City Wendy

Radiant: UPDATE with photo

I haven't told you about the Paul Simon concert yet, which was pretty great. He sang a few of my favorites and had some other artists — like Josh Groban of all people (my mom will be so jealous) — cover some of his other hits. I loved when he sang Graceland, a song that has a couple of my favorite lyrics of all time: "Losing love is like a window in your heart/ Everybody sees you're blown apart/ Everybody sees the wind blow."

There was a couple sitting behind us at the concert who had an interesting exchange before the show started:

Him: This is what real musicians do. This is what it's about — this is what being a real musician is all about.
Her: You're a real musician.
Him: No I'm not.
Her: Yeah, you are!
Him: No.
Her: You are! You were in the Jay Leno band!!
Him: Aw, that was nearly 20 years ago — I can't just keep using that...

beat

Her (quietly): I wish I'd known you 20 years ago...

And, scene.

Hey, I had another celeb sighting at the show. I saw Claire Danes and Hugh Dancy sitting not too far from us (in the cheap seats!). She looked like a prettier, sleeker version of normal and like someone I could be friends with. Actually, I sort of wish we were friends. She seems like the kind of person who'd remember your birthday and be game for a girl day of pedicures, sushi and shoe shopping.

You know who else I got to see this week? Jeremy Sisto, when he came into the coffee shop yesterday and ordered a latte. If you don't know who he is, he played Billy — Brenda's crazy brother — on Six Feet Under, and if you still don't know who he is, then I implore you to Netflix the entire series immediately, because holy crap, he's amazing in it, as is everyone else, and he also happens to be supah hot. Hotter in person, really. I think I blushed the color of sunburned baby thighs just looking at him. He's got that whole darkly disturbed and angry thing which made me want to reach over the counter, grab him by the collar, and lick his teeth. (He was nice, by the way, and probably not all that disturbed or angry, really. He also has the cutest dog).

In other news, I'm getting my hair colored today, which may not sound like such a big deal, but this will be my first real foray into the NY salon scene. Until now, I've just been getting my hair done with my old stylist and colorist on my return visits to Chicago. I'll actally be there again in just two weeks and could hold out for familiar hands if I really wanted to, but I decided it was time for me to branch out. It's a big step in cementing this whole move, actually, and feeling more at home here. I'm going to see a girl who comes into the coffee shop a couple times a day, who's also new to the city and who works at a trendy salon a couple doors down from the shop. Honestly, the salon is way trendier than I'm used to (think Leopard print chairs and crystal chandeliers), and I already have anxiety that I'm going to seem so out of place there, but what the fuck, the girl I'm going to is super sweet and I'm sure she'll make me feel comfortable and it will all be fine. It just so happens that People magazine this week has a section called Radiant Redheads, so I'm going to tear out the photos of Julianne Moore, Marcia Cross, and Lauren Ambrose (who dated Jeremy Sisto's character on Six Feet Under), bring them to the salon and say to the stylist, "Here, make me radiant. I have some teeth I need to lick."

Update: Someone asked if I would post a picture of my hair after I got it colored, so here it is. I'm not sure the intensity shows as well in the photo, but I'm really happy with the way it turned out and the girl who did my hair was so sweet and really listened to me that I'm even going to put my hair in her hands again next week when I go in for a trim (which I desperately need). She promised she won'y take any much length off since I'm growing it out and will just a clean it up a bit. If anyone in NY needs a colorist/stylist recommendation, let me know and I'll pass along her info.

Passing Time

The theme in my life lately is this general feeling that time is moving at such a rapid speed I don't know how to just slow things down enough to relax and enjoy the moment. Weeks seem to fly by and it seems like New Year's was last month but here it is almost May and I'm left wondering what happened to the last 4 months of my life. Monday will mark two years since Drew and I met. And it will also be my mom's 57th birthday, which boggles my mind even more than my imminent 32nd quickly approaching. When, I wonder, did we all get so old??

