This diminishing loaf of pumpernickel on my kitchen counter is the first loaf of pumpernickel I’ve ever bought. I’ve always wondered, quietly, somewhere in the vast space of my mind where such wonderings quietly go on, what pumpernickel is, exactly. Some kind of grain? There’s something ugly about the word, but ugly in that faintly attractive way. Know what I mean? So last Saturday when I was at Uprising and saw they were out of challah, I turned to the pumpernickel ingredients list. I don’t remember now what-all was on it, something about white flour and rye flour and, sure, maybe some wheat, but I do remember that there were also dark chocolate and honey. Of course the loaf was snapped up immediately, and it’s been treating me well all week. Anyway, today, finally, in my flurry of procrastination, I look up “pumpernickel,” and, people: this now ranks up there with my favorite breads, because this is its distinguished etymology:

German, from pumpern, to break wind + Nickel, goblin; from its reputed indigestibility

Well, well, well. Anyone for a slice of tootin’ fairy bread?

...put together a bowl of muesli and Greek yoghurt, arranged a bunch of books, sorted some laundry, discovered and contemplated a new bruise, had a tin of cookies mailed to a friend, scrambled an egg and piled it up with grilled tomatoes on pumpernickel toast, loaded the dishwasher...

Help, I need help.

No, but, truly, it is some kind of art how distractable I am. I sat down to get some work done—a last-minute panic preparation session for my meeting with this professor later today—and all of a sudden it’s half an hour later and I’ve: skimmed the New York Times online, responded to a bunch of comments on my blog, stretched, refilled my coffee, put my feet on the table, taken my feet off the table, drawn the curtains to see the day, and, well, now, blogged. There must be some way I can make a performance piece out of this...

I am an idiot, because tomorrow I am supposed to meet with a professor to have him be my thesis advisor, but instead of actually working toward even the idea of a thesis with which to wow him, I’ve been doing that thing where I just sit around stressing out about it. And now I’m sleepy. So I guess my choices are two: go see him tomorr and try to bluff my way through it, or go see him and say, “Um, can we do this next week?” Sigh. Both ways I look like an idiot, but I guess choice number dos makes it look like I’m an idiot who at least doesn’t want to waste his time, right?

Goddamit, why am I that girl who is always wearing white whenever she finds herself eating any pasta dish with even a hint of tomato???

The rain she is coming down like winning; she is coming down like fury; like a mad mother; the rain she is coming down still.

It’s a funny thing, this solitary lifestyle.

(I say this recognizing that what I refer to as a “solitary lifestyle” has been in effect for maybe ten hours. Last night the GabZi-r fanclub membership doubled when Karen and Rachel joined the New York posse to connect to the Monday-nite musical hotspot that is Paris, France. We squatted the forum and shouted between offices and danced in the hallway and curled over laughing till we couldn’t speak. I believe at one point Rachel ran out singing “I want to sex you up” and found herself face-to-face with the former head of the department. So, no, I really don’t live what one could call, in all seriousness, and with a straight face, a solitary lifestyle. Today, however, what with the sky thick and white with mourning, and all sounds muted by the rain drip-drip-dripping all day, I have the impression that I may be the only person left in the world.)

Up just after seven, stumbled to the living room and put on the morning soundtrack—a little Joan Sutherland, a spot of Death Cab for Cutie, a touch of Astrud and João Gilberto, a whisper of Rachael Yamagata. Breakfast over the Times, then I installed myself on the sofa with Le Rouge et le Noir for the day. I have been surprisingly good about reading for class so far this semester, and I suspect it is because—while the accompaniments of coffee and coffee and a biscuit and strawberries and tea don’t hurt—Stendhal is such a master storyteller. Somewhere around page 590, the only possible reaction was to exclaim “Holy crap!” which I’m sure is what they were saying, too, back in the nineteenth century.

All in all, it’s not a bad thing, this solitary lifestyle. Until it’s time to put on Boney M and get ready for my dinner date, I will be a little hermit crab: hear me be very, very quiet!

You know how sometimes in the middle of preparing a meal for yourself you’re just not hungry anymore? It’s really too bad when that happens, ’cause then you have a lamb and grilled eggplant sandwich on pumpernickel just sitting around looking enticing, and you have to say to it, “Not right now, honey, I have a headache.”

