rhinestones

Okay, I am breaking my vow of silence with a quick word about nose piercings.

Aka, I got one.

Ever since I was fourteen, I've wanted very badly to get my nose pierced ---nothing flashy, just a little rhinestone in the middle of my face, you know--- and each conversation with my mother on the subject went something like this (abridged version):

"Mom, can I get my nose pierced."
"Over my dead body!"
"Fine then. I'll do it when I'm in college."
"NO YOU WILL NOT."

As I have been slowly coming to the realization lately that I am actually in college, It occurred to me a few weeks ago that I am theoretically at liberty (or at least, if not imbued with divine right, obliged by the very nature of my status as a college freshman) to get pierced, tatooed, dyed, or otherwise foolishly decked in the fruits of postmodern body choice. As it were, I opted to be tame and forego getting the word "Mommy" dyed into my arm and instead, celebrate my nineteenth birthday by planting a piece of jewelry in my left nostril.

Of course, even though I had had intentions to get this done for weeks leading up to my birthday, on the day of, I hemmed and hawed throughout the entire day; once faced with the prospect of walking around with a piece of metal in my face, having someone stab me (albeit clinically) with a hollow needle, and having to face the potential disapproval of my mother were the major factors dissuading me from seeking the boho-coolness of a piercing. However, about half an hour before the piercing studio closed, I was struck with the thought that, beyond the very practical issues surrounding this decision, piercing my nose was about body choice and therefore life choice, about having the power to make a bold decision concerning an element that presents me to the rest of the world: my face. This was a decision, unlike the hugely controversial ones regarding college, or the minute ones involving where I will eat dinner each night, that I could, and would, make entirely on my own and completely in the service of my own wiles. And there's an amazing power in the ability to say "hey, this is something I want, and I want it enough not to really care what other people think." No matter how free-spirited or culturally autonomous I like to think I am, the fact remains that I do care too much about how the small decisions I make about my life will affect others' opinions of me and therefore the nature of our relationships. So I did it. And, big surprise: my relationships with the people I love, or my outlook on life, or the respect I seem to get from people, has not been affected. Even my mom, when I told her, was surprisingly enthusiastic and accepting of the notion that my nostrils have wandered their way out of her jurisdiction.

As it turned out, the piercing itself didn't hurt all that much, either. The owner of the shop, a long-haired, ex-hobo from Houston Street, was friendly, efficient, professional, and so quick that I barely even realized that I had been officially pierced until it was over.

A small triumph.

This is what I pined for...

Well, the temperature has finally meandered up into the 60's, and it seems that much of my whining about the perpetual doom and gloom of Rochester was due more to the fact that it was cold than the idea that Rochester has nothing to offer. In the past week, I have had the pleasure of watching the sunset from a bridge over the Genesee River, losing my phone to the depths of the Genesee River, playing baseball and losing to an eight-year-old, and learning how to fit seven grapefruits into my bag, not to mention discovering three incredible coffee shops (oh haven of havens!) within a quick bike ride of my dorm.

Unfortunately, a number of factors are contributing to the fact that I am writing so much that I haven't the energy to write for myself anymore. These include my forays into propaganda writing for the Rochester Admissions Office, the fact that I decided it would be a good idea to write an enormous research paper for my Feminism class rather than just biting the bullet and taking the final, and the predilection of my African Studies teacher to assign 10-page papers every other week. Conclusion: until the end of the month, blogging is put on hold.

Mmmmmm, college.

Spring Break Reflections

Last Thursday on my way home for spring break, I scribbled the following notes while pressing my cheek up against the cool window of the train.

"I'm on an Amtrak train to New York City for spring break. It wasn't until I boarded the train, settled into my seat, and glanced out the window to see Rochester slowly slipping away that I remembered how much I love to travel. During the countless stir-crazy nights of the past two months, I've reflected on the depth of my wanderlust, but I didn't remember the vicious freedom of slipping between cities, gazing out of windows at the countryside's secrets, and meeting the freshness of new places head-on... The other side of the window is moving by like scenes from a movie reel, and it's taking effort to remember that I am of these new things, and not only watching them. I have the supreme luxury of experiencing and being a part of things that I have never seen before. This life is not a movie.

