"man in black is insane"

I was at the gym Tuesday when a woman about my age got onto an elliptical machine near me. She was accompanied by a man wearing black pants, a black turtleneck, a black coat and glasses; he looked like Fred Armisen doing a blind character - in other words, not exactly your typical gym rat.

"You didn't see it?" she said.

"No," he responded. "Jennifer and I have a thing about... movies. I don't think I've seen a movie in the theater in six years."

"What?" (At this point, I turned my music off - earbuds still in, of course - so that I could hear them better.)

"Yeah, we figure that if we're going to spend two hours sitting next to each other, we should spend them talking, you know? It's a waste to just sit in front of a screen in silence together."

For the next twenty minutes he stood next to her as she worked out, occasionally adjusting the speed on her machine. At one point, he put his hand on her back to steady her.

Not entirely sure why, but I've been thinking about this duo a lot since Tuesday. The obvious conclusion would be that he was her personal trainer, but he was SO un-personal-trainer-like (I'd be surprised if he could run for five minutes without wheezing) and their conversation so strange/intimate (in my mind, the only things people talk about with personal trainers are the weather and reality television) that it just doesn't quite seem right. I wondered if maybe they were having an affair, and he didn't have his gym clothes at her place which is why he was wearing his "street" clothes (and also maybe why he was talking about his "deep connection" with presumed wife Jennifer... to remind his mistress where she stands in his life? I don't know). THEN, today I started worrying that maybe he had/has this woman in some sort of brainwash/cult/kidnapping situation. (I mean, he hasn't been to a movie in six years?? That seems like the kind of detail you read in the People.com story about an abduction.) And now I feel like I should have said something, even a little nod in her direction, so that she could have had an opportunity to mouth "I am on this elliptical against my will" or "Man in black is insane" or whatever. At the very least I could have given his get-up a little up-and-down and quipped, "Clearly you haven't been to a clothing store in six years either..." on my way out.

a brief clause

I assume there is no breathing adult who has not watched all of "Downton Abbey" by now (I was watching "Downton" in March 2011, by the way, not that it's a competition or anything). Anyway, I think we can all agree that after the sugary gumdrop waterfall (?) that was Season 1, Season 2 was something of a letdown. The plots got unwieldier and, frankly, duller. New characters were introduced in such a way that you knew they weren't going to be sticking around for long, which made their ample screen time (at the expense of the Coras and Thomases we had grown to love!) even more irritating. And, while Maggie Smith is undoubtedly phenomenal, hearing her 55th zinger is less exciting than hearing her 5th. Of course, I still loved it all and watched that last five minutes of the Christmas special 17 times, etc.

Now that I've had a few months to ruminate (oh, I guess I should have written "spoiler alert" or whatever at the beginning of this post), I think my favorite thing about the second season is that Mary's Great Scandal (i.e. that a dude died in her bed while attempting to take her virginity) -- which is basically the driving plot point of the entire series -- is, by the end of Season 2, NBD... to everyone, but most notably to Mary herself. Mary goes practically insane keeping this secret for years, feeling so guilty about it, agonizing over it, etc.; but then, in the end, she gets to a point where she just can't feel anything about it anymore... and it's fine! Sure, people like Matthew and her dad are surprised at first when she tells them, but they get over it quickly. And it's safe to assume the Pamuk of it all will be essentially forgotten by the time Season 3 rolls around.

I don't know, I just find this a really important message (lol)... and also applicable to our modern day lives? While none of us likely have secrets/scandals/anxieties as glamorous/intense as Mary's, we all have certain things, I'm sure, that we feel intense shame about and that we keep to ourselves. You'll be sitting with friends at brunch and something will strike a chord and you'll think "phew, thank god no one at this table will ever know I secretly write love letters to my old college professor!" (or whatever your particular "Pamuk" is). Not too far down the road, any such "scandal" you might be involved in now will almost definitely seem inconsequential -- such a trifle! -- and you'll be reminded of it one day and tell the Matthew in your life about it and he'll laugh and that will be it. It's nice and comforting -- when everything feels so heavy and uncertain -- to envision that future in which your present biggest concern will seem silly, a distant memory, at the very most just a brief clause in an early paragraph in the Wikipedia entry of your life.

you and marvin

You're hanging out with your good friend Nate and his friend, whom you've met a few times maybe, at Nate's apartment. You're on cordial, perfectly fine terms with this friend of Nate's (let's call him Marvin), but there is no way you'd ever hang out with him without Nate; whenever you and Marvin see each other, you overdo the niceties (while thinking to yourself something like: "There's no way Nate could be closer with this chump than he is with me... right?").