Man, I hate it when my camera battery decides to give me the finger and retire for the day. All of a sudden, everything becomes a photograph untaken: a weathered “No Parking” sign painted on a brick wall; the Hispanic dude restocking the old-timey tabac display at Pastis; the morning sun hitting a shelf of thick glass bottles; the chubby, unshaven clown celebrating the new Gymboree on Fourteenth Street.

When you’re just out of the shower and dinner’s on the stove and Sunday night is deep and still save for the occasional subway rumbling beneath, Nina Simone’s “I Put a Spell on You” filling the house is divine.

Like luxury, there will be lamb tonight.

I like the park plenty, but sometimes there’s just too much action going on, what with the baseball and the frisbee and the hula-hooping and the kids on scooters. So Sunday morning found me heading up to the roof deck with a basket of blanket, coffee, water, sweet green grapes, SPF 40 sunblock, Le Rouge et le Noir, and five pounds of Oxford Hachette French Dictionary. On a day like today, there is nowhere else to be but four flights up, New York City stretching out and out, and the sun delicious on my skin. Four hours later, Mathilde de la Mole had just written Julien to come to her room at one in the morning, quel scandale.

The way to turn a Friday night into a Saturday night is: Kat comes over, there’s baked chicken with lemon and green beans and little red potatoes and roasted garlic, there’s a salad of avocado and corn and cherry tomatoes and cilantro, there’s a bottle of Rioja, there’s eating and drinking and raucous merry making, and the week just over seems far in the past. The after-dinner walk takes us to the neon lights at the local movie place, where the perfectly mindless “First Daughter” is playing in just enough time for a ice cream soda first. The Pavilion, with its purple upholstered seats embroidered with the theater’s gold logo, is a special place to watch a movie because you just never know what you’re going to get audience-wise. In the almost-empty screening room, last night’s smattering included a group of punchy fourteen-year-olds in the back row, who yelled at the screen at key moments and then dissolved into giggles. Home just after midnight means it is time to bake brownies and watch “The Wizard of Oz” till we nod off sometime in the three o’clock hour. And then the best thing about making Friday night feel like Saturday night is that it really is still only Friday night, and when we wake up the next day the whole weekend still lies glittering before us.

Right now I am cooler than anyone else, because I have my new phone and new service and man oh man it is good to be connected again. I’ve texted you and you, and did you get my message?

At the phone place yesterday, when the guy asked if I knew which phone I wanted, I said, with the insouciance of one too concerned with loftier goals than to worry about such fiddly details, “Oh, I don’t care so much about the phone, what’s the cheapest one you have?” One ugly little hunk of plastic later, I was saying, “Hum. . . and what’s the next one up?” So now I have this lovely silver flip-thing and it works pretty much everywhere I need it to work, and I set it up so the ring tone is all drums and trombones and trumpets and cymbals playing Stars and Stripes Forever. There’s syncopation, there’s chords, there’s even a key change. So call me already!, because I can’t wait to strike up the band.

Exorbitantly, decadently, tucked into a corner at Blue Ribbon Sushi, we ran up a hundred-and-twenty-dollar dinner bill. Then I said, “Can we go get ice cream somewhere?” and Tom, and this is why I love him, said, “Totally.” We walked to Ciao Bella on Mott, where he bought me a scoop of Red Velvet gelato, which is raspberry and vanilla, and which turned my tongue a deep crimson.

(I like things that turn my tongue colors, which is why the Slurpee flavor of choice is always Blue Raspberry. It is a constant sadness to me that Blue Raspberry is hard to find. Every now and again I pop into all manner of petrol stations and 7-11s, and always there is cola flavor and cherry flavor and no Blue Raspberry. It’s a damn shame.)



At North Six, Conor Oberst seemed high on some sort of top-secret designer drug, or maybe it was just good ol’ booze. Slurring and then forgetting words and then knocking over mic stands. The show was some kind of incredible musical train wreck. His ever-changing band seemed, tonight, to include Billy Idol on bass. Leaning against the wall in the back, we watched, stunned, mouths open, before falling about in almost-disbelieving laughter.