Over the weekend, I started cleaning out an antique desk I inherited from my paternal grandparents. There's really no room for it in our apartment and beautiful though it is, it doesn't really fit our design aesthetic and I doubt it ever will. I hate to sell it, but without a place to store it, I'm not really sure what my alternative is. Anyway, I was cleaning it out over the weekend, getting it ready for a potential sale, when I found a little secret drawer full of old cards and letters my grandparents had saved from years ago. Most of them were Father's Day cards I'd sent my grandfather back in the early 80's when I was still a wee child with buck-teeth and well-worn ballet slippers. Some of the letters were from my parents and covered family updates from about the time I was six, right before the birth of my sister, until I turned 12 or so. Reading them was really like finding some buried treasure, but more interesting that re-discovering what my life was like 25 years ago, was imagining my mother writing those letters, the age I am now, all of 31 years old, married and living in Japan, with one kid already and another on the way. What different paths we've taken, what a different life she's lived from her own mother who never left the midwest. And yet, there it is, I can read it in between the lines of those old letters: the similarity between us, the desire for adventure, the excitement in living a life so different from our childhoods.

Included in the bundle of letters was my grandparents' wedding photo. I'd seen it before, but it'd been years and years. I'd forgotten how strong the resemblance is/was between my father and his father, how my sister takes after them in a way that's maybe not obvious at first glance. I'd forgotten the similarities between my grandmother and me, how our eyes are nearly identical, how we have the same round face. I thought of them last night when Drew and I watched A Streetcar Named Desire at the MoMA. I wondered if they watched it in the theater when it first came out. I wondered if my grandmother ever wore hats like the  women in the movie, like Vivien Leigh. I wondered if I'll have grandkids someday who'll wonder about me. I wondered when I'll stop being a thought in someone's mind.

Passover ended over the weekend and Drew went to temple to say a prayer for his mother who passed away when he was young. I like that tradition in Judaism of remembering lost loved ones, I like the idea of keeping people alive in our thoughts and stories. It doesn't make time seem any less fast-moving, but it helps to think I can write the stories down, make them last forever, even when the people in them are long gone.

Me in the Corner

I don't know if it's the extended daylight we've been enjoying lately, the morning workouts on the rooftop, the iron and B complex supplements I've been taking, or just finally starting to hit a bit of a stride here in NY, but I've felt more myself in recent weeks than I have since I moved here. I guess I like having a bit of a routine and for someone who works mostly from home, it can be a challenge to create that, but I think I'm getting there. I suppose the weekly gig at the coffee shop helps, though I'm not always sure it's the best place for me. The money isn't great — imagine that! — but it does provide some interesting fodder, and maybe that's worth more than a few dollars extra an hour I could find in another job?

Lately when I go in, I've been paying attention to the way people engage with me. Since I'm terribly self-conscious and always think everyone I meet either hates me or loathes me, and since I feel like a total fish out of water in impossibly trendy soho anyway, I'm always convinced every word uttered by a customer, from please to thank you, is a direct mocking of who I am as a person. Yesterday some guy even said to me after some idle chit-chat about hard-boiled eggs that he knew I was from the country. Having spent a total of about 5 nights of my entire life in the country, I really wasn't sure how to respond. His friend jumped in and said, "What if she's not? Maybe you just offended her." To which he replied, looking me in the eye, "Oh, I know she is." What the fuck! It's stuff like that that gets me all frazzled. Obviously this guy didn't know what he was talking about and was just talking to hear himself talk, but I couldn't help getting all wrapped up in this idea of me projecting the image that I'm Corn Cob Country Girl. Is it the way I talk? My attire? The way I pour the coffee? What? And why do I care so much what some random stranger in a coffee shop thinks after two minutes of talking to me?

"He was just trying to pick you up," Drew said after I told him the story.
"Really?" I asked, "Am I so naive I can't pick up on when someone's trying to pick me up? And when is calling someone a country girl a pick-up line?"

And was it a pick-up line when someone asked me how much I spent on my necklace? Who does that? Who walks up to strangers and asks how much they paid for things? It's so strange to me.