You come back from the bathroom and a song you can't stand is playing from the plugged-in iPod and you shout theatrically, "Really, Nate? This song?! You would play this garbage! Chaaaaange it!"

Marvin leaps to attention. "Oh, this is actually my iPod," he says. "I just put this on..." And you immediately start gushing nonsense: "Ohhhh, I didn't, ummmm... realize! I was just... this song's totally fine. I like it, actually! You know, me and Nate, we... you know?"

"I mean, I can change it... no problem," Marvin says.

"No, it's great, really," you say, sitting down and taking out your phone.

There are a few moments of silent shifting before Nate clears his throat and asks if anyone wants more wine.

dads

I'll often send rambling e-mails to my parents - sometimes I'll put my brothers on them, too - in which I'll report some news ("Dad, your beloved 'Person of Interest' is filming on my street today...") or, more commonly, ask for advice about something ridiculous ("Should I be worried that I've had a 'water in my ear' feeling for 36 hours now?"). Almost without fail, my mom will reply within the hour. Either she'll send something brief from her phone ("sounds fun," "be careful," "im not really sure, honey"), or she'll write a longer message (perhaps with a relevant link or two obtained from a hasty Google search). Occasionally one of my brothers will contribute a sarcastic remark to the thread.

My dad, however, will rarely respond. If I've specifically asked for his opinion, or if my mom has written back with a "I defer to your father on this one," then he'll crank out a response -- but, otherwise, infrequently. Sometimes though, a few days later, the chain long since defunct, he'll respond to my initial e-mail (reply sender) with something completely unrelated. Like, he'll reply to the "weird thing on my electric bill" chain from a week ago (which he never weighed in on at the time) with the message: "Interesting article about writers on page 7 of wall street journal today." This specific habit of his strikes me as just about the most "Dad" behavior I could conceive of.

honey, honey

I was in San Francisco last week, and, on one afternoon, my friend Andrew took me and our friend Sarah to this store in his neighborhood called Her Majesty's Secret Beekeeper, which calls itself "the only urban beekeeping store in America." Andrew had been talking this store up for hours beforehand, and, per usual, I was responding with skepticism. I asked if there were going to be any bee hives in the store; Andrew rolled his eyes and said, "Yes, so many."

Well, let me tell you now before I even launch into the tale: if you ever find yourself in San Francisco, you've got to hit up this place.

We walked in and were immediately greeted by four chickens who were scampering around the wooden floor. There was a fifty-something man - not to be all "New York" about it, but he looked like the kind of dude who'd be playing a ukulele in a top hat on the A train - carving something at a woodworking station set up in the middle of the store. He barely looked up at us.

Sarah went to pick up the chickens (both males were named "Edward," we were told; both females, "Henrietta") while Andrew and I approached the counter, where there were jars of three different kinds of honey sticks: blueberry, sage and a third kind I can't remember.

I asked the man which of the three flavors was his favorite, and he grimaced. "I don't have a favorite." He looked at us with apparent disdain. "By the way, 'blueberry' doesn't mean they taste like blueberries. It means that's what those bees ate..." Andrew bought three blueberry sticks for the three of us.

Because I was in that kind of mood and it was that kind of store, I asked the man if he had ever seen "Bee Movie." He smiled, I think; it was hard to tell because of his white beard.

"No, I don't see movies like that," he said. "So many factual errors. I wouldn't be able to stand it."

"Do you like bee puns?" I asked.

You would have thought I'd asked him if he was OK with murder. "No."

"There's so many though..." I said, almost tauntingly (I'm not really sure what I was going for). "'Honey, I shrunk the kids...,' 'Bee-utiful'..."

He looked up at me from his carving apparatus.

