[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Earth, Wind & Fire — September

Do you remember?

I hated September. As the leaves changed hundreds of miles north of me, so did everything around me. I’ve suffered more breakups, illness, loss of friends, death, accidents, screaming matches in a drafty apartment, overall pain than in any other month of the year. I have a notebook where I did the math on this. I made lists and carried the two and it’s a fact. September swept in and did not look over its shoulder. I kept my eyes down but felt it in my bones, the dread of things I couldn’t control.

I’m superstitious. I still hate September. I haven’t had a bad one since I was 21 but I’m always looking out of the corner of my eye for something, anything to happen. I remember too much. Maybe it’s not that things have stopped happening to me but that I’m not scared of the possibility of change. I’ve left people and things behind and grown, I know that I need less than I used to believe I did. Instead of letting things happen to me, I’m beating everything to the punch and doing it myself. I’m wary but ever hopeful. My glass is half full of something light colored so I won’t have a panic attack if it spills.

On the topic of removing credit from someone’s work

Or as it is also known, plagiarizing. Or stealing.

Remember this post? About the ocean from the other day? Me too. Imagine my surprise when I learn it has been reblogged here: http://denisesfairytale.tumblr.com/post/1049074852/its-yourself-that-youll-find-in-the-sea

Also seen here:

Now, do you see the original poster, ie. the writer’s credit on this? Neither do I.

There are things on the internet that make me mad or annoyed or roll my eyes every single day. I let them roll off my back because they don’t matter in the long run.

This matters.

It is my work and I have taken time to write something and whether or not you like something I write or consider it valuable, it is an original creation to have the credit stripped like it’s some random dancing cat gif makes me super pissed off. I don’t care if it’s just the internet, you do not disrespect someone by passing off their work as yours or anyone else’s. That’s just fucking shitty. And no, I don’t care that a bunch of usernames “makes your blog layout look bad”. Either go and reblog from the original source or suck it up and deal with it.

This has happened to me in the past on tumblr and as always, I contact the person who posted it in case it was just an oversight and I also contact the tumblr staff because this is not what our blogging experience here is about. Many of us are sharing original work and we should not be scared for our words and photos and drawings and music. Eventually someone is going to figure out that you’re passing off someone else’s work as your own and call you out on it. I rarely ask people to reblog things but please, if you can, reblog this post. If not for yourself then perhaps for anyone you know who creates things. It is terrifying to see something you create, an extension of yourself, not given the proper credit it deserves.

I miss winter. I miss getting drunk with you on blue Long Island iced teas, me on one and a half and you on probably four and a few beers. I miss fighting with you about how you’d put Samantha Morton at number 14 on your potential wife list even though I’m numbers 1 through 13 as we walk down Madison Avenue. I miss screaming drunkenly at you when you try to hold my hand. I miss you trying to steal my phone from me on the corner as I call my best friend to tell her what was happening. I miss the alcoholic haze that makes a New York January seem nonexistent. I miss holding my coat way out with my hands and trying to drunkenly convince the hostess at that restaurant to let me use the bathroom since “the baby was pressing down on my bladder”. I miss arguing as we bought hot dogs and cheese fries from the Jamaican men on the corner. I miss them laughing at us as we slurred at each other. I miss refusing to speak to you while pleading for you to eat so you’d sober up. I miss staggering down the stairs to the 1 train and letting you sit next to me with rolled eyes. I miss you spilling the cheese fries down the front of your jacket. I miss the way we laughed about it and how you tried to kiss me with a literally cheesy mouth. I miss the way how I said sorry for being a lightweight kamikaze by taking off my glove and putting my hand in yours. I miss the way you let me know it was okay and that you were sorry by rubbing the palm of my hand with your finger. I miss sharing the headphones to my iPod to listen to Talking Heads on the way back to the Bronx. I miss an empty subway car and how when we were almost to 231st street, we attempted to swing around the poles. I miss the look on your face when I wrapped one boot around it and twisted around. I miss walking home in the cold against you. I miss the way we drunkenly mumbled about the future and how we wanted to get married one day; I miss the way we didn’t even try to take it back the next day. I miss being too drunk to have sex but not so much that we didn’t try. I miss sleeping skin to skin and the snow and rubbing my foot against yours to help me fall asleep and our alternating breaths and slowing heartbeats and good night.

