daylight savings

I've been stuck indoors for the better part of three weeks trying to get my Crim Lit brief, my A Paper, and my Hays memo done. One down, two more to go. It's not pretty - one is overdue by 18 months, and the other is due in three days and I got nothing down on the page yet.

I went out last night to watch my third and last MOKA performance at NYU. It is a fine event that draws extraordinary souls out from the sepulchral lawyerly forms in which they are ordinarily confined, and reminds us that we are still young, creative, performative, and fun, unlike the professional tradition we have indentured ourselves, via Debt Ellis, into. Sonia's reading of Elizabeth Bishop's Questions of Travel late in the evening's performances nearly brought me to dumbstruck tears. Before she went on stage, I snatched her crumpled notes away from her and read through her handwritten diacritics, the lines that told her to emphasize now and now speak slowly; when she read it, I heard an elegy. The poems final two lines ask, "Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?" And of course not: there is no choice between staying at home and going out to watch strangers in a play, because there remains no home left for us to go back to. Here we are, finally, in the artificial solstice of a foreshortened spring Sunday in the last semester of a strange decision we made, unbeknownst to each other, to travel together until May.

So after the show, we traveled upstairs to the lounge that is the student coffee kiosk in the daytime and the afterparty by night, and took hesitant sips of our vodka tonics (or at least I did) and urged our poor old bodies to move in time to skipping Latin tracks being played off somebody's laptop. So many of these beautiful people looked so happy. Alejandro led me in a dance so aggressively that his body odor was imprinted into the left shoulder of my t-shirt; Sophia was a gentler lead during a cha-cha. The clocks had already been set an hour ahead so we all felt more noctural and more dangerous than we really were (or at least I did). Somebody kept trying to turn the lights off, and somebody else kept trying to turn the lights on, so the room went between states of illumination. One person expressed his surprise at the concept, generally, of weaves, and leaned pleasantly into everybody else.

I walked with Oliver to First Avenue and 14th Street. Along the way we resolved to form a secret society, known by the initials S.T.M. (only members can know it, but membership is open), dedicated to the appreciation of our last two months in this city, this mischievous monument which not to look upon would be like death. The last line is pretty, but it is not mine; E.B. White wrote it.

What is it? I'm feeling old, folks. I felt old when I was nineteen, but now at twenty-seven I feel like a ripe fossil. When I was younger and more anxious I thought aging through one's twenties was like walking through a graveyard of all the things you thought you could be, and all the headstones would say pat things, like "Astronaut," or "Hannah Arendt." I certainly did not expect to exit this graveyard with only a business card imprinted "Esq." What am I doing? Whatever happened to unpredictability? Is it too late to leave this place to become an artist?

Elizabeth Bishop says yes. My body also says yes - I have wrinkles, gentle readers! I broke up a marriage, gentle readers! Daylight savings upends me, gentle readers! I want to go home, but I love you all too much!

[Sorry. Like I have said before, caveat emptor, cave canem and res ipsa loquitor. I get my melancholy blues once a season when I can't sleep. Welcome to the here and now! I saw my old friend Fist Fuck on the First Avenue L train platform, but his friend Bat Face was not with him, just a brindle dog who kept looking at me because I kept looking at it.]