Lost in Texas

About a year ago, I was in immense pain. My world was turned upside down in May 2008, and I was having a hard time trusting that the hole in my heart would ever get smaller. And I'm happy to report that a year and a half later, it has. Nothing will ever be the way it was again, but in many ways, it's for the best. Circumstances have changed, relationships have been mended, we went through hell and back, and got the help we needed to move on. Not that I will ever stop being haunted by the past, but the more time goes by, the more trust I have that the future will be different. Things got worse before they got better, as they sometimes do, but in mid-April, things started to improve. My family became whole again, everyone was safe, and happy memories started to fill the spaces previously occupied by worry, hurt, and sadness.

In April, I also left New Haven for sunny Brooklyn. It was a move based on wise advice that took 10 months to act on. The move has made for an unenviable commute, but it's only twice a week. And when I come home, I am in the home that I've made with Fletcher. I get a hug every day, and all my clothes in one place. Anyway, sometimes it blows my mind how much has changed. In June 2008 we went to San Francisco for a week and I felt guilty the whole time, feeling like I should have been somewhere else. This June, we went to Panama and I didn't think much about home at all. In July 2008, we went to the Cape and I felt like I was keeping a million secrets. This August we went to the Cape, and the only secret is that we ate 1/2 a pound of lobster each. So, you know, that's nice.

Most of all, I wanted more than anything to be okay for Fletcher, who stood by my side patiently through everything. But I couldn't be okay for him until I was okay for me. And I got there, thanks to a lot of work and determination and love. So in October, when Fletcher proposed, I was ready to say yes. I mean, I was ready before then, but the point is that it couldn't have happened before I was ready to get better. The man I love with all of my heart deserved to be engaged to someone ready to be happy again. And at some point during this year, I was. So there was that.

In the middle of all of this, I studied for comps. Then in December, I took them and passed! But most importantly, I did so with my family supporting me every step of the way. So yeah, 2009: you kicked my ass and then I kicked yours. As for 2010, well I'm not going to be greedy. All I want is for everyone I love to be happy. At first it sounds like a lot, but what I learned this year is that the opportunities to be that way are always there; when you're ready to let go, you'll find your way.

Labels: being resolved, Lauren, resolutions, things that are hard, things that get better

No one really cares about another person's work out schedule. Except for Lauren. But my gym membership expired last week, and I've been too lazy to bother to renew it. So I've been working on building the holiday paunch. As a gift to Lauren, obvio, because who wouldn't want to have more of me to love?

Anyways, tonight I did 20 minutes of 30-Day Shred. Ouch. Apparently, the past year of running and cardio has left my upper body shriveled and weak. Luckily Gillian Michaels is willing to cajole me into shape. And now I will eat more christmas cookies.

Well now that that's over, I am slowly putting my life back together.* I started with a sushi dinner with my lovely fiance who put up with my stressed out shenanigans for the last few weeks (though he might argue longer). Then I slept for 12 hours, went to a hedge fund-snuggie party (srsly, I have to wrestle photo documentation from Fletcher, but it's true), slept another 12 hours, played a lot of wii, window shopped on 5th avenue, took my sister to a taping of Saturday Night Live (woo!), slept another 12 hours, went to an ugly-sweater holiday party (see aforementioned wrestling of photos--the best part was when Fletcher and my sister swapped sweaters), and watched half the first season of Lost. I experienced boredom for the first time this afternoon, and it was awesome. I still have some grading to get to, but for real? A's for everyone; I'm done suckers. Anyway, the best part is I've read a total of three pages since comps, and it was only because Fletcher's uncle forced me to read a selection from Theodore Rex. Other than that, I am off-duty!

During those rough days and nights I was toiling away, wiping away tears and generally feeling lousy, I came up with a list of what I'm going to do now that I'm free. Some of the items on this list seem like really? you couldn't do that in the past 6 months? But the answer is no, I could not. Comps took everything out of me and made the smallest of tasks feel overwhelming. Now that it's over I'm going to:

fix my watch (broke five weeks ago)
fix my nano (broke 3 months ago)
clean the house (last tackled 2 months ago)
organize my clothes (omg, I've been waiting to do this forever. Am so excited. It's a multiple day process. Last tackled in March 2009).
buy hangers (because Fletcher finally figured out I've been stealing his. And also, I have a pile of clothes I bought a month ago that are waiting to be hung up)
buy frames and hang prints (have been waiting since May 2009)
buy holiday presents
read backlog of ny magazines (from October on)
plan wedding (yeesh. Wedding TBA but probably in August)
eat food that doesn't come in bars or snack size bags, see e.g. vegetables (srsly, I thought I was going to turn yellow from vitamin deficiency by the end. Thank god for luna bars, not for any real nutrition but for ensuring I didn't die)
see friends and family (slowly being remedied but was in serious withdrawal)
watch movies that don't have to do with the geography of postwar cities (amen)
go to the movies
play wii (also being remedied)
watch all 6 seasons of Lost in time for the season 7 premiere Feb 2

Anyway, lots to do. Had no idea how worn out I was until comps were over, so I think it'll take a while to ease back into a normal life. Thank god I can leave my siege-mentality behind.

