Last time, I wrote about the idea that everybody in New York is seeking the life that's just around the corner. I don't know that I'm so much seeking that - not yet. Day-to-day existence here is still a novelty and a joy, even if it sometimes is a pain. For now I'm happy with what's here, what I happen across. I'm learning every day, and I take this life as it presents itself and Iove the whole experience.
The thing I seem to have found, without even looking for it, is some part of my personality that hadn't been as visible before. I'm bossier since arriving here. I'm stronger and more assertive. I'm more confident, I walk fast. I flirt more. I don't take bullshit from people, and sometimes I come across as demanding.
I like it.
The other day, Sabra and I went to the East Village to pick up the futon we were buying for our living room. I knew a car service that would send a Suburban, so I called them once we go to the guy's apartment, and I guess I used a very authoritative tone with the dispatcher, who was trying to rush me off the phone.
"Do you work in fashion?" the guy asked, when I hung up. Not in a mean way, but very matter-of-fact.
I stared at him astonished for a moment (I was wearing ratty moving clothes and no makeup) and then told him that, in fact, I sort of did.
"Oh, he said," because I know lots of people in fashion and they're always ordering car services to come pick up this and that."
"I've just adopted a bossy New York demeanor since I moved here," I told him.
And yet, like many New Yorkers, I'm bossy and can be brusque in crowds, and at other times when it's necessary to assert myself, but talk to me one-on-one and I'm as friendly and down-to-earth as can be. That's how so many people are here - you've got to demand to get many things, but if you talk to people directly they go out of their way to be nice.
I think it has something to do with this: we're united by our willingness to put up with place, both tyrannical and wondrous, and our love for it - our willingness to sacrifice for that love - unites us. It's as though we were the multiple wives of a charismatic, mercurial man, and we were all alike (despite our rivalries) by the way we loved him in spite of ourselves. That's the feeling you get in New York.
So I like this new me. I may finally be living up to my fiery Aries nature. I never thought I fit the stubborn, take-charge Aries profile, but I think maybe I had just stifled it beneath the good-girl behavior I learned so well.
It's not about being mean, it's just about asking for what you want and telling people, in a reasonable way, when you're not happy with something. I find this tactic rarely has negative results. When you're merely asking for what you want or stating how you feel, no one can really argue. And people respect you more for your cojones. I'm glad to be here, finding mine.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Ruminations
Have I ever mentioned that I love the “Post” in all its rollicking, truculent, unabashedly low-brow magnificence? I gobbled it up this morning and think I ought to do so every day (while dutifully tucking in to the Times as well). The papers seem to appeal to the two sides of me, the serious thinker, and the girl who just wants to have fun.
Outside my window, a schoolbus is bleeping its backup bell and across the street a tall girl with bright-red hair flaring up against her green sweater ambles by. It’s loud here but I like it – I see a lot from my perch.
Some days it takes me so long to wake up. Sometimes I think the only time I truly get out of my hours-long morning daze is when I’m out striding through the sunshine. Yesterday I ventured out around 10:30 to do some long-pushed back errands (tailor, leather repair, etc.). I saved them all because the LES is garment central (or used to be) and I knew I'd get better work at better prices than on the UWS.
My tailor shop, on Orchard Street, charmed the hell out of me. It was narrow and dirty, the floor littered with safety pins and straight pins and lint and other fluff, and an angry, neurotic man was bellowing something about his zipper when I walked in (I think he need therapy worse than zipper-repair). Two old Jewish ladies had their hands folded in their laps or were twittering about – Irene and Susan there were called, which I knew because the proprietor made sure to learn our names. I asked them how the shop was and they informed me there was no better deal on the Lower East Side. The walls were paper with baseball paraphernalia, and the prices were tacked up on big pieces of white paper which clearly stated, in black marker, how much any possible job might cost. I paid $14 for a pants hemming and coat-sleeve repair, which took only 30 minutes, and which I deemed a bargain.
