Tag: new york city

god of the sun

Even his name was reminiscent of my past- of feuds that burned and still glow quietly. It means “god of the sun.”

We rode the train halfway across town. He sat next to me and never asked for my number. I laughed quietly as I waved, stepping off the train to his tortured expression of shyness. I realized later that he had gone 10 stops past where he needed to go.

A friend whispered to me with that mischievous glint in her eye that she had passed my number along to him.

***

Your room was equipped with only the following: a mattress on the ground piled with mismatched blankets, thick and dark curtains drawn at a weak attempt to ward off the light and noise from the streets, and books tastefully stacked all around the room. Which really are the only requisite things that I look for in a man’s room, obviously.

You’d labor over the kitchen counter to serve us caipirinhas that were sticky with sweetness and too much cachaça, and I’d flip through the books that you had carelessly left on the tiny dining table as you ran to Duane Reade to buy too-expensive limes. You’d quiz me on the concoctions- on whether the batches were too sour or too sweet- with all the seriousness and exactness of the mathematician that you are. I love men who measure things, because I measure nothing and spend my life on estimations instead. Which is why I constantly find myself trying to correct my errors in calculation.

That night we snuck a shitty bottle of red wine and two mugs up to the rooftop that said “entry prohibited” – the rooftop that creaked with our steps and stained our clothes black.
You ran downstairs to get an old towel for us to sit on.

I scooted towards the edge and swung my legs off the side of the roof while staring at the lights of the Empire State Building, looming large enough to reach out and put in the palms of my hands.

You are wary of heights so you sat awkwardly a foot away from me, eyes kind of yearning for the bravery to get closer. I threatened you with that silly habit of attempting yoga poses in precarious places – and you dove for me in panic, almost pushing us both off into the middle of Macdougal Street’s revelry. We laughed while you placed my head on your lap to kiss me in such a casual manner that I almost believed you were cunning enough to have planned it. You continued kissing me beyond the relief of not falling- over and over, as if to desperately forget your fear of heights by falling in other ways. You fumbled with the rubberband and couldn’t stop touching my hair in that way that said you’d waited months to do just that.

Later, on the mattress in your room filled with books, I leaned back across your pillow with my hair twisted back up and watched the orange of the streetlights filter across my legs.

Secretly, you watched me with equations in your eyes, god of the night.
Secretly, I smiled back with the solutions in mine.

wastED

starting today, Blue Hill Farm is “temporarily reinventing” its location in Greenwich Village as wastED, a popup devoted to a theme of food waste and re-use.

WastED will collaborate with local farmers, fishermen, distributors, processors, plant breeders, producers, restaurants and retailers, reconceiving “waste” that occurs at every link in the food chain. We are also partnering with more than 20 guest chefs to curate daily specials and help celebrate what chefs do every day on their menus (and peasant cooking has done for thousands of years): creating something delicious out of the ignored or un-coveted.

though i have yet to dine at Blue Hill (don’t worry! it’s on the wishlist– the upstate Stone Barns location in particular), i have long admired its incredibly simple and powerful mission: “We will tell you a story of the earth, and we will feed you wonderfully while doing so.” Dan Barber has painstakingly (over the course of ten years) sowed the seeds of change where chefs think about not only the farm-to-table aspect, but the seed-to table journey. as the GQ article puts it:

Is it any wonder, with all that to coordinate and care for, that Blue Hill has required a heroic length of time to reach its potential? The Trojan War lasted ten years. Odysseus spent the same time making his way back to Ithaca. Very few restaurants have such resolve. We live in a meek era when nine out of ten don’t survive that long, and the few that do rarely improve. Yet Blue Hill has painstakingly evolved into the restaurant it was surely destined to become.

as the friends that i frequently dine with know well, i am passionate about not wasting food (almost to a point of self-detriment). yes, if you don’t believe me, i dare you to watch me eat the cartilage off of your fried chicken bones.

i admire the approach that wastED will be trying from March 13-31st, and i hope we will all find more creative ways to use what we have (or what others don’t want) in an effort to waste less.

attention without feeling is only a report

The absolute splendor of a completely empty schedule on a Sunday. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t wake up at 6am. I arose later than I have in months, looked lazily at the full sunlight and went about my entire day in almost complete silence. I cooked breakfast and went outside to elatedly watch ice melt into sidewalk rivers in front of my eyes, and felt giddy at the “45 degrees” staring at me from my weather report check. I felt the warmth of spring stubbornly insisting on its first appearance through the curtains of persisting wintry cold. I went and hid in a bookstore for a little while. With all of New York City at one’s disposal, sometimes the greatest luxury is just being by yourself.

Often when I do actually find myself having a quiet evening at home, I type in an artist’s name on Spotify (tonight, Sonny Rollins keeps me company) and then just work or allow myself to meander through reading books or blogs or articles.

At night just before bed, my memory wanes and occasionally in the mornings I’ll wake up to little notes I had emailed to myself. If you haven’t tried it, it’s actually pretty spectacular to read letters from yourself. I treat my entire blog as such.

Last night, I emailed myself my own blog entry from a while ago (aptly one that mentions Netflix, since I fell asleep watching an episode of Scandal). I found the quote at the end of my blog post referenced again here, where Brain Pickings explores the love between Mary Oliver and Molly Malone Cook. (I have always loved reading Mary Oliver- I liked that Brain Pickings referenced “her familiar touch of emboldening light” when speaking of the things she wrote in the wake of her lover’s the death). It’s exactly how I would describe her writing.

I was drawn to Mary Oliver’s thought that:

“Attention without feeling… is only a report.”

Later in the article:

But perhaps the greatest gift of [Mary and Molly’s] union was the way in which they shaped each other’s way of seeing and being with the world — the mutually ennobling dialogue between their two capacities for presence:

“It has frequently been remarked, about my own writings, that I emphasize the notion of attention. This began simply enough: to see that the way the flicker flies is greatly different from the way the swallow plays in the golden air of summer. It was my pleasure to notice such things, it was a good first step. But later, watching M. [Molly] when she was taking photographs, and watching her in the darkroom, and no less watching the intensity and openness with which she dealt with friends, and strangers too, taught me what real attention is about. Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter. Such openness and empathy M. had in abundance, and gave away freely… I was in my late twenties and early thirties, and well filled with a sense of my own thoughts, my own presence. I was eager to address the world of words — to address the world with words. Then M. instilled in me this deeper level of looking and working, of seeing through the heavenly visibles to the heavenly invisibles. I think of this always when I look at her photographs, the images of vitality, hopefulness, endurance, kindness, vulnerability… We each had our separate natures; yet our ideas, our influences upon each other became a reach and abiding confluence.”