It’s yourself that you’ll find in the sea

(image via)

I swam before I walked. Literally surrounded by water, my parents assumed that I needed to learn as soon as possible. I was almost a year old and kicking around the pool with my parents. Once I was a little older and seemed strong enough, they took me to the beach. I waded into the water, my parents holding my hands, and felt the weightlessness of the ocean. Salt water got in my eyes and it was an entirely different burn than that of chlorine. It hurt but was clean all at once. It was home.

My family has an almost mystical appreciation of the ocean and its properties. If someone was getting over a cold, they were sent to go swim in the ocean for a few hours. If you had a healing cut or injury, get in the salt water. Even the proximity of the ocean seems healing. On summer days in New York City when the buildings seem to trap the heat in a stagnant cloud around your head, I yearn for the clean air of the sea for just a moment. Sometimes it’s less about being in the ocean than just being close enough to hear its call.

I was an unhappy girl at 18, 19, 20, unlike myself and numb. I didn’t feel much nor did I want to, having been burned before. I moved smack dab in the middle of the state to go to school and found myself suffocated. I paced my dorm, my apartment at night, unable to sleep. I drove my car north into the mountains, I took flights alone to see old friends and have conversations where I had nothing to say. Once, in the middle of this country, I assumed I was unused to being landlocked. I flew home and drove to a stretch of quiet Atlantic, as close as I could get to the edge of the ocean.

It was night time and the water was black. I’d always been petrified of the ocean at night, unable to see the things swirling around your legs but I took of my clothing and swam in anyways. I swam hard without paying attention to my stroke until I was far out. The moon seemed huge as my head bobbed from the silvery water. I took a deep breath and let myself sink underwater. My eyes were closed and I stayed submerged until I could feel my lungs prickling for more air. It scared and excited me all at once. I breathed slowly and floated on my back, watching the glow of moonlight on my nude skin. I did not think for the first time in years and stared at the sky. I crawled into my bed covered in salt and sand that night, sleeping late the next day.

I’m not saying the ocean is magic, I’m not saying that it’s going to fix you. I’m not sure that it did fix me. What it did do was make something click in my brain, it woke me up. It reminded that there was something bigger than the numbness and the bitterness I felt, that you had to feel the terror and the pain in order to feel the moments of ecstatic joy you sometimes get. I was reminded that sometimes joy and terror can be the same thing. I don’t know that I need the ocean like I used to but I do think that sometimes you just need a reminder that you are alive and hopefully, feeling something, anything.

It’s true that things could always be worse and that you have to keep your life in perspective in order to see the good things you do have but there are just days where I want nothing more than to stomp my fucking foot and say enough, I’m sick of this shit, when will it be my turn, why does this happen to me, why can’t I get what I want exactly when I want it? And you need to stomp and to scream because no matter how easy your life may be, living is fucking hard sometimes. It’ll never be easy but it’ll always be worth it.

"Romanticized and misapplied, individualism keeps us self-indulgent. It keeps us ignorant of contracts, of money, of benefits, of rights, of how the partnership between author and publisher ought to work, of the areas that threaten both publisher and writer. It keeps us in an adversary relationship at certain junctures where such a relationship is counterproductive. Individualism can also keep us dependent on foundation largesse, grants, fellowships, campuses, cloisters and handouts. And if things go on in this manner, individualism will idle us-it will keep us from the work we have chosen to do."

Toni Morrison on the need for a community of writers, “For A Heroic Writers Movement”

“Too ______.” “Not _______ enough.”

My professor was late to my first class of History of Cuba today. I sat watching the sky outside slowly turning gray and internally high fived myself for bringing an umbrella. It was cold in the classroom. I sat on one foot. The classroom slowly filled up, everyone spreading around so as to not sit next to someone else. Some random girl in jeans sat next to me.

“I like your glasses,” she said. “They’re very different.”

“Thank you.” I smiled politely as this tended to happen on the first day of the semester a lot. She spoke after a minute.

“So are you a history major?” she asked.

“No, this class just fits nicely into my schedule and goes towards my second major,” I replied. “Plus, I’m Cuban so it’d be interesting to know more about my heritage.”

“No way, you’re Cuban?” She looked shocked.

“Uh, yeah, definitely am.”

