharp surprises. They wink at us in the mirror, a deeper edge of pink than befits the surrounding skin, during an obsessive morning inspection.

I have scars. And 1 ... 2 ... 3 ... 4 ... 5 of them are on my face. They never irk me or cause dismay, like a tattoo might if it never matched the tattoo in my mind's eye. They're simply around, a collection that I couldn't help but accumulate, friends I couldn't help but meet, mistakes I couldn't help but make, lessons that I couldn't help but learn. 

Here are their stories.  

5. He sits to the left side of my eye, about an inch long, following the outer curve of my eye from bottom to top. I sometimes think I can still see where the stitches were but it's probably a projection of my memory. He would be the only bad-ass scar (simply because he's the most obviously displayed on my face) if it wasn't for how we met, a report that is most decidedly not bad-ass since being bad-ass involves convincing everyone that you will always be invincible. I wish I could tell you his story but I don't know it, really, it's just a sort of fun house memory, warped with smoke and a weekend back and drinking to make things stop changing and a pill and a rude hospital bed awakening and a time that people said I almost died but I never believed them. It was the first and only time I did not control myself. It cost me about as much as a house. 

4. He's right next door, hidden beneath my left eyebrow. He's about the width of a nickel, making my eyebrow point weirdly and sparsely. When I lived in Washington D.C. between junior and senior year of college with my fiancé it was hot and we would buy Slurpees every night and sit on the stoop in whatever clothes we felt like and never tire of talking to each other. Mine was cherry. He slurped Mountain Dew. We never said no to each other, because that's just what that sort of love felt like, and so we never said no to anyone else either, and so we didn't say no to a houseguest who was apartment hopping or his rather eccentric sometimes boyfriend. On a night when the sometimes boyfriend drank too much I decided he needed to go, a notion that he violently resisted. Since I was a boy who pokes and destroys, and a college boy who liked to get into fights with a lover looking on, and the one who always handled everything, I made him leave. And I got a scar. 

3. The next scar is between my eyes but you can hardly see it. He's a crease, really, on the bridge of my enormous nose. The story is much longer than this will give credit for, and by now others tell it better, but it is mine. A great friend from school, a man who I would always admire, head-butted me in the face for kissing his girlfriend. This man had a well-known propensity for head-butting people, and so I asked him if he was would do it to me. He said no, and, like an asshole, I kissed her. I bled all over my bathroom, and woke up having crusted half of my pillow and one side of my bed with blood, feeling very wronged but having been put soundly in my place to hear anyone tell it. A few days later, another great giant of a friend set my nose while I bit down on a belt. Then, since he had accidentally pushed it too far, he wrenched it back in the other direction and set it again. Now it is just a crease. 

2. I find the next difficult to describe. He's not a scar that I like to look at. He's small, on the right side of my top lip, and he doesn't seem to have a shape as much as a few dots along a line that pull on my skin and sometimes keep one side of my mouth from smiling fully. He's frozen a bit of my smile in time, smashed into my face by a steering wheel the moment that my brother died, a penance among many. 

1. She's the only she, a crater on the surface of the big full moon that is my forehead. If #5 were Orion's belt, you could follow him to her, a little Sirius from Canis Major. She's the silliest but oldest, filled in with love and lots of overlooking. See, having no self control does not mix well with chicken pox for an 8 or 9 year old. My mother dutifully applied calamine lotion to the little red dots, cooing over me when I was good with my hands behind my back, and taping the tips of my fingers when she thought I was cheating. It was the first and only one that I picked. Mothers are always right. 

It's funny how our lives are written everywhere — sometimes initials carved on branches, sometimes 140 characters at a time — when all the time, whether we know it or not, we're the paper.

Every Room I Slept In Before Here

When I first moved to New York City, I gallivanted across every neighborhood I could stand in a desperate attempt to find a place where I could comfortably walk around naked. Before the apartment, I romantically daydreamed about living at least once in every borough, failing miserably because people catcalled me in the Bronx and Staten Island sounded greasy. Still, thanks to Craigslist and my laissez-faire approach to having a roof over my head, I’ve stayed in my share of sublets, crashed on my share of couches, and begged my share of favors. Every time I moved into a new sublet, which happened an average of every 10 days, I found myself overwhelmed by presence and personality, the strange way I was invading someone’s space. So I started scribbling. Now I have a place of my own with a fabulous roommate, but that won’t save you from my disjointed, completely out-of-context ruminations on real estate and homelessness.

