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[agirlmeetslife]

On Breaking Old Ways

In a recent Mass celebration, I recited the Nicene Creed, as Catholics do weekly in accordance with our traditions.  I think one of the effects of attending Mass virtually these days is the newfound awareness on practices that have become rote.  "…God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God..."  I thought, God from God? Are they saying Christ’s begotten nature is being the heir apparent to the throne?  Wasn't challenging Constantine's monarchy almost a guarantee of imminent death?

I have been reciting the Creed my entire life, but I’ve only now started hearing what I’ve been saying.  Providence denied me the same command over the language as that of these early Christians, but it gave me the ability to recognize inspiration when I see it.  I want to send you an email, because, if I have a small fraction of the enlightened minds and bold convictions as those seated at the first Council of Nicea did when penning those radical words to the creed, if I could access just some of the truths inside merely myself, as the men at Nicea had inside their entire faith, I might feel wild with success.

It occurs to me that I've never said sorry.  There are many things, of course, for which I am sorry, so I'll just start with my petulance.  I think you were friends with me at a time I felt most entitled to all parts of everyone's internal life, purchased, I believed, by the injustice and pain I experienced in my own early life.  

Taking a broad view, pain is observed on a relative basis.  But pain is never personally experienced this way, is it?  Pain, when it happens to you, is absolute and unredeemed.  And in my case, I carry whatever fractured experience I have and heap it onto other fractured experiences and then do things like hurl skewering words at people around me or demand impossible things from them.  As uncomfortable and agitating as my explanation to you is, I said terrible, unthinkable things to you, because I was attempting to make pain absent by its very accumulation.  It is not an excuse, I know, but I think context might help.

I guess if we are going down this road, I should also say it was during a time that I was figuring it out.  This presupposes that whatever it was, has been figured out now, which, as you might suspect, is farthest from th…let me put it this way. Have you ever seen someone with no sense of cardinal direction try to find their way off of the right exit on a freeway at night only to be pitifully escorted off by a police car?  Because to anyone who hasn’t seen this happen, I really have no point of reference from which to compare my life of figuring things out.  But of course you have.

Over the years, New York became a map of my walks recounting to you the things that unmoored me; the rooftop of my building became a confessional in which, over calls to you, I laid bare my haughtiness.  I think I will never really understand you.  Who in their right mind would see a girl, with her ungovernable soul, an individualist with a snickering disdain for the weaklings in the world, and think, yeah, I’d like some of that, please?  And the way you withheld judgement, your instinct for understanding just about everything, and the incomprehensibly forgiving nature, I found you alien.

I worked with a portfolio manager once who used to be one of the physicists working on the Higgs Boson, which is a very tiny particle...the elementary particle, the “God particle,” named so for its presence at the moment of the creation of the universe.  The only way to see this particle is by colliding it with other particles, from many different directions and with other particles.  You end up with an outline of the particle, but not with the particle itself.  And through this long, meandering way, I finally arrive at my point.

I am sorry for my petulance, for so many of the colliding with you, so to speak.  Of course, I never got what I wanted by doing so.  Today, I can only see the outline of what happened and why, seeing it happen from all different angles to infer the existence of the masked fear and pain, artifacts from an earlier life.

I have summoned all the discipline I could to keep this email pithy, a laughable exercise now, although my failure to do so can only be softened by my promise that if you saw my first draft, it would make you open the email, cringe, and immediately close it because no sane person wants to read an email whose length rivaled the Magna Carta.  So let me just address what your next natural question might be, why this email now?  I don’t know.  I suppose at some point, I just have to do the things I’ve been meaning to do.  And perhaps, the question after that you might ask is, what of this?  What does it mean?  Probably nothing for you.  You may still think I am pathologically ridiculous.  And smart money is with you on that.  But I suppose if the men at Nicea were onto anything, it is that codifying into words something they believe to be real, even if the response from their audience may not be what they hoped for, was really the only thing worth writing.  Everything else is just…what was it that you and I once called things that should not concern us…a rounding error?