They did another thing I love there, which was refer me to somebody who could do the work better than they when it came to adding a loop to my leather belts. The Puerto Rican man behind the tailor-shop counter directed me to a Jewish shoe-repair shop below Delancey and about five blocks away. Now, this is a neighborhood filled with shoe-repair shops, but he knew just the one. I’m touched by these old arts – the repairing of garments, the customizing and bespoke things. It’s rare these days for anybody to own anything they’re inclined to take care of – when a dress only costs $24.50, who wants to pay $10 to repair it? But I like to own things with history (and usually a few holes) and to keep them and care for them – the reward is greater than with items that fade and pile and come apart (literally) at the seams after you’ve owned them for a month. When that happens with items I buy, I march them back to the store and request a refund. Though increasingly I simply don’t buy them in the first place. I love a bargain but abhor “cheap.” I prefer old things and things with glamour, vintage jewelry – strings of glass beads and old cocktail rings; long leather gloves, fur shrugs (though it’s not pc); coats, coats, coats; belts that have something to say; evening bags; and the kind of dresses made to show off a narrow waist.
It was refreshing to hear an interview with Isaac Mizrahi on WNYC (via the Time's "The Moment" blog) where he advised against buying things on sale – those are the odd, ill-fitting things, he said. Which is kind of what I’ve thought all along, but have been chastising myself for thinking. It was freeing to hear. I think I’d save money, actually, by avoiding sample sales. I seem to get caught up in the moment and buy things I regret. And my favorite things are largely items I’ve just stumbled onto when I wasn’t intending to shop – a vintage snakeskin-patterned raincoat happened upon in a vintage store when I popped in; same thing with an elephant belt and a chartreuse-wool dress – I wasn’t shopping on any of these occasions. One of my favorite clutches was a $100, I-have-no-time-but-I’m-going-to-hold-my-breath-and–buy-this wardrobe addition and another is the Diane von Furstenberg pencil skirt I paid a fortune for but which is my go-to garment I can wear six ways. Yes, the best things are those I spy when I merely step into store for a quick perusal, not intending to get anything – and then I just go for it. When I set out to shop, I go with the mentality that I have to get something, or I haven’t accomplished my goal – and that leads to regretted purchases. I’m going to go to the consignment shop asap, in fact, and unload some of them.
But yesterday. The shoe store was shuttered – we had all forgotten the Jewish holidays. But it’s on my street, practically (in the no man’s land below Delancey) and I’m glad to know where to go. It’s sometimes hard to find these places, they don’t often have websites or advertise much; the tailor shops, the repair spots – all of it is a dying art but one I cherish. And while I was looking for the shoe store I found a much-lauded donut shop, Donut Plant, a harbinger of what the area will be, whose pillow-soft organic donuts made me understand why I once encountered two girls who had taken the subway here expressly to find it. I couldn't direct them to it then, but now I know.
It’s fall in New York and I think I might finally understand this season. Summer was a youthful, go-go party of sultry evenings and endless running around and ensnaring ourselves insouciantly in scrapes only to laugh it off and scamper away. But I think it’s during fall that New York is most itself. In blazing, knowing autumn, the city’s wiseness and weariness is revealed. It’s at once at its most glorious and it also seems to be shrugging off the trials it puts us through: "Yeah, whaddya gonna do?"
I love this place so much that sometimes I’m aching for it before I remember that I’m in it. Could it be true, like some have written, that we all stay in New York for the life we imagine is just around the corner? Maybe that’s part of it, but I’m pretty thrilled with this life – the combination of indulgence and penny-pinching, of glamour and grit. The way I can go about my daily errands and suddenly look up and see the Chrysler Building, or go for a run and watch the sun bounce off the river beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. I never want to lose that sense of wonder.
Outside my window, a schoolbus is bleeping its backup bell and across the street a tall girl with bright-red hair flaring up against her green sweater ambles by. It’s loud here but I like it – I see a lot from my perch.
Some days it takes me so long to wake up. Sometimes I think the only time I truly get out of my hours-long morning daze is when I’m out striding through the sunshine. Yesterday I ventured out around 10:30 to do some long-pushed back errands (tailor, leather repair, etc.). I saved them all because the LES is garment central (or used to be) and I knew I'd get better work at better prices than on the UWS.