2. Queens

It’s a tiny back bedroom but it’s mine for a week. It’s a little of what I expected from him (mirrors everywhere, a big soft bed) and a little of what I didn’t (that’s a lot of sage and crystals). Still, I owe him big time.

8. Chelsea

The apartment looked as French as everyone sounded, and that’s the only reason I ever stayed over.

1. Upper East

Tiny shorts and a tinier tank-top in a now-less-than-tiny-seeming brick rectangle with no space for anything but living, and a fire escape for everything else. I moved here days ago and it’s hot, hot, hot and I could sweat through the walls. My New York family stopped bustling, slowed by the heat, stretched out on the mattresses that cover one side of the room. It’s how we sleep, and how they sleep when I’m not here, I assume, all tossed together. Everything here is tossed together, but it makes a big, happy pile.

10. Queens Part 3

I long to live alone but I'll miss our lights-out chats when I do. 

5. Williamsburg

She said she wrote music for a living, but needed to get away. I was just glad she looked like the girl from Rilo Kiley and not a gorgon with a meth habit like the last one. I’m in love with her space, and I think possibly her by proxy: she reads great books (and thus, so have I for the past two weeks), she has a guitar and keyboard that I’ve been romancing, and the 2-room attic space gives me an apartment boner. I can even climb out onto the roof to smoke, if I feel like risking life and limb for nicotine (and I usually do). The second floor always smells like weed, but that just means her roommate always seems happy to see me. Once, she offered me ‘shrooms she found in the freezer. I guess this is just a spontaneous kinda place.

3. Queens Part 2

And now I owe his roommates too. Couching it for a week.

9. Union Square

It’s a closet, really, but the whole thing reeks of her glamorous creative energy. She pinned cards to the wall to outline her novel, pictures to the door to inspire her outfits, and family to the desk to keep her sane. The whole thing seemed suffocating until I realized that she didn’t have time to breathe anyway. This girl has creating to do.

6. Alphabet City

A really very fun and really very unwise and really very spontaneous notion of an evening. Need my shirt back.

7. Bushwick

She covered the walls with photographs, most of them pictures of an arm or a smile or an eye. It was clear that they were all the same person: a cute boy whose girlfriend spreads his pictures across walls. She had a good eye for photos, and for boys. He was clearly a boy – his smile was impish in black and white. She left out tarot cards and I wished that I knew how to read them, but I still studied the faces and the eerie designs. She collected regular playing cards, too, but clearly random ones she found lying on the street. I brought one home and added it to the deck. Loud rap music drifted into the skylight every night and turned my dreams into music videos. I stole a book of Tibetan folk tales and left a $20 bill with a note. Why do stray cards litter the streets of Bushwick?

4. Sunnyside

It wasn’t the couch that made me wake up feeling limber.

11. 1372 York Ave

It took me a little while to start crying when I first got here, but it went on for a while. The sheer weight that lifted and the panic that fled left a little space for something, and it took me a while to know how to fill it. I sat in the middle of a big empty room and thought, “I’m home!” and realized just what that really meant. Then I rubbed my eyes, took a shot of whiskey and unpacked a pair of shoes, just to make it official. It’s really good to be home. 

Whiny Queen Emotes After Spilled Coffee Crisis

I went to Starbucks and ordered my usual - a grande iced whole milk caramel latte with shots on top - and paid $4.84 for a few hours of Internet. The barista asked me if I was an actor. I smiled and told him no. Apparently I look like somebody from The Taking of Pelham 123. Probably a slow tip night. No matter - while sitting down, I somehow missed the table and threw my drink everywhere, missing the people sitting on both sides of me but making Starbucks look like there'd been an angry coffee bomb attack. The baristas were cool, demanding that I let them clean it up and make me a new one. I was so embarrassed that I tipped them $5 and left because the people that had almost been coffee bombed were glaring at me. $9.84 for 0 hours of Internet. I walked away feeling like crying until I bumped into another Starbucks literally 2 blocks away. New York City has a few redeeming benefits.

I was looking for Internet because my phone just died. Not batteries-require-juice-died but quietly-slipped-into-the-great-beyond-died. The cause of death was water damage, meaning that AT&T and Apple representatives will take one look at it and laugh until I leave the store. I imagine them doubled over the Genius Bar, clutching iPads flashing the word "HA".

My phone just died because I went to Central Park in the middle of Hurricane Irene with a large kite I wanted to use as a hang glider. I floated a few feet from the ground after I opened the wings until a huge branch flew through the wind out of nowhere and carried me into the Hudson River. My phone had been in my pocket the whole time.