“You just don’t seem that Cuban. I mean, you seem too white to be Cuban.”

“Well, I am.”

Too white. I’ve heard it before as people question the fair skin and generally on the European side features I inherited from European grandparents and great-grandparents. In my private high school, it was said with pleasure and respect by a lot of my white classmates: “You don’t seem that Hispanic at all!”. By other Hispanic people, I’m often seen as betraying my ethnicity by not neatly fitting into a stereotypical role as Latina. I grew up in a fairly affluent, mostly white suburb. You may be surprised to learn that I speak and write fluent Spanish, know much about my cultural background, and make one of the meanest plates of ropa vieja around. I do not really listen to Latin music or wear big hoop earrings or do any of the things that many people see as markers for “Hispanic” but I am Hispanic.

To you, girl who sat next to me in class as well as you the reader, I say this: as long as you continue to classify and judge people based on your knowledge of stereotypes instead of actually getting to know a fully formed, unique individual who is made up of any number of backgrounds, you will be ignorant and you will miss out on understanding just how complex and beautiful people are. To assume that there is one common Hispanic or Black or Asian or Christian or Muslim or LGBTQ or female or even, yes, White experience or identity, is to put people in a box before you even know them. There is no right or wrong when it comes to identity, you cannot be “too black” or “not Asian enough” or “too boyish”, you are what you are, that’s it. I’m sick of hearing that I’m too white, that Obama isn’t black enough, that lesbians would be more accepted if they all fit into some feminine stereotype, that all Muslims are terrorists. That’s fucking enough. Everyone’s life experience and identity are valid and while communities share aspects, every single person has their own story, their own face that the world sees; you can’t just lump everyone together and expect to understand who a person really is.

I am a part Jewish Catholic Cuban Spanish (along with other things!) cisgendered woman who grew up in the suburbs. Pa que sepa.

So this is from an old Daily News but they have these ads in probably every Thursday, Friday, and probably the weekend editions of the paper. I act like a fucking idiot whenever I see these ads. Michelle and I had discussed over brunch this need we had to have a puppy and nurture it and take care of it, like this strong pull towards puppies and it’s so, so true. It’s some fucked up biological clock replacing babies with puppies.

I know what you’re thinking. Oh, whatever. Everyone loves puppies and they cuddle them and squeal and coo over them. Yay. Puppies.

No.

Lately, it’s like weird, creepy hormonal clockwork. I see this ad and I lose my shit. I’m pretty much always reading the paper on the subway and then I see this ad and I grip the paper tighter as if the 2D puppies are going to escape from the fucking page. “Oh no, puppies, stay right here beneath this story about some girl blogger eating from food trucks oh wait do not care!” I can always feel my nails turning slight blue underneath my nail polish at how hard I’m gripping the pages. My mouth erupts into one of those eyesore grins you only see on 5-year-olds who haven’t learned how to not use every facial muscle to convey joy. Some of these ads literally say this:

SO MANY WRINKLES!!!

Indeed. So many damn wrinkles. When I read that and see the wrinkly puppies, I make some sort of noise that can only be translated into text like this:

EEEahafnoaiJJKNNKFJND.

Then whoever is near me looks at me like I am suffering a seizure or am slightly mentally retarded but no one gives a shit; it’s New York City. I sort of sit for several minutes laughing and keeping my now melted heart in my chest as I just repeat the brilliance of SO MANY WRINKLES to myself. If Gabe is with me, he usually kisses me at this point to try and snap out of my puppy rapture but I am just mumbling SO MANY WRINKLES against his mouth. I am always excited about dogs on the street but something about this ad kills me. It’s so honest, it just automatically plugs into what is loved about puppies:

· WRINKLES

· Puppy faces

· WRINKLES

· Not poop

So if you see a girl reading a paper on the subway or while walking down the street and she suddenly seems to go into shock or is apparently impersonating Jack Nicholson’s Joker, do not fret and let her ride it out. Soon she will only be repeating SO MANY WRINKLES in her head.

All day long.

I will take you to the end of my world.

I keep thinking about the things we learn about people on the internet, how we present ourselves not only online but to the world as a whole. We are the curators of our own lives and we carefully and continuously choose what and how we will present ourselves publicly. This of course leads to levels of what we share, different for lovers and friends than for sort of friends and coworkers, entirely apart from the things we share with our mothers. I realized this as I find myself making important decisions about my future of late. I only told some people about said choices and realized that this filters down to all aspects of my life, including blogging.

