The Way We Get By

6/17/15, “The Way We Get By”

New York, New York

So much of what we do in life can be categorized as the way we get by.  The title of tonight’s entry comes from a play I saw last night, possibly the best play I’ve ever seen.  In it, the two characters wake up in the middle of the night after drunkenly sleeping together and spend an hour and a half arguing if they should sleep together again.  Halfway through, we learn they are step siblings, and they have always had feelings for each other, but they have pushed aside the feelings because that’s “the way we get by.”  It is a line that has stuck with me for the past day now.

Take the dead-end job, and I’m not talking about my job here or anyone I know.  We stay at that job because that’s the way we get by.  We don’t have any other options or we’re too lazy to look for another job or we are afraid of change.  That’s the way we get by.  Doing work we find boring or working for an abusive boss, we grin and bear because that’s the way we get by.  Then, when people ask us about our job, we tell them how much we love it, we lie enough so that one day we might believe it.  Why do we do it?  Because it’s the way we get by.

The same is true of a dead-end relationship.  We stay in it because it’s the way we get by.  We hope that maybe the good will outweigh the bad or we just so desperately want to be with someone, with anyone, that we stay in the relationship.  That’s the way we get by.  Or you have a friend you like as more than a friend, but you don’t say or do anything about it.  You could have been in love with her from the moment you met her, or maybe you developed feelings after knowing her for a year.  Either way, you are afraid of losing the friend, so you keep quiet, you let the feelings fester.  Why do we do that?  Because it’s the way we get by.

People look at all the good in their life, and they think, that’s what makes me happy.  The sum total of the good things in your life is often what makes you happy (though I prefer to derive my happiness from the way I feel about the person I am).  We are so afraid of losing any of those things in our life that make us happy that we, well, Disney reference, never look to see what’s waiting just around the riverbend.  We choose the smoothest course.  Why?  Because that’s the way we get by.  We say of our friend, “She’s like a sister to me,” and we hope that, if we say it enough, we might believe it ourselves, because that’s the way we get by.  I have written in other entries how I believe saying, “I don’t think of her that way,” without giving specific reasons why you believe a relationship with her would not work is the biggest load of bullshit anyone ever offers.  We offer that line because that's the way we get by.

Beth and Doug have had these feelings since they were 13.  They did not act on them because they were step siblings, so they were afraid people would judge.  They repressed their feelings because that’s the way we get by.  We accept the small bad instead of risking the larger bad because that’s the way we get by.  In life, we often do what is comfortable and what is easy, and we do it for one simple reason: because that’s the way we get by.

Memories

 3/1/15, “Memories”

Scarsdale, New York

I can think of no better place than my old room in my parents’ house in Scarsdale to reminisce over a theme that has been with me all weekend: memories.  This room is my fortress of solitude.  For eight years, it was the one place that was mine, the one place where no one could enter without my permission.  Even if we were fighting, all I had to do was barricade the door to keep out my parents.  If the fighting was bad, or they insisted on continuing to nag me through the door, all I had to do was blare Avril Lavigne or the TV to drown out the noise.  Why my father thought that by yelling at me to do my homework, which would in turn cause me to create noise to drown him out would possibly cause me to be able to focus on my homework is beyond me, but is just one of the many memories I have of the past fifteen years from this room, from this house, from this town.

There are good memories and bad memories, just as there is good and bad in my life right now.  The good is mostly the people in my life, whether it is a best friend who reentered my life in 2011, a girl who changed my life in 2012 in a way that she has no idea and may never know and has been the predominant “force for good” in my life since I met her, a new best friend that developed spontaneously in the fall of 2014, or another girl who became like a sister to me at the end of the year.  These four people, my four best friends, are the good in my life.

