Year in Review

Yes, I’ve been very bad about keeping up with my blog. I’ll add it to my list of “growth” areas for 2009.

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These past few months I’ve kept myself busy with various writing projects and with yoga. The studio at which I teach, Yoga to the People (a by-donation studio with locations on St. Marks Place in New York and in Berkeley, CA), has been getting a lot of media attention of late. It’s been written up in Vogue, Yoga Journal and New York Magazine. Just recently Time Out New York declared YTTP a good place to meet singles. In January we’ll be opening up a hot yoga studio in Midtown. Exciting.

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I’ve been back in Minnesota for about a week now. As soon as I got home from the airport, Cassandra and I launched our gingerbread project, thereby ensuring that Christmas would indeed happen. Gingerbread men sort of embody everything I love about life: ginger, happiness, anthropomorphized food. Like Paris, yogurt and Marias novels, we were made for each other.

Not my gingerbread men.

There is something weirdly satisfying about being in a place that takes winter so seriously, where for about three solid months the mercury rarely creeps above freezing. I had a wonderful Minneapolis day yesterday, complete with a trip to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and mock duck rolls at Jasmine Deli. There are so many perfect days to be had here. (The same is true for New York, of course, but the scarcity of my time here makes those days so much more poignant.)

The Frank Lloyd Wright area of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Random observation: There’s more crepuscular purple in Minneapolis’s sky than in New York’s. Minneapolis often purples. Par exemple:

Purple Minneapolis

I feel like the sky often looks like this. Or perhaps that’s just how I like to remember it.

Molly’s Madeleine

I really will write a longer blog post soon but in the meantime, I wanted to draw your attention to this New York Times article written by my friend Molly. (Molly, who was planning on becoming a chef, lost her sense of smell when she was hit by a car. She writes about her gradual recovery of the sense. For more, check out the link to her blog on the right-hand side of this page.)

Overheard at Whole Foods:

A child throwing a tantrum in the check-out line because he wanted Vitamin Water. Not candy, ice cream or soda. VITAMIN WATER.

Conclusion: New York kids are weird.

Thoughts from the F Train

New York is never not beautiful to me. It was snowing all day yesterday and raining all day today but STILL New York is sublime: I love this city in all of its meteorological moods. Even if it’s not always picturesque, New York is ALWAYS cinematic.

I need a big loan/from the girl zone

I’ve sort of disappeared lately. Between school, Salon and two consecutive bouts of consumption (or influenza, who can say?) I’ve been feeling a little overwhelmed. My typically steady stream of drivel has run dry. (But watch this space: it will be back in full force once the semester is over, I expect.) In the meantime, I may be limited to terse, fortune-cookie-length blog posts.

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A few weeks ago, I was graced by a visit from Jessica Deutsch, who came to run the New York City marathon. She was a total champ, finishing in three hours and twenty-five minutes. Sick sick sick… Jess’s visit reminded me of how much I miss the company of female friends. For some reason, it seems like most of my friends in New York are guys. And as much as I enjoy the Y chromosome, I tend to be more effusive about my women friends. Sigh… Where does one go to meet interesting girls in this town? I haven’t found it yet…

*Post title (“I need a big loan/from the girl zone”) comes from Tori Amos’s Caught a Lite Sneeze.

Altr’East River

I read (or heard) once in college that to speak another language is to have another life. This makes perfect sense to me; every language seems coloured by the world-view of its speakers–there is more beauty in Italian and more pleasure in French. I feel like a similar thing can be said for neighborhoods: you have many lives as you have homes. Each new setting changes one’s haunts and habits. A register shift occurs.

Earlier this month, I moved from the spasmodic East Village to Park Slope, a tweedy pocket of tranquility in Brooklyn. I’m excited to explore the neighborhood–the streets, lined with trees and gorgeous, historic brownstones, promise quality walking. I live within blocks of two beckoning Italian restaurants, one of which advertises a goat cheese, fig and prosciutto pizza, which is really just a love letter to Megan, written in the underemployed medium of pizza. Prospect Park is a mere block and a half from my apartment (reminiscent of my summer on the Upper West Side), and the farmers’ market that I used to frequent in Union Square when I was a resident of the East Village has been seamlessly replaced by the farmers’ market at Grand Army Plaza.

I’m hoping that a calmer, more focused Megan will emerge from this new setting: one who maybe cooks instead of living on soup from a can, one who reads ACTUAL newspapers rather than the online version, one who resumes her much-vaunted epistolary tradition.

Of course, this semester is insane, my disarray all too mobile (I didn’t leave it behind in the E.Vil), and I’ve scarcely settled in. So much for that.

I still don’t feel like I’ve spent much time in Park Slope but I look forward to learning its streets and finding my corners.

On Going Home

I consider Minneapolis my hometown, though I’ve spent more of my life gazing at it from a distance than within its city limits. Growing up in Rosemount (a blemish on my biographical geography, although I love the home where I grew up), I looked longingly to New York but also, more realistically, toward Minneapolis. (Both focal points were correct–if there’s one thing I have a knack for, it’s for knowing where I should be.) Now, blissfully ensconced in New York, I gaze back with fondness at my urban midwife.

It’s funny how moving away has elevated Minneapolis’ status as a travel destination–my city now shares with Paris a rosy aura of nostalgia. I’m not kidding. I have lyrical yearnings for a city that so many East Coasteners assume is a Midwestern backwater. Idiots…

My feeling for Minneapolis is similar to my feeling for Colombia: I love these places all the more because people don’t know that they’re supposed to love them.

