And Another Thing....

A Spoonful of Sugar

I'm pretty sure I just saw Mary Poppins on the train. The real Mary Poppins, not Julie Andrews.

She wore a neat brown coat and neat olive rubbers. A neat olive attache was slung over one shoulder. A pink winter scarf brought out the same pink in her cheeks, made her blue eyes and curled golden hair look almost childlike. And then there was the hat. A broad-brimmed black boater with a startle of flowers.

She was whimsical. Not just the hat, but the way she was looking around the subway car, as if any moment she might either break into song or take someone to gentle task for having their feet up on the seats.

Ugin?

Where are you?

You haven't been around in a while, and in your last email to me, it seemed like you were going through a hard time.

Worried.

Please write and tell me you're OK.

This week's column

I know, I never post them in their entirety when I post them. But this one seemed like a particularly good idea. Moslty because the girl I talked about here promised me---promised me!--that she would stop the public courting of the other girl for a while, just until I was emotionally safe. I asked for a month. I would have taken a week. Instead, she lasted barely a weekend.

"Dodging a bullet" doesn't quite describe how very, very lucky I am to have gotten out this early.

Dodging a bullet

            Anger fuels me just as hard as love. Or nascent love. That's what I learned today.

            Yesterday, my feet were so light that I was Eliza Doolittle, flying down the street, literally feeling like I could fly, I mean, with my heart a helium balloon in my chest lifting me up, up.

            I spent all of yesterday in that haze of lightness and sunshine, that miasma where everything and everyone seems golden and precious, even the guy on the subway who squeezed into a non-existent seat beside me, and so squashed my space to something smaller than a rat cage.

            I wasn't in love, but I was on the verge of it. I could feel it opening carefully inside me like an origami box, fold upon intricate fold creasing open, straightening to attention.

            I sped through that workday as if I were seeing her afterwards, even though I wasn't, because I had come from her warm bed that morning. But I wanted to be home to think about her, to imagine, to dream, to remember. I like her so much, that's what I told my friends yesterday. She seems like a caretaker. We have a good time together. I really like her.

            Then last night, I was tooling around on the Internet. I read her blog, as I always do. And something about one of her posts, some vagueness, some insinuation, made me stop. I looked at the comments, written by one particular poster. I jumped to the commenter's blog.

            And then I started shaking. Because it was very, very clear that the girl I was dating and the commenter were having an intense emotional (at least) romantic relationship.

            I read the posts and comments to a friend over the phone. "Am I being paranoid?" I asked.

            "Uh, no," she said. "It sounds like the cop all over again."

            Her comment slapped me. Not in a bad way. In a "Wake up, Girlfriend!" kind of way.

            Yes. She was a lot like the cop that I had dated, my one really disastrous relationship that had no sense, no reason, and no security from beginning to end. That girl—like this one, perhaps, though I don't really know her well enough to be sure—was a girl without boundaries, who bled into one relationship after another, not finding what she was seeking because she was so lost.

Indeed, when yesterday I confronted this girl I had been dating about the romantic, commitment-oriented words on her website, and the commenter's website, she seemed exactly like the cop---not sorry that she had been conducting this public courting, but only apologizing that she had not been brave enough to tell me about it when I had stayed over the night before. And not really ending things, exactly. And insisting that she and I have something special, even so.

            "We're done," I said.

            This morning, I felt great. Fierce. Sympathy and worry was rolling in from my friends, but I strode down the street like a warrior. I realized, as I headed toward work, that I had just relived three bad years of my life in 24 hours. Except this time I did the right thing. I walked away. Quickly.

I dodged a bullet, as my friend Mary would say. I used to let bullets hit me. I would stand there and take them, and then cry in astonishment when I slumped to the ground, bleeding.

            But there is no wound here. I am as whole as I ever was. This time, I ducked.

            I smiled to myself and made an imaginary line on an imaginary wall, charting my emotional growth the way my grandmother used to mark my height. It is times like this when we can see the ways we've changed for the better. "I have grown this much," we say to ourselves. We were small before, but now we are taller, healthier. Older and wiser is a cliché, but it is still true.

            I am angry today, and that makes me feel strong. And hopeful. And happy. The world is still precious. The light is sharper, laser-like, but still golden, and still light. My feet are heavier, but they are still my feet, and they are still solid under me, and they still carry me forward toward where I need to go.

Jennifer Vanasco is an award-winning, syndicated columnist based in New York. Email her at Jennifer.vanasco@gmail.com or read her occasional blog at jennifervanasco.com.

Death as Fantasy

So, I just caught up on the last three episodes of Grey's Anatomy via iTunes. For weeks, I've had to practically cover my ears as friends around me sniffled and said things like, "Oh, it's so sad!"