Okay, so that's a lie. I actually slept through Hurricane Irene accidentally because it was boring and not loud enough to wake me. I hunkered down with great friends on the Upper East Side this weekend and the hurricane disappointed us all, even though the time spent together didn't. I dropped my phone in a toilet and I don't have anyone to blame but myself. It was clumsiness. It only bugs me because it's the worst possible time to go dropping my phone into toilets.

My bank account has about the same amount that a bum probably makes in a week for being annoying on subway cars. That's because I let myself spend while preparing for a hurricane that didn't happen. And because I haven't been careful with eating out. I'm on Craigslist every day for a few hours, stalking apartment listings, and I'm getting sick getting nowhere. Is there some secret to city apartment living that I'm missing out on?

I just need to reassess my habits and goals, I guess. And try something new.

I'm in the city that never sleeps and somebody's shaking me awake.

My Life as Told by My Phone's Google Search History

williamsberg
I didn't know how to spell Williamsburg until 3 days after I moved here.


who's playing in central park
I went on a date in Central Park last Saturday with a rather intelligent, engaging book. His name was Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, if you must know. And the loud screaming I heard turned out to be a concert for somebody called Henry Santos. I've never heard of him before, probably because he sucks. But maybe I'm just saying that because he distracted me from my date. I'm cranky to have discovered that solitude is so hard to find in this city that it's almost non-existent. Even in a park.


european pants size conversion
Okay, see, I dress like a farmer. A big, poor, gay farmer. At least, the looks that I get in NYC make me think I do. I think when people see me this is what they see. I could offer a lot of reasonable excuses - like the fact that I haven't cared about purchasing clothes for years because in Michigan I could be wearing a fucking kimono as long as it was made of denim and broken dreams - but last weekend I spotted a United Colors of Benetton ghetto enough to have a huge sale. And those Benetton whores apparently think sizing linen shorts in foreign is clever.


turn off twitter texts
I am having a blast at my new job. I just live, eat and breathe on Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr/Whtvr. I thought I was a social media addict before, but that'd be like saying Snooki used to really like attention. Now I'm trying to figure out the healthy balance between immersion in my new learning experience and not. going. nuts. when my phone blows up with tweets at 2 a.m.


opacity
Technically, it's the quality or state of being opaque. But it's also a website for urban explorers that my brilliant photographer best friend looked up on my phone when she was visiting last weekend. I sneaked a peek after she left it up there, and am now planning a trip through a few abandoned subway lines. Applications for sidekicks are currently being accepted.


McQueen exhibit
I stood in line for 3 hours 2 Saturdays ago with 15,000 other people to see it. It was beyond words. If you missed it, you can always watch the paltry internet version.


Lara Stone and natalia vadianova
Of course I was having a conversation with my new gay friends (seriously, in this city it's like a Britney Spears concert just got out on the next block every day) about who are the prettiest models and of course I had to look up pictures of my favorites. Who were the prettiest. Obviously.


dos caminos NYC and insomnia cookies and bianca's italian
After having lived in this city for almost a month, I'm really proud of 2 things: first, that I have such wonderful friends that show me interesting, delicious niche places and second, that I have culled a repertoire of places to show off myself. These searches were for directions to some of my new favorite places, and you'll have to come visit me for your own introduction.


update cell towers
I sincerely believe that if Dante had written the Inferno today, he would have put the head of the the person who invented AT&T below the ice and in Satan's bunghole. You'd think that in the biggest, most populated city in the country, I'd get great reception with my iPhone. But no. #whiteboyproblems


suspenders and belt
Apparently, if you wear them together you look like a really pessimistic nimrod. Who knew. Oh, right - Google.

Things I've Learned From My First Week in NYC

Rules for the Subway
Avoid eye contact. If you have a good reason for looking at someone, look at them in a way that communicates that reason unmistakably.

If you carry anything onto the subway, cradle it on your lap as a barrier to everything else in the subway car. If anything happens, you can curl into the fetal position around it so the most important things are safe in the middle.

Attentive instincts are much more useful than any subway map.

Figure it out yourself.

Rules for Work
Get to work early and leave work late. Don't worry about when you're supposed to be anywhere, just when you have work that should be done and when you have nothing left to do.

If you want to meet people, introduce yourself. There is no water cooler.

During the week, you work. That is all you do during the week. During the weekend, you play. That is all you do during the weekend.

Figure it out yourself.

Rules for Money
You're going to spend it, but you're going to earn it.

Yes, that's the actual price. Don't act surprised.

Think about necessities first, friends second, and frivolity last. Groceries don't cost more here. Restaurant food costs more here than some whole restaurants cost elsewhere.

