May 2011
7 posts
The Neural Network of Love
On my morning train rides, I often find myself staring at women’s fingers, looking at engagement rings and wedding bands. At first, I blamed the fixation on natural inclination towards shiny things, and then, my line of work. This morning, though, half-dazed from a night of fitful sleep, I realized the reason I stare comes down to one question: What is it about this woman that someone...
If the desire to covet what one doesn’t have weren’t ingrained from our beginnings, would happiness be easier, or would sloth?
The Street Fair
Sometimes, plans are made and not carried out. This Saturday, I planned to get into writer-mode, maroon myself in a cafe and write. Instead, I spent one a.m. to nine a.m. on Saturday in the emergency room by the side of someone whom I love dearly (he’s fine now). I didn’t write a word all weekend; rather, I’m lucky to have even put myself back on a somewhat normal sleep cycle. I...
On today’s episode of “Amazing Idea or Terrible Idea?”, I ponder hopping on the G train tomorrow and returning to the Bedford Avenue cafe in which I started Slope to write something new. Will it conjure a productive nostalgia or an awful visceral reaction? Tune in next week for the thrilling conclusion.
“At some point his book had become his marriage, or consumed his marriage. Or...”
– Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross
Next Time's the Charm?
I’ve never quite understood—or been able to identify with—people who seem to have an endless stream of ideas. Writers and dreamers who have ideas for characters, settings, lives, plots bursting out of their heads with such violence that they worry they’ll begin leaking from their ears. Because I have a finished novel, an agent, a writer’s approach to the world, most...
As a New Yorker who lived through September 11, who watched the towers burn, the plumes of smoke billowing across the Long Island Sound, who cried and trembled until she could get in touch with her parents, both of whom were working in the city that day, who still has visceral nightmares about the attacks, who works every day on Forty-Second and Broadway, I’m saddened and sickened by the...