metropolis meets wilderness

I saw a New Yorker cover once that was a New Yorker's view of the United States. Manhattan takes up most of the picture, New Jersey gets a shout-out, but after that the rest of the country is squished into a couple of inches with a only a few random states and cities named before Hollywood, and then the Pacific Ocean.

When you live in the West--especially inland West--it's easy to have an inferiority complex. You have the sense that everything cool comes to you last--like indie films, or clothing chains, or the Hard Rock Cafe, which came to my hometown of Salt Lake City about 10 years after the restaurant was already lame. Of course, California is the counterweight to the country's east-centricness, but it still feels like New Yorkers think of California as a quaint place where people make tacky entertainment and wear flip flops and shorts to the office. For these reasons, I love to see West Coast novelties that have travelled against the current and invaded the East Coast instead of the other way around.

For example, Jamba Juice opened in Manhattan a couple summers ago, and New Yorkers were lining up down the street for Mango-a-go-gos and Pina Cowladas. Having lived in Utah and California, I was baffled and somewhat smug, knowing that smoothies were a long-since passe food trend out west. I mean seriously, wasn't Jamba Juice even before Cold Stone? And even Cold Stone was old news. Likewise with Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. For about six months after its opening, it seemed like all anyone on Manhattan wanted to do was go to Whole Foods. I actually had invitations to go "out to dinner" at Whole Foods. For once, I, the Westerner, got to yawn and say, "Oh yes, Whole Foods, it's cute. Be sure to try the organic gingersnaps, everyone loves them." Hey, I have to take my opportunities for snobbery where I can get 'em.

Anyway, what I'm leading up to is that I went to lunch yesterday at this trendy place called Bubby's, in Tribeca, and one of the menu items about blew my boots off. Right there, under hamburgers, was "The Garlic Burger: our version of the Cotton Bottom's classic." Okay, so if you are from Salt Lake City, particularly the 84121 zipcode, you have known the Cotton Bottom practically since you were old enough to look out the car window. It's a dive bar off the freeway interchange, sandwiched between a fancy restaurant with valets, etc. and a bunch of tree-lined estate homes. Nestled in the fanciness is the Cotton Bottom--like a weed in the rose garden. The entire lot around it seems to have gone to seed, and there are always Harley Davidsons parked out front. Of course, if you were a kid you just knew the Cotton Bottom was the nexus of everything bad and fun that your mom didn't want you to do.

I finally went to the Cotton Bottom a couple years ago when I was home for my sister Jamie's bridesmaid party. I had their famous garlic burger, so I was quite confident of what the Bubby's waitress confirmed: the chef had lived in Utah or skied in Utah or something, and this $15 burger was in fact modeled after that of my hometown dive bar. Little did I expect that this, of all obscure and random things would make it to the big city. Take heart, Westerners. If the Cotton Bottom can make it in this town, anything is possible.

p.s. HogiYogi: if you've been thinking about expanding to Manhattan, now is your chance!!!

bored of my brain

Sometimes I get bored of my brain. Not bored out of my brain--although sometimes that happens, too--but, I mean I get bored of being in my head with my same old ideas, worldviews, thought patterns, etc. One of the things I like best about teaching is I get to see the workings of other brains, on paper, a couple times a week.

My best students are often not humanities or English majors, like you might expect, but science students. There are a bunch of engineering kids who have to take my writing class and they inevitably think they will hate it, and wonder why the eff do they have to take it when all they're going to do with their lives is design geodesic domes and map the human genome--or whatever it is they learn to do in those science classes.

Anyway, the science kids think differently, and I love their approach to problem-solving and structure and ways to use words and, well, I love to see the way their little brains work. On the last day of class one of these engineering students, who we will call Chen, brought in this sort-of prose poem, an ode to U Writing, made up of his Facebook statuses over the course of the semester.

U Writing Related/Inspired Facebook Statuses:

Chen-Chen's way to type 300 words: write 3,000, then cut out 2,700 words.

Chen-writing when God sleeps. 7 am.

Chen-ambition will kill me soon.

Chen-it did.

Chen-wow, I'm done with U Writing for 2 minutes?

Chen-thoughts of UW creep in...creep Chen out...creep out.

Chen-life has a lot of doing that does nothing...wrote two pages i had to completely delete...full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Chen-verisimilitude of being.

Chen-the king of thwarted time.

Chen-is shocked at minimalism...aka, shocked at myself.

Chen-high from insanity.