There is plenty of bad, too, but this entry is not about the present, it’s about the past, it’s about memories.  I am currently smoking my 2006 Christmas Pipe, over eight years old, and my world has gone to hell and back in that time, but I don’t even want to talk about the memories of that time, I want to go back further, to talk about the memories of while I was living in this house, while this room was my only sanctuary.  I mentioned the good and the bad, and there is always good and bad.  I can never be purely happy for more than like an hour.  Invariably some negative thought or event creeps in.  I’m stressing over a relationship, a trip I’m planning is falling apart, someone isn’t responding to my texts, a friend is bailing on our plans, whatever it is, there is always some bad that creeps in and sours the good.  It could be 90% good, but the 10% bad is the thought that permeates.

However, that’s okay because, with memories, you can segregate the good from the bad.  The bad works itself out, and you forget why you were ever stressing about the bad, and you only remember the good.  If you do remember the bad, you can remember it as distinct from the good, not as permeating the good.  You remember the night when you stayed all night preparing for a math competition that you were determined to take no matter what, when you took it with almost no sleep because this was the only chance you had to prepare yourself for it.  You don’t remember what stressors were preventing you from preparing earlier.  You just remember that you determined to do it, and you did it.

You remember all of your crushes.  You remember how happy you were every time your crush sat down next to you in class, how you could barely focus, how you were almost afraid to speak in class that day because you were going to blurt out her name.  You remember how cute your 9^th Grade Crush was, how you were convinced that you were in love with her.  Even if you didn’t know what love was then (or even if you still don’t know what it is), you know that what you felt when she sat down next to you, when she did her little happy dance, when she smiled at you, when she said your name, you knew that you had never felt anything like that before.  You remember when you cried when you found out that she had a boyfriend, not because it meant you didn’t have a chance, but because you were an idiot, because you thought you were in love with her when you really didn’t know anything about her.  You have good memories about her and bad memories, but you can remember those memories independently.  You can hold onto the good while you also remember the bad.

You remember your 8^th Grade Crush and the trick that she played on you, the cruelest trick anyone had ever played on you.  No, you don’t remember the good about her.  She was a blithering idiot, a tall blonde (which may explain why you are now attracted to smart, short, brunettes), and you remember exactly why you liked her.  You even remember staring at her in Spanish class or when she got a 55 on an exam, an exam that you aced.  However, you don’t have the good memories of her.  You have bad memories of the trick that she played on you, but you also have good memories of how you didn’t let it get to you, how the next year you listened to Sk8er Boi so many times until you knew that you would never again let any girl bring you down and instead lift yourself up so that one day someone would say to her, “Sorry girl, but you missed out, that boy’s mine now.”

These are the memories you have.  I could keep going.  You remember your 7^th Grade Crush, how you almost invited her to your Bar Mitzvah, in spite of the fact that you had a girlfriend at the time.  You remember your girlfriend, how the relationship ended when you told her that she’d have to call you back after the Bob Costas introduction during the Sydney Olympics.  You remember sitting on the couch with her, you remember sitting on the couch with your laptop pretending to listen to her on the phone, you remember telling her that you loved her even though you didn’t, something you swore you’d never do again.  You remember your 6^th Grade Crush, you remember leaving a Valentine’s Day card in her locker, something you’re sure that she has long forgotten.  You don’t really have any good memories about her, either.  Actually, you don’t have any good memories about any of your Middle School Crushes.

Middle School was a hard time for you.  You didn’t have any real friends, the one person you did hang out with regularly, the only person you could have called a friend was really just your rival.  You were the two smartest kids in the school.  You would bus over to the High School to take advanced level math courses, and you were both top of the class.  You were on that bus when you heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.  You remember getting off the bus and asking him, “What did the crazy Palestinians do this time?”  You remember donating your birthday money two days later to the cause.  You remember going to a box store to buy gloves for the construction workers.  You remember how you knew the world would never be the same again.  You remember your Y2K celebration and the Official new millennium celebration, both of them with him, one at his house, one at your house maybe?  These are good memories.  You also remember the day where he say casually said, “I’m not his friend.”

You remember when you swore off friendship when you decided that you didn’t need any friend other than yourself.  That was before you spent 3 weeks in Alaska with your best friend from elementary school, before you texted back and forth 50 times in one day with the prettiest girl in the world about a stupid blue and black dress, before you went down to DC with another friend just for the heck of it, before you realized what it meant to love someone like a sister and to be genuinely sad that she was upset and happy when she’s happy.  Those are your four friends, and you have memories of times when you had zero friends, when you didn’t want any friends.

