Prove it all night

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to try and shave 2 minutes off my mile run. We never had anything like the Presidential Fitness Challenge at my school growing up, and I feel horribly robbed of an opportunity to commiserate with kids all across the country. All I remember about middle school gym was the archery unit, which strangely, our teachers opted to hold inside the gym rather than on the sprawling outdoor field next to it. Am I the only one who thinks that sounds like a safety hazard? The point is, while I may run a shitty mile, I could maybe take out a dangerous criminal if they were at very close range and happened to be robbing the bow and arrow store where I’d dipped in to use the bathroom.
So even though shaving off this time was my idea, I’m finding the process miserable. I don’t practice by myself, so the only time I actually run the mile for time’s sake is at the twice a week sessions I have with a personal trainer. I show up, bloated and a little nauseated from the 20 oz bag of M&M’s I’ve been meticulously disarming at work, and I think back to the last session and how bad I felt while I was running. And all I can think is, well, Hallie, you’ve got to beat that time today, so however bad last session felt? This is going to be WAY worse.
My complaints run a cycle you could set your archery schedule to. About a 1/4 of a mile in (on the treadmill of course), I tell my trainer “I’m so hot. Can you please turn on the fan?” A 1/3 of the mile, there’s an edge of desperation in my voice when I tell him, “You have to talk to me. You can’t just stand there.” By 2/3s in, it’s, “I really don’t (gasp) feel well! I’m going to (gasp) puke!” Then I start thinking,, I’m not going to puke. I’m going to shit my pants all over this treadmill, and then slip in my own waste and go hurdling into the dumbbells, which will find some way to knock out my front teeth. See, Hallie? This is why you don’t spend 5 years living in a city without nailing down a fucking dentist! And where are you going to get the milk you’re supposed to use to soak the teeth the dumbbells just knocked out on the way to the dentist you don’t have?!
At this point in my hysteria, I’ve only got a 1/10 of a mile left, and my trainer has put the speed so high that my brain shorts out like an old appliance. My legs feel like they don’t belong to me.
This is the hard part about having goals. Reaching each week’s milestone doesn’t make me feel strong. It only highlights the gurgling stomach and the burning legs that say, “This wasn’t easy! Remember how ugly it could have turned out?!” And present week’s self looks back at last week’s scoffing, “wow, you thought that was hard? Pathetic.” And then I peer down a tunnel of training sessions, and I want to yell at the external force driving me to do this, “When is it enough?! When will I be fast enough for you to leave me alone and let me enjoy my workout mix without constantly cranking up the speed?”
Of course, there is no external force. The external force is me. And the answer is 2 minutes, 2 minutes is enough because that’s what you set out to do. And when you get there, you can jog in peace, and maybe channel some of that residual angst toward that “reviving the old blog” goal you set. But for today, be a writer who can run a 7:30 mile. For today, that is quite enough.

My city of ruins

CARD # 2: FIND THE NEED

Epel says, "It is important to identify your own needs as a writer so that the writing process can serve a deep purpose inside you."

In the house where I grew up, we were encased. Our hedge was so tall that I had to use a step-ladder to trim its tops. That was my job, taking care of the yard. My father pawned it off on me when he got sick of paying Than, the lawn care “freelancer” who rang our doorbell when it snowed or the grass got patchy.

In the winter when we had snow days, my brother and I built forts, one on either side of the yard, and spent the day in unsupervised combat. There were no time outs. We threw icy snowballs. Cars inching along our side street so as not to skid got the ones we didn’t dare throw at each other.

One spring, we tried to plant a paltry cherry tree in the middle of the yard. A cousin mistook it for a stick and ripped it right out of the ground. We tried to plant a sunflower next to the hedge, but it got no sun.

Inside the yard, little girls and I (a little girl too) popped snails and ruined anthills. So many bugs displaced at our hands! We mashed my father’s irises into love potions. One of the rougher neighborhood girls taught me to write “FUCK YOU” in chalk on the sidewalk. My mother caught us and made me scrub it off alone with dish soap, while my accomplice wandered home without punishment. In winter, we covered the hedge in white lights.

When I was 21, my parents tried to cart my sister off to jail. Before the police arrived, she walked right out the front door. There in the yard, my father reached out to stop her. Hold on to her. She bit him. Like wild animals do.

By the time I got home, there were squad cars parked on the street. Front gate hanging half open, like a loose tooth. Neighbors with strollers craning their necks for a better look as they passed. So this is what we must have looked like from the outside.

I am terrible at small talk. It strikes me a trait women should be able to maneuver. When a new person talks to me I am so nervous my listening skills dissolve. I am thinking, what can I say next to endear this person to me, entice them into friendship? But how can one possibly know another, when they are too anxious over being liked to tune into the other’s frequency?

There are a few people I telephone. My brother, my mother. Rarely my father, who is just deaf enough to get irritable when he can’t see your lips moving. The thought of phoning others strikes me as exhausting.

We sold the house, to a family who didn’t move in right away. They left the Christmas lights up through June, didn’t cut the grass. Started to paint the window trim, changed their minds. No matter where I am, I often get the feeling that I am standing in the dark, pressing my nose to someone else’s window.

