Everything in New York seems to merit preserving. If it's not historical, it's personal. If it's not personal, it's cultural. But you can't. You can't save everything. You just have to pack it up in your brain and take it with you when you go.
I think it's hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world.
I can't see the forest through the trees, except the trees are people.
For the average person, taken to their sick bed, it takes a serious bout of pneumonia or a full body cast to completely forget the life they had prior to falling off the rollercoaster. I, however, will do this over a paper cut on my thumb, obsessing of said cut and being generally consumed by it.
At the end of each year, I sit on the floor and go page by page through the old calendar, inking annual events into the new one, all the while watching my year in 'dinner withs' skate by. When I'm done, I save the old calendar in the box of the new one and put it with the others on a shelf.
I have definitely had experiences where I can feel the shift from simply living my life to being slightly outside of my life and taking notes.
The world I describe is about how people live now. It's not about zany people with unlimited, inexplicable funds in an apartment somewhere.
My personality, when tasked with creating meals, goes something like this: Is there a way we can make this more difficult? Because let's do that. I don't mean to complicate things. It's just - why buy pre-packaged potato salad when you can spend your morning boiling potatoes and flipping out because there's no dill in the house?
I love to bake, so I made vanilla bean and blueberry muffins for sick hospital children. Just kidding! All of that is true except the sick children part.
The hardest thing is spending twelve hours a day accommodating the rest of the world, then going home at night and criticizing it. I would be curious about what I'd write if I didn't have to worry about offending.
Sometimes in New York, you're walking down the street and you realize there's a girl walking in front of you whose thighs you could hit a golf ball through, and maybe that makes you depressed.