Still, even when he is crazy fucked up, the kid has a singular voice. He sang this song where the colors were blue and blue and blue and gangrene. And his “Lua” was that kind of quiet beautiful where you see dust sparkling like magic in the spotlights.



We went to Rosemary’s after, where the boys got Buds in massive styrofoam cups. The jukebox was playing “YMCA” and “Macho Man.” Giant butterflies hung from the ceiling amid strings of Christmas lights. I mutilated the lime in my gin and tonic while we sat in the red pleather booth. Bright Eyes turned into Ted Nugent turned into Bob Dylan turned into Ireland turned into a film where people are eaten by sharks turned into Vincent Gallo turned into Will Ferrell telling off his dog in “Dodgeball” turned into Cairo turned into making out with a boy ballerina turned into people hanging off buses turned into Bangladesh turned into Saigon turned into the subjunctive tense in Romance languages, and then it was time to go home. We stepped outside and a cab pulled up like serendipity.

At Thirty-fourth Street, when the conductor announced that the train was going to go express, people filed off, muttering, grumbling. On the platform, this guy kicked at the car’s metal sides, yelling: “I hate you, R train! I hate you!”

I don’t usually have occasion to be on the yellow subway line, but today’s excursion to SoHo found me heading downtown on the R. It’s not like I have so many complaints about the F train crowd: tucked in among the bony-wristed Chinese uncles with their Mandarin newspapers and bulging plastic bags, the massive-haired Russian women, the teenage mothers, and the large Jewish men bent silently over their Torahs, you will find your young, thrift-store-outfitted eye-candy. But hel-lo yellow line, with your Eurotourist boys in blond and brunet, and dude looking sharp in a dark, double-vented suit (two vents are always better than one, people).

I hadn’t looked at Time Out New York in a while till yesterday on the subway ride home from school, and holy moley, the fall music line-up is looking sweet. Jason was so on the ball over the summer that I have tickets to the sold-out Franz Ferdinand show October 3. But there’s also Puffy AmiYumi. Frente. Bette Midler. The Killers. Rilo Kiley. Will I go to all? Will I go to none? Alls I know is, Tom and I are gonna rock the Bright Eyes show tomorr. We don’t have new sneakers or a studded belt, and we didn’t really work very hard on, as the boy calls it, “waifing down” to mix in with the indie kids. But we ain’t thirty yet, and we have cool hair, and we’re gonna emo it twenty-somethin-style, the way we do.

At the gym today, miracle, over the close-captioned TV news and télé-achats, they were playing Wild Cherry and Parliament and Alicia Bridges. Le freak, c’est chic. Aaaaahhhh I wanna go dancin!!!!

Joy is not having to do sit-ups today because I did sit-ups yesterday.

Walked home along the park tonight. The crickets were singing, and then also the frogs.

The unexpected thing about the hookupZi-r to music central chez Gab is that it turns into some kind of loopy afterhours French lesson. Last night, over a picnic of garlicky lentil soup, grape leaves, and tabouleh from the hole-in-the-wall around the corner from Maud’s office, we connected to the insanity already rollicking along in Paris. On the live online forum, a sausage is not a sausage, a banana is not a banana, the Eiffel Tower is not the Eiffel Tower, ceci totally n’est pas une pipe. “Maud, what’s couilles?” “Balls.” “Oh.” . . . “Um, what’s a rondelle?” “Dick.” “Ah.” They sure don’t cover this in class at Columbia.

To celebrate my burgeoning vocabulaire: a bunch of dried figs, a bar of bittersweet Lindt, and dancing about to Louis Prima.

Que j’aime le lunch !

I. cannot. wait. In two, count ’em, t-w-o days I can kick my piece-o-shit cellphone to the curb and sign up with another provider, and then maybe, just maybe, I will no longer have to be that girl who’s frowning at the diminishing antenna bars on the phone screen while everyone else around her is chatting it up. If all goes well, I’ll even be able to text overseas like the rest of the world. Keep yer fingers crossed. Well, I mean, keep ’em crossed, then let’s say the texting thing goes through, then probably you’ll want to uncross them, for speedy-texting purposes. I am texting queen; hear me, um, text. Tck tck tck tck tck.