The rising

In an effort to resuscitate this blog, I’m putting on display my newest writing project, a series of exercises from Naomi Epel’s “Observation Deck.” Tonight I drew my first card (meant to “jump start creativity,”) this is what it prompted:

Card #1: ACT SUCCESSFUL –
Epel says, “Imagine a future in which you have become the writer you always wanted to be. You are living the way you want to live in a place filled with things that you love. Let this future reassure the present that everything will work out.”

Welcome to my apartment! Come in! That? Up there? That’s the roof garden. I’m a real green thumb. My herbs have made it through several rainstorms. Of course I use those planters with holes in the bottom. What kind of a monster would overlook a plant’s basic need for circulation? All my planters are incredibly breathable. And those are brussels sprouts. Yes, they’re very hard to grow.

Would you like a drink? I wouldn’t mind one. It’s nice to let down your hair once in a while. As responsible mothers, how often do we get the chance? Isn’t being a mother fulfilling? Especially because we are so damn good at it.

I keep the scotch in that globe over there. Yes, it opens into a bar! Several times when I was younger, I tried to learn about scotch, and always forgot everything I was taught the second after I learned it. I nearly gave up. Then one day, I thought, maybe I’ll give it one more shot, and you wouldn’t believe it but these days I’m known as New York’s premier scotch connoisseur. The whole experience encouraged me to challenge what I believed to be my limits.

Oh, thank you. You look wonderful too. During my pregnancy, I was diligent about my pre-natal yoga. Yoga really relaxes me. Helps me sleep. No, I don’t have those sleeping problems anymore.

Yes, I still keep in touch with her. Her too. I’m lucky that way, to have kept so many people I love close to me.

These are my books, I feel silly showing them to you. You don’t think it’s impolite, do you? I just hoped you genuinely wanted to see them. Short stories, about strong women. They sound silly when I describe them that way.

I used to think I was meant to be an unhappy person. It was probably because of my age. Mid-twenties. Maybe everyone feels unhappy at that age and just doesn’t talk about it. I thought a light inside me had burned out, like I was some broken refrigerator and all my insides were rotting in the still, stinky air trapped behind the door. I used to have a lot of boyfriends, and they would say “Tell me what you’re thinking! Why don’t you talk to me?!” But I’d be afraid, that everything inside me had turned, had curdled, they they’d be disgusted if I opened up.

And then one day, I didn’t have anymore boyfriends. And I thought, the only company I have is broken down old Me. So I just had to get over it. Because really, hating yourself is just a way of freezing time, of not taking care of what needs to happen next. I wanted to be made of wax. To stand outside myself rattling off judgments: Her arms are too skinny! Her waist is too thick! She is too quiet, too mean, too young for that gray streak on the right side of her hairline.

Let me pour you that drink. I would apologize for digressing, but I don't feel comfortable being sorry about something so trivial.

At first, I had to keep moving. I had to make the bed and wash the dishes and sweep the floor even if I’d swept it yesterday and hadn’t walked across it to track any dirt in since. It was important not to pause, because in pausing I might remind myself: you are terribly lonely. And a thought like that could discourage a girl from sweeping the floor, because maybe she thinks that dirt is her only company.

Is that drink too strong? Oops! I should have added water. You'd think I was an amateur.

That loneliness, it goes away! Not until much later of course. But at a point, you just get tired of moving so fast all the time. And so little by little, you slow down. And then one day, you rest. And in resting you suddenly realize, you’re able to sit with yourself.

My best was never good enough

When you no longer care about the Grammys, you’ve lost your capacity for joy.
You feel wronged? I understand that. Outraged. I sympathize. But those are all feelings, and to have them is thrilling in itself. At least your little heart is pounding.
P!nk hung from the roof of the Staples Center by a ribbon, people. She twirled, dunked, and in spite of it all, belted not one single breathless phrase. Do you know what kind of endurance that takes? What kind of dedication to your craft? And yet today, I faced this curmudgeon talking point: “Why do we need our singers to act like the friggin Cirque du Soleil?”
Of course we don’t need them to, and yet, to our overwhelming good fortune, they can. Doesn’t that put in perspective the pool of talent from which we pluck our pop artists? It is a vaudeville ocean into which we get to cast our nets, distractedly, lazily, only to wrastle up Gagas and Beyonces and even the rarest of P!nk fish. How fortunate are we.
So let’s just run our fingers over the texture of the matter. These greats are on the menu! Can we take a moment to be thankful for swinging a reservation?
Now, seriously, fuck Taylor Swift. I was sympathetic when Kanye embarrassed the trembling little thing at the VMAs. I thought, poor kid. Give her one of those popcorn statues to jazz up her horseback ribbon shelf. But where was Kanye last night after Beyonce busted her ass through an outrageous “If I were a Boy”/”You Oughta Know” medley only to concede album of the year to Fearless? I’m sorry, what exactly makes you fearless? Was it dancing so “silly” in your “You Belong to Me” video with those “dorky” Sally Jessie Raphael glasses? I’m not trying to be cruel. But, Taylor, sweet, young Taylor. You know that Stevie Nicks used to get coke blown up her ass by a midget, right? Bitch used to have some street cred. And you’ve got her singing back up for your song about nerd pining? Why do I feel like last night was only more than a fairytale for one of you?
I’ll just say one more thing, because it must be said. Yes, Gaga was robbed. But two strong points (I can say that because they were made by my boyfriend, not me.) One, making the people sitting behind her negotiate that hat was not good Grammy karma. Two, it should have been Gaga’s year, she played her little butt off on that scorched piano, but it just wasn’t. And good that it wasn’t. It’ll keep her hungry.