[agirlmeetslife]

The Only Way Out is Through

The past three years of my life has been full of big changes, and this last year was the most eventful of them all.  I am a different person today than the one I was when I started writing here.  In a way, I am more scared, and in other ways, I feel stronger.  I think it is time to journal again, because, I feel like I am starting over in my life.

I think I’ll start by sharing two emails I had written to someone, redacting his name.  They are an appropriate start, because in them, I provide context for what has happened in my life and where I am emotionally and mentally.  Then, I will begin to answer the hard questions that I had been avoiding for years, and in doing so, I hope to gain better insight to what’s going on inside me, and, importantly, know to do about it.

Buckle up.

[agirlmeetslife]

Live from New York.

[agirlmeetslife]

With full hearts, we welcome our sweet baby girl, Alexandra Nina Troufanova, who came into this world with such trust. And to my husband, whom I would choose again and again, a thousand times over: your love makes me brave. (at Upper East Side)

[agirlmeetslife]

My New York visiting my California friends.

[agirlmeetslife]

Date night.

[agirlmeetslife]

Can't fake the funk.

[agirlmeetslife]

I told him that the next few months, I'm going to be an emotional pinball. He responded, "Oh boy." 💋

[agirlmeetslife]

Home from work, listening to Kendrick Lamar's new album, and getting ready for the Metropolitan Opera. Love Fridays.

[agirlmeetslife]

Calvin Trillin is a Hilarious Writer

If ever there ever was a question whether The New Yorker magazine is one of the finest publications to read, let this recently published piece cast any doubt out of our heads:  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/01/the-irish-constellation

Allow me to provide a snippet:

“Now that everybody’s confessing everything, I’m ready to confess that, until about five years ago, I was under the impression that the constellation Orion was the constellation O’Ryan.  I thought of it as the Irish constellation, sort of the way that actors refer to ‘Macbeth’ as the ‘Scottish play.’ ‘Do you see O’Ryan’s Belt?’  This is not so crazy...My customary answer would be ‘No.’  I have been called a constellation denier.  I don’t accept the term.  I sometimes vary the a simple ‘No’ with something like ‘No, but if you look a bit to the left I think you can see Penelope’s Pants Suit.’”

Everything about this is gold.  And not only because the writer, Calvin Trillin, reminds me of me: haplessly deficient in common-place knowledge, moderately insecure in the guise of sarcasm, defensiveness, and hilarity (I don’t achieve these to that the degree he does), and the result of being completely ridiculous.  

[agirlmeetslife]

Summary of Him and Me

Him, while driving me back to my coffee shop to work and approaching a Starbucks: Wait. You were working in this Starbucks?

Me: No. Keep driving down the street. I was working in that coffee shop over there.

Him: Right, I didn't think you would be in a Starbucks.

Me: Wait...what? Why not?

Him: Starbucks is not hip enough for you.

Me: Hold on a minute. I am low maintenance and I can work in any coffee shop.

Him: I think you are the most amazing woman, but false, on both parts of your sentence.

Me: ...

Me: What kind of coffee shop would you be working in?

Him: Starbucks.

[agirlmeetslife]

Cancer

It’s been a while since I have written, and for those who have ever read this site in its entirety, the experience is like tracking my mental breakdowns where it is clear I am at times holding myself back from typing in all caps.  Not chic.  I’m tempted to list how pressed for time I am, alongside increased responsibilities and scrutiny that come as a part of a career in finance, as the reasons for not updating this blog.  But to attribute my negligence to these would be dishonest, hiding a somewhat more subversive reason for my conspicuous silence.  Lately, writing on this blog has given me a sort of idiosyncratic discomfort, akin to my experience, as a Catholic, of having a deep longing to participate in the Sacrament of Penance after not doing so for an extended amount of time.  I approach this blog, as I would the Confessional, with nervous caution after I’ve disappeared a while.  In both cases, in writing honestly and confessing to God my sins, it is a confrontation with my inner person, a debate with myself, and I have no idea what wildness lies in wait.

