Something Amazing, I Guess

On what I'm waiting for

I had time to kill before Sara’s birthday party and a crowd was gathering outside of the Bowery Hotel. Four paparazzi with iPhones on gimbals and fifteen women clearly on their way to or from their own versions of Sara’s birthday party, too. I asked two girls in jean shorts who they were waiting for, and they looked at each other and giggled and said they didn’t know. No one did, not even the ones with gimbals. 

There were three black Escalades idling out front, and I stood talking to the girls in jean shorts about our favorite yoga studios and what it was like being students at NYU and speculating who might come out next. One jean short thought Gracie Abrams. The other thought Pedro Pascal. I was hoping Eli Manning because I just have to see those ears to believe them. We watched each SUV fill with people none of us recognized and twenty minutes later there was just one left. A palpable anticipation pulsed through us, as expectant and breathless as soon-to-be fathers in a delivery room, arms all but outstretched towards the hotel lobby (which I guess in this metaphor is our wife.)

I was at risk of being late to my birthday party now, but the sunk cost of so many SUVs weighed heavier than my woven leather tote bag full of birthday party wine. A brunette woman, well dressed, came up behind us from the side door and leaned in, almost whispering, “who are you guys waiting for?” The three of us performed the routine we’d perfected over the course of the last dozen times we’d answered this question, shrugging and smiling and admitting in unison that we had no idea. “Oh, that’s so funny!” brunette said. “Have a good night.” She swanned past us, stepping stilettoed into the last black SUV and drove off. 

This is more or less what my life feels like lately. Like putting in time — a new side hustle, another Hinge date — believing it will work out, waiting for pay off and receiving just shy of nothing; or a beautiful, nameless brunette.

Iconic family artifact: door-knocker from my grandmother’s cabin

I took an enneagram test before bed. I usually don’t let myself have my laptop in bed because then where does it end, but four solid months of low-level ennui and I’d kicked sleep hygiene more or less to the curb. Jellycat on my chest, I clicked easily through the fifty yes or no questions from a service that was free in return for just my personal information. 

I answered most of them without hesitation — “I like to keep my feelings to myself” (absolutely not here is a link to subscribe to my newsletter.) “I like to feel close to people” (yep wish I was holding your hand right now,) But then my cursor came to a screeching halt, Little Horse and I staring blankly at #27: “I can see the future clearly.”

I’ve never felt further from a “yes” to this question in my life. Not even because things are less sure now than they’ve been before, but because the longer I stay in New York, where you don’t own where you live and a cup of coffee worth drinking is $8, the more I’m humbled into admitting I never had any idea. I can see what I want it to look like — more money, a boyfriend, the cure to plantar fasciitis, one glimpse at Eli Manning. My ten-year plan is storybook. I live in the free-standing brick house for sale just down the street from me now (the one called the “Piano Maker’s Mansion”) with my husband and our three kids. They all have family names and they’re avid readers. I have a garden in the back where I grow fresh rosemary and kale and a dog and a cat who sleep curled up in the same chair. I’ve already sold one best-selling novel about ______ and I’ve just signed a deal for another on _______. Genius ideas for best-selling novels TK.  

I answered “no” and the results of my test came through over email seconds later, along with an invitation to purchase an $18 eBook and a course on how best to harness my natural gifts. I’m a 3, the email told me. “The Achiever.” Highly driven for advancement. One who wants to make sure their life is a success. Oprah Winfrey, Augustus Caesar, Rachel Berry from Glee. 

I cried in the street for the first time in years last week, brought on by you guessed it a text from a boy. We’d been on three dates two months ago before he left town for all of March and most of April. They’d all been fun but bracingly platonic and I’d thought after our third date, spent seeing The Brood at the Metrograph, “maybe this will be the first time ever I actually pivot from romantic prospect to friend.”

We hadn’t talked since before St. Patrick’s Day and even then it wasn’t of any particular substance. “How was your day” and a Spotify link that faded easily, naturally into the ether. I hadn’t thought of him for weeks when his name lit up my phone screen. He was sorry he hadn’t texted in so long, he had a great time with me this February and he was back in the city now and he’d love to see me again. But, “full transparency, it would just have to be as friends.”

Imagine you were having a nice afternoon, enjoying yourself, maybe you’re out on a lake rowing around in a canoe or walking through a field of tall grass letting the soft blades run through your fingertips and then out of nowhere a guy you haven’t seen or spoken to in one month and a half comes up to you and yells in your face “I AM NOT ATTRACTED TO YOU.” 

Maybe you would laugh at first, like I did, sending screenshots of the text to anyone who’d know. But maybe then you’d notice the bottom edges of your eyelids getting hot and your vision blurring into a little circle. And maybe you’d need to leave the coworking space to snivel on the sidewalk about the unfairness of it all, still adrift with oars in hand, a text from a guy you’d never even kissed sending you careening into crippling self doubt. 