Born to read

Early on in college, I dated a guy whose body odor bore an uncanny resemblance to cat urine. Smells aside, he was a wonderful boy. But I remember suggesting that maybe he shouldn’t ride his bike around so much, as bikes lead to sweat and sweat led to a vivid sense-memory of the corner in my basement where Muffin used to mark her territory. (Do cats mark their territory?)

“Isn’t it so cool though,” He responded thoughtfully, “To think of your body as its own little motor? To think that I’m getting around everywhere powered by my very own energy?”

Oh smelly thing, your passing poetry shook me out of my slumber! And a decade later, tearing up at the last paragraphs of Born to Run by Christopher MacDougall, I felt it again. (The book's title doesn't hurt.)

Why didn’t I read this book for the marathon? Just imagining the Tarahumara, a group of super-human runners indigenous to Mexico’s Copper Canyon, gliding over parched Chihuahua terrain would have gotten my feet moving way faster than writing my name on my shirt. Once puny school boys become ultra-marathon champions. Girls school boys on 150 miles runs with Mountain Dew and Pizza to fuel their tanks.

The booked also marked my first attempt to solicit Facebook friendship from a stranger. Jenn Sheldon, if you’re reading, I probably don’t seem any less lame, do I? I guess a blogpost doesn’t get you much closer to a person than a status update. Oh well, keep pounding that pavement, baby!

P!nk: just like a (happy) pill

I hope you guys know, I mean I hope you REALLY know, P!nk’s not like those other girls. She’s told you so, (see “Hazard to Myself” verse three: “tired of being compared to damn Britney Spears. She’s so pretty, that just ain’t me.”) But if I may, I like to fancy myself a bit of an emotional barometer for pop cultural icons. My reactions to those who parade about the top 100 are rapt and sincere. So for the week at least, P!nk is my “it” girl.
I lay in bed on Sunday evening with the TV on, thinking I was staring down the glowing embers of a weekend. I’d hosted a house party, unclogged my drain, called the super to repair my busted fridge. What else was there for me? I thought, until P!nk’s “Behind the Music” burrowed through the haze of my nappiness.
She rescued Linda Perry from has-been obscurity! She shirked gender norms and proposed to her husband! She can do aerial ballet, and that’s really hard. I once saw a woman fall from her ribbons in the middle of a Cirque Du Soleil show.
Sure, there are plenty of teenage girls whose teachers slip them copies of The Bell Jar, who discover Ani di Franco by tuning in to their town’s college radio station. But the girls who don’t scratch beyond the surface of Mix 107.5 deserve strong female role models too. Sunday night, I watched a woman grapple with the professional goals, romantic turbulence, jealousy, neediness, and the human spirit triumphed! No fame bullshit. No agenda. She didn’t smash one reporter’s car face a single possession charge. She was just a girl tryin’ to make it this world.
Oh P!nk, empowered and vulnerable, career woman and care-giver. This week, in moments of weakness, I shall draw from your strength.

Born to run II

I’ve never been nine months pregnant, but I imagine it feels something like counting down the hours to the New York City Marathon.
You’re not ready! Sure, you read the books, you did the stretching, you ate for two. But somewhere in the dustiest corner of the darkest closet of the smallest apartment in the high rise of your brain, you suspect it isn’t enough. All these months of training, you’ve struggled through the messiest of relationships with your body. Some mornings, the two of you were hands missing the hi-five. Well-rested, properly fueled and loose, your legs seemed to resent your very attachment to them.
What did I do? You wonder.
You know what you did. They’re whispering below the rhythm of your heavier-than-usual STOMP STOMP STOMP.
Other mornings, it’s like your legs sent you flowers, just because.
What did I do? You wonder.
You know what you did! They’re beaming as they pull you along like you’re maneuvering ice instead of the trash and dog poop of a New York City street.
You’ve put your faith in your legs, but let’s face it: your legs are some moody little bitches.
You’re emotional. You’re a grown woman, but you find yourself calling your parents every night, walking them through the details of your smallest new physical sensation. And because they love you, they patiently pretend like they care, offering encouraging questions like “Oh? What part of the heel?”
All this dependency on your parents is stirring up other vintage habits. Admit it, you downloaded Little Earthquakes last night, didn’t you? Now you know, running through tears of nostalgia makes it pretty tough to gasp a proper breath.
You’re exhausted, but you can’t sleep.
You have to pee all the time.
Nobody knows how you feel!
You’re too antsy to keep your mind on one task for too long. But you know this: what you’re about to do is going to be a huge pain-in-the-ass. But when it’s over, you’ll have something to be proud of. Because not everyone can manage what you are your body just pulled off.
So chill out.