I should begin simply.  My father has cancer.  I did not grow up with him, and in many ways, I do not know him.  Yet, strangely, I think this is what fortified my connection with him, as if the unfamiliarity created this hollow vacuum inside of me, of my wanting more of him.  Growing up, I placed blame on him for our loneliness, for my mother’s obvious flaws, and for my own hubris.  As an idea, he became in my formative mind the reason for my unhappiness, and I believe that was what propelled me towards my ultimate destiny.  But the truth is, happiness was not what I needed.  I was a restless girl, and what I really wanted was the experience of pain and elation, of creation and destruction.  My estranged relationship with my father fueled the vexed tension that became the foundation of who I am, and it concentrated my ambitions in my search for something great and uncompromising in the face of such vulnerable, flawed humanness.

I have never in my life felt as alone as I have during the period in which I learned about and began dealing with my father’s illness. Many have written about having their mettle tested during times of emotional isolation, but there is an exquisite kind of pain that comes from begging God for the life of your own parents.  A 120-day countdown was a cruel punishment.  How was I to witness my father’s body and spirit rapidly deteriorate and unwind from each other?

I became obsessed with executing expediently his move from his impoverished situation in Louisiana to California.  If he had a few months left, I was determined to make it possible for him to spend them mending broken relationships with his family.  While doing so, demons were unleashed inside me as I tried to summon from my own craven heart forgiveness and grace towards this man, seeming to fail more times than I succeed.  In perhaps a final act of defiance towards God and the cosmos, I signed a one-year condo lease for him and flew to California from New York every weekend for appointments with doctors and lawyers. I called in favors, redeemed political and social capital from everyone I knew, enrolled him in a detox clinic, and then signed him into UCSF for this final phase of his life.  Clocking an average of 4 hours of sleep each night, I became irritable, angry and impatient with mostly everyone.

My dad, sensing my unraveling, one night sat me down to talk to me.  There comes in each relationship a transformative moment of walking through the looking glass together, and that night, we recognized in each other the depths of our despair.  He said that I had tried my best and that it was okay for me to let go.  He told me that all of what was happening to him has nothing to do with me, and he was sorry for everything.  I had never felt my heart break as hard as it did that night.

Life, for me, is a mystery, and I will never be able to understand how it works.  In a recent dramatic plot twist, the doctor at UCSF has informed us that the doctors in Louisiana had misdiagnosed the number of tumors my father has.  Given that the tumors that actually existed are in a contained area around his neck (and not in his lungs, shoulders, and brain as we were originally told in Louisiana), it is operable with the potential, if operationally successful, of my father having many more years of a cancer-free life ahead of him.

Elation and pain, creation and destruction, those are the elastic reality that makes the heartbeat of life. My father cannot explain this second chance given to him, but staring down the barrel of a loaded gun that doesn’t fire begets the ultimate understanding of redemption.  As for me, watching my father veer so dangerously close to the line that separates life and death has opened my eyes to many things, one of which is that there is simply too little time.  There’s too little time for self-doubt, too little time to be held back by fear from what I want, and too little time for caring as much as I once had what others thought of me.  So here I am, summoning the courage and strength to come back to this blog, my sort of confessional if you will, typing all of this while I wait for my father in surgery right now.  And I don’t regret if all of these words now paint a more flawed, fragile, vulnerable portrait of who I am.  There are worse things.

[agirlmeetslife]

The Perfect Fit

First, I love David Sedaris.  Why?  Because I have a pulse.  I’ve literally laughed out loud at every article he’s ever written, and I often fantasize what an exquisite experience it would be to sit across from him over dinner.

Second, this g-d quote: “I got hats as well, three of them, which I like to wear stacked up, all at the same time, partly just to get it over with but mainly because I think they look good as a tower.”

Third, David, when shopping for unreasonable things with his husband, is all of us.  Witness:

“A few days later, at the big Comme des Garcons shop, I bought yet another pair of culottes, a fancier pair that are cerulean blue.”

‘What are you doing?’  Hugh moaned, as I stepped out of the dressing room,  ‘That’s three pairs of culottes you’ll own now.’

All I could say in my defense was ‘Maybe I have a busy life.’”

The Perfect Fit:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/28/david-sedaris-shops-for-clothes-in-tokyo

[agirlmeetslife]

Definition of Snark

Me: Last Friday, I ran onto a plane 10 minutes before it took off. Like, I was basically running on the tarmac.

