There are few times I feel more romantic towards myself than when walking through the streets of New York without wearing headphones. How quaint, how whimsical is she! She may as well have woken up and drank milk straight from the udder before needle-pointing ‘til sunrise. She is far too thoughtful to pollute her virginal ear canals with the modern cacophony of Post Malone and the like. She just lays in wait, ready to be delighted by her common man.
Mostly, though, what I hear is an unsettling symphony of people talking to themselves mixed with sirens of an ambulance that some dummy in a Lexus won’t let through the intersection. But I also hear people talking to other people, which is almost always fascinating. On one particular Saturday in Soho, commuting from one compulsive purchase to the next, I passed by two girls holding hands, talking about astrology. “You know, July 23rd is the last lucky day of the year,” said the one with the bleach-dyed t-shirt. “Oh, yeah, I almost forgot” said the one wearing a bra as a top (which I celebrate).
They seemed totally unfazed by this but I of course was doing my best not to totally spiral, thinking of ways that I could possibly prepare. I put the Last Lucky Day in my calendar. I told everyone it was coming. But I tried not to think about it too much. I didn’t want to scare it off or make it resent me. I approached it as you would a dog, careful to avoid eye contact lest it should think I was a threat, instead staring fixedly at the spot above the Last Lucky Day’s left eyebrow as I offered my hand for it to sniff — trying to walk the dental floss-thin line between jinxing and manifesting, hoping for the best but expecting the worse.
A few days ago, after months of cautious optimism, the Last Lucky Day finally came. I woke up thinking it. I ate breakfast thinking it. I put on my favorite white dress and my favorite sneakers and I walked outside thinking it. And then I took twenty steps from the front door of my apartment building and a bird pooped right on my head. I couldn’t believe it. I gingerly brought my fingertips to the mess and brought them down to assess the damage, looking from my hand to the girl wearing Lululemon who had seen it happen. “No….” I said to her. She kept moving. I don’t blame her.
Even with an optimism so conservative that it would win a state seat in Alabama, still the Last Lucky Day wilted in the shadow of my expectations. It’s among my most destructive habits, right behind popping my chin-zits — I tend to think almost exclusively about the future. I always have. I’ve had names for my four future children picked out since I was eight. I want to have contingency plans for every scenario that could possibly go wrong. I want to arrive two hours in advance for my flight from New York to Virginia. If it’s first come first serve, I want to be waiting when the doors open.
My life is replete with uncertainty. Everybody’s is. But I feel like I’m much worse at coping with it. I like knowing what’s coming so I can figure out what to wear and what to pack for lunch and if I should bring a book or not. But trying to prepare for the future is like trying to hold water in a sieve. I know the sun will rise tomorrow and I know my egg yolk will still be nice and runny after about seven minutes in boiling water, and that’s about it — everything else falls through the mesh.
A newly minted “adult” (don’t laugh!!), I’m at a point where the sieve looks more like a hula hoop, and the proverbial future-faucet is broken and the knobs have fallen off. A couple of weeks ago, feeling desperate for some sort of hint as to what might be on the horizon, I went and saw a palm reader. She was doing a $10 special and she was wearing a Polo Ralph Lauren zip-up and smelled pretty badly of cigarettes. I’m pretty sure she was sleeping when I rang her little buzzer.
I sat down and offered her my hand (instinctively taking all my bracelets off before I did so, I guess so she could really get a good view.) She didn’t touch it, didn’t flip it around, just looked at it pensively for a few seconds, sighed, and said “you think about the future too much.”
I felt embarrassed. Like she could see the strings attached to my hands and feet, my present self a puppet to the puppet-master that is me from the future. I do everything for her, trying to anticipate how she might feel, how the things I do now might affect her. It means that, sometimes, I tend to do the safe thing, the tried-and-true thing, as a means of self-preservation, invoking the modern mantra of “self-care” — a way of being that insists that the happiest life is achieved by putting yourself first.
I did this for a long time, pulling out of plans if I was feeling even slightly ambivalent, prioritizing self-optimization, the perfect nine hours of sleep and enough time to exercise in the morning, crafting for myself a comfortable, velvet rut where I could watch Grey’s Anatomy and eat dried apricots and never know pain or disappointment. The line graph of my enjoyment was one with a trajectory I could predict — it’s always the same and it’s almost always perfectly flat.
This is, as it turns out, a hellish way to live. It’s too much pressure to be solely responsible for your own happiness, putting all your eggs in one basket and also somehow laying the eggs yourself. It’s so much better to live for other people instead — to share with them and to take what they offer from their baskets too and to bake a beautiful frittata or maybe a quiche and to enjoy it together. I’m almost always delighted by other people — “people are all we’ve got.”
So I’m making a concerted effort to follow through, to be steadfast and reliable, to be someone who is more concerned with how she makes other people feel, rather than dogmatically insisting that I be perennially well-rested and up-to-date with Dr. Karev.
This newfound project has absolutely skewed my line graph life. When I leave my apartment, that perfectly flat, unwavering line becomes a scatter plot —a pigeon might poop on my head, but I also might run into Chris Rock. I might have a completely awkward encounter with a girl I kind of know but don’t really, or we might hit it off and be best friends forever and give speeches at each other’s weddings.**
When I step outside, when I show up for the plans I’ve made, I can’t predict where any of the points on the plot may fall, but if I take a step back, the line is trending upwards. The more I step outside, the higher the average becomes, and the better I get at really genuinely enjoying everything I do and everyone I meet. Like the moon-faced Swedish gallerist who had spent the first half of his career as a professional squash player. Or the French grad student who wrote a comedic play about climate change. Or my friend from school whose dad eats PB and J’s on Trader Joe’s lavash wraps every day.
And i’ve figured out ways to make sure that the points on the plot land near the top. I’ve found that almost every interaction is good if I start it by saying “I love your shirt.” It’s always true, too. Even if I wouldn’t wear the shirt myself, I tend to like the fact that they’ve chosen to. Telling people how you feel about them, generally, if it’s positive, always leads to good results. I am leaving the floor open now, as ever, for anyone and everyone to tell how they feel about me but only if it’s good of course and especially if you have a crush on me.
The psychic said I worry about the future too much, but she also said she could tell that I was open to it, and that I’d always be surrounded by people who really need me. I don’t know what shoes to wear or how I should do my hair for that eventual future, but it sounds like it won’t be half bad.
**The psychic also said I would be getting married and not divorced, and that I’d be having three children, two of them a set of twins. Which means I’m going to have to knock one name off the list. I think “Liesel” might have to be the first to go — my passion for the Sound of Music has somewhat mellowed since the third grade. And I’m not Austrian enough to pull that off. Incidentally, in addition to thinking about the future all the time I’m also almost always wishing I was more Austrian.