http://www.active.com/donate/teamtiara2009/HHaglun

The E Street Shuffle

I’m a white girl, yes. But that fact alone gives you no sense of how uncomfortable I look when I’m dancing. Let’s just take dancing out of the equation for a second. At ease, my posture resembles an overturned folding chair. During parties I have to avoid the front door so people won’t hang their coats over my head. Basically, I wander this world looking like a dying plant.
So you can imagine how a body that wants to collapse into itself doesn’t really “do” dance. But it hasn’t always been that way! When I was fifteen in Argentina, where babies can shake their butts before they wipe them, my girlfriends used to drill me to whatever was on the radio. I can remember stumbling around Jesica Fernandez’ bedroom to “Laura, se te ve la tanga” (“Laura, I can see your thong”), her Hanson and Spice Girls posters flashing their condescending smirks as I struggled.
But I practiced enough to master a kind of exaggerated hip swirl, like I was hula hooping without the hoop. And with that one move in my armory, I could relax enough to show my face at the disco. I stopped responding, “I don’t speak Spanish” when anyone asked me to dance.
Comfort atrophies. It’s been seven years since I left Argentina and I can only really lose it on the dance floor when I’m more than a couple drinks in. Yesterday at the gym, I watched the same episode of “Dance Your Ass Off” twice, (why did Oxygen run the same episode twice in a row?) and somewhere during the second screening I got to envying those fatties. (Awful awful awful. I don’t know why I called them that.) But really! How unburdened these contestants were by the distance between a typical dancer’s bodies and theirs! I watched them, and then I watched them again, flaunting how there was just more of them to shake, more of them to groove. Their dance came from a hot little bulb deep in the heart. Do we all have that bulb? Can I turn it on if I find the switch?
Chubby arms and legs still lurched about my brain as I left work last night. And perhaps that’s why he meant so much to me. Passing the glass-for-walls of the Alvin Ailey Dance Studio on 55th and 9th, I stopped to watch students of an Afro-Brazilian class in full sweat. Young, toned, beautiful black women ducked and stomped powerfully across glossy wood. And among them, there he was. This small Jewish-looking man somewhere over sixty. He work black tights and a black t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He stomped on the wrong beat, thrust his arms left as the rest of the group went right. He furrowed his brow in deep concentration. And when he reached one end of the dance floor, he turned around to do it again.
There’s nothing more stunning than effortless courage.

Remember the time

I am a kid, and my elbows are dirty because all of me is dirty and all of me is dirty because I am a kid! Right now I am in the sunroom leaning over the back of the couch, my brown joints smudging the white windowsill where they rest. I’m looking out at the backyard, which is where I acquire most of my filth.
The backyard is a memorial to the projects my family had only energy enough to begin. There’s the dog run to whose gate we never bothered to close. We dreamed so big for that dog run! Installed an electric wire along the top to keep the dogs from escaping. Planted a grape vine to weave within its chain links. Built a doghouse to replace our puppies’ quantity of space for quality. But the trees blocked the sun the grape vine needed to survive, and the carpet in the doghouse molded once it rained, and one day I grabbed onto the electric wire for no reason and opened my eyes to two concerned dogs trying to lick me back into consciousness.
There’s the pear tree that never grew pears because we didn’t planted another to pollinate it.
There are the thirsty patches of earth we fertilized only once in May to try to coax the grass that once grew back into existence.
That knot of branches was a rose bush my dad bought my mom for their anniversary. Dog pee is not good for rose bushes.
The sunroom is different. If the backyard is a place to transpose ideas into objects (dog runs, pear trees, roses) then the sunroom is where thoughts haven’t developed fingers enough to count as ideas. They are zygotes of ideas. They are dreams.
I want to tell you what I do in the sunroom, because I have never told anyone:
1) I play Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman”. I think I’d like to be a tragic specimen of Americana. I fantasize about the melancholy of feeling close to my trunk.
2) I put on my dad’s oversized earphones and pretend I’m an operator for the Great Western Sugar Company. I tell whoever’s on the line about allowing my children only a deck of cards to play with. I’d wager money on any of them in a hand of gin rummy.
3) I take an egg cup from the kitchen, place it on the windowsill, and pretend I’m a drunk getting loaded at a dive bar. I take deep swigs of the empty egg cup and yell clumsy-tongued, “Hit me another, Skip!”
4) I listen to the “We Are the World” record I plucked from my parents’ collection for its cartoon jacket. It makes me cry.
And so this is why I think of the sunroom. Because when it comes to alumni of those bright afternoons, Michael Jackson was my only surviving companion. Willie Loman drank himself into an early grave. The Great Western Sugar Company went broke in the '80s. And Skip just disappeared. I hope he went back to college. He was so much more than that skeezy windowsill he tended. Oh MJ, whatever you were, you kept me company when I had nothing but the particles of dust caught in sunbeams to stare at. For your companionship, for your moonwalk, for rounding up me, Lionel Richie, Cyndi Lauper, Dionne Warwick, and so many more in the sunroom to feed those hungry Ethiopians, I am grateful.

