Blues

Happy Birthday to my b-l-o-g (half yesterday, half today...I created it a year ago yesterday but didn't really post much until a year ago today.) I can scarcely believe that one year ago I lived in Atlanta with Craig - in our first apartment as cohabitators, and have since moved twice, once to Richmond and then on to New York. It feels like multiple years have passed since all that, which I've deemed a good thing: evidence Craig and I have filled one year with more experience than some witness in a lifetime! At least, from a constant relocator's perspective.*I figured since I posted the City facing south previously (from Rockefeller Center's newly opened viewing platform), I ought to pay due tribute due north - the Park, where I will participate in the Komen New York City Race for the Cure in a couple of weeks, and the Upper East Side there to the right which manages to feel like home more each day.*We've returned home tonight from a barbecue in Seldon, NY: L.I.R.R. at Penn Station to Ronkonkoma, L.I., where our Pakistani coworker picked us up in his car and drove us to his home where his wife and two teenage children tended to food. It was a fine showing of coworkers, and enough kids of varying ages to remind me why I'm not ready in my 29th year to even contemplate the thought yet. Our trains were only running back to Manhattan on the hour, so by 7.20 we were back on the road to be dropped at the Ronkonkoma station to catch the 7.43. One way: 2 hours, door to door. Seems long...yet it amazes me how brilliant travel can be when you simply board a train versus climb behind a wheel. I purchased two books today and began one on the train, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, of which I've read such rave reviews and frankly, Capote has been on my "must read" list possibly since college. Since the release of the movie titled Capote, which we've yet not seen, I've had an itch to read him - what better time than now when I can devour a book in a week or two during my daily commuting? Anyway, it's incredible: it's no secret that a family is brutally slain, and the book is of course a retelling of actual events, yet the suspense leading up to the murders is fantastic. I even fanned a few pages as we pulled into Penn Station tonight to see if I could glimpse how far from the actual crime I am yet, 50 pages in. Not far.*This reminds me that I have yet to explain the whys or hows of my fiction course. When we first moved to New York, without our possessions, with little but the thrill of New York and the pleasure of spending time with my old college friends and their respective companions, I dropped a loose mention to these friends of taking fiction writing from a certain organization that I've known for some time now, without knowing actual details thereof. Their feedback was less than positive with regard to the organization. Politics, bad instructors and so forth. As an alternate suggestion, I checked out an actual liberal arts university located in Greenwich Village, a progressive approach to learning is their mission. I happen to have another old friend in the area who completed her MFA in poetry at this institution, and so I got a hold of her and she replied that my interest in non-credit enrollment is not only (more) affordable but would also yield (similar) results to completing a program, so I concentrated hard on where my money was being spent for a few weeks and went ahead and registered for my first course - ideally it will get my lazy head back in the writing game and inspiration will abound. Ideally. But I am so excited, I can hardly breathe when I think of it. It's an evening course and I will likely feel overwhelmed with such a huge week of work compounded with a night class - but I'm discovering more, more and more that that is what living in New York is precisely about: living upright, mobile and awake - barely fulfilling a sleep quota yet fulfilling every other quota a human might have: in love, in work, in activity, in food, in talk, in sight, in sound. You get the idea.*I titled this post Blues because in remembrance of a time when I did not blog, or for a time when I didn't live in New York or have Craig or basically for a time when I didn't feel as though pieces to the puzzle of me were being configured quickly enough to maintain any loose idea of happiness or even straightforward satisfaction, the Elton John song "I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues" comes right to mind. It always made me cry before the Craig and me era. In the chorus, Elton sings, "Time on my hands...should be time spent with you." During Craig's snowiest days in Syracuse, NY, during my iciest ones in St. Louis, and mind you, this was all taking place between late-03 and late 04, which was not that long ago, I would play this song repeatedly, whether alone in my car or in my apartment. I would mentally will Craig to call me, or to write, or to be sitting someplace quiet that same time as me, wishing as hard as I was wishing for it to be so, that we could be together. And now, here we are, so much time later and pockets brimming with together memories, changing the whole face of that Elton John song to me, making it happier, somehow, reminding me that each moment can be absolutely filled with not only the person you love, but also the place you love to be, the thing you love to do, and the you you want to be.*