For those of you who have been reading Dirty Water since its birth seven months ago, we hope you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read. With the turning of a new year, me leaving Boston, and International Girl no longer abroad, the girls of Drama City have decided to say goodbye. Seeing as there has been “a lot of blue” lately, you can still track Classy Girl to New York at http://mightymanhattan.blogspot.com. The site has only recently been formatted, so keep checking in for updates.
In other news, I’m leaving tomorrow. Time flies and I’m beginning to think you can never really catch up with it. Last night was an emotional night at the Pig, with Sweet Girl (and my song) telling me not to go. I don’t know if I’m ready to leave my friends behind, but sometimes you can’t stop life from happening. Someone once told me that you need to leave your comfort zone in order to experience life. Maybe being too comfortable isn’t really living life at all. Well, I’ll be uncomfortable on some friends couch in Brooklyn for a while, so that has to count for something.
So I’m going to head out alone and hope for the best and while it will be difficult and different to get used to a life away from Boston, I’m looking forward to taking on the colossus of the Big Apple.
It’s all hello’s and so long’s and I’ll see you when and visit then, but no one ever really knows who they’ll ever see again.
Three days left and the attempt to leave my life behind and venture off to create a new one is more difficult and overwhelming than I thought. I don’t want to spend too much time thinking about what I’ve accomplished and what I’ll never be able to finish.
To the guy at the camera store and the one who loved jazz and the dreaded mail that I don’t think will stop any time soon. It will be more vodka sodas at different bars, and the weather report will change, but open hearts (steamed) will remain the same.
I bet Boston looks different driving away than driving in. This city creeps up on you and hits you the way something does that you’ve known for a long time and have only just allowed yourself to realize.
Classy Girl heads for New York after Johnny Damon agrees to join the Yankees for 52 million, Classy's compensation will be considerably less, however she can now wear her Yankee cap without fear of intimidation.
Thursday night at the Pig: stressful. Checking news feed on my cell phone between vodka sodas, waiting to see if the MTA is going to go on strike in NYC. If so the interview I’m supposed to have the next day is going to be canceled, ruining my plans to do something about my future. After being sung about by my favorite Irish guitarist, "the prettiest girl who comes to the Pig every Thursday and never gets lucky because she’s too intimidating..." the MTA strike is still in talks, and I go home to sleep and assume that in the morning I will be on my way to Manhattan.
New York. After talking about myself for roughly an hour, citing all my great (hah) qualities and how qualified those qualities make me for the position, I walk around Manhattan and fall in love with it all over again. The city is like a good man that you’ve met before but had to leave behind. Its return makes you realize how there's really nothing else quite like it, makes you realize how much you've missed it. It’s the kind of place that you can reinvent yourself in. The 1/9 to 14th and the L to Bedford, I make it to Brooklyn to drink and hang out with old friends and picture what kind of person I might become.
The trip back home feels too long, and getting off the T near my apartment, Symphony Hall illuminated in front of me, I breathe in deep the Boston air and think about how much I would miss this place if I had to leave it. I realize that sometimes you don’t realize how much you love something until you’re faced with losing it, and how Boston, like a lot of things in my life, means more to me than I let myself admit. All I know is that by this time next week everything in my life could completely change, or remain entirely the same. They seem so flimsy, these things a grown woman can hang her over-grown hopes on.
Well. It’s that time of year again. The snow is falling and store fronts are filled with lights and ribbons bombarding the world with good cheer and 30% off holiday sales.
It’s that time of year again when I start to listen to the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack on my way to work, letting the feeling of good will towards my fellow man creep up on me like the cold Boston air.
It’s that time of year again when people throw holiday parties, and I spent Friday night at one in the District with Kinsey. It was a full house, packed with people I didn’t know, and as we were pushed up against the wall by the celebrating mass, my vodka soda spilling on my tulle skirt, I thought that maybe the holidays really are crap.
I haven’t even started my Christmas shopping yet.
While I’m a wait-to-the-last-minute kind of gal, preferring exciting holiday spontaneity to the monotony of planning, I’m finding that I’m falling short on Christmas spirit this year. The lines and crowds of people are now making me feel claustrophobic, angrophobic, hypengyophobic and even mildly pantophobic.