The train car is overheated, and I wish for nothing more than to be outside... We're moving through the archetype of the North Country, and it's so beautiful that I'm kicking myself for staying on campus and in the city in the past weeks. The ruralness of it reminds me of the Pennsylvania roads that Yoda and I wandered through on our bikes last summer, except with a twist of wintertime mystery. Everything is coated in snow: the hills, the trees, the rocks, the boulders. Even the icy streams turning in between the trees are dusted with the lightest layers of crystalline powder. The houses we pass are something out of a Jan Brett picture book: diminutive, sturdy, secondary to the snow and wild, rambling, brown-and-white majesty of the forest. I never knew that ice on barren trees could be so beautiful, all curves and graceful, sparkling lines. Trunk after trunk, branch after branch, is outlined in glowing ice that glints but does not melt in the sun.

We're passing through red pickup truck towns, and abandoned hunter's havens in the middle of clearings. Every once in awhile there is a field that looks like an ice skating rink, and rumbling hills in the distance rising to the challenge of shaping the horizon. Buildings dot plains of fallow farm fields, spiky with brown stalks that poke up out of the snow, gently and with spunk. I finally understand why people call the snow “pristine”."

The following week continued in similar style, akin to an awakening from what I can only characterize as a kind of hibernation that I have burrowed into for the past few months. When I moved to Rochester in January, I found myself landed in a brand new place stark with odd challenges and an absence of the people I love and the things that interest me. I didn't have the familiar muse of New York City, of commuter trains and even the rambling farm roads of Central Jersey to keep my sense of noticing alive. So I settled into a defensive state of mind, one in which I simply sat waiting for the day that I could return to a place that would inspire me. And let's face it: Rochester doesn't inspire me. As much as I love my classes and enjoy my new friends, Rochester as a place doesn't buzz with the potential for poetry that I have found in other places in my life. As soon as I arrived in New York last Thursday, I felt alive again, awake; I was at home in a state of complete, surround-sound, 3-D-goggle vision inspiration. And more than that (perhaps because of that?) I felt utterly at home. Being back in Princeton and New York for ten days felt like recharging: I've come back to Rochester with a dual understanding that I cannot let life pass me by in the way that I have been, and that ultimately, though I have resolved to find the little beauties of Rochester so that I never go as crazy here as I did before the break, I can't stay away from New York forever. When I was applying to college, I thought it would be a good idea for me to live in other places, and as much as I value the prospect of seeing every little place that I possibly can, even when I lived at home I never had the chance to burrow into that amazing city that I've idolized for so long but never had the chance to truly embrace.

Anyway, enough with the introspection, and onward to the stories...

When I got into Penn Station, I had a few hours to kill before catching a train back to Jersey. I meandered (okay, I made a beeline) down to Union Square and popped into Pie By The Pound, my favorite pizza shop in the city. I think that more than anything, it's the memories that draw me to Pie; it seems like every time we have a CTY reunion in the city, or something crazy and weird happens while out with friends, or Yoda and I need a place to sit and hatch some new weird and crazy plan, we end up at Pie. By now the owner, Jeff, a tall, friendly bald man with a love of grand schemes and good people, knows me. As soon as I came into the shop, he pulled me into a hug and sat me down to hear all about college. I think that's one of the things that continuously draws people to New York: in provincial places like Princeton, or smaller industrial cities like Rochester, the people don't exhibit an almost desperate underlying need for human connection. A long time ago, I thought it was odd how much nigh-intimate interaction occurs between random New Yorkers, how many conversations spring up between people in a city where the underlying rule is that you don't make eye contact and you always mind your own business. But I think in a setting built around that kind of impersonality, when a connection is made, it is automatically more intense, even if ephemeral, than it would be in a place where people smile at each other when passing on the street. I've gone to the same coffee shop in Princeton at least three times a week for three years now, and though I know all of the baristas by sight, and we'll occasionally make small talk while I'm waiting for the milk to foam, I still don't know any of their names, and probably never will. But every once in awhile in New York, though it's rare, intense connections are built because once you break that fourth wall in between you and the person making your coffee or heating your slice, you really can't go back. It's pretty wonderful, really.

