Death in 140 Characters

Eric: oh god, i did it.

Eric: i have a twitter.

Me: what is your first tweet going to be?!

Eric: "this is my first tweet, @america"

Eric: or #america?

Eric: how does this work?

Eric: IS IT AN AT OR A HASHTAG

Eric: [has mental breakdown]

The Things She Did With That Broom!

Abbey: literally stuck in a conversation with people seriously discussing 401ks. i just laughed at a 401k joke i didn't understand!

Me: get out of there and come to musical monday. a tranny just nailed 'defying gravity'.

I Blame Disney

Sometimes, when a date is going well, I do a terrible thing where I envision the other person and myself in situations in the distant and sometimes not-so-distant future, like taking him to a co-worker's housewarming party that I don't want to go to by myself but also don't want to subject any friends that I actually care about to. Or taking him to a friend's wedding. Maybe you do this, too. I am going to suggest a new plan of action for both of us and that plan of action is: stop. Things can change a lot in a week, things can change a lot in a day, and, truth be told, that loser probably wouldn't even sing along and dance to Shout! with you anyway and what good is that?

Daddy Issues

I try to make myself inapproachable on the train. I put my head down and read a book or the New Yorker [address label removed] and keep my earbuds in and turn them off. Or keep them on and lose the book, making sure the music is playing at a volume that will not bleed out into the car because, for some inexplicable reason, I am physically unable to skip over that Taylor Swift song and really like Rockapella's rendition of Canon in D. I am not sure how either of these songs got on my iPod, but they are there and they aren't going anywhere.

I do this, put up my New Yorker wall, because the first week I was here, I didn't. I was riding the train to the park to journal and be around people and try to figure out why the guy I was dating at the time was all of a sudden having "phone trouble" whenever I wanted to talk and to figure out where all of my money went. This is when a homeless man touched my face. He just grabbed it, after asking me numerous times whether I thought he should shave his beard or leave it. And when I finally responded, staring straight ahead, that he should keep it, worried that if I encouraged him to shave, he would whip out a razor right then and there and take it to my ear or throat, he grabbed my face and asked me didn't anyone ever teach me to look at someone when speaking to them? This was with the hand that he had just been twirling in the beard in question. My earbuds have been in ever since.

They were in on the day when a very Park Slope-y couple got on the train with their Trader Joe's bags and running stroller and sat down next to me and I felt something on my leg. I looked down and it was a baby hand, straining and reaching and landing on my leg. The hand was attached to a baby body and a baby face and it was baby smiling at me. I like babies, I am not one of those people who try to amp up their street cred by saying how much they hate kids. I like kids. I don't know how to talk to them, I talk to them like they are little adults and, shockingly, most babies don't care about the documentary I watched on my friend's Netflix Instant Queue last night, but I do, as a general rule, like them. The mother began to apologize like mad and I told her it was fine, because it was. The dad stayed quiet. He looked like one of those hipsterguys who just cannot be bothered to talk unless it is over some pretentious cocktail or imported beer and only then if it is about the new "sound" of so-and-so's album [IT SOUNDS LIKE MUSIC!] or the aesthetics of post-modernist anti-transcendentalist screen printing shit. We got to talking and the baby kept reaching for me, smiling, grabbing my leg. It is exactly the way you want a first date to go and exactly the way you don't want a train ride to go.

This conversation ended with the mother asking me if I ever babysat, presumably so that she and her husband could go to some vegan independent press book release party, and I said ... uh, yes, because I am poor and have managed to make it twenty three years without killing any humans yet. She asked me for my number and I gave it to her. I have not heard from them and secretly hope not to.

I was my telling my friend Carrie this, as we were riding the train to the Brooklyn Flea, which I like but can be oppressive with the amount of people who would have lots of things to talk about with the Park Slope husband. Once we got there, I was crouched down on the floor, admiring a pair of boots that 1) would never in a million years fit me, and 2) if they did, would probably cost as much as I spend on groceries in any given month, when I felt a familiar weight on my shoulder. It felt like a baby hand.

This time the baby hand was accompanied by a baby voice and it said: DADA!

I turned around and even after the kid saw my face he kept lurching at me, asking to be picked up. His mother, to her credit, followed closely behind saying "no no no no," and apologizing and telling me that I looked like her husband from behind, which I am still not entirely sure how to take.

And now, on the subway yesterday, a kid ran across the car calling out the familiar DADA and lunging straight for me. It is like there is a magnet or something, drawing these kids in my direction. I don't feel old enough to be a dad, but if there's one thing I've learned from 16 and Pregnant, it's that that feeling is wrong. Guys my age could, technically, have kids entering middle school. I still feel terribly young, still get offended when the spindly salesgay at Uniqlo calls me sir [moreso because I don't believe that anyone shopping at Uniqlo deserves to be referred to as an adult].

I want kids. Someday. In the very future tense. Abbey's brother is having a baby and already talks to his wife's stomach asking the baby for confirmation that he or she hates Obama. Abbey said she wants to take the baby aside, early, and let him or her know that he or she is loved and that they can be whoever they want to be and do what they want to do even if that means smoke a little pot and not vote Republican all the time. She wants to tell them that it is okay if they don't want to wear a dress or if they don't want to wear pants and that it is okay for them to love whoever they love. She wants to let them know that it will all be okay. I want my future kids to know the same things and also, to know that I will understand if they run across trains or reach out there hands to strange men and say DADA as long as, at the end of the day, they know who their real dad is.