How did your spend your time then?  Well, you have very happy memories of that time.  You remember Super Mario 64, the greatest video game of all time.  You remember how you couldn’t wait to get home so that you could play it for an hour before you had to start your homework.  You can still see the console from your bed.  You remember the scary levels that you wouldn’t play if you were alone in the house or if it was after dark.  You remember Quarterback Club and Ken Griffey Baseball.  Those are all good memories.  You remember Neopets.  You remember how there were RPGs you loved so much, how on Friday nights you were allowed to stay up as late as you wanted to play them, your mom allowing that you would be able to fix your sleep schedule by Monday.  That’s a great memory.  You even considering doing it again, finding out what new RPGs have come out over the past decade, and wonder if any of them could be as good as the ones you knew and love.  You could even replay your old favorites, but you don’t have time for that now in your busy life.

You remember the rough times that started in 10^th Grade.  You remember having to stay up late finishing assignments because you lost your ability to focus, not being able to sleep even when you could focus, your life slowly turning to hell.  You have repressed as many memories as you can from 11^th and 12^th Grades, the ones that are too painful to recall even a decade later.  Those were bad memories.  You think how, if you could have one wish, you’d be able to relive your life from 10^th Grade with the knowledge and experience you know have, how, if you could do that, you might have pure happiness right now.  You think of all the little moments over the past decade you would replay, all the little mistakes you made.  Those are bad memories.

You remember further back, you remember your 5^th Grade Crush, a girl who is just as adorable now that she’s engaged as she was when you used to leave Synagogue early together to go to baseball games.  You learned that she was actually a friend before you realized that you were incapable of having a female friend without developing a crush on her, your two current female friends included.  You remember the teacher who changed your life in 5^th Grade just by showing you a little bit of respect and honesty, more respect and honesty than your parents were showing you at the time, something for which you will never forgive them, no matter how much they thought they were protecting you.

You remember when your brother went off to college, how you would cry every time you went to the train station with him, how the KFC you would get was small comfort.  You remember all the times you went to visit him in Philadelphia.  You have good memories and bad memories of time you have spent you with your brother over the fifteen years in this house, often interspersed, but, in retrospect, you can remember the good and the bad separately.  You remember all the days you would get drunk together when you were in your teens and he didn’t know how to take his liquor straight so he would have you drink half of his gin so that he could add the Diet Sprite to the cup.  You remember playing Quarterback Club and Mario Kart together and with his friends.  You remember how he made sure all of his friends, all of his girlfriends were accepting of you and treated you like a member of the group.

That is why you call the girl he is about to marry your sister.  She’s not “like a sister.”  You consider her your sister, and you are possibly even closer with her now than you are with him, though the two girls you think are like a sister to you and the two guys you call “bro,” your four friends, are closer to you than your brother and sister.  You were friendly enough with his friends that when it came to organize his bachelor party there was no question of you reaching out directly to his friends.  One of his friend’s sister used to babysit for you.  You definitely had a crush on her.  You remember the good and the bad, but of your brother and his friends, you remember almost only the good.

You remember when you moved into this house, how you cried to leave your old house but also how exciting it was to move into the new house.  It was good and bad and probably seemed all bad at the time, but you can now separate the good and the bad and remember the good separately.  You could go back further, but this entry is about the memories you have from living in this house, and your pipe is finished.  You remember the fights, you remember the disappointments, you remember the bad, but you also remember the good, and that is what matters most, the happy memories.

It was 8 PM when I started writing this entry, and that was always shower time.  If I could push it back to 8:02 PM, or even 8:10 PM, that was a win, but at 27 years old, I get to decide when shower time is.  I can take my shower at 9:30 PM, which is when it will be by the time I publish this entry and get into the shower, or, if I were so inclined, I could take it in the morning or not at all.  I encourage my readers to think about the good memories of their life and, if they can, try to remember the times that seemed bleak as they were occurring but are now only good memories.