Back at home, I felt like my house had been hit by an Improv Everywhere team: the colors of the walls and the contours of light falling onto the furniture was so familiar it hurt, but huge landmarks of my life were missing, as if I were living inside an incomplete puzzle. My room was so zen, stripped of the posters and photographs and ticket stubs that used to coat the walls. It was completely empty save for my desk, bed, and the wicker mannequin I used to keep my hats and scarves on. I still don't know what will happen to her when the house is sold; I certainly don't have room for her in Rochester, and I doubt that she'll match the decor in Santa Fe.

The first morning that I made breakfast, I realized that we no longer have a toaster, and that half of the mugs were gone. Instead of the usual array of wooden spoons, spatulas, soup ladles and whisks in the "miscellaneous kitchen junk" drawer, we now had two long-stemmed spoons and a single spatula at our behest. Every day, more utensils would disappear as mom packed them, leaving Carly and I to stand blinking into drawers whose contents shrunk by the day. It was very Alice in Wonderland-meets-Harry Potter. I had to credit Carly with her patience with living in a disappearing house.

Most of my vacation was a whirlwind of seeing people: I visited Paul, from whom I finally gained custody of the keyboard that we got Idina Menzel to sign on some Thanksgiving weekend years ago; had dinner with Sandy and Everett, a newlywed gay couple that my mom goes to church with who are currently loving the struggle of raising their 13-year-old daughter, and who decided that bringing a quiver of wind-up bunnies to the pub would be a good idea; I got kicked out of Panera with Himanshu and friends, and then proceeded to stomp on an apple in the middle of Vandeventer Street as we stood giggling about god-knows-what. Dominique and I stayed up until four in the morning watching "PS I Love You" and crying, and I sang along to the entire Garden State soundtrack with Carly. I ate leftover lasagna that mom and I made on Christmas and froze, and I took a drive through the single-lane farm roads of Northeastern New Jersey that everybody forgets about when they say that my home state is the armpit of America. Oh, and somehow I got invited to the Inaugural Ball in 2009 (that's a long story that I'll be telling later).

Somewhere along the way, I realized that I never hated New Jersey, or Princeton, or even Montgomery. What I hated was being in high school, having so many limitations and restrictions and dreams that I couldn't even elucidate. After I graduated, I kind've fell in love with Princeton, and with the memories that I didn't even notice making when I was in high school. I've had a quirky, wonderful life there, and as much as I thank god I'm not in high school anymore, I hate the prospect of leaving New Jersey.

I'm still really not a fan of the freeway, though.

Spring Break

Happy March!

On Saturday, I'm going home for the first and last time. It'll be the first time since I've been at college, and the last time because two weeks after I go back to school, my mom is putting our dog in the car and moving her life to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Our house is on the market, and just yesterday, four different families came to look at it. All of the things I'm going to need and want and use are here with me in Rochester, and my summer clothes and things that I don't absolutely need are packed in boxes, stacked neatly against the walls of our garage. And even though I know I'll be back in the neighborhood countless times in my life to visit friends, when I leave my house after spring break, I have to really say goodbye to the place where I grew up.

I've lived in a lot of places: Boulder, Morristown, Bedminster, Montgomery, and now Rochester. I've been a resident of three states, and had bedrooms in four different houses. But as much as I bitched about it throughout the ENTIRETY of my adolescence, it's Montgomery, a snooty, suburban town in Central New Jersey four miles off of the Princeton University campus that's been the only place I've ever really called home. And now that I'm not going to have a home base there anymore, I'm realizing how much I loved it... Even if a huge part of that love was loving to hate it.