I think about it at almost 1 am on a Sunday because I am forever sifting through email I receive from readers. I’m terrible at replying to email due to both procrastination and the awkwardness that fills me as I attempt to sound like my most interesting self. I know I never sound as charming and smart as I hope to and so I take weeks, even months to reply. It makes me feel guilty because I receive truly wonderful emails that move me, some of which even make me cry. I think of this anonymous person sharing a part of who they are with me in response to my own sharing and it’s powerful. That feeling of connection when you really don’t know a person at all.

So I choose what to share. There are some things I deliberately choose to never speak about, others that just never come up. I’ve shared intimate details of my life, mostly when time has passed, and yet never shared simple things that would never be considered as interesting or juicy. I share about the life I’m currently living in real time but I unconsciously choose to protect certain aspects, to keep them private and safe from the prying eyes of, well, anyone who happens to chance upon this. I wondered if perhaps I was hiding parts of myself from this space for some unknown reason but it’s no different than the rest of my life. You live and you filter and you share when the time is right. It doesn’t mean you don’t know someone or that the connection you might feel with them isn’t real, you’re just peeling them apart in time. You might never know a person entirely but it doesn’t mean you don’t know them; you just take what you need.

I have so much news, so many things in the works, in time.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Slowreader — I Like You Most

and your bright eyes are giving me sunburns
and the grandstands are filling with headlines
you like me when i’m not being stubborn
but i like you most all the time

Here is a list of things that can make your period late and/or disappear:

1. Stress

2. Screwing up the last week of your birth control pill dosage

3. A combination of the above

4. A baby

I always think I’m pregnant, I have a sort of paranoia about it and I blame it on the Discovery Channel and this one documentary about parasites. One poor, poor woman had some sort of tapeworm creature that had to be removed from her very swollen abdomen and from that moment, my brain clicked and just permanently associated it with a baby growing inside me, eating all of my delicious omelets and fruit cups. I’m the kind of girl who cures anxiety by taking a pregnancy test because “at least I’m the boss of my uterus,” as I always say.

This was different though. I didn’t say anything to Gabe, who looked greenly pale for someone so ethnic, as I picked up the test at the drugstore. Our neighborhood had turned into fucking Baby Town. I kid you not. Our coffeeshop, our grocery stores, our quiet lovely treelined streets had been taken over by tiny, beautiful newborns in spacecraft-resembling stroller contraptions. We even joked about a possible Law & Order-inspired procedural called Baby Town with toddler DA’s and a baby drug dealer who said “goo goo ga ga!” while smoking a doobie (it’s funnier when I act it out). I love babies but on the brink of my final undergrad year and about to dive into preparing and applying for some sort of grad or law school, I do NOT need something else attached to my tits.

The final straw was when I threw up in Starbucks. I sat down and thought that there really was something in my uterus who did not like chicken masala and naan and who was now calling the shots. I bought the test and we walked home making jokes that weren’t funny at all. It was so fucking hot outside. I got home and took off my jeans and underwear, rifling through my bag for the test in just my baseball tee. I stalked off to the bathroom and locked myself in. I MacGyvered this cup-shaped top from your shaving cream into my official pee cup and dipped both sticks into it. I waited. Three minutes is a long time, so much longer than you ever think it is. Those three minutes are like the suspended animation that Captain America exists in post-World War II or something.I used the time to stick my head out the door.

“Hey, if you see the cap of your shaving cream in the trash, don’t take it out,” I said.

“What did you say?” You were reading the Daily News.

“The cap to your shaving cream. Just, you know, don’t use it again.”

You looked at me for a bit with a weird half smile.

“I PEED IN IT DO NOT USE IT JESUS.” I slammed the door and locked myself into the bathroom to continue waiting.

We always say we don’t want kids; they’re so expensive, loud, we’d never sleep in, all of the things lots of people say, things I actually believe. But we talk about baby names and I’ve come around on Thor (only as a middle name) and you hate Poppy with a passion but will let me have a Bianca. We talk but it’s not time, if ever. I stare at the edge of the sink and the first one has one line.

Not pregnant.