Chen-I BLEED SLEEP

Chen-I DON'T BLEED BLOOD, I BLEED CAFFEINE

Chen-lost in the maelstroms of the mind.

Chen-genius lacks cultural precedence.

Chen-thinking deep thoughts with a shallow mind.

Chen-400 standard deviations below myself.

Chen-has IQ(-1) after -100 hours of sleep.

Chen-ode to the essay: Oh cursed be the spite-that I was ever born to set you right.

Chen-senseless all-nighter number infinity.

Chen-sleeplessly.

Chen-uni writing existentialism.


I probably wouldn't have liked this list so much except I knew how much he started to like writing, and the amazing, sometimes oddball connections he could make in his essays. In one piece he successfully linked the wilderness vs. civilization debate to the black widow living behind his bookshelf to Huck Finn to the Ford on cinderblocks on his neighbor's lawn.

I also like this little list because it's emblematic of his unusual way of doing things, but at the same time reveals the same frustrations that I, myself, often have with writing. These could have been my writing Facebook statuses. In class we often talk about what makes writing so hard is that it's a massive act of translation--an attempt to encapsulate the context, logic, memory, etc. in your own brain in a way that makes sense to another brain.

This prose poem reminded me of what's so great about writing in general: it provides us with the comfort of knowing that we don't all think alike, and at the same time, it provides us with the comfort of knowing that our experience is not vastly different.

alone in xanadu

I am homesick this week. This is the time of year when school is out, and I usually flee back to the West, back home, back to family, just in time for the yellow wildflowers to bloom on the mountainside, just in time for backyard barbecues, just in time to drive around town in my mother's convertible, just in time to stay up all night laughing, eating too much junk food and watching worthless television.

But here I am, still in the city. And to make matters worse, everyone else in my family is home, barbecuing and convertibling and eating too much cake without me. It's times like this I most keenly feel how far I've strayed from home, how I chose somehow to live in a city that has no kin or bloodtie for me. I feel maybe a bit like Joan Didion did when she wrote this perfect essay about being a young woman of the West who found herself living in New York City:

From Goodbye to All That

You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May. For that reason I was most comfortable with the company of Southerners. They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some indefinitely extended leave from wherever they belonged, disciplined to consider the future, temporary exiles who always knew when the flights left for New Orleans or Memphis or Richmond or, in my case, California. Someone who lives with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar. Christmas, for example, was a difficult season. Other people could take it in stride, going to Stowe or going abroad or going for the day to their mothers’ places in Connecticut; those of us who believed that we lived somewhere else would spend it making and canceling airline reservations, waiting for weatherbound flights as if for the last plane out of Lisbon in 1940, and finally comforting one another, those of us who were left, with oranges and mementos and smoked-oyster stuffings of childhood, gathering close, colonials in a far country.

Which is precisely what we were. I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live, But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu.

The first time I read this essay, this last part struck me as particularly true. I don't know that my friends who grew up here can ever quite have the same moment, on the way home from shopping for socks or getting a haircut, when they look up and catch a glimpse of Times Square or the Chrysler Building, and think, My goodness! I live here. I live right here in the Center of It All. I am trying to enjoy these charms of the city to cheer myself.

dirty thirty

My friend is coming up to the city tomorrow for her birthday. What would you do if you were coming to New York City for your 30th?

ps. She's been to New York several times before.

photo courtesy of someone named Pancake's myspace page

happiest meal

My favorite thing about my old neighborhood in Harlem was the McDonald's, which had two defining features:

1. A parking lot (where do you see a parking lot in Manhattan?)

2. A walk-up Window. Yes, WALK-up.

It had a drive-up window too, but like most New Yorkers (except for cabbies), I have no car. So, the drive-up had no appeal for me. Actually, it had some appeal for me around 11:30 pm. when I'd get a hankering for a twisty cone. But McDonald's is closed after 10 p.m except for the drive-up window. No car, no drive-up, no twisty cone. (You cannot walk through the drive-up, yes I asked.)

Enter McDonald's greatest invention since special sauce: The late-night walk-up window. It's a tiny box, sort of like the kind they have at gas stations where it's just a dude behind a thick shield of plastic and you have to slide your cash under the window. But instead of old candy bars and chew, you can get a quarter-pounder.

You can imagine my delight when I saw that the McDonald's on my block just added a walk-up window a couple weeks ago. I'll admit, probably the only reason I would go to McDonald's is because I think the walk-up window is so genius. Late night twisty cones, here I come.