And then there are the Beautiful People, who aren't always necessarily beautiful, but either recognizably famous (yesterday I even waited on Michael Stipe), or insanely, other-wordly gorgeous I imagine their lives to be filled with glamorous photo shoots for magazine covers, globe-trotting vacations in Fiji and St. Barts, and weekly massages, which, in my mind, is the height of luxury. In a weekly 6-hour shift, I see at least 4 or 5 of these people and each time, they have the same effect on me: I feel simultaneously awestruck and utterly inferior. It's those times when I'm painfully aware of how bold the line is between them (the Beautiful People) and me. It's not that I want to be them per se, or even have their lives or looks or whatever, but I can't help feeling in those moments that all I am is a 31-year-old coffee shop girl. Even if that's just what I do 6 hours of the week.

So, of course, being the neurotic, over-thinker that I am, all this brings me to larger, more existential thoughts about what I'm doing with my life and how I define personal success and achievement and what my goals and ambitions are. Living in New York and rubbing shoulders with such successful people has definitely made me evaluate my own desires to "make it"...whatever that means. I know I want to do creative work I'm proud of, I know I want to support myself as a writer, I know at the end of my life, I'd like to be able to point to at least one thing I did that had an impact — made people cry or laugh or think or whatever. But I'm also evaluating my life outside all that and asking myself, "What if that doesn't happen? Where else am I going to find success and achievement and joy?"

Okay, wow, this post went off in an entirely different direction than I'd planned. But anyhow, I guess these are the things on my mind. Also on my mind? Dudes, I'm gonna see Paul Simon tomorrow night — something I've been dying to do for years and years now. I may not be one of the Beautiful People, life's pretty good just the same.

Greener Grass

It's no secret that I'm not exactly crazy about our neighborhood. I don't mind Hell's Kitchen too much, but we're less than half a block inside Hell's Kitchen, which means our neighbors to the east are theaters, hotels, and crap stores that sell pink I Heart NY hats, Statue of Liberty snow globes, and 2 inch plastic taxi cabs. Aside from the awesome restaurants on 9th Avenue, the convenience of the subway and the proximity to Central Park (5 minute walk!), there's not much charm at all in where we live and I end up spending a lot of time fantasizing about where we might go when we're ready to move up in the world.

Sometimes I think I'm sold on Brooklyn. Certain neighborhoods there have the same comfort and familiarity as my favorite neighborhoods in Chicago. I imagine finding a local watering hole and making friends with the bartender. I imagine riding my bike to the store and to Prospect Park, and I imagine engaging a little more with the immediate world outside my front door rather than arming myself against it with big sunglasses, an iPod and a fast gait.

Friday night, Drew and I went to a rooftop BBQ at our friends' condo in Prospect Heights. The walk from the subway to their place was filled with ethnic grocery stores, tree-lined streets, people on bikes, and kids out playing on the front stoops of their apartments before the sun set. Later, up on the rooftop, we had an amazing view of Manhattan, the lights of the city illuminating the whole horizon like one big beam of energy. I tried to pinpoint our apartment somewhere in the mass, but the closest I got was World Wide Plaza.

After the BBQ, on the way back to the subway, we walked 4 blocks without passing anyone on the street. I told Drew the neighborhood was way more dead than Andersonville, my old neighborhood in Chicago, on a Saturday night. "Remember how you used to think it was so quiet there?" I said to him.

I never thought it was too quiet there. Quiet enough, sure, but never too quiet. But then I moved to the middle of Manhattan and now I can understand what Drew meant. Still, I feel torn. I go back and forth. Is quiet good? Do I miss it? Is it what I really want?

Getting off the subway in Manhattan, we're swept into a frenzy I've never known anywhere else — it's immediate and it's kinetic and it has a gravitational pull that tugs on you until you're in the center of it. It's fun and entertaining and stimulating and there's always something to see and watch and do and hear.

Friday night, when we got back to our building and climbed the stairs to our apartment, we heard a saxophone from our open window. Thinking it might be from next door, Drew went up to the roof to get a better listen. Two minutes later, he came running down the stairs and said, "Our neighbors are having a party. They've got a jazz band playing!" So we grabbed a couple of beers, went up in the roof, sat in our chaise lounges and listened to the jazz band 5 feet away from us on the other side of a tall fence.