*And for those curious, everything went great! I was really happy with my performance, and after the sheer terror faded away, I actually had fun. But it took a good 45 mins for that to happen. Also, I couldn't eat all day and listened to the same three songs on repeat until I took them. Anyways, enough. It's over!

Labels: comps, Lauren, no more reading, school's out, time to have fun

I finished reading for comps on Friday. These last few weeks have witnessed herculean feats of the brain. I take comps on Wed, so catch y'all on the flip side.

This week:
Soja, Edward W. “Exploring the Postmetropolis.” In Postmodern Geography: Theory and Praxis. Claudio Minca, ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.
Mitchell, Don. “Postmodern Geographical Praxis? The Postmodern Impulse and the War
against Homeless People in the ‘Post-justice’ City.” In Postmodern Geography:Theory
and Praxis. Claudio Minca, ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.
Katz, Cindi. “Hiding the Target: Social Reproduction in the Privatized Urban Environment.” In Postmodern Geography: Theory and Praxis. Claudio Minca, ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.
Smith, Neil. “Rescaling Politics: Geography, Globalism, and the New Urbanism.” In
Postmodern Geography: Theory and Praxis. Claudio Minca, ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.
James, David E., ed. The Sons and Daughters of Los: Culture and Community in L.A.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.
Brooks, Michael W. Subway City: Riding the Trains, Reading New York. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press: 1997.
Carter, David. Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004.
Thompson, Krista A. “Performing Visibility: Freaknic and the Spatial Politics of Sexuality, Race, and Class in Atlanta.” TDR: The Drama Review 51:4 (Winter 2007): 24-46.
Kim, Claire Jean. Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Rose, Tricia. “All Aboard the Night Train: Flow, Layering, and Rupture in Postindustrial New York.” In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.
Butler, Jeremy G. “Redesigning Discourse: Feminism, The Sitcom, and Designing Women.” Journal of Film and Video 45:1 (Spring 1993): 13-26.
Baldwin, James. The Evidence of Things Not Seen. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1985.
Bayor, Ronald H. Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996
Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1960.
Garreau, Joel. Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. New York: Doubleday, 1991.
Smith, R.J. The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Lost African-American Renaissance. New York: Public Affairs, 2006.
Newman, Harvey K. Southern Hospitality: Tourism and the Growth of Atlanta. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1999.
Shfrin, Elana. “Le Noir et Le Blanc: Hybrid Myths in Devil in a Blue Dress and L.A.
Confidential.” Literature Film Quarterly 33:3 (2005): 172-181.
McInerney, Jay. Bright Lights, Big City. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.
Gottlieb, Robert, Mark Vallianatos, Regina M. Freer, and Peter Dreier. The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle For A Livable City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Klein, Norman M. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. New York: Verso, 1997.
Fine, David. Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000.
Dear, Michael and Steven Flusty. “The Postmodern Urban Condition.” In Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, eds. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash. London: Sage Publications, 1999.
Harvey, David. “Flexible Accumulation Through Urbanization: Reflections on ‘Post-
Modernism’ in the American City.” In The Urban Experience. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, 1989.
Dear, Michael. “The Los Angeles School of Urbanism: An Intellectual History.” Urban Geography 24:6 (2003): 493–509.

For class: read Dreams From My Father. I found it pretty compelling. Go-bama, etc.

Labels: anticipation, comps, fall reading, Lauren

the end is near. panic has not set in yet. probably effective tomorrow. also 2 more days of class left. sorry kids, i will be a better teacher next semester. also, my thanksgiving consisted of reading, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner, and doing 30 day shred. it was as pathetic as it sounds. maybe more so. there were tears. also, i watched west side story. a little cheesy, but the songs are pretty spot on.

Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Race, Space and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007
O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1953), Artificial Negro” (1955), and “Everything that Rises Must Converge” (1961) in The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974.
Hackworth, Jason. The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007.
Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Hays, Constance L. The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company. New York: Random House, 2004.
Grem, Darren E. “‘The South Got Something to Say’: Atlanta’s Dirty South and the
Southernization of Hip-Hop America.” Southern Cultures 12:4 (2006): 55-73.
Andranovich, Greg, Matthew J. Burbank, and Charles H. Heying. “Olympic Cities: Lessons Learned From Mega-Event Politics.” Journal of Urban Affairs 23:2 (2001): 113-131.
Beaureguard, Robert. Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993.
Bullard, Robert D. and E. Kiki Thomas. “Atlanta: Mecca of the Southeast.” In In Search of the New South: The Black Urban Experience in the 1970s and 1980s. Bullard, Robert D., ed. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1989.
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: The Modern Library, 1961, 1993.
Wolfe, Tom. The Bonfire of the Vanities. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1987.
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
Meriwether, James. Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Scott, William B. and Peter M. Rutkoff. New York Modern: The Arts and the City. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Labels: comps, fall reading, Lauren

Catherine's post reminded me that once upon a time, I was the outdoorsy type who loved nothing more than to frolic out in the woods and commune with nature. I'm pretty sure that even as a wee lad, I was never as afraid of bears as Catherine and Lauren are, but maybe my fears were just displaced by other, realer fears:

Like moose.