"Once someone lost a wallet here so two police officers showed up," he said. "They spent a good five minutes making bee puns before getting down to business..." He looked off into space.

We took some pictures with our iPhones of Sarah holding the chickens. (When I asked him why there were chickens in a honey store, he said, "they keep me company.")

We bought three more honey sticks -- this time, sage.

"These aren't as sweet," Andrew said, slurping the honey out of the plastic casing.

"Sage is really bringing me down," I said.

"Isn't that a Joni Mitchell song?" the storekeeper quipped. And this time I was certain he was smiling.

"who should go first?"

Few things make me feel closer to a good friend - reaffirmed in our bond - than meeting a new person together at a party. I'll be standing with Kelly by the drinks table and someone will approach and make a rum & coke and then turn and ask us "how we know the birthday girl." Kelly and I will give each other this brief, smirk-y look - "who should go first?" - before answering in turn. Revealing our jobs and neighborhoods, we'll both talk in this exuberant, uncharacteristically friendly manner, like we're giving a tour at an art museum. As Kelly tells the stranger where she's from, I'll gaze at her proudly, maybe nod my head a few times. I'll chime in with a personal detail about her - "she's the only New Yorker who still has a flip phone!" - that adds an exclamation point to our evident closeness without overdoing it.

the new year

This week has been rough. I'd imagine the first week of a new year is pretty crummy for everyone. We see it as this opportunity to set some lofty goals, "restart" our lives, "live strong" and all that. I'm going to exercise all the time and be sooooOOooooOOoo productive and work on being this really present/supportive friend and stop looking at Facebook profiles that make me feel sad and weird. But, inevitably, it's January 5th and you're slumped on your couch watching a "Kourtney and Kim Take New York" marathon and your iPhone screen starts inexplicably freezing so you throw it on your bed and you haven't been to the gym all week and, sure, this is like any number of 2011 evenings, but it stings more on January 5th. Everything was going to be different this year.

This was my mindset as I got on the subway Thursday night.

On New Year's Eve, last Saturday, my friend Marissa and I had taken the 3 train uptown to head to a party on the Upper West Side. We were sitting across from a group of four friends who looked like they were right out of ABC Family central casting. The one female was perky and pretty and wearing skinny jeans and several layers and a jaunty hat that would have looked ridiculous on any woman who did not have the face of a Neutrogena spokesmodel. The men were rugged and handsome and looked Australian (they weren't). The most striking of the three had unkempt shoulder-length hair and Jake Gyllenhaal facial scruff. He didn't say much to his three friends (he was standing even though there was an open seat next to his sitting companions); he seemed almost ill at ease, as if he were one of their cousins who was visiting for the weekend, tagging along for New Year's Eve revelry before heading back to Chicago on Monday. We got off the train right as they all broke out into laughter over some joke one of them made about either a streaker or a stickler, I couldn't quite hear (the former seems more likely). I told Marissa, "If the CW ever remakes 'Tarzan' in 'modern day NYC' where Tarzan is like undercover as a NYU undergrad when he's not swinging on vines, that guy's their guy."

Five nights later, Thursday night, after a distressingly lethargic day, I put on two different coats over a sweatshirt and left for my brother's apartment in the East Village to retrieve an air mattress. I got off the subway and power-walked through the cold to his place. I picked up the air mattress (which my brother had stuffed in a gift bag adorned with the logos of various NHL teams) and immediately turned around and walked back to the subway. I zoned out by the track as the 4 train approached, thinking about the e-mails I had to remember to write when I got home. The doors opened and... out walked Tarzan. The same guy. I did a double take as I moved into the car, hitting the woman behind me with the air mattress bag. And then the doors closed and the train lurched forward and everything felt different. What is this world in which you run into the same stranger twice in one week? In New York City, no less! I felt like I was on a J.J. Abrams TV show or in a prologue to a psychological thriller novel. The coincidence meant absolutely nothing and also everything. How can you feel self-pity and glumness when there is just so much strangeness out there - so much amusing, weird, bizarre happenstance all the time all around you? You don't need resolutions or expectations or rebirths; you just need to go outside.

reflex grimacing

Returning home at 26 feels strange and uncomfortable, like you've swam back into the shallow end of the pool and there are flotation devices everywhere and the water suddenly feels too hot. There are reminders all around you of a former life: Airwalks in the closet, photographs of graduations and soccer teams seemingly at every turn, a "Little Miss Sunshine" ad ripped out from a magazine affixed to your bedroom wall (the bright yellow now a muted brown). It's suffocating.

