Leper Event

A few weeks ago, a blog I read regularly, let's call it Metropolist, had a post for a singles event that it was holding. It was being held in a store that we'll call Complete Edibles. My immediate reaction was "Ha, ha! This is for losers!" But then I thought, maybe this could be fun, cute fun people shop at Complete Edibles.
I asked my co-worker X is she wanted to go. "Free food!" I said after I saw her horrified reaction. "What are you guys talking about?" asked our other co-worker, A. "Um, nothing. It's, uh, a singles event," I managed to choke out.
"I feel like a have a terrible disease. It's like I'm a leper," I said to X. She didn't want to go, but I told her it was too bad because I knew her name, birthday and email address and signed her up.
Today after work, I didn't feel like going. But when I showed up there was already a long line, so I decided I wouldn't be suffering alone. Of course the people in front of me and behind me were both women. In fact it seemed like the whole line was women. "I'm treating this like a sociological experiment," said the girl in line in front of me. After signing in, I introduced myself to a girl I recognized from NYU, I'd seen her at the Okkervil River show too. At the mixers table, I talked to another girl. "You're supposed to be talking to guys, not girls!" her friend admonished her. I felt like damaged goods, but she was right. I looked across the street at the basketball court, a group of 5 girls and 2 guys were playing. Are there any guys in New York? NYU girl and I ran into each other again at the alcoholic sorbet cart. We discussed the Richard Serra show at Moma, NYU, and New York was full of women. At least I got my grocery shoppind done.

Doesn't remind me

I've been really bad at both updating this and my real-life-pen-and-paper journal for the past month or so. I meant to post about my trip to California but haven't. I'll get around to it.

It's getting to be that time of year again. The humidity that hangs over New York is being blown out to sea, and soon the serene crispness of autumn will blow through the city. It'll be the high holidays, and my birthday, a time to take stock. These past five years I've changed so much that I'm almost unrecognizable to myself and yet there are still things I can't change.
I went to a show tonight at a bar in Williamsburg. Everyone there seemed to be exactly my age. Slowly sipping our beers, no whispering about fake IDs or hastly downing rum and cokes. Everybody clapped politely and rocked gently to the music. There was no pushing and shoving, and we would move out of the way quickly and quietly to let people pass. Whispered apologies were exhanged if the maneuvers did not go smoothly. It was genteel, and almost, even...mature. At one point, I found my self standing next to the the oldest person in the room. Late thirities, he'd pushed his way across the room and somehow finagled a bar stool. He carried a nervousness about him and seemed to take up twice the space of anyone else there. I wondered how many more years of youthfulness I had to be seen in places like this.
I'd been planning on going to grad school next fall. It seemed like the logical next step. It'd be a way to get out of the working world and back into the sleepy arms of academia. But I realized that short of buying stationery, I have no interest in going back to school. Everyone I've told my plans to has made a face, and told me that they can't see me doing that. I really can't either.
So all this indecision had made me fairly cranky. I've been particularly judgemental lately. All around me I see examples of how I don't want to live, and very few of how I do.