Hungry heart

This morning I toured the gold vault at the New Federal Reserve. They keep it all in the basement, five levels below the subway. It’s stored in little cells as if it’s being held prisoner in the Mayberry county jail. I don’t know much about the nuances of the federal economy. I really just wanted to hold one of those $300,000-worth-of-gold bricks in my hand. Carolyn, who gave us the tour, pointed out that ever since the gold standard was done away with, gold only retains value based on how beautiful we seem to find it.
And it is beautiful. Since gold is so malleable, the bricks have to be mixed with another precious metal to hold their shape. The gold mixers, (who are they? Do they mix it up in a big vat? Do they wear chef’s hats?) generally use either bronze or silver, so that when you take a few steps back and look at all those chunks piled on top of each other, you can see how their tint varies from red to white, their quality from old to new, all sparkling even though they are kept too far deep in the earth to catch the light of anything.
One brick would change my life! And there are so many down there, over 500,000. Who would know the difference?
When I was little, my dad took my brother and me on a tour of the Denver Mint. In the gift shop afterward, my dad bought us each a coin stamped with the face of our favorite American president. My brother chose Carter. I chose Nixon.
That was right after I’d seen the Anthony Hopkins film about him. I cried so hard when Paul Sorvino, (Kissinger), exclaimed “Think of the greatness this man could have achieved if he had only been loved.”
Who could have loved Nixon enough to free his greatness from its little cage? Could Pat have scrambled his eggs with more tenderness? Could Tricia and Julie have brought him his slippers with more sincerity? No, only Nixon could have loved Nixon enough to achieve the greatness he fell short of. He didn’t, but only he could have.

Meeting across the river

Oh blog, we are truly friends. I know this because I’ve been treating you badly in the same way that I treat other friends badly now and then. For one reason or another, time puts a little distance between us. You are always somewhere upon the desk of my mind, but you’re buried beneath stacks of nonsense labeled URGENT. And the more I avoid you, the more I avoid you. I begin to wonder, what will I say after all this time? My wonderful memories of you are blurred by my own guilt! You become obscured by the silly smog I create by overthinking! Did you know our relationship was undergoing such a climate change? Probably not. I tend to compose these stories in the privacy of my own head. It takes saying them aloud to set them free. And once they’ve trotted off into the wild, you and I can resume the relationship that BOTH of us take part in. Oh blog, will you take me back?
Blog, I’ve been itching for an adventure. It all began a few weeks ago with a trip to Mexico. I know, blog, that should have been adventure enough! But it wasn’t, it was just a little taste. It was long sleepy days next to a pool with piña coladas and the smell of sunscreen and it was nights in the back of a cab trying to string together the Spanish that I promise I could speak once upon a time! The Spanish was a sense memory trigger for the years I spent in South America.
I moved to Formosa, Argentina as a fifteen year old who had never studied Spanish. My host family plucked me from airport, drove me to their home, stuffed my face with milanesa and empanadas, and used the little English they knew to explain to me that the bidet in the bathroom was what “you wash your ass in.” I was tired all the time, but because I was learning all the time. I didn’t have to motivate myself to hunt down extracurriculars. I just had to sit with people and try to piece together what they were saying.
We let a stray dog with mange die in our garage. It took so long, we called her Miseria and left her chicken bones that she could barely chew. We threw rocks at the big round trees lining our block so that bats would scatter like fireworks from their nests inside. The power went out every summer night and we sat on the roof staring at the water tower. I learned how to tolerate dancing till 7am. I learned how to cuss people out in Spanish. I got a really tight pair of jeans. I had lice for a year!
I rode on the back of someone’s motorcycle next to El Rio Paraguayo with the full moon so bright it felt like we were being stagelit. I caught piranhas in that river! I sat at the hospital while my friend’s little body tried to thwart the bus that had run it over. When it couldn’t, I went to my friend’s funeral and felt queasy from its crudity. Her skin puffy, her knuckled clotted with blood, her mouth stuffed with cotton, the smell of formaldehyde unmasked by the bouquets that surrounded her.
I worked at a disco!
I started a pastry peddling business out of my kitchen!
I forged signatures for my host father’s gubernatorial campaign!
I was so little, how was I so brave?
I want to get on a plane to wherever and find that feisty little fifteen-year-old me. I want to ask her if she’ll be my tour guide.

Highway patrolman

I was a block away from work when I stumbled upon the face-off. A man waving two butcher knives above his head seemed unfazed by the fifteen policemen with pistols poised in his direction. He stomped toward the cops until one doused him with pepper spray. Without a flinch, the man switched course, almost reaching 11th Ave before he paused to study a horse drawn carriage en route to Central Park. I really thought they were going to shoot him. I kept thinking, I can’t believe I’m wearing this stupid hat right now. It’s an affront to this man’s dignity to die in front of a girl dressed like goth Princess Toadstool. A face-off on today of all days. I never wear hats.

But they didn’t shoot him. They tazed him bro, and he fell with a thud like someone dropped a bag of sand. Later I heard he was a resident of the halfway house nearby and had stopped taking his meds. It scares me that the only thing keeping some of us from slipping from the ledge of sanity can be some pill as big as a fingernail.
I’ve narrowed down my most looming fears to two: getting fat and going crazy. The first is residual from early life chubbiness. I’m pretty sure that after enough decades I’ll pee that fear right out of my system. But sometimes I think that if I had to bet on one person I know to bring a gun to work, I put my money on me. (Please don't turn me in to the feds, I'm using hyperbole to make a point.) I come from a long line of crazies who were stricken out of nowhere and for no good reason. Like when you go to bed feeling fine and wake up ready to puke your guts out. I worry that will happen to me. I worry about it often. I think I read “Lisa Bright and Dark” too early in life.