I may be sacrificing stars and crickets, but I had a sax player serenade me to sleep on a roof several stories above Manhattan, and I guess that's pretty good, too.

Rooftop Workouts

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but we have terrible upstairs neighbors. They're loud and they're rude. Every other weekend one or both of them (both twenty-something boys) have friends in from our of town (I'm guessing from Jersey, Drew guesses Boston). When the friends are in, they have noisy all-night parties and traipse super loudly up and down the stairwell on frequent trips to the liquor store. One one such trip during a party a couple months ago, they even stuck a few cigarettes underneath our door to, I don't know, prove some point about how rockstar they are? When they aren't having parties, they like to play their video games really loudly. They must have their speakers right on the floor because when they get going, my god, it's like our apartment sounds like some sort of war zone. We've asked them several times to keep it down, but they just ignore us. Drew even beats the ceiling with a broomstick when it gets really loud which quiets things down for about five minutes, but then they just turn their noise back up again, even louder.

Now I'm sure I've mentioned that I've gained some weight recently — about 5-10 pounds in the last six months or so — and I haven't been able to take it off quite as easily as I might have 7 years ago. I get lazy about going to the gym, I'm over running, and it turns out my bike is impossible to carry up and down the stairs and there's no safe place to store it or lock it up, which is another story, really, and one I'm pretty fucking depressed about. At any rate, I've been watching my calorie intake and trying to incorporate as much exercise as I can stand into my daily life, but it hasn't been easy.

So, two weeks ago, I ventured up to the roof of our building for the first time (this is all connected, just wait). I don't know what took me so long to go explore except that I thought I'd have to climb a rickety ladder to get up there and then I was worried my fear of heights would cause a problem once I got up. But actually, i just take the stairs directly to a door that opens to the roof and its fenced on two sides, so I don't even have to see how high off the ground I am if I don't want to. And as it turns out, I really enjoy being up there. It's like a little bit of peace above midtown. I even moved the dinette set I couldn't get rid of on Craigslist up to the roof and last week when I had friends in town, we shared a bottle of champagne up there. I'd like to pimp it all out with plants and and an outdoor rug and a radio and whatnot and make it a little urban oasis. Drew says no one else in the building ever even goes up there, so what the fuck, I might just turn it into an outdoor office, too, since I'm pretty sure I can get internet up there. Anyway, this morning I had a brilliant idea that connects this whole post.

I had the brilliant idea to bring my yoga mat, my weights and my jump rope up there and have morning work-outs on the roof every day! I have all this space to myself with no one bugging me or getting in my face, the sun and air feel so good and invigorating, AND with every jump I make on our neighbors' ceiling, I feel just a little bit more vindicated.  And if that's not motivation to get in shape, I don't know what is (you know, other than looking and feeling good...). So, upstairs neighbors, who's the rockstar now, hmm?

Thirty-Something

I'm 5 months away from turning 32 and I'm starting to really feel like I'm in my 30's finally. I think the first year and a half of your 30's is just practice — you're still transitioning from your 20's when you could drop 10 pounds in two weeks without batting an eye. You coast through 30 with hardly a hitch. "This is easy!" you think, "It's just like being 25, except with more money." And then suddenly you're 31 and a half — it's that extra half that really does it, so don't think you're safe just because you've reached 31 and nothing is different. No, suddenly you're 31 and half and your whole world has changed. For example:

1. You can hide a roll of mentos under your boobs when you take your bra off
2. The water weight you've always gained during "that time of the month" doesn't go away when that time is over. It stays around and the next month it's just added to the new water weight you gain until you realize that maybe it isn't actually water weight, after all, and before you have time to acknowledge that maybe you've actually ten pounds in the last 6 months and ought to do something about it, you split your favorite pair of jeans with the bulging expanse of your fleshier thighs. This may or may not have happened to me over the weekend.
3. Two words: grey hair
4. One word: ma'am. Get used to it because you're going to hear it every goddamn you place you go whether you like it or not, and chances are you love it about as much as wearing tight underwear, which is another thing you'll have to get used to because:
5. Large panties from Victoria's Secret have suddenly gotten smaller. I don't know if they've changed their sizes recently or what but there's no longer enough fabric to fully cover my cheeks and that's really annoying.
6. Also annoying? Suddenly little bulges of pudge over my waistbands on my back left and right side. I don't want to talk about it!!!
7. Last night I was crossing the street and saw a mother walking with her teenage daughter who was dressed in a very inappropriately short skirt and rather than think to myself "I'd never dress like that," I thought instead, "I'd never let a daughter of mine leave the house dressed like that."
8. I'm not even thinking like a person anymore! I'm thinking like a mom.
9. To that point, the other day I was on the subway and this sorta cute boy was checking me out. He couldn't have been a day over 23, so I thought, "Huh, I still got it," before I realized that in his eyes, I was probably a MILF.
10. Maybe you've recently gotten a new ID, because maybe you've just moved to a new city, like, I don't know, New York. So you kind of want to show it off because it's been years since your ID said anything other than "Midwesterner" in corn-on-the-cob lettering stamped across the top. So when you go to a bar with some new friends, you pull it out to show the door guy and without missing a beat, he takes one looks at you, waves away your ID, winks at you and says, "That's okay."

Hey all you 30-year-olds, this your future. And I didn't even mention the wrinkles...

The Circle's Round

Years ago, before moving to New York was even on my radar, a friend of mine who escaped to the city right after college told me that she'd never felt lonelier than she did in New York. I thought I understood what she meant, and through the years as I heard similar sentiments from other people who'd spent time here, I really thought I got it. After all, I'm an empathetic person, I've moved to new cities and started over plenty of times, and I've certainly been lonely before, so I could understand what it would feel like to be lonesome in New York.

But experiencing it now, I finally understand that I really didn't get before. The loneliness here, it's different somehow, and I can't understand why or really put my finger on what exactly makes it different. But it's just what I've heard before — what I'm sure you've heard about life in New York — that there's nothing like being surrounded by people all the time to make you realize how lonely you are.

I guess I don't really know how to talk about this without seeming like a jerk. I had a built-in best friend when I moved here, a handful of college connections, and I've been really lucky to have met lots of awesome people since moving. So it's not a lack of people in my life, and it's not that I don't see potential for some great friendships, because I do, but it's just in the absence of the friendships I'd spent years cultivating before I moved, these new ones still in their infancy seem so, well, young. And I'm suddenly struck with just how long it takes to create deep, meaningful friendships — the effort and time one has to invest to have those, and I guess in New York, time seems to be the currency we're all clamoring for more of. Everything just moves faster here — or is it because I'm getting older? Or that I share my life with someone now? I don't know — whatever it is, it seems like each day, I get about a third of the time I did two years ago. And with so many activities and events and things to do and see vying for my attention — and everyone else's attention — sometimes it's just so hard to find the extra hours to invest in building relationships...even when that's what I really want.

I guess this all really came to a head this weekend when my friend Matt and his boyfriend were in town. Matt's a close friend who has this fantastic energy and always makes me feel like a better, funnier, more charming version of myself when I'm around him, which is truly a testament to him more than me. Spending Friday night with him and our respective boyfriends — having champagne on our rooftop and then hitting Korea town for an awesome dinner followed bykaraoke — was so  easy. There weren't any surface getting-to-know-you conversations or awkward mismatches of humor — partly because we were drunk singing all night, but mostly because I was with people who really know me — a luxury I just don't get to have very often and one I forget how comforting can be.

It's nice to have people I can have brunch with and meet for happy hour and go shopping with, but I can't help craving something more and feeling impatient for the kind of bonds here that I have with my friends in Chicago. But, anyway, as far as "problems" go, this is a pretty good one. I've got potential for some great friendships here and as I invest time in building them, I've always got my best friend right beside me. My trusty old laptop. Oh, did you think I was talking about Drew? Yeah, he's pretty good, too.

The Week That Wouldn't Quit

Jesus, it's been a week and I am so happy it's finally Friday.

My parents called me on Sunday from the hilltops of Tuscany and went on and on about the gorgeous view, the wine, the beamed ceilings in the castle-like villa where they're staying for the whole week. By contrast, I've worked 12-hour days nearly everyday this week and my hair's been greasy.