Within hours, though, the rhythms begin to return. You share a glance with your mom as your dad launches into an overzealous defense of his latest favorite TV procedural. Your brother complains about having to sit in the middle in the back seat of the car ("Don't dwell in the sorrow," you say; he responds, "I don't even know what that means, but I know that's advice you've never taken.") You march into the living room to complain about the internet being slow and end up sitting down and eating 17 crackers and watching a half-hour of a football game and forgetting why you entered the room in the first place. You still feel like an impostor - like you're playing yourself in a play, kind of - but it all, at least, starts to feel familiar.

When it's time to leave, you pack up your stuff quickly (you never bothered taking your clothes out of the suitcase). Before your mom drives you to the train station, she asks if you want to take some bagels with you; you respond that you don't need them - "I'm going to go shopping when I get home" - and you look away from her immediately. You wonder if you'll ever stop reflex grimacing when you refer to your New York City apartment as "home" in her presence, and if you can really be considered an "adult," whatever that means, until you do.

"not sure if you remember me..."

Recently I e-mailed someone whom I've never met before but with whom I exchanged e-mails a few years ago (we had become Facebook friends at the time, too). Even though this guy - let's call him Doug - has been floating at the top of my gchat list for about two years now, and even though I see Doug's updates all the time on Facebook (I could name his three most recent jobs, tell you what neighborhood in NYC he lives in now... and I'm pretty sure I could pick a guy he briefly dated last year out of a lineup), when it came to writing this e-mail, I began it with, "Hey Doug, Not sure if you remember me, but...."

Doug wrote a friendly e-mail back to me and included somewhere in his first paragraph "Of course I remember you!" And since then I've cringed like at least twice a week thinking about my "Not sure if you remember me..." opener. There should really be some sort of Gmail tool that prevents all e-mails including that phrase from being sent! It creates the opposite kind of uncomfortable strangeness as when some disaffected woman at a party whom you've met a bunch of times shakes your hand and pretends she's never met you before. It's self-deprecating to the point of nauseating. The response is always "Yes, uh, duh, I remember you, weirdo."

But the impulse makes sense to me. Somehow it's extremely easy to convince ourselves - even though we see so much online everyday about people we barely know - that our own online presences are somehow obscured, hidden, secret. That girl Macy from high school whose wedding pictures I looked at last month certainly never looks at my profile! Even though Caitlin and I follow each other on Twitter, I'm sure she just glazes over my tweets without reading them! Even though Doug's on my gchat list, he probably looks at my name on his and wonders who I am! Actually though, this willful ignorance is probably for the best: I'm pretty sure that if we didn't all think of our online selves as "invisible," in a certain way, none of would ever post anything at all.

BCCed

It sometimes feels like a good number of my "friendships" subsist solely on party invites. A former co-worker I haven't seen in two years, but whom I still dutifully include on every invite for a birthday party or housewarming. A guy I got drinks with once seven months ago whose Facebook statuses I occasionally "like." A high school friend who lives in Chicago whom I add to the BCC field as a way of saying "hi," I guess, even though we've been in the midst of a nine-month long game of phone tag and I think I'm the one who's meant to call her back?