Since the last time I cut my finger, I have: sprained my ankle; bruised my knee; scratched my face with a raggedy fingernail, leaving a fine welt from cheek to chin; cut another finger; and erased my entire iPod library, all nine-point-whatever megabytes of it. If anyone knows where my mind is, I’d appreciate your sending it back.

A good Sunday morning is the sky big and blue, a cup of coffee, and a slice of chocolate-cranberry toast. Dancing around the kitchen to Otis Redding.

Maud got here in the evening, stopped in the doorway, and said, We have to go to the roof right now, there is something crazy going on. Up four flights we opened the roof door to a chilly wind. West, beyond the low brownstones, over the Hudson River, the sun was a massive blazing orange round. Manhattan shone. Here and there windows caught the sunset and turned into sheets of gold, seemingly suspended. Clouds speeding by the sun were pink, pink, pink like never before, delicate blushes turning into electric shades. It was wild, psychedelic, hallucinatory. After a while the sky started to look like an extension of land. Clouds morphed into coastland and mountains. Stretches of evening blue turned into sea.

Eventually the sun dissolved. In the nippy air, I danced from one foot to the other in my thin T-shirt. Back downstairs, it was warm and smelled of lamb and allspice and orange zest.

Then India came by with a large enamel pan of semolina cake. She told me like three times what the thing was called, but somehow the name refuses to stick. I can only hear “baboushka,” and I know that’s not it. In any case, it was golden and thick with syrup and had sliced almonds on top, and some of us had three slices of it with chrysanthemum jasmine tea, after dinner, while we watched “Blazing Saddles.” If you haven’t seen this miracle of filmmaking, you must run, do not walk, and rent it immediately. It is the kind of thing where, if you try to just dash upstairs to the kitchen get some more hot water for tea, India and Maud will insist on pausing the DVD because you cannot miss a single moment. It is lunacy on a whole ’nother level. In fact, it is lunacy spread out on maybe four levels. There is a chance you will chortle and snort, very loudly, through it. That will only enhance the experience. When we got to the end of the movie, we started to watch it again. Then we stopped, and went upstairs instead to pick at leftover salad and cheese.

There is baboushka still, for a teatime treat tomorrow.

A wake-up thunderstorm in the morning heralded what seems like the first real autumn weekend. In the dark, lay in bed listening to the faint, soothing drumming of rain dripping into the drainpipe.

There’s a something in the air—a sadness, a coolness, a calmness. . .a somethingness. Clearly, what needs to happen is, Maud calls, dinner plans are made, and then it all falls into place: Django Reinhardt on the CD player; lamb shanks on the stove simmering in cinnamon and wine; a salad of butter lettuce, tomatoes, and orange peppers chilling in the fridge. We will watch “Ghostbusters,” and then we will watch “Ghostbusters 2.” There’s food enough for all; just ring the doorbell when you get here.

Aaaagagagaga SoHo is such a nightmare, even on a weekday afternoon. When the pavements are full of slow-moving out-of-town foot-traffic, the thing to do is come home to read Le Rouge et le Noir on the sofa while the subway rumbles underneath. And because this is a good Chinese household, the happy accompaniments are a pot of chrysanthemum jasmine tea and a couple of slices of durian cake.

I was walking down Elizabeth Street and this guy said to me: “Jesus Christ! Girl, you look healthy.”

Umm. Ooooo-kay. What?

This morning I saw the neighborhood laundry-delivery guy hopping onto his bike at the stoplight, we waved our hellos, and it occurred to me that he is a Japanese cartoon character. Specifically, a Miyazaki cartoon character. Specifically, the frog from “Spirited Away” who works at the baths, the one who jumps up and surprises Chihiro just as she’s running across the wooden bridge with Haku. Neighborhood laundry-delivery guy is a Korean dude in his forties with a round face and a big smile and muscular legs from cycling up and down these streets with loads of laundry and drycleaning balanced on his bike, so you see what I mean.

