Steps and Paths

A few weeks ago I met up with my old friend John for dinner and drinks. John and I used to swim together in adolescence; and by “swim together” I mean the kind of training that pushed homework and puberty to the side. We were in the pool for at least 3 hours a day, seven days a week and a 4-foot Michael Phelps was slapping people with a towel on the pool deck and giggling. At that time all eyes were on other teammates aiming for the Olympics or Nationals at the ripe age of 14.

John and I liked to compare our German vocabularies during interval breaks and make mix tapes with cursive handwriting. One New Year’s Eve my mom let me go over to his house with my friend Susie. We watched a movie in his parents' bed and ate fried wontons. Halloween 1992, John was Ross Perot and I was a flapper. During high school I gave up swimming in search of something closer to “normal.” And then it was off to college.

I hadn’t seen John in about 10 years but learned he was living in New York and somehow knew that those 10 years could easily be ignored. We met for drinks and it was if everything was exactly the same, plus alcohol. On our second date we had a burger at the Corner Bistro and then went to the bar where his boyfriend works.

It seems too often that I’m able to reconnect with people in this city, and too soon I lose them to another place. John is leaving to pursue a PhD on the west coast in the fall. And so, while talking it’s as if I want to fit in another 10 years. As his boyfriend poured me whiskey after whiskey I asked John if he reads any poetry and he remarked, only Baudelaire and Frank O’Hara. I had barely said the name of my favorite O’Hara poem, Steps, when John was responding with—

oh god it's wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

An hour later we were singing along to Wilson Phillips with the rest of the lingering Monday crowd and a dance party followed until the wee morning hours. Though I was cursing myself on the subway the next morning, dehydrated and lightheaded, I simultaneously looked forward to making John a new mix tape.

Being Green

This morning facing the late shift of classes at SVA I was able to indulge in slow coffee and breakfast, while I tried to channel a blog at the kitchen table. Half-hour later my roommate, Mimia, a talkative and generous girl from Bogota, stumbled down the steps moaning with half of her back covered in saran wrap and fluorescent green tape.

Flash backward 16 hours, I got home from work with a bottle of Riesling to mark the first day of real New York Spring heat and all its glorious and disgusting smells—as well as to ease my nerves for an impending “date.” Mimia and I chilled and split the bottle, she described her newest assignment in patternmaking and started cutting out some metallic leather to sew a clutch purse. “How do you say???” She motioned to the top of the purse where a clasp might be. I racked my brain for the official Mimia thesaurus, which always makes me question my own hold on the English language. I was half-listening half processing thoughts about that week at work.

Then I left the apartment headed to a neighborhood restaurant—one of the revolving-door establishments that seems to focus on a new kind of cuisine—Peruvian, Vietnamese, Italian, every few months. Somewhere between the wine last night and coffee this morning Mimia got a little bored, took herself out to a hipster establishment on the LES for PBRs, and then tried to find a tattoo parlor she visited last year while also drunk.

“I said, I think this is the street, but if it is not, it’s a sign that I should not get new tattoos.” This statement is completely rational. She moaned on about how the outline wasn’t thick enough and the new star on her shoulder blade wasn’t straight, and I felt as if I was displaced a few decades away wondering how I managed to hit my late twenties without a stab of ink on any part of my body. And how, perhaps luckily none of the capricious decisions I made years ago, left any visible marks.

More Cowbell

As I left my apartment on Friday morning at trot pace, both to postmark my taxes 4/15 and make up the 10 minutes I would be late to work, I approached the corner to the sound of a bell in rhythm. Turning, I noticed the musician—a man standing at his open window, no screen, directly above a bodega, proudly pummeling his cowbell. He looked as if he had gotten out of bed that morning naturally expecting a crowd gathered outside for his traditional cowbell symphony, a weekly rehersal for the Carnegie Hall gigs. As I looked around the others were trotting in time on their own paths to the subway, and I thought “Ok, Why not?”

Time Travel

Remember those Coed-Naked sports shirts that everyone had in high school with the really bad puns? Yesterday one of my silk-screen students was wearing a threadbare Coed-Naked Skateboarding shirt; “Life is slick on the stick.” I was immediately transported back to Towson High School, 1994, milling down the hallway en-route to “Art in Business and Industry” class to rehash last night’s episode of My So-Called Life, cut out drawings with an exacto knife, and attach them to a poster board with rubber cement to advertise The Pirates of Penzance.

Needle and Thread

I spent the better part of last year working on an edition of an artist’s book by Louise Bourgeois called Ode a l'Oubli, loosely translated as Homage to Forgetting. I found such contentment in this job every day—spending 8 hours embroidering dots in a specific but random scattering, drawing and cutting out patterns, and quilting checkered cotton. On a bad day I would run over my thumb with a rotary blade while cutting shapes out of silk. On a good day all of 32 stripes, individually sewn, would line up perfectly to form concentric squares.

I suppose I am attracted to repetitious, mind numbing work of some sorts. Or maybe most of the satisfaction from this job came from leaving the studio at the end of the day having made something beautiful, even if it wasn’t my own.

Today I spent the afternoon at a work-related gathering at Lakeside Lounge and my boss from the Bourgeois project was in attendance. After the usual pleasantries she asked if my life was “still in flux.” Wouldn’t most people say "yes"? She then outlined a production she is undertaking with a new artist, and asked if I might be interested in more freelance sewing work; however this time the thread will be the artist’s own hair.

I couldn’t help picturing myself over the next few months, hunched over yards of linen reminding myself not to lick the thread while sliding it through the needle. Regardless, it’s always good to know you have marketable skills—maybe hair-stitching is the new painting.