Oh, I can’t close yet, the Olympics.  You remember each and every Olympics you watched in this house.  You remember Sochi 2014, you remember bringing McDonald’s in from the city.  You remember waking up in the middle of the night to watch the Cross Country races and the Biathlon with your cigar as you wrote your philosophy paper.  You remember the first day when you overslept the first event.  You don’t remember much of London 2012 in Scarsdale, though you have plenty of memories from that summer in the city.  That was the end of the dark times, that was just after you met the girl who would change your life, the girl who still doesn’t know it (unless she is reading this post).  One day you’ll tell her, and she’ll be touched, but not today.

You have almost no memory of Vancouver 2010, since that was during the Dark Times.  You remember Beijing 2008, all the times that you raced back and forth into the city, when you put up the aluminum foil on the windows to help keep you on Beijing time, foil that is still there almost seven years later.  You remember screaming when Phelps went 8 for 8, when he won a race by a hundredth of second.  Your barely remember Turino 2006, since that was during your rough time in 12th Grade.

You remember Athens 2004.  That was the best.  You remember all the times you raced back and forth to McDonald’s to get your food during lulls in the events.  You remember the little cards you made with the winner of each event, before looking up results on the internet was easy.  You remember the effort you went through to do your own Decathlon, even the pole vault.  You remember Salt Lake City 2002, making your cards all together at the last minute before the ceremonies closed.  You remember Sydney 2000 as you mentioned earlier.  These were stressful times making the viewing work properly, but you only remember the good, and that is the point of this all.

Groundhog Day

2/2/15 (Groundhog Day)

New York, New York

In the movie “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray’s character relives the same day thousands, or perhaps millions, of times.  Each day, it starts off the same way, with the same song playing on his alarm clock, and the same events happen to him.  I had joked that it would make a good prank for me to walk into the office each day this week and have the same exact conversations with my coworkers, pretending that we kept living Groundhog Day.  However, tonight, I realized that we are in fact reliving the Bill Murray movie.

We wake up at the same time each morning.  We go to the same job.  We do the same assignments at work.  The details of the assignments might be different, but they are pretty much the same.  We make the same cup of coffee.  We have the same conversations with our coworkers.  We go to lunch at the same time.  We leave the office at the same time.  We do the same activities every evening.  For the most part, day in and day out, week in and week out, we are in fact living the Bill Murray movie.

We text back and forth with the same people every day.  The conversations are the same, but we keep having the same conversations because we love the people who are texting us, and, by keeping in touch with them every day, the long subway ride, the Hudson river, or the 1000 miles that separates us from our friends is reduced to the swipe of a finger and the chirp on our phone.  Even if we go months without seeing them, we only go hours without thinking about them.  We do all of this every day because we don’t change, because our love for them doesn’t disappear day to day, because, whether we have loved them for months or years or decades, we continue to love them day to day, because we are in fact living the Bill Murray movie.

The flipside is that every once in a while we make a change in our life, but it is not long before that becomes the new normal.  We see a movie one night and then the next.  We go to see all eight Best Picture nominees.  After that is done, we enjoy it so much that we decide to see every film nominated for an Oscar.  Before we know it, we are going to see a movie every night, and that becomes part of our daily routine.  We make new friends and old friends fade away.  We break up with our girlfriend, and we mope for a week before we find a new normal.  We start looking for someone else, and that quest becomes our new normal.  We return to our old philosophies of love, and that becomes the new normal.  We start doing all the things we used to enjoy doing, and the old normal is now the new normal.  Once the new normal sets in, we are once more living the Bill Murray movie.

While I do not think it was Harold Ramis’s intention to create a parody of the way we live our lives, it cannot be denied that, in many ways, we are living the Bill Murray movie.

