I’m Amanda. I’ve got wide eyes, a smart mouth, and a MetroCard. And I’m not afraid to use them.
Snow has blanketed the city just in time for Valentine’s Day! I spent the morning sloshing around downtown to get to the building where I’m supposed to grade ELA state tests. Upon release this afternoon, I scurried to the train station. Streets downtown are closed and clogged with slush that’s been around the block.
The long weekend with MLK day was much needed and fondly remembered. I’ve been meaning to put these pictures up, but have winced at the idea of trying to remember everything in the correct order. I wish I could say this about all weekends.
Each has an individual feel. Some are plush and overstuffed as armchairs, cushioned with extra days. Others are fuzzworn, thread-stretched, paltry days to rest, to work. Neither of these happens over such weakened weekends.
Among all the other great colloquialisms my dad has imparted (”dry as a popcorn fart,” anyone?) is “a snowball’s chance in hell.” The first real snow in NYC this winter had this likelihood of lasting. That is to say, none. It melted away in the day’s sun, not even leaving slush as a reminder.
After our Friday workday in Union Square, Renee and I headed off to the Lower East Side. We’d been talking about teaching and professional development all day, and the topic slightly shifted. We began to examine self-development, what we’re thinking right now about next week, next year, several years from now when we will have long forgotten the comment one of us made to the other about the ghoulish Halloween mask stuck high in the branches of a tree. 
We talked about relationships. How a woman never seems to feel good enough if she’s not dating someone, if a man does not find her so beautiful and good that he is content to be with just her indefinitely. She talked about her days since she’s been alone, how they haven’t been lonely, and I wonder if I should miss the days when I was dizzy with meeting new people and making people laugh with very polished, seemingly spontaneous jokes. I don’t miss them, but I can admit they were sometimes easier than being in this state, sucking on this sticky toffee of “us,” trying to be happy and make happy.
I got to see what a studio on the Lower East Side looks like. Renee’s is more expensive than mine with less space, everything I expected with an unnecessary full kitchen and modern bath. The latter of my abode blocks and blocks above hers may have once been a small walk-in closet. Renee is afraid her apartment looks like a college dorm, as most of her furniture is that cheeky plastic purveyed at Urban Outfitters and Ikea. Not to mention that she lives in a box. Her posters are stuck to the wall without frames, her kitchen cabinets stuffed with books and handbags. My apartment actually looks a bit more grown up, decor wise, though the post-it strata of the desk and the random parked shoes and periodicals reveal a scatterbrained packrat. I said it looked like the apartment of someone out of graduate school, which she is. She relaxed but said she wants to work on it, though she’ll only be there eight more months before she can’t afford it anymore.
We walked for blocks, stopping at a fish market, a playground, a pet store full of fish and bubbles. I laughed as she recounted a painful story of bikini waxing, and I asked if she would ever want to be young again. She said no. (Readers over 25, proceed to roll your eyes. I know I’m still young, but not what I consider shiny, expansive world young).
I wouldn’t, either. Not now, not Friday. I felt content being 23 and knowing my way around enough to see this city, to take pictures, to talk about what else might happen later.
1. This emailed anecdotal from a co-worker:
Both of these students were completely off task during French. I sat at their table and graded papers. The entire class, they talked to each other, complained loudly how wack the school was, griped at each other, did not follow along with the lesson, and tapped their pens. When the rest of their table was doing a good job and not feeding into them, they began talking to themselves. Not to each other, but literally talking to themselves. At one point I even asked Bernice who she was talking to. She just hissed and rolled her eyes. While Kenyon was reading they both talked over him. DaShawn at one point was removed, but came back worse. DaShawn banged on the table, kicked the table, and complained about everything very loudly. They were in their own world and did not follow anyone’s directions. Bernice will serve a removal for Monday in addition to tomorrow and DaShawn will serve a removal for tomorrow.
When Cade got back from Philadelphia yesterday afternoon, he’d already promised to do whatever I wanted to do. The original plan was to schlep around the Lower East Side and eventually make it to Washington Square Park, where I’d rollerskate on the flattest concrete surfaces I could find.
Over the summer, I was reading a newspaper at a subway station near my apartment when my blood ran cold. I felt creeped out when I read that hours before, in the very station where I was waiting, a few feet from where I sat, a man injured an MTA employee and a random commuter with a chainsaw. It was an attempted New York Chainsaw Massacre.
I’d been waiting for this day since I was a buck-toothed, freckle-faced twelve-year-old. My first New Year’s Eve in New York City! There I was, crouched on the ground, everything I’d eaten that day being vomited, confetti-like, outside my gate at LaGuardia Airport.
I stepped out of the school today during my prep period in order to get something to eat. As I rounded the corner, I noticed the crowd of people blocking the sidewalk. Across the street, another crowd stood parallel to them. Old women in lawnchairs, people with cameras, moms with small children.
