Last of the September Posts!

I’ve literally got so many things to do that my brain is shutting down and I am writing blog entries instead. This is my life. Deal with it.

Ugh the third week in September was so mundane I can’t even bring myself to blog about it. The only good thing (outside of finding my favorite pen, nail file, and scissors in the couch) was a spectacularly awkward Advertising Law seminar where we talked about the subtle nuances of attaching a brand name to something, say, like “Two Girls One Cup.” At this point, of course, I burst out laughing, and everyone in the auditorium looks at me quizzically. I’m looking around, mouth open, like “Guys? Guys?” and no one knows what the video is about, hence no one knows why I’m schadenfreuding out over here. Oh my gosh, if only someone under 35 had been in the room with me so we could have made glorious, knowing, uncomfortable eye contact with each other.

Friday, September 23 I went out for drinks on the Lower East Side with Marsha and her friends.

We went to the Blue Owl, which was an adorable, hidden gem of a bar under a Tarot Card studio. Not a lot of people, beautiful mixed drinks (the bartender whipped up some awesome sparkling Mormon-approved cocktails for me), and well priced. Started talking to Krystyna Printup about Iceland. Apparently she had gone there after a bad breakup, and it was a restorative spirit journey for her, where she fell in love with a fisherman and got to ride the local horses. I was pretty much dying by the end of the evening.
Krystyna giving me the thumbs up

We went to Vesalka for food afterwards. Talked to Diana Eng about her new line of laser-cut shirts, which I adore. (Seriously, if you have a chance, check them out here.) Much of the night was spent with Natasha and Grisha, discussing the finer points of boiling your own stock for richer soups. Grisha takes his soups very seriously. Not sure if that’s the Russian in him, or if he’s just an intense person.

Saturday, I went to Central Park to hear some traditional Hasidic stories. Mark’s boss had invited me, plus I love Jews more than anything (sorry I’m not sorry). Afterwards, Diane (the boss, not the designer) came up to me, and like the sage older women she is, decided to just ask me straight up what was going on with my relationship.

Kind of taken aback, I told her that I was cool with everything, except I wasn’t sure of the reasons for the break up. She looked at me surprised, and said “I thought you had talked about this issue thoroughly?”
I sighed. “We did, but all of the explanations I got were very contradictory.”
She then told me a lot of highly personal things, which freaked me out a bit, because they indicated that she had a lot more insight into what was going on than I did. I felt the familiar sting of walking into a classroom as everyone stops talking and stares. At the end of her assessment, she said, “For what it’s worth, I think he loves you more than anyone else in the world.”
Nope, can’t say that’s worth a lot right now.
But it was a nice gesture, trying to make me feel better about the whole thing. It’s nice to know that there are some real, old-school hippies left in the world.
After speaking with Diane, I met Brooke in Koreatown, and had dinner at this crazy little cafeteria on 32nd street. Basically, everything tasted delicious, with very hot spices and very affordable prices. Way to go, New York!
Afterwards, we went to some of the Korean grocery stores and bakeries. One very attractive man chatted me up, and me being me I completely blew it and accidentally insulted him. I just don’t know how to be careful with men in a romantic capacity—they’re so fragile, and you can’t just say things like, “actually I totally hate salted prawns, but I am delighted by your enthusiasm!”
After buying up some tasty Korean and Japanese snacks, we headed over to the movie theater. I wanted to see Moneyball, and Brooke wanted to see Drive, so we each bought a ticket to the movie we wanted to see. I decided to watch the first part of Drive, and when it was over, Brooke would join me in Moneyball. Now, Imma just throw this out: the first 30 minutes of Drive could be some of the best moviemaking I’ve seen in ages. Crazy score, smooth and lazy SoCal cinematography, realistic dialogue. It could have been a brilliant, self-contained short film, and it would have been a complete triumph.

Then I left, and proceeded to watch almost 3 hours of Brad Pitt eating stuff. Brooke comes in after about an hour, totally white. “After you left, it was like a whole other movie!” she whispered. “Ryan Gosling stomps a guy’s head to a pulp! And they show it! They show it Mary!” Yikes. Very glad I did not stay for that.
Sunday kicked off what I will call the Email Trail of Tears, which started with my dad writing to Mark, Mark responding, Mark writing to me, me responding to Mark, and then Dad forwarding his correspondence to me. During the course of the exchange, I was presented with the 7 Theses of Failure: or the 7 ways in which I had been found wanting as a partner. And I have to say, having them all in black and white was totally and completely freeing. What started off as humiliation was quickly followed up with good, old-fashion righteous anger. And nothing is quite as awesome as righteous anger.
Of course, the cleansing fire of rage did not stop me from crying on the subway on Monday, or crying at my cubicle. I started going down a very dark road, where I began to wonder what the point was in trying at anything other than being hot, really. Clearly, it didn’t matter what I had accomplished; because I wasn’t sexy, slender, or alluring, all of my other positives were negated. I’d never felt uglier than I had at that moment.
But on Tuesday, I sort of just got over it. That sounds very dismissive, but all of the emotion just disappeared overnight. By withholding the real reason behind the break up for so long, I had been kept in this tortuous limbo. Now that I knew, I was able to see how sad the whole thing was, and leave it as a kind of Tolstoyan tragedy. I’m sure, during the next few months, I’ll have many more such epiphanies before sliding back into the abyss. But the positive thing is that each peak and plateau gets a bit higher than the last. It’s such a relief as the love and the hate merge together drop by drop into a tepid indifference.