Or male testosterone. I once watched a man brand himself with a cattle brand because he was so fired up from hiking. This was before Black fraternities popularized it. Did I mention it was a cattle brand?

Or human stupidity. Caramel apples are a delicious and easy treat to make while camping. Melt some caramel squares, stick an apple on a fork, dip, and enjoy. Of course, if you replace the fork with a pocket knife and then take a giant sticky, sweet bite, you end up slicing through three inches of your cheek. All the blood makes the caramel look more like one of those crappy candy apples that your hill-billy cousins prefer.

Or psychopaths. After graduating high school, some friends and I spent a month backpacking around Yosemite. Unbeknownst to us, on the morning that we set off, the police had found the decapitated body of a park ranger not more than thirty miles from where we started out. Needless to say, our parents were crapping their pants until we made it to a telephone 8 days later.

Or isolation. I spent a bunch of summers building trails in New Mexico. It was fun being out in the mountains for weeks at a stretch with a bunch of other 16-20 year old guys, not needing to shower or bothering to wear underwear. There were a bunch of other groups scattered around and every once in a while we'd hike over to see the other groups for dinner or compare cocks or something. There was one group that was too far away for us to get to, but we started to hear a pretty weird story. Apparently, a woman had been riding a donkey on a trail where these guys were working, when a thunderstorm suddenly blew through. She was struck by lightning, killing the donkey instantly. She was fine. Discuss amongst yourselves the miracle of grounding or something. So these kids, they hike over to the donkey with all of their tools and start to go lord of the flies meets godfather on it. They then box up the head and ship it back to the base camp on the next supply run to be delivered to the tent of some guy they don't like. A five day old severed donkey head. Shit's unbelievable right? Some kid took pictures. All of them standing around the donkey, taking turns with a saw. With donkey blood on their faces like some warpath voodoo shit. Fucked up, no? When I finally saw some of these guys, its even worse. Turns out they couldn't do it. They got a third of the way though the donkey's neck and it was too hard/too gross for any of them to continue. Then one dude picked up a pulaski, aka the baddest tool in the history of man, and just went to town on the spine until they could drag it off.*

Of course, there's really only one thing to fear while out in the woods. And that's mountain lions.

*Needless to say, this particular program was reorganized shortly thereafter to provide additional supervision. I also can't believe that I haven't told this story before, it may be the most amazing story in my arsenal.

Labels: bears, camping, Fletch

Sitting on the couch this evening Lauren asked me about a song.

L: Do you know that song on your iPod?
F: Ummmm?
L: On your shuffle?
F: Uh, sing it for me?
L: Its about a woman who has three daughters, who crawl out of the sewer onto the sidewalk and then her body goes cold and then they get married and the bride trips on the vase and all the wine spills?
F: Ummmmm....Was it a male or female singer?
L: Male.
F: Exactly how many times did you listen to this song today?
L: For four miles.
F: ...

Turns out that it was Death Cab's "Death of an Interior Decorator". In fairness, she described the lyrics pretty accurately, except for the part where Lauren mistook her uterus for a sewer. But I guess them's the breaks in metaphors.

Labels: Fletch, Lauren, music

Sick of these updates? Then imagine how sick I am of reading books. Speaking of sick, apparently I had the swine flu this week. And apparently that's how Fletcher got it. So it's been pretty sick up in this joint. At any rate:

Bender, Thomas. The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea. New York: The New Press, 2002.
Himes, Chester. If He Hollers Let Him Go. Chatham, NJ: The Chatham Bookseller, 1945, 1973.
Currid, Elizabeth. The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Schneider, Eric C. Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Rotella, Carlo. October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Brown, Claude. Manchild in the Promised Land. New York: Macmillan, 1965.
Miller, Warren. Cool World. Boston: Little Brown, 1959.
Miller, Warren. Siege of Harlem. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
Marc, David. “Comic Visions of the City: New York and the Television Sitcom.” Radical History Review 42 (1988): 49-63.
Chang, Jeff. “Race, Class, Conflict, and Empowerment: On Ice Cube’s ‘Black Korea.’” Amerasia Journal 19:2 (1993): 87-107.
Sánchez, George J. “‘What's Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews’: Creating
Multiracialism on the Eastside during the 1950s.” American Quarterly 56:3(September 2004): 633-661.
Pynchon, Thomas R. “A Journey into the Mind of Watts.” The New York Times Magazine. 12 June 1996.
Guthey, Eric. “Ted Turner’s Media Legend and the Transformation of Corporate Liberalism.” Business and Economic History 22:1 (Fall 1997): 184-199.
Mele, Christopher. Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

And for class, I read Natasha Tretheway's Native Guard. I highly recommend. She's awesome.

Two more weeks, here we go.

Labels: comps, fall reading, Lauren, swine flu