I feel like I am quite conceivably the world’s biggest Minneapolis-fan. If not, then surely its most vocal chauvinist. Who could possibly love its lakes, river, coffeeshops, theatres and public radio as much as I do? Can anyone share my profound understanding of the sublimity of Solera‘s little goat cheese balls? (I doubt it. I mean, we all know that goat cheese is good, but this stuff is my manna.) The BBQ chicken pizza and tiki drinks at Psycho Suzi’s, the Venezuelan corn pancakes at Maria’s, the spectacle of the Loring Pasta Bar…

I love that my city has the Walker Art Center, the Guthrie and the Open Book Building. Minneapolis loves the arts; I marvel at the accessibility of its scene. I used to think that Minneapolis was like any other mid-size city in the country. It’s not–it is exceptional.

The recent tear in the city’s fabric is disturbing–I’m awed by the collapse of the I-35W bridge, which I’ve driven over countless times on my way to the University of Minnesota. The river was always a favorite wandering spot of mine during my college years: Like a Dostoevky character, I have spent many a metaphysical moment on Minneapolis’ bridges (most typically the Stone Arch Bridge). I cannot begin to fathom how traffic will flow once the school year starts up again…

I digress. This past year has already distilled my Minnesota iterinery considerably. I am becoming less ambitious during my visits home, less concerned with seeing everyone I know with a 651 or 612 area code. I’m now more interested in relaxing, visiting some old haunts, spending time with my family and seeing what friends I can.

It’s odd to reduce my relationship with my parents to a few core activities: walks around the neighborhood and crossword collaborations over coffee with my mom; tennis, grilled salmon (regardless of the season, Mike Doll will brave the bitter cold for the perfect piece of grilled flesh), and pitchers of champagne sangria with my dad. These, of course, are some of the things that I miss the most but I’m saddened by the sudden significance that these rituals assume. It all becomes mimetic of our previous lives together: remember when we did this all the time? The pathos is at times too much for me to take.

Internal Wunderkammers

“The dark, frigid sky was like a symbol of his soul. An impalpable drizzle was falling, driven before that wind from the southeast that (Bruno used to say) makes a person who lives in Buenos Aires even more melancholy, so that he looks out at the street through the rain-blurred windows and murmurs what shitty weather, while a more reflective sort thinks what infinite sadness.”

–Ernesto Sábato from On Heroes and Tombs

I just recently finished Sábato’s On Heroes and Tombs and was completely absorbed by it–not since A Heart So White have I read a novel so studiously. Sábato’s metaphors are unbelievably imaginative: at one point he describes a fat woman as “a giant, quivering custard: but a custard with intestines.” (A proto-Tom Wolfe!)

Like A Heart So White, On Heroes and Tombs was a recommendation that took me five years to act on–I am so glad that I did. This book is very much for me–the way New York City, yoga and the fiction of Javier Marias are for me. Some things seem to suit me so perfectly that I am astonished to think that they sprung up independent of–and indifferent to–myself.

Uncovering these identity-fragments is inordinately pleasurable. This, I suppose, is what makes me a gleaner–I tend to see life as a scavenger hunt, each year adding new treasures to my ever-accruing internal wunderkammer. (I have an expertly curated inner world, although you might never guess it from my constant external disorder.) This year, for instance, I’ve added Pan’s Labyrinth, the Mexican muralists, ceviche, Roberto Bolaño and Ernesto Sábato. Every year I’m a little richer.

My romantic world-view explains why I feel destined to visit certain places–why Colombia was necessary for “my personhood” and why I feel like there is something for me in Mexico and Buenos Aires. It thrills me to know that there are scores of other “destined” places that haven’t even registered on my radar yet.

I am, admittedly, a ridiculous human being.

The Savage Detectives

Francisco Goldman on Bolaño‘s infrarrealista manifesto in the New York Review of Books:

“Rather than prescribing any particular aesthetic principles or commitments, it urges infrarrealistas to leave their narrow bookish circles, to see the world, and find their rebel poetry in their own uncompromising lives.”

That is a seductive slice of manifesto to read right now, when the dialectical tension between stability and vagrancy that characterizes a (interesting) person’s 20s has become, for me, insufferable: Part of me wants to travel around Mexico for an extended period of time, acquire some scrapes, complicate my biography and live to tell the tale; the other part wants to stay in New York, sustain conversations and drink a little too much wine in “narrow bookish circles.” (This is a dilemma I rehash with Thomas almost every time we go to the Yaffa Cafe to write.)

In A Heart So White Marias describes a character in the following manner:

“He always gave the impression that he was missing out on something and was painfully aware of it, he was one of those individuals who want to live several lives at once, to be many, not limited only to being themselves: people who are horrified at the idea of unity.”

Next to that passage (I underlined the bold part with a squiggley line, which normally indicates a personal rather than readerly reaction to the text) I wrote: “me!” Indeed, that is me–I wish that I could cram a couple of different lives into my 20s; I love the vigor of this age and would like to use it several times over.

Another salient tension for me in New York: private vs. public life. I am astonished by how much of my life is unfurling in public space. As an introvert with a rich heritage of quietude and introspection, this is mildly unsettling. I used to joke that “Megan happens” in solitary moments, I need to sit still for ideas to crystallize. Now, I can’t seem to get a moment to myself–or when I do, they feel a little too luxurious: milk baths of solitude.

I still haven’t mastered life here.

Sénégal Fast-Food

Carl Kruger wants to ban pedestrians from using ipods in the streets of New York; until he does, here’s my favorite song to ped.-out to in Manhattan. (And, no, I don’t think that ‘ped.-out’ is a legitimate phrase, but can’t you feel it?):

This entire CD is pretty awesome.