Maybe it’s because I don’t see the meaning in buying presents for people in order to show them you care. I don’t understand the concept that, just because it’s Christmas, you should tell the people you care about how you really feel. Shouldn’t we be having the attitude of honesty all year round? Why does it take snow storms, egg nog and cheesy movies to knock us out of our stupors and realize that we should stop being idiots and be nice to the people around us?
Or maybe it’s what Sweet Girl said to me last night when I was lamenting over the fact that it is twenty days until Christmas and I’m feeling less than excited about the season – we are getting older. The real world makes it difficult to see past the tough sheen of reality to visions of harmony and sugar plums, whatever those are. I’m afraid that Christmas will come and go, much as it did last year, without any lasting affect on me at all.
Maybe it’s like what Charlie Brown says, and I just don’t understand Christmas. I like getting presents, and sending Christmas cards and decorating trees and all that, but I’m still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed.
Last night, while locked out of my apartment for over an hour, cold and tired, sitting in the hallway and staring at the closed door in front of me while waiting for a roommate to return home with keys, at least five people from my building passed by, looked at me and simply said, “that sucks.”
Isn’t it bad enough having to go home for the holidays, listening to the incessant naggings of your parents asking you what it is that you’re planning on doing with the rest of your life, while they still act like you’re sixteen and fail to recognize that you’ve literally been living on your own in a city for the past four and a half years, that when you wake up in the morning after a night of drinking downtown at over priced bars with everyone you’ve ever graduated from high school with, talking to you as you think to yourself, who is this? and you nod and smile anyway because they seem to know/remember a lot about you and you can’t, for the life of you, remember their first names, that you have to sluggishly, head pounding from $10 vodka sodas, make your way downstairs and open the cabinets of your childhood kitchen to see the worst thing in the world you could ever imagine seeing sitting before you: decaf.
Out of anger and the knowledge that you won’t be able to function for the rest of the day without it, you drive in search of it. No Starbucks around the corner on Huntington, or up Mass Ave or down the street in the Prudential Center. No. At home you sacrifice, and speeding in your clothes from the previous night that you slept in and have yet to take off, all you see are pink and orange signs that radiate the horrible stench of sugary liquid that people keep insisting on calling coffee.
Dunkin Donuts is ruining my life. Well, it ruined my holiday at least and while it’s normal to see a Dunks on every street corner in the Dunkin Donuts-loving-Boston, going home and seeing new ones popping up everywhere makes my heart start to race from panic much like the effect of a doppio espresso macchiato.
Are we really sacrificing quality for speed and pastels that don’t even match?
All I know is that after four days of withdrawal it’s good to be back in the city, where at least both establishments are represented equally. And if Freddy Ferrer is right, and there are two types of New Yorkers, just call me part of the java leisure class, part of the “BlackBerry-packing, Prada-wearing megalopolis” sans the Berry and Prada.
I’m a daughter of the Cleaver characters, who paid too much for a college education and is currently being underpaid in an entry-level job that I’m overqualified for, packing my own lunch to save up for Starbucks, the rocket fuel for the people who do the city’s really hard work-clutch our hot white and green cups tightly with the aspiration that someday, we too, might be lucky enough to get paid for hardly doing any work at all.
She keeps me up. The woman outside in the alley that we call the lobby as if it were a real room to the people who find parts of their lives in the parts that other people have thrown away.
The check out man at the camera store is leafing through a tabloid and I wonder if he’s bought it on his own or if he’s really interested. The guy behind me nudges me in line, I move forward. Everyone’s interested he says and asks me what my name is and then tells me my pictures were good. Are good. I feel nervous that he looked even though everyone knows that the man who develops looks.
Like I look at the woman outside in the alley that we call the lobby as if it were a real room. He tries to sell me a photo album and I tell him I’m not a photographer and only photographers should put their pictures on display. Like the three men who bought me drinks on Saturday night but none of them were the right ones. Men or the drinks. More of things I don’t need.
I’m dreading going home. Too much food and too much family and not enough space or time. Time is flying, and the more there is the less there is and I wish I was back on the Vineyard
I’ll be sure to take some more shocking pictures soon so the check out man at the camera store can have a little more fun.
I will take tylenol pm (extra strength) tonight so that the woman in the alley doesn’t keep me up.