To add insult to greasy hair, my computer's been on the fritz for the last few months, so until I have enough dough to buy a new one, I've been using Drew's during the day while he's at work. But this week it, too, crapped out and he took it to the shop to be fixed, which meant I was stuck with my tempermental, incredibly slow computer, which made blogging (my paying blog gigs) rather difficult. Add to that the Nerve server crashing yesterday under the weight of all the reader love, and it's been a tedious tech week to say the least.

I haven't been stuck at the computer all week, though. There was my weekly gig at the coffee shop on Tuesday where this guy introduced himself and told me he works next door emptying the garbage and sometimes he watches me work through the window. As I washed dishes in the kitchen later that evening, sure enough, there he was peering at me outside the window, garbage bags in hand with a creepy smile on his face. So...that was fun.

Speaking of fun, Wednesday was Drew's birthday — the first we've spent together sicnce we started dating (last year I was still in Chicago). I saved my pennies and got him a digital camera, which he was so excited about until I confessed I hadn't gotten around to buying a memory card for it yet because I'm a terrible girlfriend. So there he was with his flashy new camera on his birthday, and could only take 6 pictures. Yay! We went out for a birthday dinner with his father and brother and all four of us got red snapper. I could add a joke here about how drew had red snapper for his dessert as well, but that would just be inappropriate. My parents read this blog.

Hey, I spent the afternoon in New Jersey yesterday. That's exciting, right? I spoke at a conference with a few other blogger women — A Baby Boomer's Life After Fifty, who represented well, the baby boomer bloggers, Notes from the Trenches, who represented suburban moms, and Mom in the City, who represented urban moms. I'm not positive, but I think I represented bloggers with greasy hair and  mood swings. When asked about perceptions of bloggers, I said that before I got started blogging I pretty much thought most bloggers were attention-hungry narcississts with no lives. "It turns out I wasn't that far off," I quipped. Oh but hey, we all know that's not really true. We have lives! Just look at our twitter feeds (updated 50 times a day) for proof!

Anyhow, it was actually sort of relaxing getting out of the city for a few hours. I had a driver and everything, so I sat back in the comfy car and totally zoned out on the ride to Somerset. Back when I was in college in Missouri, a long drive was one of my favorite things. Drives out to the country, highway drives, drives to the liquor store and back. You name it, I liked it, and when life got a bit to stressful (because college life is sooooo hard), I'd get in my car and just head off somewhere. Living in Chicago for 7 years where the traffic is a fucking nightmare totally changed my attitude towards driving and I turned to bike rides on the lakefront for my stress release. But yesterday, with the sun shining brighter than it has all year, the temps soaring to the mid-70's and an open road with miraculously zero traffic, I remembered how liberating a long drive can be. And when I got back to the city later in the afternoon, Drew and I headed to Central Park and soaked up the waning hours of the lovely day. I'm looking forward to at least a few more like yesterday before he gets so beastly hot outside I won't be able to bear stepping away from the air conditioning.

Finally, my friends are coming in from Chicago this weekend after their flight was cancelled last month and they had to postpone their trip. Tonight we're heading to Koreatown for some BYO karaoke in a private room and I can hardly contain my excitement. And to clarify, that's BYO booze, not BYO karaoke machine, though that could add a whole other layer to the experience, I guess. Anyway, happy weekend to all. May spring be sprung wherever you are...even if we aren't all be lucky enough to be in Tuscany.

Alphabet: A History (D)

Drew

It's early spring, late afternoon, I'm having beers and burgers with girlfriends at The Edgewater. It's warm enough that we can sit on the patio outside, which is a good thing because some of us haven't remembered locks for our bikes. We lean them against the unpainted picket fence where we can keep an eye on them while we eat and drink and talk about boys.

I'm the youngest in the group — still a few months shy of my 30th birthday and conversation turns to the challenge of finding a good man before we become old maids.

"I don't understand why it's so hard," I say, "I just want someone who's funny and charming and kind and gracious and creative and ambitious and smart. Curly hair, glasses and dimples don't hurt either," I add.