Of course, these people never come to your parties. (The people who come are the 20-40 people you actually see regularly, the ones you expect to show up.) But you keep including them out of habit. You copy and paste your BCCed list from last year's birthday party e-mail and, sure, you delete a few people - a friend's former boyfriend, a past subletter - but there are a few relics you leave on. There's something nice about the thought that your "birthday drinks!!!!" e-mail might remind that former co-worker of that time you sprinted to a cab together holding two boxes filled with party hats. Maybe she'll write back a quick hello ("Sooo sorry I can't make it that night. How are you???"), though she won't respond to your (probably too enthusiastic) response. Or maybe she'll just think to herself "Oh, Josh," before archiving the e-mail. But either way, your having included her in the BCC field - however inconsequential it may seem - reveals that there's some part of you that wants to hold on just a little bit longer.

behind her back

There's this weird perverse thrill when you find yourself talking about a friend behind his or her back with another mutual friend. There's a sense of guilt, sure ("we're talking about Emily behind her back! she's our good friend! that's so fucked up!"). But there's also this catharsis in venting, in finally getting this stuff off your chest with someone who understands ("gahhh I didn't realize how much Emily annoyed me until talking it out with Rachel like this!"). And then there's also the comforting realization that if you and Rachel are talking about Emily like this, you and Rachel must be closer than Rachel and Emily are ("Rachel feels comfortable saying all this mean stuff about Emily to me! we are so close!").

Of course, as "fun" or therapeutic as these conversations may seem at the time, they almost always result, later, in your feeling super crummy. You get on the subway and you stand against the door instead of sitting in one of the open seats. You have a momentary paranoid flash of Rachel divulging to Emily all the awful things you said over a bottle of wine on some future Friday night, and you feel nauseous. Most of the time, Emily's great. You love Emily. And if you and Rachel fell into a Emily trash-talking conversation that easily, aren't the chances pretty good that the two of them have had a similar conversation about you at some point?

You get off the subway and immediately text Emily some stupid forced joke and ask if she's free for dinner later that week.

tom and kendall

It's rare, I've noticed recently, that I have a conversation with someone (anyone: a best friend, someone I've just met...) in which one of us doesn't reference something specific we read/watched/listened to on the internet: a YouTube video, a New York Times article, a mashup of "Teenage Dream" and cats purring, whatever.

Usually, these conversations go something like this:

Tom: "Man, I feel like I'm more tired on the weekends than I am during the week... even though I sleep later on the weekends! Weird, right?"

(Tom is clearly a winning conversationalist.)

Kendall: "Oh, did you see that Slate article about that?"

Tom: "No, what did it say?"

Kendall: "Oh, uhhh, just what you're saying, sort of. You know, our bodies release more... or, like, on the weekends, our... you know what, I'll just e-mail you the article."

Tom: "Oh, cool, okay."

Like 90 percent of the time, Tom doesn't get an e-mail from Kendall. Kendall probably just forgets, or she looks up the article the next day and realizes it doesn't say anything close to what she told Tom it did, or she thinks it would be kind of weird to send it to him since they've only met like three times and she'd have to find his e-mail address on Facebook.

But, in the occasions when I've been a Tom and the Kendall has sent the article the next day ("Here's that sleeping article I was telling you about... xx"), I always find myself like weirdly and irrationally impressed. "Wow, what a competent person!" I think, "She followed through." I don't even click on the link and probably archive the e-mail immediately, but my whole perception of Kendall changes. "She must really have her shit together. I bet she's never late to dinners and has a super clean apartment."

"... and before you know it, the whole day sucks"

I arrived in Boston a few weeks ago to find a bunch of large cardboard boxes stacked in my childhood bedroom. "We're going through all of this before you go back to New York," my mom said, glancing at the boxes, which I knew were filled with notebooks, papers and other memorabilia saved from the 18 years I lived in Boston.

I ended up parting ways with about 75 percent of the work and relics, to my mom's glee, but kept some choice artifacts that looked potentially interesting. I've been slowly working my way through them since, an undertaking which - though it's mainly resulted in lots of Facebook-ing of old teachers/classmates and plaintive staring out of windows - has garnered a few gems.

One of my favorites is this journal entry (?) I wrote on a piece of loose leaf paper on "2/13." ("Some thoughts" will follow.)

Some thoughts:

1. Originally I thought this was from, I dunno, fifth grade? NOPE. After some cursory investigating, I learned it's from ninth grade. I wrote this when I was in high school!! Yes, that was still over ten years ago, but this is not the conception of my ninth grade self that I've been working with. I guess I'm just happy that Twitter and Facebook weren't around then as I can only imagine what sorts of over-the-top emo statuses I'd have been posting.