I am so happy for my mom. She needs to move to Santa Fe, and she deserves it--- her entire adult life has been spent taking care of other people, and the time for her to start a new life is way overdue. The idea of the single empty-nester packing up her life and moving to an artsy town in the American Southwest sounds like something out of a collection of mid-life crisis stories, but for my mom, it's her dream, and everything that she is. Ever since she was in college, moving east was something that she did out of duty, and wandering back west (usually in a car packed with all of her most important stuff, as will be the case at the end of this month) was something she did because her identity requires it. She's been vacillating between New Jersey and the Rocky Mountains since 1980, and it's about time she moved back for good.

But for me, it's a little different. I was raised in New Jersey, amidst flat farmlands and billboard-ridden highways. I lived on an express-train line into New York City, and as it turns out, New York is my American Southwest. I love it the way my mom loved Colorado when she lived there during college, and I idolize the streets of the East Village and the weird skyline of Central Park in the way that she yearned for pueblos and Native American pottery while she was raising me in a safe, sturdy community an hour south of her parents in New Jersey. While my mom was dreaming of other places, I became a Jersey girl, as much as I hate to admit it. I went to the mall with my best friend on Saturday nights in my Freshman and Sophomore years of high school; couldn't wait to get a driver's license and crashed my mom's car a month after I finally did. When I was sixteen I fell in love with New York City and never went back, even though, as I've been told by friends who live in the City, I still smell like New Jersey and will never stop.

(I really hope that last bit isn't true.)

So as much as I'm happy for my mom and excited about the new home that she will make for herself there, a part of me knows that as much time as I spend in Santa Fe, it's never really going to be my home. My home base still lies somewhere between the cherry blossoms of Princeton and the grit of New York, and I love it too much for that to ever change. In a lot of ways, my mom's move means that I'm more autonomous than I really thought I would be at eighteen: I live in Rochester. All of my stuff is here. And when I'm not here, I'll spend the rest of my time between New Mexico and New Jersey/New York, from mom to friends and back again. And I'm okay with that. I'll be back to Jersey, and I'm sure I'll be bitching about it all over again in time. But it's just going to be so damn hard to say goodbye to my room, and the kitchen where I learned to cook, and my makeshift art studio in the attic. My childhood is there, and within months, someone else is going to be living in it. A big chunk of home is going to be gone from home when I go back to visit over the summer.

For Once, I'm Not Afraid of the Dark

It's funny; I always assumed that once I got to college I would never want to leave. As a kid, college seemed like the be-all end-all--- I loved wandering around the Princeton University campus, pretending that I was a student, wandering empty halls that reeked of Ivy League glamor. Now that I'm actually in college, however, two things have become evident to me: 1. I never really took the time to think about what I'll be doing after college, and 2. I can't wait to get the hell out of here.

It's not that I'm not enjoying college; I am. I love my classes, I love the fact that I have 3-hour seminars where, when the professor gives us bathroom breaks, we stand in the hallway discussing sexual politics and Simone de Beauvoir and never actually get around to going to the bathroom or filling up our water bottles. I love the fact that for the next few years of my life, I have the supreme luxury of wallowing in my intellectual interests without having to worry about paying rent and getting a job. But at the end of the day, the fact that I'm (finally!) throws into light the fact that the next phase of my life ---the one after college, the one I never gave much thought to--- is coming up fast. I know that I'm only a Freshman, but the college years go by quickly and with my AP scores, I'm already on course to graduate early. And the thing is, that doesn't scare me. Rochester has a program called Take 5, in which students can take an extra year here, tuition-free, to study whatever they want. I think it's a pretty neat idea, but after talking to a bunch of classmates who plan on doing Take 5, I've realised that what many of them want is not so much the opportunity to delve deeper into a subject of interest, but rather to delay for one more year the perils of real-world existence.