Figure it out yourself.

Rules for Writing Social Media
You only get one clear brief witty sentence. It helps if you're a clear brief witty thinker.

Re-write. Fast.

Don't bother to say things that people have already said, unless you're giving someone credit for it on purpose.

Figure it out yourself.

Rules for People
People take their cue from you, and reciprocate. Friendly is as friendly does. Scowl and you get scowled at. Smile and you get smiled at.

Look dangerous when you feel that you're in danger.

You are expected to honestly represent exactly what you want at all times. There's no time for vague Midwestern passive-aggressive politeness. Expressing exactly what you want quickly and nonverbally is a New Yorker's way of being polite by not wasting your time.

Figure it out yourself.

Rules for Rules
Make them up as you go along. Everyone else does.

Rules can be like an instruction manual: easy to ignore initially, but a helpful study to get a head start.

Everyone has a different set of rules - cabbies, friends, other ethnicities, roommates - and you should learn and respect them.

Figure it out yourself.

Today I Move to New York City

I'm sitting at the Milwaukee Airport, on a stack of luggage, like the princess and the pea. There's a suitcase the size of a baby elephant on the bottom, a garment bag in the middle, and my laptop bag on top. Inside of the garment bag, my carefully ironed formal work clothing is probably doing a used-tin-foil impression. There's no pea involved, but I can tell something's up.

In case you hadn't heard, I'm sitting at the Milwaukee Airport on my luggage because I'm moving to New York City. I accepted an offer to work temporarily as a Social Media Assistant for The Daily, the beautiful next-gem iPad newspaper. Living in New York City has been a dream of mine since years before I had ever been to New York City, but I was sure it was exactly like pirated Internet Sex and the City episodes.

I'm sitting on my luggage to punish it. I just had to unpack 5 pounds to avoid a hefty overweight bag charge. If everything overweight was similarly sentenced (by having 5 pounds hacked off and then being sat on), I think we could save a lot as a nation on healthcare.

The challenge for this trip has been simultaneously packing for 2 things that should be mutually exclusive: flying and moving. Somehow, I was supposed to fit my life into a checked bag, a carry-on and a personal item. I burned a lot of bridges with my possessions in the process, but choices had to be made! Most of them went like this:

Packed: The Elements of Style by E.B. White
Not Packed: My AP Stylebook

Packed: My dad's old Acer laptop
Not Packed: My poor enduring MacBook, declared dead by a technician. Don't worry, I gave it a proper funeral.

Packed: Slim-fit dress pants, every tie from the 90s or later, and new dress shoes.
Not Packed: Lensless glasses, jewelry, unessential cosmetics, anything frayed or dingy.

Packed: A new haircut that makes me look exactly like my father.
Not Packed: My lazy summertime farm-boy nonchalance.

But I know that all the things I left behind will forgive me in the end, and be waiting in the Midwest for whenever I return, whether it's in October at the end of my internship or only ever for holidays.

I'm positively buzzing with excitement.

A Letter to My One True Love

With all the time that we've spent together, I expect that you know the way I feel about you. But I want to tell you, anyhow, as a thank-you for the years you've been here and the months I've waited for you to come back. 

I've known you forever, but I remember the first time that you and I spent an afternoon alone together. It was in the fenced-in backyard, with a German Shepard and a sandbox. You made the sand hot and the dog jumpy. I drank from the hose and sprayed down the dog with you looking on. 

The first time that I knew I loved you was the afternoon that we both spent at the forbidden pond, forbidden because it was too deep and too murky to survive swimming in, too far back into the fields for anyone else to see us together. I laid in the grass and felt you next to me with my feet in the water, then went home to find my mother panicking about where I'd disappeared to. I didn't tell her that I was spending time with you, I just figured that she knew. I still got scolded, but you didn't, even though you were the one who tempted me away from the house in the first place. 

I didn't see you this year until I came home from college, though I looked for you every day in Michigan, hoping for the colors and the heat you bring to normal mundane days. You were waiting for me in Wisconsin, and I walked back to the no-longer-forbidden pond to hang out with you again. 

I always miss you when you leave. When you're not around, it's as though everything around me dies bit by bit. The color drains from the trees, the pace of the world slows to a crawl, and I miss the sun even when it's out in the sky. 

You're the only one that can peel the skin off of my shoulders just by looking at me. I can be with you for fifteen minutes and my mouth feels dry and I start to sweat. When you're around I find sand in my clothes, smoke on my breath and bug spray on my clothes. 

I love you, Summer; never leave. 

Joel