"I know the perfect guy for you," Meg says, putting her beer down, resting her chin in the palm of her hand, and looking at me intently.

"You do?" I ask, "Who?"

"This guy, Drew," she says, leaning back in her seat. "He's everything on your list."

"Everything?" I ask, sceptically.

"Pretty much," she says.

"Well, why haven't you introduced me to him yet?" I ask.

"He lives in New York," she replies.

"Well, why would I want to meet a guy in New York?! I don't want to meet a guy in New York." I say.

"Weren't you just saying that you have to be open to finding love?" she asks.

"Yeah, but like, in your own city. New York's on the other side of the country!" I say.

"Aren't you going there in a few weeks?" she asks.

"For a weekend," I reply, "I'm not moving there."

"You should meet him while you're there." she says in a way that suggests it's a done deal.

"But —" I begin to protest as Meg pulls her phone out of her purse and starts dialing a number.

"Hi Drew, it's Meg!" she says into the phone a second later. She talks to him for a minute and then hands me the phone.

"Uhm...hi." I say. "Meg says we should meet?"

"Okay." Drew says easily.

"But...you live in New York and I live in Chicago..." I say.

"I can commute," Drew replies.

Five minutes later, I hang up the phone with plans to meet Drew for a sushi dinner later in the month when I'm visiting New York. For the next two weeks, Drew and I email back and forth every day, exchanging stories about our childhoods, friends, travels, hobbies. I'll save these emails and will print them out eventually for safe-keeping, but for now, I don't even know what he looks like. I just know that when I log onto my email account and see a message waiting from him, I get an excited little thrill that catches me off-guard. He makes me laugh and even though I can't see his face, can't hear his voice, wouldn't recognize his handwriting, I'm getting to know him. And everything I don't know about him — what he looks like, for example —I've filled in with guesses and assumptions and wishes of what I might like him to be. That he lives on the other side of the country is something I've pushed out of my mind. For now, I just want to enjoy the fantasy of it all.

The day comes for us to meet. It's May 5 — my mom's birthday. I dress carefully in a knee-length apple green corduroy skirt, a blue tank top, a brown leather belt with a green and blue belt buckle, and green wedges. I wear just a touch of eyeshadow and my glossiest lipgloss. My hair is still long — it's three months before the infamous mullet cut and subsuquent chop-off of all my layers. When I'm ready, I take the subway from Astoria to the Prince stop in Soho and as I walk up the steps to street-level, I see him right away. He has his back to me, but I know it's him. He has the curliest hair I've ever seen and is shorter than I imagined. He turns to me and I see him make the connection. We walk towards each other. I suddenly start panicking. What am I doing? Why am I about to have dinner with a stranger? In an unfamiliar city? How do I know he isn't some kind of kook?

"Are you crazy?" I ask him two minutes after we meet.
There's been an awkward silence between us since we exchanged 'hello's' and now he seems lost and completely unsure where he's going.
"What?" he asks, nervously.
"Are you crazy?" I repeat.
"Oh," he says, "Yeah, I am."
"I thought so," I reply.

We're silent for another couple of minutes while we keep crossing from one side of the street to the other, never really getting anywhere.

"Do you have any idea where we're going?" I ask finally.
"Not really," he says.
"Hmmm." I say, wondering if I should just go home. I'm not even that hungry.

Somehow, by some miracle, we finally cross the right street and end up at the sushi restaurant. They've messed up our reservation, though, and the table we were supposed to have out in the garden is occupied by another couple. I sigh. I don't mean to, but I'm suddenly under-whelmed by it all. Things aren't going at all as I imagined. I meet Drew's eyes and he looks equally unenthused. How could this happen? We had such good chemisty 1500 miles apart. We stand in silence for another five minutes while the waitstaff clears a table in the garden for us. We sit and order white wine and some gyoza. I tell Drew about growing up in Japan and how my parents would pick up McDonalds for my sister and me before we went out for sushi.

We finish out appetizer and wine, the sun sets, he seems a little less neurotic. By the time our entree comes and before we finish our second glass of wine, he's growing on me. I like the way he looks in the candle light, I like his smile, he has nice teeth.