2. Who keeps a journal on separate pieces of loose leaf paper like this instead of, you know, finding a book? Even a memo pad would have been more normal.

3. The content is so nonspecific! It's like the most dull Angsty Journal Entry possible in that there is absolutely nothing revealing about it. Isn't the point of a journal to let everything out and vent? I really want to know what had happened beforehand that worked me up enough to underline the word "always" and close with that emphatic "fine"!

4. "Often, I know not." ?!?!?!?!

5. The conclusion is so dramatic! I've "come to the point" where all I can do is "sit back" and wait for people to come to me? For one thing, I'm not even sure what this means. For another, knowing me, I probably wrote this defiant entry and then five minutes later couldn't help myself and fired off passive-aggressive e-mails to whichever friends had been irritating me.

10:38pm

You're at a friend's apartment on a Friday night with two or three or four other people and you've finished dinner and you're on your second bottle of wine. Someone mentions Mark's party and a few replies are muttered (you're all aware, of course, that none of you are actually going to go). You realize you're picking furiously at something you'd never usually eat (onion-flavored chips, carrot cake). A laptop surfaces, either because someone wants to pull up the profile of a dude she went on a horrific date with ("No, he's actually cute... like, short though... oh, let me just show you") or because someone wants to play a song or a YouTube video or something.

Ten minutes later, everyone is crouched around the screen as Megan clicks through a Facebook album of a college acquaintance's vacation to Bermuda. You've already seen this album, embarrassingly, but you feign shock or disgust every ten pictures or so ("Again with that black top?!" "He really does look like Jesse Eisenberg, it's so weird!"). When the album's finished, Megan opens another one ("Oooh, it looks like she's wearing a bikini in this one, guys!"). You take out your iPhone even though you know you haven't gotten any texts... and then slide it back into your pocket. Someone mentions "Moneyball" and, though you've seen it, you remain silent as Megan's boyfriend delivers his somewhat inane critique.

on pete hornberger

On Monday night I was loitering by the 14th St. ACE subway stop, on the phone with my mom, when I looked up and saw Pete Hornberger fast approaching (his real name is Scott Adsit, but obviously I'm not going to be referring to him as that). He was walking pretty briskly, with an attractive, European-looking woman trailing close behind him. I'm not exactly sure what came over me (and, let's be clear, I'm by no means a major Pete fan or anything like that), but I literally just hung up on my mom mid-sentence and followed him down into the subway.

It dawned on me as I galloped down the stairs that this was totally bizarre, almost inexplicable, behavior on my part. He was clearly in a great hurry with this girlfriend/wife/female friend and it's not like I had any great intention in mind. I was not going to stop him and whip out some "30 Rock" joke. I was not going to get up in his face with my iPhone. It was as if he was a magnet - a disheveled, marginally famous magnet - and I simply had no choice in the matter. (I guess I would have to be a magnet, too, here, for this metaphor to work.)

I got to the bottom of the stairs just in time to see Pete and Mrs. Pete unsuccessfully attempt to swipe through the turnstile. (Mrs. Pete's card didn't have enough money on it.) Pete gawkily run-shuffled toward the MetroCard machine and the madcap nature of their scramble actually did remind me of a frantic "30 Rock" hallway scene.

I was just standing there, a few yards away from them, making no attempt to hide my gawking. It struck me that I was surprisingly interested in "Scott." Did he get recognized often? Did this significant other of his proudly tell people at her salon, "Oh, you know the bald guy who works with Liz Lemon? That's my man"? Did Scott and Pete dress the same? Were they equally as ornery? Is Scott on text messaging/buddy terms with Alec Baldwin or are they merely work colleagues?

I watched as, reloaded card in hand, Pete and Mrs. Pete raced back through the turnstile and down the stairs to wait for an uptown train. I moseyed on down to wait for my downtown train and looked across the way at the departing uptown ride. They were gone. I wondered if anyone in his subway car would recognize him.

When I got back above ground, I didn't really feel compelled to text anyone about my "celeb sighting." It sort of felt like I had just been on a whale watch and caught a momentary glimpse of a dolphin or eel or something. Not that I've ever been on a whale watch: I never really understood what you were meant to do if you saw one.