My tailor shop, on Orchard Street, charmed the hell out of me. It was narrow and dirty, the floor littered with safety pins and straight pins and lint and other fluff, and an angry, neurotic man was bellowing something about his zipper when I walked in (I think he need therapy worse than zipper-repair). Two old Jewish ladies had their hands folded in their laps or were twittering about – Irene and Susan there were called, which I knew because the proprietor made sure to learn our names. I asked them how the shop was and they informed me there was no better deal on the Lower East Side. The walls were paper with baseball paraphernalia, and the prices were tacked up on big pieces of white paper which clearly stated, in black marker, how much any possible job might cost. I paid $14 for a pants hemming and coat-sleeve repair, which took only 30 minutes, and which I deemed a bargain.
They did another thing I love there, which was refer me to somebody who could do the work better than they when it came to adding a loop to my leather belts. The Puerto Rican man behind the tailor-shop counter directed me to a Jewish shoe-repair shop below Delancey and about five blocks away. Now, this is a neighborhood filled with shoe-repair shops, but he knew just the one. I’m touched by these old arts – the repairing of garments, the customizing and bespoke things. It’s rare these days for anybody to own anything they’re inclined to take care of – when a dress only costs $24.50, who wants to pay $10 to repair it? But I like to own things with history (and usually a few holes) and to keep them and care for them – the reward is greater than with items that fade and pile and come apart (literally) at the seams after you’ve owned them for a month. When that happens with items I buy, I march them back to the store and request a refund. Though increasingly I simply don’t buy them in the first place. I love a bargain but abhor “cheap.” I prefer old things and things with glamour, vintage jewelry – strings of glass beads and old cocktail rings; long leather gloves, fur shrugs (though it’s not pc); coats, coats, coats; belts that have something to say; evening bags; and the kind of dresses made to show off a narrow waist.
It was refreshing to hear an interview with Isaac Mizrahi on WNYC (via the Time's "The Moment" blog) where he advised against buying things on sale – those are the odd, ill-fitting things, he said. Which is kind of what I’ve thought all along, but have been chastising myself for thinking. It was freeing to hear. I think I’d save money, actually, by avoiding sample sales. I seem to get caught up in the moment and buy things I regret. And my favorite things are largely items I’ve just stumbled onto when I wasn’t intending to shop – a vintage snakeskin-patterned raincoat happened upon in a vintage store when I popped in; same thing with an elephant belt and a chartreuse-wool dress – I wasn’t shopping on any of these occasions. One of my favorite clutches was a $100, I-have-no-time-but-I’m-going-to-hold-my-breath-and–buy-this wardrobe addition and another is the Diane von Furstenberg pencil skirt I paid a fortune for but which is my go-to garment I can wear six ways. Yes, the best things are those I spy when I merely step into store for a quick perusal, not intending to get anything – and then I just go for it. When I set out to shop, I go with the mentality that I have to get something, or I haven’t accomplished my goal – and that leads to regretted purchases. I’m going to go to the consignment shop asap, in fact, and unload some of them.
But yesterday. The shoe store was shuttered – we had all forgotten the Jewish holidays. But it’s on my street, practically (in the no man’s land below Delancey) and I’m glad to know where to go. It’s sometimes hard to find these places, they don’t often have websites or advertise much; the tailor shops, the repair spots – all of it is a dying art but one I cherish. And while I was looking for the shoe store I found a much-lauded donut shop, Donut Plant, a harbinger of what the area will be, whose pillow-soft organic donuts made me understand why I once encountered two girls who had taken the subway here expressly to find it. I couldn't direct them to it then, but now I know.
It’s fall in New York and I think I might finally understand this season. Summer was a youthful, go-go party of sultry evenings and endless running around and ensnaring ourselves insouciantly in scrapes only to laugh it off and scamper away. But I think it’s during fall that New York is most itself. In blazing, knowing autumn, the city’s wiseness and weariness is revealed. It’s at once at its most glorious and it also seems to be shrugging off the trials it puts us through: "Yeah, whaddya gonna do?"
I love this place so much that sometimes I’m aching for it before I remember that I’m in it. Could it be true, like some have written, that we all stay in New York for the life we imagine is just around the corner? Maybe that’s part of it, but I’m pretty thrilled with this life – the combination of indulgence and penny-pinching, of glamour and grit. The way I can go about my daily errands and suddenly look up and see the Chrysler Building, or go for a run and watch the sun bounce off the river beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. I never want to lose that sense of wonder.
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