Anyway, the moment I realized he is the cartoon frog, Ninth Street was transformed into illustration. My cartoon life is surprisingly like my life life. The golden retriever on the corner still hangs out on the stoop, wearing his red bandanna. Delicate white muguet still peep shyly out of wood-paneled flowerboxes. The brownstones are still brownstones, but they are outlined, unevenly, in pink or white. My hair is still in ponytails, but, Japanese-cartoon-style, it is blue. I didn’t look behind me, but I suppose I was trailing stars and pink confetti and little yellow lightning flashes. I didn’t have a private plane, because I am not a rockstar, I am just me. Still, there was an understanding that I could easily be a cartoon cowgirl, with the hat and the boots and the pigtails and the pony. On top of all of this, Chrissie Hynde was singing “Message of Love.” It was good, good, good, like Brigitte Bardot.

A bad day for pink:

1. I was wearing a light pink T-shirt today when I got caught in the downpour. Helloooo, exposure.

2. After a year or so of hard wearing, my lovely pointy pink shoes finally gave out gave up today, what with the rain and all.

3. Slicing garlic for dinner, knife went straight for finger (which is pink). Blood seeping through the tissue was pinkish, then, very quickly, dark red.

:-(

Everybody just be nice to me.

In a fit of du côté de chez miam, I am dicing a bunch of tomatoes off the vine to make a beautiful, thick sauce with orange peppers and bay leaves and lots of garlic and maybe, just because I can, some salmon. This will go over some grilled-vegetable ravioli. Otis Redding on tap. Dinner in twenty minutes, come as you are.

Dear Vincent Gallo: Really, what do you want from me, I mean, I just, what. What. What exactly was the point of that giant wank that was “The Brown Bunny”? I’m not saying I want my $10.25 back; I’m not even that annoyed I had to watch Chloë Sevigny in action, especially since for once she wasn’t being hailed for her cutting-edge fashion daring in wearing a pair of goddamn bloomers; and certainly you didn’t have anything to do with the sweat-smelling dude next to me who jiggled his leg uncontrollably and ate hard candies, one after unending other, from a crackly plastic bag.

All in all it was an okay way to spend a Sunday night, and there was even hot chocolate after at Pink Pony, where someone’d requested a bunch of Pretenders songs on the jukebox.

But really.

You do a bang-up job on “Buffalo ’66” and then seem to disappear for years (except that time me and Tom and Lars walked past you on Greenwich on our way to lunch) and then. . . this? Vincent Gallo, did you spend all those years wanking?

Greg said he thought the film was beautifully shot, so I hoped there’d at least be that, but don’t you think that whole depressed-suburbs, mournful-driving, life-in-all-its-subdued-seventies-shades-passing-by thing has been done again and again already? I get it, I get it, I feel the great inescapable weight of Bud Clay’s emotion.

Still, nice job finding actors who make me feel itchy and uncomfortable about their characters’ lives. And nice job actually including a rabbit (even several) in the film, even after I’d wagered, “Twenty bucks says there isn’t even a bunny in this.” And, okay, nice job in that scene where the light from the sun over the horizon is big and white and it kind of hurts.

That is all. Thank you, Vincent Gallo.

All was quiet on the Western front, the showdown was on: just me, Stellou Cowgirl, and a pair of goldy gold shoes. The kind of scene where they taunt me through the display window, and already my fingers are twitching, making grasping motions in the direction of the prize. Anyway, I guess I won, because said gold shoes are still sitting on a pedestal in the store, and alls I came home with was what I went out to get, which was a stick of butter.

(Although, really, had I gone in and tried on the shoes, and had they fit, and had I walked out with said shoes in hand—or on feet, as it were—then also would I have won, because then, hello, I would’ve had some gold shoes.)

(Yes, I know, I already have a pair of gold shoes. But these ones were different. Different.)

Non mais c’était trop fort, le best way to start the week is perched on a table in some office in the French department at NYU, connecting to FranceZi-R and laughing it up with Maud because 2 bo j. h. ch 2 bel j. f. pour écouter musique de merde et + si aff. Seven in the evening, after I booked it downtown after class, after we were greeted with one technohiccup after another—an iBook that wouldn’t connect to the network, a PC that didn’t have speakers, a mouse that refused to mouse, connectable speakers that refused to speak, toutes ces conneries—after we finally invaded a vacated office and hooked up with the live online forum, the scene was madness. With no way of actually hearing the radio show, we were reduced to singing whatever words we knew of whatever songs were listed: “Shakin that ass, shakin that ass.” Delirious with hunger and a half-success, some of us sprawled on the table while others of us leaned back with a smoke. Bordel c’était merveilleux. Gaaaaab on t’aaiimmmeeeeeeuuuhhh!!!!