Routines

12/3/14, “Routines”

New York, New York

The scene: 1:30 in the morning, a dimly lit city apartment.  The floor is strewn with various articles, ranging from laptops to shoulder bags to a laundry bag, the most noticeable object a brightly lit air purifier, which is responsible for the only sound that can be heard.  Another light turns on in the pantry and a rustling sound is heard, followed by a slow and steady crunching sound.  The camera pans to the pantry and zooms in on a man in his twenties, 6’2”, 225 pounds, wearing shorts and a t-shirt, a scruffy face the result of not having shaved in two days, absentmindedly snacking on a bag of baked pita chips.  He is clearly preoccupied by his own thoughts.

What is he thinking about?  He is thinking about how much his life has changed in the past 7 years.  He is thinking how his 20s have blown by him in ways that he never expected.  He is thinking about how happy he is in his life, how happy he has been for 3 years now, about the wonderful people that have entered his life.  He is also thinking about the people who have left his life, the “fading friendships” as he calls them.  Above all, he is thinking of one of those fading friendships, the first person who visited him when he moved into this building six years ago, the girl who was his best friend for over a year, the one person from all those fading friendships whom he still remembers fondly.

By the time he finishes the bag of chips, all such thoughts have disappeared.  He just wants to sit in his chair and smoke his pipe, which he hopes will help him fall asleep.  Having just travelled halfway around the world literally for a weekend, he has not slept through the night in a week.  In fact, he had not been back in the country for 48 hours yet, and he was nowhere near recovered on his sleep.  By all rights, he should have been dead tired.  Instead, he is still awake at 1:30 in the morning, and sleep seems as distant to him as do the sites he had just seen in India.  He is not stressed.  He is not worried.  He is not caffeinated.  He is simply not tired.  This is not his usual routine.  He throws the empty bag of chips into the garbage, and the camera follows him as he walks back to his smoking chair.  He lights up his Tuesday Dunhill pipe.  He has not slept yet.  It is still Tuesday as far as he is concerned.  That is part of his routine.  The scene cuts out.

Scene two: the same apartment, 19 hours later, the same man, 19 hours of additional scruff on his beard, a different pipe in his mouth, the 2007 Christmas Pipe.  He smoked the 2006 Christmas Pipe a few days ago.  Of course he would smoke the 2007 Christmas Pipe next.  His routines would not allow anything else.  What the viewer does not know, not unless they know him, is that this is a man of routines.  It is man who finds it almost impossible to break his routines.  He will establish new routines, but altering his routines is not something he does easily.

The sequence of events that transpired to lead up to him sitting in that chair were mere happenstance, and it forced him to alter his routines.  What are these routines?  His evenings are planned with almost clockwork precision.  Mondays he has dinner with his girlfriend.  For Four months, Monday has been their night, even before they started dating.  Tuesday and Thursday he pursues his philosophy degree at the local college, spending an hour talking with one of his best friends after the last class as he smokes his cigar, the same Romeo y Julieta Churchill each evening.  The weekends he either travels or spends time in the city with his friends or goes to his parents’ house in the suburbs.  It might vary week to week, but it is always one of those three.  This is clearly a man who loves his routines.

Our reader might now wonder about his Wednesdays.  Well, he used to have a different Wednesday routine, now, he leaves that as his “variable” day.  Yes, this is a man that loves his routines so much that he plans one specific day a week to “shake things up.”  In the new semester, with a new class schedule, he will come up with a new set of routines, but, as the semester winds down, he will stick to his routines right up until the moment that he finishes that last Churchill and hugs his friend goodbye before she heads off to Israel and Greece.  He will fight back tears because, even though they will promise to stay in touch, he knows that they will likely never see each other again.  He fears that she will just become another “fading friendship.”  He will be leaving the country himself three days later, to head on a cruise to Antarctica, and, when he gets back, he will develop new routines.

As he sits in his chair, smoking his 2007 Christmas Pipe, as he has done every year since 2007, he looks around his apartment and thinks how much his life has changed since last December.  He feels warmth.  The space heater behind him is new.  Last December, he did not have heat in his apartment.  By choice, he had his radiator removed and chose instead to bundle up and sleep under multiple layers.  The sheets on his bed where he is resting his feet are new.  The souvenirs on his dresser, directly in his line of sight, while not all new, are newly displayed.  The pipe, the ashtrays, the chair, all old.  Even the laptop he is using to type this entry is old.