I remember going on a whitewater rafting trip as a child. After dragging the boat onto the sandy bank for lunch, our guides rounded up a group for river diving. At 8, with my swollen stomach and purple bathing suit, I peered over the edge of the rocks we'd climbed, thirty feet above the inky river, listening to a young husband try and coax his wife into jumping. “Look, that little girl isn’t scared to do it,” the man explained and nudged his chin in my direction.

In the end, the wife couldn’t be convinced. But with the river guides cheering behind me, I stepped off the ledge, listened to the world around me rush, then crack then get very quiet. I held my breath as long as I could underwater, wanting privacy to savor the satisfaction of my own courage.

Fear of craziness only makes me crazier still. Better to be brave, since I know I can be.

Brilliant Disguise

I remember vividly the “Mike Tyson’s Punchout” game that made its home to the left of the salad bar at the local Pizza Hut growing up. As my brother poured quarters into its little red coin slot, I watched from the table through a fog of ranch dressing. If only I’d known then what I know now the video game’s namesake, maybe I would have spent more time battling alongside my brother and less eating my way through an entire meat lovers pizza.

I was a fat little kid, that’s beside the point. So was Mike Tyson! He says so himself in James Toback’s new “Tyson” documentary, which has helped me refine in another small way why I have become so obsessed with boxing of late. I used to think I couldn’t really tell what distinguishes an incredible fighter from a good one, but watching footage of Tyson before he was Iron Mike, back when he was just starting out with Cus D’Amato, back when he was dealing eight second knock-outs in the Junior Olympics, you realize what a fierce creature he once was. I say “creature” because he was too fast to be human. Watching him shadow box around the ring as a young man makes you wonder if someone accidently knocked film reel into high speed. I’m just so moved by it. It’s the most naked kind of grace, not like dancing or gymnastics or ice skating. It’s grace without the presentation, which to me is the most enviable kind of beauty.

The movie walked me through Tyson’s failed marriage to Robin Givens, his rape conviction, his relationship with Don King, and the only thing I really knew about him before the movie, his taste for ear. But seeing him so calm and candid, angry without all the “I’ll fuck you til you love me faggot” abandon, made me able to recognize the guy behind the caricature. Even with the lisp he wasn’t a caricature. People are just really complex.

On an unrelated note, now that Souter is stepping down from the Supreme Court, I’d like you all to join me in lobbying for the appointment of my dad, Norman Dean Haglund. Judge Haglund could really teach those old bags a thing or two.

The Wrestler (actually, boxer)

Last night, I went to The Golden Gloves Tournament at Madison Square Gardens. It’s an amateur boxing championship where men and women of all weight classes try to out-punch each other in the face. Actually, it’s not just the face, it’s the chest too. But not the top of the head, or the back, or below the belt, of course. And fighters can’t hit with just any part of their gloves, only this little part around the knuckles that they’ve marked with tape. There are so many rules to boxing and if I start listing the ones I learned last night I will get bogged down. The point is, whoever scores the most points, (as determined by the 20 or so spectator judges) gets to wear home a pimped out gold chain with a boxing glove pendant as big as my kidney at the end of it.

Does that description sound glib? It shouldn’t. Boxing is fucking awesome.

I was tired and grumpy and hungry when I got to Madison Square Gardens. Then all the sudden I was watching a scrappy 112 lb girl kick the crap out of her opponent! It was like the fights I used to watch in front of my high school after lunch break, (East High alumni know what I’m talking about.) And when Shemuel Pagan of the Bronx took on Vassilliy Zherebnenko of Kasakhstan it was the Cold War all over again! Pods of Russians throughout the crowd chanted “Russia! Russia! Russia!” while my boyfriend tried to goad his friend and me into a “USA! USA! USA!” counter-scream.

But it’s so obvious to say that bloodlust was what yanked me out of my end-of-a-long-week fog. I’ve got all this testosterone in my bloodstream these days. I have this vivid mental picture of a bunch of tattooed testosterone particles in wifebeaters teaming up to try and chase the frail estrogen out of my system by way of my monthly cycles. I work and play sports with all these dudes. I like books about war, I’m learning the rules of baseball. Getting revved up over people trying to knock each other unconscious is just one more wrinkle in a journey that ends with me growing a full moustache.

What I didn’t expect to see was the tenderness between fighters. You rest in the middle of a round by wrapping your arms around your opponent, by leaning yourself against them so that they carry your weight for a few seconds. It sort of looks like they’re calling a truce, like they’re wondering, “What were we fighting about? I’m so tired I can’t even remember anymore.” At the end of each match, the boxers would hug each other, hug the opponent’s trainer. And that they had just been kicking ass made their embraces seem that much more tender.

If only we could cut our emotional wheels that quickly in real life. After the punches thrown, it takes so long to find our way back to each other. We return to the center of the ring by way of ginger inches. But most of the time, fighting doesn’t seem to amount to much more than a sport. Would it be great if forgiving could be done as jauntily as those boxers’ embraces? To me, anyone who can let go of shit that easily deserves to make off with some golden glove bling.

Part (wo)man, part monkey

I spent Easter in Charlotte, North Carolina, making shish kabobs and fruity drinks with my old friend, Brooke. We even listened to a radio show we'd recorded on her "My First Song" when I was 10 and she was 12. I found my call in to Brooke, who was posing as an on-air advice columnist, a little depressing. 10-year-old me pretended to be a pregnant woman in her third trimester with five kids and a husband who'd just left her. My character wanted to jump out a window, but was quickly consoled by Brooke's advice to "take a shower and ride a bike." Reflecting on it now, it's probably not so easy for a very pregnant lady to bathe herself and hop on her Schwinn. And unless he has a thing for fat cyclists, I doubt it's gonna bring back her man. We were naive. 