Abbey's Reaction to YOUTH IN REVOLT

"Michael Cera needs to stop losing his virginity"

Forgetting and Remembering

My friend forgot how old she was.

I was not there, so maybe parts of the story are wrong, but I know that the part about her forgetting her age is not. There was a time when it seemed like we knew everyone that the other knew, but we live further away now and a friend of hers I have never met was telling her about a boy she had never met, but that this friend thought she should meet. And, using the theory of relativity [well, a theory of relativity], instead of telling her how old he was, said, "He's four years older than you." And she said, "Oh! So, 26?" My friend is 24. Making this boy 28. And she is bad at math but not that bad. She told me this with lots of exclamation points and can-you-believe-thats, how she really thought that she was still 22. Sometimes she feels younger. Sometimes I do, too.

I have been forgetting things lately. Mostly unimportant things: names of old professors, plots of books I didn't really connect with, TV shows from youth. When I was little I prided myself on remembering things and the idea that I would never stop remembering things. Life, then, felt not-so-long and not-so-expansive and there was a time when I truly believed that, if pressed, I could name from memory every person I had ever met. More recently, I believed that I could name every person in my graduating class. I would tell people this, anecdotal evidence of the small place I'm coming from, but it was true. This was years ago, when I was 18 and new to college but had never felt further from high school. Saying those names then would have felt like a memorial service. Now, I would have to read the names from a paper someone would have had to provide for me and I fear it might feel like a seance.

I guess what I'm saying is that some things fade.

There is a girl at work I don't know very well. On my first day, I was warned about her, told to stay away and that she was crazy and that if you gave her anything, conversationally, to latch onto she would cling to it with sharp nails and drag you to her choir concerts and knitting circle and did you really want that? I thought this was unfair. She had smiled and greeted me just as warmly and generically and with claws hidden as everyone else. But I'm not much for knitting. So I avoided her. And, in the meantime, I have come to realize that we would probably not be friends in real life. But that doesn't mean that would be true for everyone.

Regardless, this is a girl who remembers things. Recently, she posted on our virtual staff sign-in board that it was six years to the day that she had first stepped foot into the Mediterranean Sea! Another co-worker and I rolled our eyes at this and I said , my god, I can't even remember when I lost my virginity.

It was just something to say, but it was also true, for a second. And then the memory flared up again, like the middle of a fireworks show and there we were. To be fair, I have an aid in remembrance in that it happened on September 11th. Not in 2001, but you still remember something like that. When I tell the story I throw in a line about two national disasters in a single day. A particularly crass friend made a comment about twin towers.

I didn't know him very well. I only knew his major because he took classes with some of my friends. I didn't have his phone number. "This was not the way it was supposed to happen," is hackneyed, but is also usually true. People who don't say that just haven't been dumped by that person yet or haven't really lost their virginity.

But listen, I didn't know his vitals or his five year plan or anything, but - and this may sound ridiculous, but - I didn't want to. All I knew was that he was drunk and I was drunk and I wanted to and that he wanted to. And when you're 19 years old and it still hasn't happened for you and you are starting to think, honestly, that it never will and that you certainly aren't going to get any more desirable from here on out and you truly believe that you will die and in the autopsy they will be able to tell that you never had sex because you saw a Law and Order once, accidentally, where that happened and that the coroner or whoever does the autopsy will be too busy laughing that they forget to find out the real, actual cause of death [which is not virginity!] and your family will never find out and it will severely impede the grieving process, well, mutual desire is enough.

It was bad and it was short and there was no lube and I think we both got hurt. I did. I walked back across the quad. Because, of course he lived across the quad. They always live across the quad. And it was late. And I called my friends, those who had been at the party with us and those who I had known from high school, and no one was up. Except, finally, Milena. We hadn't spoken in awhile, but she let me talk and then cry and then cry harder when I discovered that my polo shirt [my god, I was nineteen] was inside out. At that point, such a small and unimportant thing had the power to absolutely shatter me.

I didn't know at that time that I would go a little crazy with the hooking up that year and that it would get a little dangerous and that I would finally have to impose a year of celibacy, for my sanity and for my self-respect. I didn't know that someday I would get good at it, the whole sex thing. Better, at least. I didn't know that it would not always hurt so much and that it, actually, is better if you know him very well, if you have his phone number. Well, not better, but certainly not the same. I didn't know that I would forget the things we talked about before and after. I didn't know that I would forget all details of the story that I haven't already included here.

Things have been happening around here lately. They feel very important, most of them, and heavy. They feel like things I will remember for awhile, or at least not forget. But I think it's healthy to keep into perspective that things fade. Some of these things will certainly fall away - those that are not necessary, are not really big-picture important, along with weak plots, unimpressive professors, your age. And some of them won't. They will crop up again, years later, as vivid as that day you walked into the Mediterranean for the first time.

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