April 29, 2008...5:30 pm
Social tales
Thursday
Had dinner with one of the writers from the Sunday writing group. We stayed till closing time. She is so lovely and positive. I’m a little in love, and I told her so.
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Friday
10:15 a.m.: Cried at desk after reading news headlines. My boss was not surprised at all. I am embarrassed to say that I was.
3:00 p.m.: Snuck out of the office to have dessert with my cousin. Met the pastry chef who worked at the dessert spot. He’s a wise-ass. By four p.m., slunk guiltily back to work, with cousin in tow. She sat in my guest chair for a while, not knowing what to do with the rest of her afternoon.
10:30 p.m.: Met with G and her out-of-town guests at a restaurant, two of them Chinese poets, another a translator of Chinese poetry, and the other a student of acupuncture. One of the Chinese poets did not speak English, and I did my best to be clear during our conversation. He called G a mei nu zuo jia—a beautiful woman writer. The translator teasingly translated the phrase as “chick-lit writer,” but I admonished him and gave G the correct translation. Then the poet invited me to visit him in Chengdu, where his tribe lives and which is near my father’s province. I vowed to the poet that I would go see him next year, and hopefully on a trip with my parents.
11:30 p.m.: A package awaited me at home. A friend had sent me one of those diaries with a lock on it. I’d owned two such diaries from elementary school and middle school, when I grew frustrated with and jealous of my brilliant best friend and was obsessed with boys and my wardrobe. These diaries are stashed away somewhere in my closet, and when I’m ready to clean out that closet I’ll reread them and have a good laugh. They’ll be both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I still have my quirks and social anxieties, but I’ve come to accept them more or less, and any bad feeling toward anybody is tempered with a mild amusement at my own sense of drama and self-importance. If there’s a particularly good entry, I’ll copy it into this space. My friend’s note in the package read: I have a challenge for you. Write down the secrets of a character, and by the end of the summer you’ll have a whole novel! Make the secrets as intimate and insane as possible. Ah! My “character”’s first thoughts about keeping a diary were:
- “I want to kill my parents.”
- “I want to kill my best friend.”
- “I want to kill myself.”
followed by:
- “Must ask everybody’s permission first, of course. And if the answer is no, then long dialogues with each about why, though dialogue with self must necessarily be the shortest.”
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Saturday
11:00 a.m.: Had lunch at La Bonbonniere on Eighth Avenue. Ordered my favorite: the famous challah French toast (three thick slices) and one pancake. Sat at the counter and watched the owners squabble as they made omelet after omelet, pancake after pancake, sandwich after sandwich. Somebody two seats down shook his head at me and said, “They’re such lovers, aren’t they?”
12:00 p.m.: Went to a café for coffee and writing. Hardly wrote. Well, did write, but saw that the piece I was readying for my writing group made no sense whatsoever. None. There had been a good opening paragraph a week ago, then I butchered it into something else, and now I’m trying to remember the germ of that first version. But at the café, got nowhere, so discarded it for the time being. Then saw somebody working with a red pencil and the Chicago Manual of Style at hand, so went up to him to ask if he was a proofreader and if he’d like my press to try him out. Hell yes, he said.
2:00 p.m.: Wandered over to the Eighth Avenue street fair, where a friend was giving a dance class demonstration for a gym promotion, and his pals, both dancers and nondancers like moi, agreed to back him up. I am not a performer—I find that I can “shine” only in a very specific mind frame—but I did love the hilarity and the public spectacle of it, and so I wound up dancing through the next two dance demonstrations as well.
6:30 p.m.: Met up with my nephew, T, for a babysitting stint. He took me to a ramen spot on Third Avenue. He kept spinning in his seat. The lady who sat beside him asked the waiter, “Do you have any forks?” T said to me, “They’re going to make a lot of money tonight because we’re here, plus the lady with her three children—why does she have so many children?—plus there’s that couple over there, plus that man over there, plus the couple who were here before us . . .” When we got back to his apartment, we watched a Scooby Doo movie in which Cass Elliott made a guest appearance. There were many jokes about her weight, and the plot made no sense. I grew drowsy on the couch. T and I had shared a whole box of Skittles gum, and my wad of gum was melting in my mouth. During the bedtime ritual T did not ask this time if I wanted to see his privates. Instead: “Want to see my underwear?” He was proud of his Gap underwear. Then he said, “Okay, you can turn away now, because I’m going to change.”