There is a creeping sensation that nothing means anything. Sometimes I sit in the shower with the water on hot, and then I can feel

We were sitting at Lucien for an evening snack, there was fish soup and an endive salad, and I sat cross-legged in the booth. We were talking, but ultimately it came to this: boys render us speechless: “I mean— it’s just— I just— it’s like— yah, no, I dunno.”

Westville is windows open to West Tenth Street between Bleecker and West Fourth, warmth and chatter and the smell of hotdogs on the grill. Last night Kat showed up pink and rosy, and then we were inside, with the warmth and the chatter and the smell of hotdogs on the grill. And the roasted beets and sweet walnuts, and the cauliflower and garlic, and the crispy skinny fries, and, yes, the hotdogs, and the peach pie and the chocolate-sandwich cookie. Altogether a winning celebration to the end of the first week of school, I heart school, remind me of this in six weeks when I’m moaning about how much I hate school. Classes are gonna be great, just great, and with luck I’ll get to add into that one about post-structuralist and modernist art. Wednesday, after cursing the subway all the way uptown, I arrived, wet from the rain, a couple of minutes late to the class already in full swing, and I had to make my way to the front row, the only place with seats open, whereupon I sat down and the professor said: “Stella.” And I stopped my bangles jangling and looked up, eyes wide, teeth biting lip, and quite possibly in that spot of silence a drop of rainwater dripped off my bangs, and then it turned out she was talking about Frank.

And I think I’m going to drop that one on Rousseau even though maybe a Rousseau class would be good for me, and maybe I should take the Rousseau class, but I just don’t want to take the Rousseau class. Oh, dammit, still, I don’t know, the thing is, I bet Rousseau has a lot to say about blogging.

But, yeah, it’s gonna be a great year, I can feel it, it is sixteen times good that I’m not a first-year any longer. And some of my professors are hot, and some of them are funny, and they all seem brilliant in their own crazy ways. And maybe this’ll be the year I get Derrida. Must repeat: theory is just a game, a game, a game.

After days of damp greyness, wake up to the beaming sun. Breakfast is Greek yoghurt with honey and berries (straw and blue). Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri on volume up.

Blah blah, a story about stupid cell phone wrangling stupidness and running out of minutes for the month and blah blah blah, and then I say, “. . .because over the summer I downgraded to the cheapest plan since I wasn’t going to be using it, and so now it turns out I have fifty minutes for the month—” and then Maud started laughing and couldn’t stop. Because if you know me and you know my mouth, then, well, yuk it up, buddy, because you understand why I’ve been back in town just a week and already those fifty minutes are history like three times over.

“Are you happy?” she asked, and we were squinting into the sun setting over the river, and in my reflection I could see my shoulders were shiny, and the best I could offer was, “I’m not unhappy.”

Later, T. and I sat in the deepening blue while an evening breeze chased the heat. There was something approaching a quiet happiness.

The wrong boy called.

First there was the unpacked; then there was the half-unpacked, with things, like layabouts, all over the house; then there was the totally unpacked and neatly put away. Then there was pasta with artichoke hearts and tomatoes and lemon to celebrate, then there was lying on a blanket in the park, first reading, and then watching the clouds float by.

Saturday we continued reacclimating and reacquainting ourselves with this place, this life put aside for three months. There was brunch at Bar Tabac, there was ice cream in Washington Square Park, there was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, the sky hazy and pink with evening. Behind us, the Empire State Building, catching the sun, glowed red.



At Jeff’s in the Heights, a cocktail shaker in the shape of a penguin, a colander of plastic vegetables, a miniature Oscar Mayer weinermobile, and a fondue party. Man, was there a fondue party. The boy has not one but two fondue pots, whatever those things are called, and we dived into both. First cheese, then chocolate. Over wine and Donna Summer records, Maud discovered Jeff’s kangaroo hand puppet and made fast friends. For the rest of the night, each of her statements was puncuated with a wave of the paw or a perfunctory nod from the kangaroo. It was funny, and then frightening, and then both, and then she fell asleep on the sofa.