"You have nice teeth," I say, sipping my wine.
"So do you," he replies.

The people at the table next to us are smoking a joint, they're passing it around in a circle, clinking glasses and laughing loudly between inhales. They speak Japanese and sometimes they lean in together and say something in hushed tones and look over at us and giggle.

When we finish dinner, I find myself nodding when Drew asks if I want to get a drink.

"Sure," I say.
"Yeah?" he asks, "Are you sure?"
"Yeah," I reply, "it's still early."

At the bar I tell Drew how I'm writing my masters thesis and it's the last thing I have to do before I get my degree.

"After that," I say, "I can pretty much do whatever. Go wherever. I mean, life's kind of an open path, you know?"

The next day, Drew calls and asks if he can see me again before I go back to Chicago.

We have brunch together the next morning and go for a walk in Washington Square Park. We sit next to an elderly couple and watch the man sing songs to his wife (girlfriend?) and the fly on his shoe. The fly keeps leaving and coming back, leaving and coming back.

"I've got a friend!" the old man says in a thick New York accent, "Look at that."

Drew and I laugh into our hands.

Later that night my friend has a performance at a club right across the street from Drew's apartment. I tell him I'll be there, but I don't invite him to come along. I'm not ready yet to introduce anyone. After my friend performs, I get a text from Drew. He tells me he's recording Grey's Anatomy if I want to come over and watch it later. I've told him it's one of my favorite shows. A half-hour later I go over. I like being at his place. I like sitting on his couch, I like being next to him.

"I have to go now," I say as soon as the show ends.
"Right now?" he says, disappointedly, "Right away?"
"Yeah..." I say. I'm afraid every minute longer I stay will just make it harder to leave.

I cry on the stairs on my way out. I cry the next morning in Astoria Park as I look across the river into Manhatten. And I cry on the plane later that day on my way back to Chicago.

I don't know yet how it's going to work out. I don't know that we'll spend the next year and half criss-crossing the country every two or three weeks to see each other, that we'll rush to one another's homes after tediously long delays in airports and become experts in national air travel. I don't know yet that I'll leave Chicago and move in with Drew into his apartment in New York and spend the first 4 months of my time there unemployed and frustrated. I don't know yet about planning a trip through China together, or how he'll feed my cats in the morning when he wakes up before me, and about the New Year's party we'll throw and the confetti we'll still find in the rugs three months later.

Meg was wrong. Drew doesn't have dimples. And he doesn't wear glasses. But he is "funny and charming and kind and gracious and creative and ambitious and smart." And I still love his smile (dimple or not).

Happy Birthday, Drew. Here's to lots more together.

SWF seeks GM

So life in New York is going well — I'm making friends, I have work I enjoy, I'm taking some fun classes, am close to the park, the apartment is coming together, I don't even hate the neighborhood as much as I did at first, and yet, something is still missing and last night on the way home from dinner, it finally occurred to me exactly what that something is.

"I don't have any gays!" I said to Drew out of the blue as we shuffled passed 48th and 9th.
"What?" he said.
"Gays! I don't have any! I've always had lots of gay boyfriends and now I don't have one." I wailed.
"Well," he said gesturing to our notoriously gay neighborhood, "If you don't have any gay boyfriends yet and you live here, you're definitely doing something wrong."
"I know!" I said, "but what? I'm not putting myself out there enough? I'm not putting enough effort into my appearance? I don't seem approachable? What is it? Why don't the gays like me here?"
"Maybe you should go hang out at Therapy. By yourself." Drew suggested.
"Oh, my kind of gays aren't going to be at Therapy on a Friday night!" I said, "They're gonna be at dinner parties!"
"Oh, I know!" I said, snapping my fingers, "I could place an ad! It could read: 'Straight White Female seeks Gay Boyfriend for bike rides in the park, flea market shopping, Sedaris readings, and brunch. Must like karaoke, decorating, and dinner parties! Bonus for green thumbs and a love of cats.'"
"That's pretty good," Drew replied, "You should do it."
"Or..." I said, "I could just call up an old college acquaintance who happens to be gay and see if he wants to grab a beer sometime..."