For my part, I think I would go crazy if I had to spend more than four years as an undergraduate. I think a lot of this has to do with the time I spent outside of the academic arena last semester; seeing aspects of the real world that I had never before imagined was so inspiring that I cannot wait to get back out there. There are days when I am so frustrated with this cabin-fever feeling I have that I just think to myself, studying is just something you have to do in order for you to be really effective when you get back out there. I am chock-full of wanderlust, and as terrifying as it is that I'm a Creative Writing / Women's Studies / International Relations major who hasn't given much thought to her life beyond the place where she is now, I really can't wait for the next part.

This mantra may be radically different when I'm a senior researching job prospects in the out-of-work-feminist-writer field, but we'll see how it goes.

An Excursion

There's always this weird stigma to starting a new blog or journal. I always feel so obligated to share all the little stats about me--- I'm 5 foot 4 on a tall day, I'm from New Jersey, I am a Creative Writing major who finds it hard to study without red Swedish Fish. But as I'm writing these long-winded entries in which I desperately try to make myself look good to the harsh pages of a new blog, there's this little voice inside my head screaming "FOOL! Forget your identity and get down to business!"

This time, I've decided to listen to the little devil.

So. Ever since I got to campus, everyone's been telling me that as a burned-out city built on the Kodak Film empire, Rochester is not a safe place for a college student to wander. My roommate in particular enjoys telling stories of the black hole that is Rochester beyond the boundaries of campus security. As a result, I had not been off campus in a month until this morning. Finally, I snapped. I am a person who explores, who loves to get lost and find new things and meet new people, and hates hates hates tracing the same steps every day. So I put on my baggiest, warmest clothes, left all my valuables in my room, put on my helmet, and got on my bike.

I wandered the streets of Rochester for two hours, and I still couldn't find The Hood.

The Rochester I saw has all the charm of a slightly burned out city, complete with blocks of shabby yet tidy houses, winter-proofed cars coated with salt from the street, and little coffeeshops with cheesy names and faded paint. I saw lots of gas stations and auto repair shops, and a few people that I wouldn't want to meet in an alley at night, but for every one of those was a mother with a secondhand carriage, a church, and a house with wind chimes hanging off the porch roof. It was a blue-collar neighborhood, and reminded me of something Yoda and I noticed while we were touring in Pennsylvania: that every blue collar street, every burned-out city struggling to survive, and every corner with a gas station on one side of the street and a church on the other has the same vibe. There is more pride on a street with houses off of which all the paint is peeling than there is in a neighborhood with vast lawns and cookie-cutter homes. There isn't enough personality in a McMansion for any sense of pride to come through. Even in Gulfport and Biloxi, I remember seeing streets of ramshackle houses, brand-new or dilapidated but still standing, and no matter how depressed or exasperated or poor the inhabitants were, there was a sense of home there that I have just never felt in the Post-Levittown neighborhoods of Somerset County, NJ.

I ended up getting pretty lost. I crossed the river twice, flirted with the outskirts of a lovely, hilly park covered in snow and boulders that I would love to find again, huffed my way up hills and whizzed back down them, stopped to ask for directions from people who had no idea where the University is, and finally found myself at an intersection that I recognized, for it was the one that Yoda and I hit the night before I moved in, as we searched in vain to find campus and get a first glimpse of the place where I would be living for the next few years. In the end, I was able to wend my way back to campus, squinting against the wind to remember exactly where we drove that night, when the car was so packed with my stuff that Yoda had to sit in the back seat and his frantic directions from Google Maps did more to confuse me than anything else.

Ultimately, I hope to get to know Rochester better. I miss New York City bitterly, and don't think I'll survive up here if I can't do some urban exploring of my own. The other night, I saw L'Auberge Espagnole, a French film about a group of students studying abroad who share an apartment in Barcelona. At the opening of the film, the narrator meditates on how, when coming to a new place, it is odd to think that one day you will know it enough for it to become your home. I still don't feel like Rochester is my home, but I have to at least know it if I am to last up here in the cold winter of my discontent.