Sprawled on furniture and the floor in the dark, Kat and Jeff and Maud and I, we looked at the constellation on the ceiling and we listened to Jeff’s stylish songs and the Americans told the foreign girls about ghostly games played at slumber parties past. “. . .and you can’t look in the mirror when it’s dark—” “Stop it!!” “—or else you’ll see—” “Stop it!!”

Then there was the midnight walk along the promenade, the Brooklyn Bridge lit up like beauty, and then there was falling asleep in the car home, and then there was home.

If it’s Friday in New York and you’ve just gotten back from winter in Sydney and Maud’s just gotten back from summer in the French countryside, then it must be time for a Cyclones game at Coney Island. We walked on the boardwalk in the salty sea breeze to the cutest little stadium in the world, where our high-class twelve-dollar seats waited for us. There was a hotdog eaten, and fries, and a bit of a pretzel, and some pink candy floss. Then I felt ill.



We didn’t get the game, and then, as night fell, as the lights came on in the stadium and on the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone rollercoaster, as ball was played, we did. The Cyclones rocked, the Hudson Valley Renegades sucked. Kids danced in the aisles. The obnoxious guy behind us bellowed “We will we will rock you” and “Let’s go Cyclones” and, puzzlingly, “Left right left right.” During the seventh inning, everyone got to their feet. “Why is everyone getting up?” I asked. “It’s the seventh-inning stretch,” Jeff said. I laughed. “No, really,” he said. Then the music came on and everyone burst into “Take Me out to the Ballgame.” I didn’t know more than, um, “Take me out to the ballgame,” but Jeff prompted me with each line so I could sing with gusto. Then Neil Diamond popped up on the big screen, and said, “Come sing along with me,” and “Sweet Caroline” filled the cool night air. Good times never seemed so good. Hello again, America.

Having spent three months away, having spent more than one full day in the air, I am back. In the haze of my first day, during which I couldn’t remember how to turn the key in my front door or switch on the air conditioning, during which it took a good, long think to figure out which cupboard the plates are in, there are still some moments that are good. We went to Capsuto for a drink on their porch and Albert, the dapper frère, said, “It’s nice to have you back again.” That was good. Walking up Hudson in the cool evening with Tom trading songs on our iPods was good. Elliott Smith, Bob Dylan, the Jayhawks. “You’re gonna love this,” I told him, and played him “Rosanna.” Listening to Andy Statman and his mandolin in the basement of the Charles Street Synagogue was good, even though sheer exhaustion won out over jaunty bluegrass and I nodded off a couple of times. When the band started up, I said, “Wait, which one’s Andy Statman?” “In the yarmulke,” he said. “I watched ‘Hebrew Hammer’ in Sydney,” I said. Kissing the boy good-bye and getting into a cab at half past midnight was just like the old days, and I even remembered how to tell the driver the route home. Over the bridge and into the night.

When I got onto the plane in Sydney, the steward asked, “Are you going home to Singapore?” “No,” I said, “I’m going to New York.” “It’s going to be a long trip,” he said. “Yes,” I said, “I’ve never gone all the way from Sydney before. I might die.” “Ha ha,” he said, and then he stopped and said, “Touch wood.” Then he patted the leather armrest.

(The leather armrests were because I was so lucky as to have had an upgrade to business class, which made all the difference, but all the difference. In business class, the seats can become beds. There are orchids in the bathrooms. You can order a mocha or a Milo. I also tried to live it up by having a gin and tonic, but it tasted like rubbing alcohol. In business class, you can also watch “Stepford Wives” and “L’auberge espagnole” and “Raising Helen” and “Citizen Kane” and the old-time favorite, “Viva Las Vegas.” And the stewardesses—isn’t there some other PC term I’m supposed to be using?—will come and say, “Would you like a meal in about fifteen minutes? Maybe some tuna carpaccio with a wasabi mayonnaise?”, and you can have that, or the foie gras with dried fig quenelles, or the pumpkin tortellini, or, good god, good yummy yummy god, even the dim sum, which was a selection of har gow and siew mai and lo mai kai. Also, when you fly business class, you get to exit the plane very quickly when you get to your destination, and then you speed through customs, because I guess they figure terrorists aren’t about to spend the big bucks on a luxury seat.)