I called my mom on the phone, choking out “what is the point of my life” and “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore” between sobs. Admitting to myself and to her that all the constant striving for success — researching KPIs and staying late at work and enrolling in a rat race that keeps me chained to Instagram — had left me unfulfilled. I didn’t want “good job” anymore, I wanted someone to write grocery lists with and to tell the Green Mountain Energy salesman trying to scam me at the farmer’s market that “we’re not interested.” 

I listened to myself, incredulous, as I spoke in love song cliches and adages from Sex and the City. “I’ve been dating since I was fifteen years old WHERE IS HE?” I’m a sorry excuse for Charlotte York, frizzy-haired and weeping on Greene Street. 

From Picasso’s Tete-a-tete show running at Gagosian/how I’m tryna be

I believe doggedly that everything happens for a reason, which usually serves me well, but sometimes I worry that in texts like “just as friends” I’m receiving karmic retribution for the nice boys I’ve broken it off with. Like the risk analyst from Connecticut who liked to spend all his free time bird watching. I asked him how he went about doing it in New York City and he said “What do you mean? I’m bird watching right now. You hear that?” He was pointing over his right shoulder to Tompkins Square Park. I said I couldn’t be sure. “Well, it was a Thrush,” he said. 

His office was on 51st street and when he walked in one morning, there was a Woodcock standing in front of the building’s glass revolving doors. “Any time you see a bird that’s not a pigeon somewhere outside of a park, that bird is in trouble,” he told me, thus igniting a new and crippling preoccupation. (There are literally birds not in parks all the time.) He sat restless in his morning meeting, not able to get the Woodcock out of his head, until finally he stood up, told his boss he was sorry, but there was a bird outside who needed his help. His colleagues gazed at him, stunned, aiming sidelong glances at the CEO, a stern woman who held his eye contact, unwavering. “Go,” she said. Turns out her husband’s on the board of the New York Audubon Society. He rushed downstairs and put the woodcock in a tote bag and took it in a cab to the Wild Bird Fund all the way up on 86th street. He said they weren’t even really very happy to see him. 

Now I see bird-watchers in Prospect Park, aglow in khaki and contentment, and I wish that birder had been the one. What a nice way to spend a Saturday morning, wearing a technical vest and walking over dirt trails looking for Cardinals. And I’d always love any excuses to use binoculars. 

Every evening since that phone call my mom’s been quietly sending me links. To a co-ed soccer team, an improv class. To the next extracurricular that might land me squarely in the arms of The One. This is a good way to cope in the short term, feeding my Type 3 propensity for pragmatism and progress, for a clean step-by-step program to achieving my dreams — “if run club, then boyfriend.”  

But the more I pine and angst and swipe on Hinge, the more I think the real key to achievement of any kind is to give up on it all together. I was waiting for the water for my egg to boil, always waiting, scrolling on Instagram when I landed on this, an excerpt from Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl. 

"Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it."

In thinking about everything in which I endeavor exclusively as a means to an end I diminish the real, tangible good inherent to each of them. You’d have no idea from my fifteen-hundred words of lamentation that I went to my first Yankees game on Friday, that last weekend I ate homemade soup on the roof with my best friend, that I just made the Trader Joe’s checkout guy laugh so hard he said “thank you for that.” 

Maybe none of these are propulsive, nor boxes to check or investments of time on which I can expect a return. But maybe that’s exactly the point.

As seen on my block

Pony Recommends:

1. I really let my boss (me) down in missing my self-imposed pub date for this newsletter, but I simply could not stop watching The Pitt. That show is so good I was having to remind myself that it would NOT be a good idea to get hurt just so I could go to the ER in the hopes of spending time with a Dr. Robby type, and furthermore I do NOT have what it takes to work in emergency medicine given that working in emergency medicine means fixing “de-gloved” feet which YOU SHOULD NOT GOOGLE. I though the character development and pace and plot of this show was so masterful and beautiful and a really poignant reminder of what some of us are capable of doing for each other. Please watch it and text me when you’re done XO

2. I have already sung the praises of Odele’s dry shampoo and now I am here to proudly extoll the virtues of their hair oil. It feels like a little puddle of raw silk in your palm and it makes my hair all lush and sophisticated when once dry and frictious.

3. I just had one of those “start spreading the news” kinds of weekends where I can’t believe all that New York gives me, my aforementioned First Yankees Game and a visit to b-list Picassos all occurring in the same 24-hours. I went and saw Tète-à-tête on my friend

Rose Florence

’s recommendation and was not disappointed at all (I never am by her.). It’s showing until July 3rd and IT’S FREE you have to go. I keep trying to get people to tell me this looks like me:

4. Recipe corner! Aforementioned roof soup was this by God’s own angel Melissa Clark. It’s perfect for this part of springy, warming while still light and zippy. I also made this carrot recipe for Easter dinner and it was maybe the hearty carrot side I’ve ever made and I have made A LOT of hearty carrot sides.

Love you mean it XX Pony