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Sunday
12:30 p.m.: Had yummy muffins and coffee at Café Grumpy with J. We sat on a bench outside. My foul mood from earlier that morning finally dissipated. There are bursts of anger that can’t be dislodged no matter how hard I try to calm myself. Since January or so (actually, I think this started sometime last year), these bursts have been infrequent. But when they happen, it’s very hard to surface from them. I feel this is a failure of my willpower, of my rationale. Then the anger pops like a balloon when J makes one of his zinger jokes, as only he can. When I hear myself crack up, I know I am cured for the time being. It helps, too, when I’m munching on a mango-blueberry muffin.
3:30 p.m.: Went to dance class. After my half of the class performed for the other half, a woman ran over to me to give me a high-five and then a big hug. I hadn’t recognized myself in the routine, and was startled that somebody had seen that something else as well. I thanked her. I think I stand out only because I’m dancing in a style I’d learned from other racier classes; this particularly group is trained in jazz, so they’re technically proficient but don’t quite, ah, “bring the funky,” as the instructor constantly demands of us. Afterward, while I was stretching on the mats outside the dance studio, a kickboxing trainer complimented me on the dancing. He offered to give me a free private kickboxing lesson. I thought about the kickboxing retreat J and I had been talking about. Then the trainer gave me his phone number and e-mail address. He said he was going to China in August. Something about the Olympics. “Wow,” I said, “will you be on TV?” He sniffed: “I’m always on TV. But I’m fifty, I have to retire next year. I’ve been doing this for all my life, and I’ve won everything there is to win. I have twelve championships in all.” Later in the conversation, he said he was forty-five, and I knew for sure that I wouldn’t be calling him for a private lesson.
6:00 p.m.: Had a crepe from Shade to Go, then had tea at Tea Spot, then—finally—went into the IFC Center to stand in line for Up the Yangtze, for which I’d been waiting to come to New York since I’d first heard of Still Life. The film was so beautiful. I wasn’t too keen on the voiceover or the introductory piece of traditional music at first, but soon settled into the rhythm of the movie and was entranced. Beside me sat a white man I’d met in line in the lobby. He peppered his speech with Chinese phrases, which unnerved me partly because his Chinese was so good—much better than mine, and the musical tones mastered in only three years—and partly because I don’t tend to pepper my speech with Chinese unless absolutely necessary, like with my family or if I were in Taiwan (though more accurately: with family, my Chinese is peppered, liberally, with English). But to be spoken to as if I were from China, when I’d made it clear I was born in New York (somewhere on 31st Street), felt a little strange. I’m used to watching those fluent in Chinese to speak to one another with this easy back-and-forth vocabulary—that’s what I’d witnessed Friday evening with the Chinese translator, it’s what I witness indeed with those confident in their Chinese, like with my sister and our parents—and I always see these people as if they’re part of their own club while I’m outside watching them through a window. I’m not pressing my nose to the glass, though, no; instead, I’m glad simply to be a witness, to watch for those gestures and words that are familiar to my eye and ear, and to recognize that there’s a part of me in both worlds. This is how I grew up in my household. But on Sunday I was jolted by the stranger’s insistence that I was indeed part of the club; my Chinese was serviceable, and he seemed to understand me and I him more or less. He did have to translate “e-mail” to me at one point, however—busted.
10:30 p.m.: J showed me the new addition to our little family—Josephine the mouse. Last week he’d asked me, “Which name do you prefer, Josephine or Emily?” As I’m partial to “J” names for some reason, I chose Josephine. Then I asked him what the name was for. He said I’d find out soon enough, but here was a hint in the meantime: Kafka.
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Next Weekend
Saturday: Going to a friend’s housewarming. This is the friend I hadn’t seen in ages, and he showed up one evening out of the blue a few weeks ago and I did indeed give him the big hug. Then will be heading to Flushing, where my family and I will celebrate my father’s seventy-seventh birthday.
Sunday: Meeting writing group, then off to see G. S and I plan to bring her shark’s fin soup. G’s health is getting worse, and her spirit is down. I’d sent an SOS to S sometime ago, and he suggested shark’s fin soup, and I said, “You are brilliant.”
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Am recalling all this good stuff because I’m rather out of it at the moment because of premenstrual wave that hit all of a sudden. It’s been somewhat alleviated by four Tylenols and a bowl of pesto pasta, but in general, am feeling very fuzzy-minded and sore in the arms. My needing to sleep last night at 10:30 p.m. now makes sense. Josephine’s exercise wheel jolted me awake at two in the morning, though; the first night it sounded like Aphex Twin, something J used to put on for us before bed, but last night the squeaking wheel sounded more like a rusty weather vane atop a deserted farmhouse. The calm before the storm, or something.
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