I was chasing the sun; or was the sun chasing me? We flew westward over Australia as the sun sank into a pool of red, leaving only the horizon glowing orange. Singapore was lit up all twinkly lights in the dark, and in Frankfurt the sky began to lighten as we took to the air again. Coming toward New York, the funfair at Coney Island was clear from the sky, and boats big and little trailed white behind them in the water.

Back on land now, I feel, I don’t know, suspended, somehow. I don’t know where home is anymore.

Oh. My. God. If you are a Windows user and this site looks like ass, it is so not my fault. After frenzied days and late nights setting up my new blog, after checking it on not one, not two, but three computers to make sure it looks peachy, what is really, really aggravating is checking the site on the airport PC just before getting on the plane and finding out that there are hideous blue frames around everything, and dead links everywhere. What the hell is the problem with computers talking to each other? Can't we all just get along??

Even after the sundae breakfast, even after the wondrousness of early morning ice cream and strawberries and a date biscuit crumbled up and chocolate shavings, it was a grey day for leaving. It rained on our heads, and there were no horses down the street where sometimes there are horses.

I am bone tired, people. This is a broken body. In the last two days there has been walking and walking and walking to take in all the city I can before I leave, and then clearing and packing and staying up too late and waking up too early. But it’s all part of the pre-trip prep insanity, because when your flight is, I dunno, twenty-something hours long, there is plenty of time to sleep during the journey.

It’s all packed—the Vegemite and the Tim Tams and the two tins of Tasmanian honey, the Bonds T-shirts and the Elle MacPherson underwear and the Veronika Maine dress. My god, that dress. I will wear that dress and I will blind you with my grace. It’s all packed, and tomorrow there will be a plane and I will be on it.

I woke up whining this morning about nothing and everything: “It’s not fair I don’t wanna go I hate it it’s not fair I just it’s not fair I don’t wanna” and then CC said, “Coffee? And walnut toast? With butter?” and then it was better.

Then it got even better because I got to log on to Gab’s radio show direct from Paris, and have Maud and Clem and Gab do mad shout-outs and song dedications across time and space. Incroyable. It was the kind of better where you hear Maud and the boys go “Astelllaaaa” just before the Beach Boys kick in with “Surfin’ USA,” and you are sitting there with a big grin and you forget that maybe just half an hour ago you were curled up in bed refusing to face the world.

The day was calling, so CC and I caught the bus to Circular Quay, where the ferry to Manly (“Seven miles from Sydney and a thousand miles from care”) was waiting for us. Across the Sydney Harbour there were fish and calamari rings and chips and a blue Slurpee for lunch at Manly Beach. There were also: a seagull missing a foot, a girl wearing a short denim skirt that said “Diva” across the ass, and a little old Indian couple enjoying ice creams on their promenade.

We walked to Shelly Beach, the Tasman Sea sparkling on our left. We sat on a bench dedicated to “Big John” and we talked and we laughed and we looked at the water. Sometimes you laugh a laugh, but sometimes you laugh so hard you laugh nothing. Matthew calls this “laughing so dogs can hear.” Sometimes, also, you laugh till you hurt so much you can’t laugh anymore, but then you are still laughing, and it still hurts. At this point you must stop doing whatever it is you are doing, because your knees won’t hold you up anymore, and if you are holding something in your hand, you’d better put it down quick. Sometimes you can’t even laugh, you can only snort, and sometimes when you throw your head back and snort that entire trajectory, you might almost fall over.

At Shelly Beach Park, we climbed on rocks and roots to the top of the lookout point, where the big blue was big and blue, and the clouds were like drawings of clouds, and there was a breeze, and there was quiet.

Later we walked along the Esplanade to Oceanworld, where we poked around the gift shop for fish-related gifts. Because we are big spenders, we left with one pencil with a plastic orange octopus curled around the eraser end.