I flew back into La Guardia this afternoon and had to go from bus to train to make my way home. I'm never in the middle of Queens, and I never eat alone in public, so when I stepped off the bus leg of my journey and found myself next to Neptune's Diner, I decided to do something weird for the sake of that adventurous little 10-year-old who'd been on my mind all weekend.

I ate my bowl of soup next to a father in a black velour jogging suit and his children, who had a lot of questions about Neptune, depicted as a gray-haired, ripple-chested cartoon dripping bead of salt water down the front of the family diner menu. My parents used to read my siblings and me all the Greek myths, so when the father next to me insisted that Hades wasn't a god but a place, I had to intervene. Parents should not miseducated their children. Kids are the future. They deserve to be taught the right facts before they promptly forget them!

But there I was, watching tziki slide down an old woman's chin when it dawned on me, isn't Neptune the ROMAN name for the God of the Sea? This is a Greek restaurant, people, why aren't we calling it "Poseidon's Diner"? Has the world abandoned its desire for consistency? Don't we care about providing a clear and accurate lesson plan for our little kids' menu masticators?

I came this close to sharing my musings with the family next to me. But then I realized that you can call both the guy and the place he rules "Hades." And I started to feel like sort of an asshole.  

All men wanna be rich...

In lieu of devoting my time to an activity that could advance my career or inch me closer to feeling some sort of professional fulfillment, I’ve decided to transform my kitchen. This weekend, I dodged the book I was assigned to review for my writing class to pour over “The Art of Simple Food” by Alice Waters instead. My cookbook and I cuddled on the couch, trying to ignore that rebuffed paperback gawking at us from across the room. Oh assigned reading, you are so long and boring! Why do the things I feel like I’m supposed to do seem so far away from the things I want to do?

Now, I’m close to obsessed with idea of putting fresh, delicious fuel into my body. But my feelings about Alice Waters are complicated. I went to college with her daughter, Fanny. And while Fanny was always perfectly fine during the limited exchanges we shared, I’m so insecure. You probably know that already. In my mind, Fanny’s just another person who serves as a reminder that you can be much further along in life at age 26 than I am. And you can read all about it in the New York Times. Other classmates who make me queasy with envy? Jamie Kirchirk, Zoe Kazan, Daniel Kurtz Phelan…)

Am I a bigger person for admitting my own human weakness? I get jealous! Sometimes cripplingly so. And whether I say it in a blog entry or keep it to myself, I’m still in the exact same place…making copies…typing what people tell me to…asking myself important questions like “how much water have I had today?” “Am I sitting up straight?” Hydration and posture, the small personal struggles of my day-to-day.

I know, I know. Comparing yourself to others gets you nowhere. It’s like my mom said once: You don’t have to set the world on fire at 26. Of course, what she actually said was that you don’t have to set the world on fire at 24, because that’s when I started complaining about all this stuff. And now here I am, almost 27, wearing possibly the same outfit I was the day she first offered me that advice. At what age should you start to feel like if you haven’t torched your home planet, you might as well just throw in the towel and sign up for truck driving school?

So like I said, I’m going to transform my kitchen. I’m going to stock it with all the artillery necessary to throw together the kind of meal that makes my stomach feel warm instead of twisted. And it’s not going to be easy! Taking care of yourself hardly ever is. But imagine if you were your child instead of yourself, you’d make the extra effort, wouldn’t you?

Is this another distraction, something that I do instead of what I really want to do, because the thing I really want to do is too large and looming? Am I just cowering in the shadows that dreams cast? Maybe. But it’s a challenge. And I believe that any accomplishment begets another. They gild confidence to make it stronger and more flashy. And if it is a royal waste of time, and least it will keep me too busy to care.

The rising

I’m tired of the emails and the texts and the phone calls. You want to know so badly, people? Alright, I’ll tell you. But you’re not gonna like it.

A little background for those of you out there who don’t know the intimate details of my day-to-day: I work for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Two weeks ago this Thursday, The Boss himself appeared as our guest. Wednesday night, I had to take a sleeping pill to knock myself out. I woke up extra early Thursday morning to curl my hair. I put on what I believe to be my most flattering dress. I ate my oatmeal with the “Live from Barcelona” box set playing on my laptop.

But what can I tell you? There were no strings to be pulled, no loopholes to weasel my way through. Bruce came and went under a veil of privacy as I watched from a monitor next to the studio. At one moment he was right around the corner, the thud of his workmen boots making their way from the greenroom to the set my only proof of his proximity.

Another detail for those of you who don’t know, I met Bruce once before. I sat next to him through an entire taping of the show. We made small talk as they loaded the audience and exchanged back-and-forths during the commercial breaks. It was really special. That night my roommate and I drank a bottle of champagne to celebrate and I tried not to fall asleep, dreading the inevitable crossing from the day I met Bruce to the day after.