He thinks about the people who recognize him solely because of his routines.  He looks at his laundry bag.  A year and a half ago, he came back from New Orleans to find that his Laundromat had shut down.  He would need to find a new routine.  He found a new Laundromat.  At his old Laundromat, he would walk in a few minutes to close, and the woman there would always grumble and moan that it was so late.  Now, at the new Laundromat, the guy there smiles and greets him cheerfully.  “Hi, Steh-ven,” he says and quickly brings him his bag of clean clothes.  He thinks about the store where he bought the tobacco he is now smoking, the place where he goes almost every day, the place where everyone knows his name.  Of the people working there full-time now, none of them were there two years ago, only one or two were there full-time a year ago.  His routine has not changed in spite of the staff changes.

He thinks about the two places where he goes for lunch every week: the pizzeria where he gets his wings and the Chinese restaurant.  He remembers how yesterday, when he walked into the pizzeria, the waitress greeted him with a big smile and, without even having to ask, brought him two cans of Diet Dr. Pepper.  She only had two words for him, “The usual?”  Of course he would be having his usual.  He loves his routines.  Of course he would not be breaking them.  A few minutes later, he is presented with a big plate of wings.  He thinks about the Chinese restaurant, how he always orders almost exactly same thing, how the guy there greets him jovially, even if he has not quite gotten the hang of his “usual” after over half a year.

But what about his grand plans for tonight?  He was going to have dinner with his mother and grandfather at their favorite place, the place the three of them always have dinner together.  He was going to get the same thing he always gets.  He was going to drink ouzo and Greek coffee.  He was then going to go the train station with his grandfather, wait with him until his train came, light up a cigar, and walk back to his apartment, just as he does every time he has dinner with his grandfather.  It is part of their routine.  An email from his mother changed that.  His grandfather would no longer be able to join them.  Instead, he stayed at the office and went to the cigar store.  He had even picked out his cigar to smoke.  He got to the cigar store, cut his cigar, and, just as he was about to light it, got into a lively and animated discussion with one of the workers.  He put his unlit cigar down as he had the discussion.  In the meantime, unbeknownst to him, the other two workers played a prank on him.

After the discussion, he turned around, but his cigar was gone.  The discussion so lively, and he so tired and hungry, his short-term memory had become fuzzy.  Did he really take the cigar out?  He checked all of his pockets.  He couldn’t find it.  Maybe it fell down somewhere?  It was nowhere to be found.  He suspected the workers of the prank, but he wasn’t quite sure.  In the meantime, he remembered that he had a half-smoked cigar in a tube in his pocket.  He would finish that, go home, drop off his stuff, and then have dinner at his favorite Chinese restaurant in his neighborhood.  That would work great.  Then the workers revealed their prank and returned his cigar.  It would be the perfect to cigar to smoke after his dinner.

A text from his girlfriend changed his routine once more.  Their favorite singer would be singing at the tree-lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center.  He couldn’t miss that.  He had thought the tree-lighting was tomorrow.  The plan he had for the evening would not work.  Instead, he goes home, turns the ceremony on immediately, and orders himself some Chinese food, not willing to vary his routine more than he already had.  After he finishes his food, he lights up his pipe.  The tree is lit an hour later, and his pipe is finished soon after that.  For once, he is finally tired, and, he looks forward to getting a full night’s rest, just as he did last Wednesday.  While he has developed many new routines over the past year, so many of routines are the same as they were last year, even as they were 7 years ago.

Scotland

11/26/14, “Scotland”

New York, New York

In 24 hours, I will be at Newark Liberty International Airport on my way to Indira Gandhi International Airport.  I will spend 48 hours in India.  The reason I am going to India is quite simple: to take a picture with my water bottle and a cigar in front of the Taj Mahal.  That is not a joke.  That is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  I am flying halfway around the world and spending a fair chunk of change for that one picture.  Why?  Fulfillment value.  The Taj Mahal is one New7 Wonders of the World, and I am determined to see each of the 7 before I turn 30.  Irrational?  Hell no.