A few seconds later, the second one reads “-NO.” As in, no, continue on being selfish and put your life together and one day, this won’t only give you terror but perhaps something else, something more joyful. I walked out of the bathroom holding the two tests and stood in the doorway of the living room. You looked up at me expectantly and I gave you my best terrified/I just shit my pants (I haven’t, for the record, but thespian!) face.

“JK!” I said and dropped the tests in the trash. There was and is time for all the things we do and don’t want, and those things will probably change with time. What doesn’t? I curled up next to you and felt you absentmindedly place your hand on my lower abdomen as we read the sports section together.

—

When something is right, it’s as simple as you like seeing your toothbrushes together in the morning. That’s really it.

Scenes from a Saturday

I went to the bakery on the corner that I’ve been dying to walk into for months. The cakes in the window are beautiful, actually attractive the way a date would be, and they call my name daily. I walked in and was overwhelmed in the same way I would be at Toys ‘r Us as a kid. I’d hold my hand up to my mom.

“Just give me a minute, I can’t decide,” I’d say with a raise of my eyebrows.

I said the same thing to one of the women behind the counter. I asked her what each tiny tart and cake was, what the filling was, whether the icing was buttercream or whipped. She looked very impatient but there were no other customers so she humored me. I set a limit at twenty dollars because otherwise I’d need a caravan to help me carry home boxes and boxes of dessert. They tied the box tightly with string the way all good bakeries do and I set it on my lap on the train.

When we got above ground at Dyckman Street, the girl sitting across from me on the train took her cell phone out to make a call. She spoke in Spanish and I understood every word, looking down to avoid appearance of eavesdropping. There was a lovely blue and white gemstone Star of David around her rather short neck. She hung up and I looked up at her gingerly.

“Are you Hispanic?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said with an accent and a smile much friendlier than I am used to on the subway. “Mexican. Can’t you tell?”

“I just hate to make assumptions just because you were speaking Spanish.” I looked at her necklace. “I just saw your necklace and was surprised, I don’t know many other Hispanic people who are Jewish. Even though I’m just part Jewish.”

“Is this Jewish?” She fingered the necklace gently. “I used to be a nanny for a family in Riverdale and the mother gave it to me. I just thought it was a star.”

I thought about the people who have worn that star whether by force or choice and I realized how simple it really was.

“Yeah, I guess it is.”

She got off at 207th street and smiled at me as she stepped through the closing doors.

—

We ate Mediterranean  food and dessert with the same forks and talked quietly about our days. You were glad Michelle wasn’t an internet predator; I noted the irony to myself. I listened to you with a mouth full of falafel. We fell asleep on the couch and soon stumbled to bed, stiff with the day, asleep before midnight and comfortable in the notion that we are young and old all at once.

The magic of crashing stars and chutes and ladders

Forgive me for sounding naive but I always forget how fucking exhausting kids are. Gabe and I spent the weekend with his family and especially his little niece and nephew, girl age 3 (almost 4), and boy 1 and a half. I’m an only child, only grandchild mostly and I always try to mentally (and physically) prepare myself for being around little ones but it’s like I’ve come to assume that I get what it’ll be like being with kids for more than a few hours. Overnight. Days. Every single time, I think I know what I’m getting myself into because I so love watching my favorite writers and bloggers with their little ones (here are some of my favorite mom and dad bloggers-look for your name, hey!) and I think I’ve garnered enough info and facts to successfully rein in and understand these little ones I adore.

Hahahahahahahaahahahahaha. I never have a clue.

THEY’RE SO SMART. I’m not shocked by this but I AM. I’m not going to lie to you, I think some kids are sort of obnoxious but the good ones, man, they’re the best. These two, they are such characters at such young ages. I last saw them at Easter and they’ve grown inches in such a short time! The little boy was soft and still in that baby stage then and now he’s taller, running all over, getting into everything, and losing that baby stance of back arc-tummy out. Even his face looks more like a little boy, not as round. His mom pointed out with a sad face that he only had one roll in his thighs now. He kissed me goodnight and would look at me for long stretches of time before bringing me his toys shyly; he’d then try to get into cabinets and test his voice and all his big boyness.