Chang: Nice. Where did you go?

Me: Vegas. Not my type of city, but I was watching the fight.

Chang:...What?

Me: What.

Me: What elite northeast liberal snarky remark are you preparing to make.

Chang: Liberal? No. I'm just saying that if you gave me a gun, I'd be the only one walking out of that octagon. Which I suppose would make me the ultimate fighter.

[agirlmeetslife]

I Need to Calm the Heck Down.

I refused to drive Chang around in my car and said I would go rent a car with which to drive us skiing. He was not very happy.

Chang: I saw a billion X5s out today, and all I could think of was the fact that your baby would never deign to see brown snow.

Me: A rented Audi isn't good enough for you?

Chang: Ugh. Audis are just tarted up Volkswagens. And Volkswagens are for sorority girls and failures.

Me: I don't drive an X5.

Chang: Oh right. Because you are a lunatic.

Me: ...I have an X5M. The M is the only thing worth paying for.

Me: ...if only to show others you're better.

Chang: HAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHA

[agirlmeetslife]

Insouciant. #instamood #neutral #colors #makeup for #night out in #newyork #city #nightlife with #friends #fun #fashionweek #nyfw #instafashion #fashion #nights

[agirlmeetslife]

[Belated] Year in Review

I had written this a couple of months ago but had not posted it because I guess I was self conscious about it.  I decided to do so today, because I think making goals public, even humorously basic ones that every human being has mastered at the age of, I don’t know, four, helps with accountability.  So here goes a belated “2015 in Review” post.

* * *

I am misanthropic, an immutable characteristic that I had gotten away with because people generally liked me enough to write off my rancor as quirky.  The causticness was not helped when I started working in an industry where essentially the objective of the game was to take as many marbles as possible off the table so that others couldn’t, and this was not accomplished by being congenial.  The resulting prickly exterior I cultivated helped me in my own cultural and professional ascendance.  Thusly a fortress formed around me to keep people out and away from my marbles.

However, people don’t build walls unless they are afraid.  It is fear, not moral superiority, that causes people to push others away, and it was fear under the guise of cool insouciance that was my unshakeable demon.  I often wished I were as confident as I pretended to be, but the terrifying thought of people leaving me kept me up at night, and I would sooner lock them out than take the chance that they might stay.

2015 was a transformative year for me, if only for my belated acceptance of the simple fact that some people stay and others choose to leave no matter how much love you give them.  Through painstaking work with my therapist, I recognize not only how hard I had been on myself, but on those that I loved, erecting barriers not because I wanted to keep them out, but so that I could safely stay within a self-constructed, void sanctum.  I had built an impenetrable shell because I remained child-like in coping with disappointments, and I would only inject myself in situations where I had certainty that I would come out the victor.

Last year, I lost my grandfather, I ended a long-time best friendship, and I confronted head on the brokenness of my chasmic relationship with my mother.  I questioned my self worth, I cried to God, and I wondered how there could ever be any redemption from such emotional despair.  And I suppose within the question I asked invertedly lay the answer, that the joy and fullness I seek come to me not in spite, but because, of my suffering, real or imagined.  C.S. Lewis once said nothing is yet in its true form.  Our experiences the past year are simply our progression towards it.  Suddenly, I felt a veil being lifted.  My challenges and losses, paradoxically, had at once no and complete meaning.

I’m excited about 2016.  I can’t promise I’m going to be less snooty, tardy, or snarky.  However, I am beginning to think about lowering the walls I have built around me, if only by a little.  I expect that this means I will experience disappointments, but my gut tells me that this is what they mean by needing to grow up.  This does not mean that anyone should feel that it’s okay to approach me when I am walking on the street (because it is not), but I am setting goals this year towards refraining myself from responding to questions from my co-workers who want to get to know me by asking me “what are your plans this weekend” with “yes, I have them.”  Instead, I might answer, “Dinner out.”  I know exactly what the next question from those guys will be, about the teasing that will ensue, and I know I will inevitably have to say, “No - I will not reveal his name, stop asking, you bunch of orangutans!”

Baby steps.