I will attempt to see seven World Heritage Sits plus Parliament in my brief time there, but only one thing matters: that picture in front of the Taj Mahal.  Well, that, and the replica.  I will return to Newark around 5 AM on Monday and go straight to the office.  I will add the replica to my desk and, if I can find it, the flag pin to my push board.  I will distribute some gifts, and then I will forget about India.  Assuming I get that picture and the replica, it will be decades before I return to India.

This is in such contrast to the last time I was at Newark.  Correction, the last time was the Redwoods.  The time before that, however, I was flying back from Edinburgh.  I love Scotland.  It is one of my favorite places in the world.  How do I describe the beauty of the highlands to someone who has only seen it in pictures?  How do I explain the feeling of walking out of the airport in Glasgow into the rain and aptly quoting Braveheart about good Scottish weather?  How do I tell someone who has only watched Mamma Mia how fun it is to call your brother from Glasgow and then sing the appropriate line from Super Trouper?

How do you explain to someone what it’s like to be in the land where your favorite play was set?  How do you explain to someone the feeling when you look at a castle in Edinburgh as the sunlight hits it in a magical way and know that you are looking at Hogwarts?  How do you explain to someone what it’s like to quote Braveheart ad nauseam once you walk into the castle and see a statue of William Wallace?  How do you explain to someone why that first glass of malt whiskey tastes so much better in its homeland than it ever did in a bar in New York?  You can’t.

All you can do is tell them to go to Scotland for themselves, and when you tell them that that, you cannot help but want to return  yourself, not because you need to visit another WHS, not because you want to gain fulfillment value, but because you want to go back, because you want to gain enjoyment value.  You return because you want to relive Macbeth: The Experience, because you want to go to Fife and Inverness, because you want to revisit the highlands, because you want sit in that castle in Edinburgh and read Harry Potter, because you want to go to the University of Edinburgh and sit in the courtyard and read and debate Hume, because you want to have another sip of whiskey in its home.

These were the thoughts that rushed into my mind as I began to read Hume a week ago.  Well, once I got over the brilliance of his writing, then I started to remember how much I loved Scotland.  He is the most brilliant philosopher I have ever read, and it is no surprise to me that he is from one of my favorite places in the world.  I cannot wait until I return.

Vienna

11/12/14, “Vienna”

New York, New York

When people see my passport, they always ask the same questions.  “Do you meet any interesting people?” (“Not if I can help it.  I travel to observe culture and see natural and historic sites.”) “What were your favorite places?”  (“Oh, there are too many to choose from, so many favorites.”)  “Any place you’d want to go back to?”  Now, that is the more interesting question, and it is one that bears a thought out answer.  While places like Quebec and London never get old, that is not the answer.  No, the answer would be to go somewhere I briefly visited and visit it in a new and different way.

I’d love to go back to Athens and spend a week there, working on my philosophy, sitting in the agora every day, drinking wine every night, finding the intellectual heirs of Plato and Aristotle, engaging in a symposium with those who still know what that word means.  I would like to go back to an island in the Caribbean, a small one like Antigua or St. Lucia, and write a short novel, interact with the locals, and not spend a single minute on the beach.  I would like to go back to one of my favorite National Parks and camp out for a week.  I would like to go to the woods and live deliberately as Thoreau did.

However, now, as I sit in my chair, listening to my Music History CD, puffing on a Dunhill and sipping some wine, I have come up with another idea.  I want to go back to Vienna and spend a week there, experiencing everything the city has to offer.  I want to go to every musical performance I can find.  I want to see operas and concerts and listen to Vivaldi and Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven with headphones as I walk around the city.  I want to fall asleep to Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and wake up to Beethoven’s Fifth.  I want to go to bookstores and pick up books and CDs about lesser known composers and go back to my hotel room to read their biographies and listen to their music.  Then I want to drink Vienna coffee and eat sacher torte every night.