The other one had grown taller, all jumping, prancing little girl, and she is so, so lovely. The best thing about her though is her mind. A few weeks away from being 4 years old, she is so smart and so verbal and sassy. Not bratty but already a fully-formed little human. She wore me out physically, attempting to play badminton and “valleyball” and hide and seek, but mentally as well, trying to read me storybooks and making up elaborate games for her dolls. We spent a lot of time in the above playroom which also has her brother’s toys but is still a very HER zone as he moves out of his baby years.

I sat crisscross applesauce on the floor with her and looked at the drawings and coloring book pages torn out and baby dolls and princess dolls and Dora dolls and I wondered if I had been like this as a little girl. My mother assured me a few days later that I absolutely was as energetic but I can’t remember a time when my mind seemed to brimming with so much joy and energy and possibility and creation. I still burst at the seams with these sensations but it seems muted and slowed down by the mundane details of every day life. There are glimpses of the old exhilaration at times, when your hand brushes the small of my back, when I’m riding a bicycle downhill, when I hear a song I know all the words to, when I think of the perfect turn of phrase for a story, when you make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and cut it in half diagonally how I like it just because. Both of these little ones reminded me of how much I have and how little living I sometimes do because of my own fears and insecurities. There is such pleasure in doing the things that make you happy, the way children do, and I wonder why we don’t do this more when we grow up.

We came home tired after just a weekend. I lied on the bed and wondered how moms and dads do what they do, 24 hours a day. I don’t say this for sympathy but I really wonder if I could do what you do, without a break. I wonder if I have knowledge to impart, if I’d be a mom a little boy or girl could look up to, if I’d be able to keep an eye on the dangers seen and unseen. In a day and age where speed and efficiency is so highly valued, I am in awe of parents who not only watch their babies grow up in what is seemingly hyperspeed but who also have to be so patient with those little ones simultaneously. I don’t know if I’d be a good mom at all. I do know that I love the smell of baby feet and the tiny arms of little kids wrapped around my waist but I wonder if that’s enough. I’m selfish and set in my ways. I wonder if there’s enough love for all of us.

I see you with these little ones, holding them, making them laugh, and I know that anything is possible in time. Perhaps.

Things Anaïs Escobar knows how to write about.

Sex, dating, movies, books, music, the mundane. Here’s a roundup of internet writing by me from the past year:

The Love Notebook Series

Love Notebook #1

Love Notebook #2

Love Notebook #3

Love Notebook #4

Love Notebook #5

Love Notebook #6

Love Notebook #7

End of Decade Reviews

The Best Albums of the Decade

The Best Books of the Decade

Reviews for A Bright Wall in a Dark Room

His Girl Friday

Wet Hot American Summer

Villains Week: Why Hannibal Lecter is Terrifying (And Possibly Your Boyfriend)

Oscars Week: The Blind Side

Hannah and Her Sisters

Whip It

Adaptation.

Other pieces of writing are located here and here in the older archives. Questions, comments, offers of employment, book deals (ha!) can be directed to anaisescobar AT gmail dot com. Enjoy.

(via this beautiful collection, h/t pangea)

I have close to 30 tabs open on my macbook for grad school options and GRE things and “jobs for English majors since you decided to take Experimental Fiction and Postmodern Brit Lit AFTER you took close to two years off of school because you weren’t sure what you were doing with your life at 19” because I graduate in the spring. The anxiety tests my gag reflex daily. I think about my friends with law degrees and MBAs who can’t find jobs in this recession. I think about the future and how I along with countless others am possibly very screwed.

I opened this and she turned from drilling the side of a plane or a ship or whatever that is and looked at me from my computer screen.

“You don’t know what a hard day of work is, you spoiled brat,” she said, setting her eyes on me.

“I’ve worked before.” In retail. In a research library. In an art studio. I have parents who have helped me almost entirely with my college education.

“Look at the palms of your hands and tell me you’re not lucky right now.”

They are soft and I know that this recession has barely touched me while I’ve barely touched the world. She’s turned back and her hands are stronger than mine, red nailed, because she’s not scared of what’s to come, she faced whatever it happened to be.

There is no perfect path for anyone. I had ten different plans by age eighteen that have all changed or been derailed by twenty-three. Things change and life happens and you work with what you have. You have to do things you never expected you’d do and deal with that. Nothing is ever going to work out the way you planned and that might just be the best thing to ever happen to you.

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