Election Day

*Whew*

Trials never end, of course. Unhappiness and misfortune are bound to occur as long as people live, but there is a feeling now, that was not here before, and is not just on the surface of things, but penetrates all the way through: We've won it. It's going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things.

— Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Economic Crisis

The great thing about this recent economic crisis is that whereas before I had no money, now I have a convenient excuse to blame my troubles on when people ask me about my situation.

In which Ian discusses his thoughts on Marriage with a twelve year-old, and is accused for the first time of being a Homosexual.

I am in the midst of a very one-sided Jenga game with S——, a twelve year-old girl I am tutoring. This is a girl who has repeatedly told me that I would make a good candidate for Beauty and the Geek. We are playing Jenga while I drill her on her times tables as a reward for her success with solving exponents and adding fractions with the same denominator.

“How old are you, anyway?” she asks, poking a block from the stack with her pencil.

“You always forget how old I am. I’m twenty three. What’s eleven times six?”

“Sixty-six. Are you married?”

“You know I’m not married.” I pull out a center block. Easy. “Besides, I’m too young to get married.”

“That’s not true! My mom was married when she was your age!” S—— shouts to her mother who is in her bedroom enjoying a much-needed break from parenting. “Mom! How old were you when you got married?!”

“Twenty-eight.”

Her face falls. “Oh.”

I take up my point again. “Some people do get married young, but plenty of people get married when they’re older too. Eleven times twelve.”

“One thirty-two.” She yanks a block from an unstable part of the tower. “Hey, I know! You can marry my mom!”

“Uh, I don’t think so.”

S——‘s mother seems to share my sentiment, and tells her to go back to the game. S—— tries again.

“What about when you go to Japan? I bet you’ll meet a girl there you can marry.”

Everyone brings this up when they find out I’m going to Japan; as if it were a requisite of the teaching abroad experience to return home with an exotic Japanese bride in a kimono and slippers. “I don’t think that’s going to happen. Eleven times ten.”

“Yes it will!” She becomes noticeably excited. “Unless you’re....”

Her eyes suddenly become wide and she covers her mouth as if she has just heard an adult tell a lewd joke and needs to hide her understanding. She chooses her words carefully: “...unless you’re like my mom’s friends up the street!”

Her mother rushes to my rescue, and I am so taken aback that I feel the need to protest before calming down and slowly pulling out another Jenga block. I gather my thoughts.

“As I was saying, I don’t feel ready to settle down and live that kind of life. I’ve got other things I want to focus on, and a whole lot of living to do. Even if I was ready, I haven’t met the right person. And how terrible would it be to marry the wrong person?”

S—— ignores me and carelessly pushes another center block onto the table, toppling the top half of the tower with the satisfying crash that signals my time to go home. Another lesson learned.

Success

This afternoon, at 4:55 PM EST, a woman from the Kriasho Corporation called to offer me a job teaching English in Japan.

I expect the full significance of this will sink in sometime within the next few hours. Until then, I think I'll just wander peacefully in a dreamlike daze.

New York

I enjoyed myself least of all in New York….Go into the first drug-store, ask your way from a passer-by, and the indifference and harshness of the New Yorker cuts the old affection for the city out of your body as sharply as a surgeon’s knife. It is partly the hysterical pursuit of money, the fast buck, that chills, but it is also the disdain of the New Yorker for the guy who doesn’t know his way about, who isn’t on the inside.

- Ian Fleming, Thrilling Cities

I immensely enjoyed my first day in New York. By taking the train in over the water and then walking out from the tunnels into Grand Central Station’s chandelier-lit infinity, one first encounters the city the way that people were meant to; not from behind the sooty exhaust of a dirty semi-truck. I saw a lot that first day: I got my picture taken by a doorman, watched skateboarders doing tricks on the steps of a Park Avenue office building, ate in the window of an Iranian restaurant with Shervin, walked through Central Park, and imagined myself strolling through the mishaps of a Woody Allen movie. After we’d eaten, Shervin drove me on a hair-raising trip down Broadway and through Times Square, pointing out landmarks as he honked his horn and cut off other drivers. As a city driver, Shervin saw beauty in every stoplight on the avenue changing green all at once, as if opening a path for him to drive onward into eternity. I was content admiring the buildings with my head outside the car window.

But it was only on the second day, when I emerged downtrodden from my interview with Kriasho Japan (where I made a poor impression—my concentration thrown off by a hurriedly improvised teaching presentation and several questions probing the weaknesses on my application) that I experienced Fleming’s New York. I walked through a city of people rushing to their destinations completely oblivious to everyone else, where it took the accident of an old man collapsing in the street to break people out of their stupors and actually interact with the environment around them. I saw young men in blue business shirts laughing together on their lunch breaks—for they had decent jobs and could afford to laugh when I could not. There were, of course, the tourists, but some stubborn bit of pride kept me from associating with these photo-snapping gawkers. Several times I caught myself staring up at the skyscrapers and looked back ahead with the rest of the crowd lest they think I was some sort of country bumpkin. I adapted the New Yorker’s quick stride but wandered without aim; contenting myself to my usual people-watching (highlights from the day include a crowd of theater buffs smoking outside an Irish pub, a bus full of rabbis, and more hot girls than I’d seen in months) and avoiding any actual destination. My aching feet and shattered ego could only take so much of this, and I drifted to a hill in Central Park overlooking the skyline and immersed myself in a book I’d brought. Solace at last.

At least the day ended on a good note: I highly recommend that anyone capable of seeing [Title of Show] do so immediately. I found it both creatively uplifting and hilariously funny, and it raised my spirits from the pit they’d fallen into after the interview. Shervin was right—there’s no shame in going to a Broadway show alone.

Scent, Memory

The rancid scent of marijuana drifts over to my haven on the hill, I know not from where. The smell carries memories of Ben, of social gatherings in crowded rooms, of concerts in sweat- and smoke-filled theaters where jam music plays for hours, of late nights wandering past End of the World, of friends giggling in the Leigh common room (but not of Jess's apartment; that was a forced memory that came only when I compiled this list). An unexpected flood from the past at the close of this long, blissful day.

Frequency

I would hate to give the handful of people who actually read my random musings the impression that I've abandoned this blog, because I still plan on continuing it. It's been difficult to make weekly updates during the summer because I'm in the middle of several other projects right now; chiefly preparing for my interview to teach English in Japan. (Since I know nothing about teaching English as a second language, this takes up quite a bit of my time.) My other main focus has been a collaborative effort that I will write about fully at a later date, but let's just say it involves a lot of Larper jokes.

Until things calm down, I'll try to update more often by stealing things I've written for other outlets and pasting them in here as if they were fresh ideas. It's not that I'm short on material; I could easily write about the Island Party with Chris and Jessalyn up in Wolfeboro, my inability to light an old gas stove, how great a writer Anthony Powell is, or other entries making fun of various people I know and meet. There are simply too many projects, and not enough hours in the day. Look for more misadventures after my job at Sunapee fizzles out with the last gasps of summer, and the moment of truth is decided at my interview.