Walking to work two Thursdays ago, I imagined The Boss remembering me, asking for me, how jealous it would make my co-workers! To inhabit the tiniest cell in the tiniest wrinkle of The Boss’s brain! Maybe he’d somehow catch me in action at work and be barreled over by my skills. Maybe he’d demand I come to work for him in the wilds of Jersey. I get a little carried away.

But that’s the fun of it all! That’s why Thursday, after work, I didn’t really care how the day had played out. I just like dreaming about it all. Maybe you think that’s bullshit, maybe it IS! But in trying to be honest with myself, I’ve come to think that disappointment is kind of like the pop of a balloon. A disruptive, irritating burst, a stillness, and then everything resumes its rhythm.

I’m a good dreamer. I can really cook things up. But with dreaming comes the constant peril of disappointment. That’s why people like me have to be made of cork.

In the air tonight

I love Phil Collins. Today, stuck in a funk, I downloaded his greatest hits, and I've been cleaning my bathroom and drinking wine to it all night. Not that it took all night to clean my bathroom. Holy shit, I'm Bridget Jones. But the guy really knows what he's talking about. We DO need to hear both sides of the story. And how much would you love to be with someone with whom you've had your problems, but who's still on your side?

To be two hearts, beating just one line. 

Born to run

If I could just play sports, if I could just run as fast as my body would let me all day and kick and throw things until every part of me felt like an overcooked strand of spaghetti, I would be happy.

On Saturday, I played Ultimate Frisbee for three hours on Staten Island. How beautiful! When the moments we're not running can be spent looking at the way the sun hits the leaves, (twinkling like the smiles in a toothpaste commercial!) felling the clean cold of the air despite the cloudless sky. And then we're in play and running, our feet pounding at the ground, powered by the motor anatomy rigged up inside our chests. On the field my heart is an important piece of machinery. It is not faint. It is not fickle. It's just grateful for the oatmeal breakfast and the occasional glass of red wine I treat it to.

And the way we move, the we weave around each other like the yarn on a loom, or birds flying in formation. They rhythm of us is found art. Our minds are angles and calculations. Our minds are wallpapered with geometry.

It's these times that I wish I wasn't a girl. To be picked last. To lob weaker passes than everyone else. To be stuck guarding the guy who smokes between games, and waddles down the field like the squatter of a cartoon thief duo, and to find him my worthy adversary. But who can I be than the person I am? I have no body but this one to use for Frisbee. I should be grateful my body is willing to play at all.

I'm no star athlete. I've run two marathons, often keeping pace with pregnant women and 80-year-olds. but as a lone runner, I'm happy that those who match my stride are often the ones with most unlikely reasons to be there. It makes eavesdropping more interesting. On my basketball team, I foul too much, my shot is as weak as my Frisbee pass, and I'm unclear about exactly what "double dribbling" is. But only when my body is moving can my mind stop. And I need that so badly. If it weren't for sports, my mind would wear its gears out. It'd be that belt in the engine you only notice when you start to smell burning rubber. And by the time it starts to burn, it isn't doing much but making the rest of the machine miserable.  

So you're scared and you're thinking that maybe you ain't that young anymore

I’ve been having mixed feelings about the gray streak I’m getting. When I first noticed it, I felt sentimental. My mother’s now entirely silver bob began the same way. It was like I’d uncovered a family heirloom right beneath my bangs. I mean, it’s not like I’m getting old, right? How could I be? I still get carded. I wear t-shirts I bought in high school. I played a drinking game last Saturday for Christ’s sake!

But a few nights ago, I stood in front of my mirror plucking out each gray hair, my eyes wandering from my hairline to grooves in my forehead to the puckered skin at the corners of my eyes. My face is starting to look an unmade bed, and I’m too immature to even make my bed regularly! It’s as if I suddenly realized I’m in the middle of my turn in Mario Kart before I learned how to work the joystick.

But last night I went to see my dear friend Marisa in a variety show called “The Snarks Unlimited” put on by her all-female theater company The Snarks. Definitely one of the weirdest experiences I’ve come across in New York. My beautiful friend played the ingénue, and while her role was well-deserved, being the only woman under 50 onstage might have had something to do with the casting. For an hour and a half, I watched august women shuffle-ball-change in sexy corsets, freestyle about the history of their theater group, and make out with the barely legal men they’d commissioned to play the male roles. When an acned 19-year-old ambushed one those silver haired foxes and thrust his groin against her backside, I accidentally swallowed my gum.

God bless these women. Ten minutes into the show, watching ladies sashay about in hats as big as tires and belt out “Yankee Doodle” I worried I’d been transported to dawning of WWI. But these women were wild, gregarious, funny! I remember taking a theater class when I was eight and being scolded for being “hammy.” Watching the show last night, I regretted pocketing that criticism. Just think of how refined my hamminess could be now if I had cultivated it when it just beginning to sprout.

(It actually reminded me to tell you of another one of my personal obsessions, the Miss Senior America competition. I’ve wanted to see and write about the pageant for years. I don’t know whether I find it inspiring or grotesque, like a really graphic picture of elephantitis you find on the internet and can’t look away from.)

Let me be clear, that’s NOT how I feel about The Snarks. Last night, I saw a group of women celebrating a strong mutual sense of self. And with this gray streak taking over my head I need to know that’s what I’m working toward, celebrating all of my beauty. It seems like we spend so much of youth letting our beauty make us miserable.