I want to play The Blue Danube and waltz down the street for no reason at all.  I want people to look at me like I’m crazy as I pretend to conduct Haydn’s symphonies.  I want to fly home with a clear vision in my mind of 18^th Century Vienna when it was the capital of the world.  I don’t want to take a single picture.  When people ask me if I enjoyed my trip, I want to honestly answer that I loved every minute of it.  I want to be able to be able to play my favorite pieces as clearly in my head as I can my favorite Taylor Swift songs.  When I get back, I want to go to Avery Fisher Hall and listen with fond memories of my time in Vienna.  I want to never be able to hear one of those pieces again without remembering the exact moment I heard it in Vienna.

So, when people ask me my favorite places, I do have set answers.  Favorite city in the world: New York.  Second favorite: London.  Second favorite in the US: Philadelphia.  Favorite city in continental Europe: Vienna.  I am already in love Vienna.  I just to want to fall as deeply in love with it as I am with New York.

As the Leaves Fall

11/10/14

Aboard Metro North 522, En Route to Grand Central Terminal, Harlem Line

As the leaves fall, as we make our way to work or school or home or to see our loved ones, as we walk and bike and drive and ride the train, we look at the changing colors with wonder, the natural progression from summer to winter, the beauty that is to be found in death.  Because we have lived here all of our lives, we do not realize that we are experiencing the Eighth Natural Wonder of the World.  How can the Paricutin Volcano or the Harbor of Rio De Janeiro compare to the changing of the leaves that engulf this entire region of the world in splendid color.  The fall foliage of the northeast, one of the most remarkable annual events, from New York to New Brunswick, from Connecticut to Quebec, there can be no argument made that it is not one of the most beautiful natural phenomena in the world.

However, since we have lived here all of our lives, since we are blessed by this sight every year, since we know nothing else, we simply say, “Look how pretty.”  We may talk about how it is the most beautiful time of the year, how our small home town has come to look like a little taste of Colonial New England, but when the snow falls, as the Christmas decorations go up, we will take pictures of our town covered in snow and sing, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year,” and we will mean it.  We will get into the Christmas spirit and sing all the songs, decorate our houses, and when the big day comes around, we will spend the day with our families and talk about how joyous of an occasion it is.  We will then ring in the New Year, whether in our homes, at Times Square, in Quebec or Vienna, or aboard a cruise in Antarctica.  We will smoke cigars and drink champagne and sing “Auld Lang Syne” at the top of our drunken voices.  We will stumble home at 2 in the morning, and we will watch the Honeymooners until the sun comes up, or we will see what some strange new city has to offer for the New Year.  The next day will come, and we nurse our hangovers.

Then we will start to complain about the cold.  We will never complain about the snow, as we will now be saying the snowfall is more beautiful than the fall foliage ever was, but we will complain about the cold.   As the snow starts to melt, we will be glad for the warmth, trumpeting how we survived the harsh winter, saying how much we hate the winter.  Once the flowers start to bloom, once the birds start to chirp, we will talk of the wonder of spring, we will look at the trees in our garden and say that this is the most beautiful time of the year.  How could snowfall or fall foliage possibly compare to these flowering trees?  We will pot our plants and change our wardrobe and talk of how excited we are for summer.  We will plan our summer vacations and wait for school to end.

When summer comes, we will enjoy long days and, when we have dinner outside at 8:30 PM, with no need for artificial light, we will say how there is nothing like long summer nights.  We will say that the fall foliage and the snowfall and the flowering plants were nothing compared to the beauty of a summer night.  We may even travel further north, to Alaska or Canada or Greenland or Scotland or Scandinavia, where it never truly gets dark, where the sun sets at 11 PM and rises again a few hours later, leaving only twilight in its stead.  We will talk about how taking a walk at 2 AM in twilight is the most wonderful thing in the world, how the fall foliage in New England, New Year’s in Vienna, and the flowering plants in our garden cannot possibly compare to these long summer nights.

Then the leaves will fall again, and we will once more say that fall is the most beautiful time of the year.