Eldridge Street, New York City

Have I come to the moment where I can retire this diary? It seems that way sometimes. It's not that I've been so busy.  In fact, I spend quite a bit of my time alone these days. Long stretches of no one.  Sometimes it is so maddening that I am tempted to hurl one of my books against the wall, just to hear myself make a sound. Other days, I cannot bear any noise. The drone of NPR offends me, Beethoven a kind of ringing in my ears. And then I go out and see my friends and have a lovely old time.  But all the while all I want is to be home.

The days and the hours pass.  I am watching the clock.  One year.  I am fine, so far.  I don't know what will happen to me in March. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe everything.

My mother needs me to call her now, to give her some kind of comfort after a big old fight with my sister. But I don't call and I don't write.

I am reading a book about a large family and I see myself in each of the children.

Yesterday, I went to a synagogue in the Lower East Side/Chinatown for a little exhibit called The Last Word where people write on slips of paper things that they wish they'd said.  I got there before Wendy and on a piece of a paper I wrote: "I hope you weren't my last chance." I hesitated a few seconds and then I signed my name -- Zoraya.

I don't know if I meant the lost man or the aborted baby.

When Wendy showed up and started pulling out bits of paper and reading, I wondered if from the hundreds of sheets of paper rolled like cigarettes, would she find me?

Glass Houses

Finished reading The Glass Room in the early afternoon. I was sitting outside a cafe, damp cold and raining.  When I got to the end, I started to cry.  "I am Ottilie" reduced me to tears. Just as I was wiping my eyes, my friend stepped off the bus and we set off on our usual Sunday expedition. We laughed at me.  Am I soft today or was that amazing writing?  I will have to reread the last part to ascertain that.

I want to know what house Mawer was describing in his book. It exists apparently but it is never identified outright.  Somewhere in the outskirts of Prague this glass house still stands.

Today was supposed to be a trip uptown to the Cloisters but the rain made us lazy. Wendy and I stayed in the Upper West Side. We watched a movie about Queen Victoria and ate terrible Chinese food and complained about the cold.

I have never been to The Cloisters. There is always an excuse not to go. In a way I was glad because I would like to see it alone.  I have a strange love for buildings, there are structures I prefer to see alone. Mostly because I never know how I will react to certain places. The Maparium makes me catch my breath and I can never explain to anyone why that is. The Temple of Dendaur, not the temple itself but the room it is housed in, makes me sad and happy in the same moment.

This morning I found out that my friend Sara does know the violinist I was raving about in December.  Her cousin went to high school with him in Livorno and her husband knows him from the chamber music world of New York. "Do you want to meet him again?" she asked me.  "We could arrange it." My fanhood is not quite so devoted so I declined.

My twin friends are trying to fix up with a friend of theirs. He is kind and trust-funded, they tell me.  He could buy you season tickets to the opera. I met this friend on Tuesday (not part of a set up), been to his big townhouse. I don't know about dating him because he is so shy it sort of hurts me, and I am happy to continue self-financing my expensive habits.

Last night I wrote many pages to add to the novel.  I hesitate to use the N word.  It scares me. The bursts of ideas amaze me, how for months on end I am backed into a corner not knowing how to go from one chapter to another and then suddenly, with two clicks of the mouse, everything falls into place.  My haphazard prose has been there all along, it just needed to be organized.  Here's hoping for more of last night.

The Problem with Ricardo

I have been avoiding working on the novel. Ricardo is a character in it.

There are quite a bit of things to add, writing I've done over the last week that should be added to the first two chapters.  For some reason, I can't get myself to sit still long enough.

Writers block is no excuse because the writing is coming.  I'm afraid of progress. And I'm annoyed that I can feeling this way.

Why not find out what this writing is made of and finish something of significant length and give it an honest chance for success or failure? I've been writing short stories for the last few years even though I don't think I'm that good at it.  I'm really too long-winded. An old writing friend of mine used to tell me, "it wants to be a novel, not a short story."

The other reader of this blog, besides myself, wrote me to say that I should keep blogging.  That I am hitting upon something here.  Could he have been referring to my family?

When I was 23, I started a novel about this crazy family.  Florid prose, plotless descriptions of all things ethnic.  I shudder when I think of it now.  Somewhere in my files, there are copies of this work in progress.  I was too young to tackle it at 23.  And then I convinced myself that we weren't that interesting.  And the truth is, I think the story of my family is more pathetic than interesting.

That family is also an interesting psychological study. Maybe someday I will get back to them.

Writing-wise, for now, I am involved in my very own Vietnamese/Filipino/Texas quagmire.

Tomorrow I'm going back to work.  All I've done today is sneeze and eat scones and porridge. I am well enough to work.

Foreign Films and Dead Composers

Last Saturday I was at Film Forum for a screening of La Danse and while waiting to get into the theater, L and I were talking. Well, I was talking about my old roommate, the gay German lawyer with Poland Syndrome who also happens to be one of the funniest, smartest, most maddening, most self destructive people I know. And for whom I also happen to have a deep strange love. He has a way of getting what he wants, fucking it up, and then starting over.

T and I met in 2004, I think.  Love at first sight in a fringe neighborhood Brooklyn brownstone. He drove me insane when we lived together.

Anyway, the short of this story is that I was describing this crazy man in detail and a woman behind us was listening to me the entire time. At first she was embarrassed and tried to conceal her amusement. And then she abandoned all pretense and laughed gaily at my stories.  And I performed for her.

As we were getting seated, this woman told me that I should write a book. I think people meet me and expect me to be funny all the time when the truth is that I'm not very funny when I write.

Nice compliment anyway.  I'm not knocking it.

And also got me thinking about being a fame whore.  There is something of the performer in me.

So far -- no A and no M. I miss them both but not nearly as much as I would thought.  I'm mostly talking about A.  I don't miss him that much.

I have to admit that earlier today, I wrote something about how when one insists to vehemently on something, it means they are lying.  So maybe I'm lying.  But right now it doesn't feel that way.

Last night I got a bought a book about the opera. Just a reference guide to the more popular ones.  I'm pretty obsessed with music lately -- I wake up in the middle of the night and fall asleep listening to Mahler.

This morning, my last memory was of listening to a piece called Blue by Michael Galasso from In the Mood for Love (by Wong Kar Wai). I hate his movies -- there is something flat about them, too stylized, interminable. But they are always the most beautiful things to look at and listen to.

My favorite WKW movie is Comrades. I liked everything about it. God, that was a long time ago.  What a strange memory.

The writing is going well lately.  I write for work, I write for this, I write for the novel. If I were to do a word count, the number might be pretty impressive. But I'm writing for three discrete areas so it doesn't add up to much.  Still I'm rather proud of myself.

I worry about money a lot lately. When I was not working, I hardly thought of money at all. But now,  I do mental calculations (poorly) all the time.

On Writing (or not writing)

I reread bits of the novel that I work on sporadically.  It is not bad. Not the novel itself -- that remains to be seen and I have to write a lot more in order for me or anyone to make an assessment.  Just the writing.  I am liking the way I write lately.

So why don't I do more of it?

Halloween and I am home.  I was out all day, first at the bookstore where I volunteer and then at an Indian restaurant and then at another restaurant.

I've been meeting quite a few black women lately.  And I am always curious at the way they react to me.  First the reaction is guarded. And then I seem to find the right thing to say and I am somehow allowed into a club I am happy to visit but have no intention of ever staying in.

One of the women I met was Caroline. She was lovely in her sequined turquoise shawl. She is a med student at Ann Arbor and originally from Nigeria. She wouldn't look at me at first and whenever I said anything, she seemed to tense up.  Then I shared the story from high school -- how three African American girls threatened to beat me up and how I unwittingly made things worse by acting, well, like myself.  She couldn't stop laughing.  But apparently she went through the same thing when she moved to the States.  She went to the high school close to where I went to school.  By the end of the evening, she was leaning towards me and engaging me in conversation.

Is that the secret to being liked? Find the right anecdote that will resonate with someone and suddenly they deem you worthy of their company?

I'm not complaining.  I completely accept that there are certain things that draw people to each other, rules we must all follow even though we might not understand them.

But what is the thing that wins people over?  It's more than an anecdote.  It is an "IT," like sex appeal. Similar but only to certain point.

That is something my parents used to say.  They called sexiness IT. Someone had strong IT.  It doesn't translate well to English.

I have IT in the friendship department.  I discuss this with my shrink endlessly. People are drawn to me -- men women children. Even if at first they don't like me, something will happen and they will inevitably fall in (friend) love with me. This doesn't apply to romantic relationships. There I need help.

I worry when I discuss this that I sound conceited.  Maybe that is so.  But really, I'm puzzled.  What the fuck is IT? Why do I have it?  Why doesn't my sister?

And in all honesty, it is sometimes suffocating and lonely.  I don't like too many people.  I can tolerate just about anyone, but after an hour, I want to go home.

Well, I've annoyed myself now.  But hopefully you are not annoyed with me, reader (me?).