And those episodes WERE sad---until the last 10 minutes or so of the third, when things resolved happily. What's interesting to me, though, is how during the sad parts they recreated what I think is a compelling fantasy for teenagers---let's call it Death Porn.

You know the scenario. You might have even imagined it  yourself. You're extraordinary, but no one around you seems to see it. You shine, you shine---but the people around you only express contempt or dismissal or, worse, ignore you completely.

So then you die. Maybe you commit suicide, like Meredity Grey kinda-sorta tries to do here. And then, oh, everyone is sorry. They weep around your bedside. They try to do everything they can to save you. They stare at your pale blue, beautiful face and think how sorry they were that they ever thought you were anything less than amazing. They gnash their teeth. They rip their garments.

Yep. Death Porn.

But what redeemed it was the other part. The part where Meredith is in heaven, or in her oxygen deprived brain, or whatever, and realizes that she won't be able to see all of this love and tragedy. Once in a while she'll be able to feel it as the people she loves pass near her. But she'll never really be able to hold on to it herself.

This is why we live, the episode says. To hold on to those we love as long as we can.

Brains

We learn so much, every day. People, I mean. And yet I can't help wondering how much we also lose.

I was at the American Museum of Natural History today, and a film in the evolving humans exhibit talked about a new switch that's been discovered in our brains. It's the switch that controls which language we speak if we're bilinual, channeling us from one language to another.

This is amazing, and makes me want to really learn French, or take up Spanish. I'm all about strengthening new brain pathways, and this seems like a great way to do it. (Plus communicating in my neighborhood would be an great side benefit).

But as I wandered through the museum, I also thought about how much knowledge we lose. How many languages disappear, how much natural medicine, how many vanished songs. Once, women my age in New York would of course know how to make candles, and watch the sheep, and spin. Every year, we learn things and we lose things.

Our brains--even our collective brain--is only so big, no matter how much technology we have.

And the Dish ran away

Last night, I saw the final performance of A Little Dog Laughed, a Broadway play about a male movie star who is considering coming out of the closet---until he's pushed back in by his lesbian agent.

Mostly it was funny. It was very, very funny, and a scathing indictment of both Hollywood and the ways we participate in our own covering.

We do this to ourselves, the play says. We do this to ourselves because it's easier to go along with the system and get what the system values than it is to fight for our own selves and our own happiness. The perceived happiness of the multitudes is so much more powerful---who are we to say that honesty makes us happy, when all around us, heads are turned by misdirection and fame?

The Village

The last time I lived in New York, I was in high school. The streets were dirty then, and there were always cars honking. I would commute into the city on the train, and then wander around the Village, listening to Lou Reed and Simon & Garfunkel on my Walkman, watching intense games of basketball in the cage on W. 3rd, strolling into headshops and militant bookstores as if the wares they sold didn't scare me, as if they didn't belong to some world other than the tiny suburban one I lived in.

The Village is so chic now. I was there this afternoon with Naomi to see the new Nader documentary at the IFC. There are jazz clubs with bouncers and pricey Italian places, and boutiques selling only shoes. We asked for directions to Broadway, but everyone on the corner was a tourist, and no one knew whether it was east or west.

But then we had dinner at a noodle place near NYU, Dojo, and in the bathroom was graffiti I could have written once: "When will I stop being lonely?" and graffiti I would have wished I had been brave enough to write: "Bomb the patriarchy!"

OK, I thought. New York is still here. It's still here, under the gloss of the streets.

Valentine

Good morning, man in a North Fork Bank cap, your hands

folded around your ipod like a prayer;

Good morning, woman with fresh coffee, and girl

in blue fatigue pants and duck boots.

Good morning, elegance in leather, sleepy grandpa, shorty in red glasses

with cuffs creased.

Good morning, woman in all black with orange gloves.

Good morning.

Happy

Valentine's Day.

The train

As i was getting off the train tonight, I noticed a series of small stickers on the floor, like file folder labels. someone had written on them in a scrawl of black ink: "Herpes," one said. And "suck me."

And "I am so gay."

Why did this seem like a good idea, or important, or exciting, or right?

New York confuses me. So open. So closed. The city is full of unexpected slaps.

When I reached the sidewalk, the sky was throwing icy needles at my eyes, my cheeks. It almost felt good, because it almost felt better.

Social Intelligence

I'm finishing up Social Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman, and it has rearranged how I look at my life--or at least, how I look at relationships.

Goleman's idea is that our relationships actually have a physical impact on us---on the patterns of our brainwaves, the structure of our brains, the ebb and flow of hormones and proteins, the health and frailty of the ecosystem that is our own body. He says that genes matter, but our relationships are a big factor in explaining what, exactly, our genes express. Most hopefully: he says that you really can re-learn, you really can change your bad patterns to new ones, often with the help of good relationship choices.

There's enough here that I'll probably do a column on it this week, but I wanted to pull something out quick. In one chapter, he divides people into three groups when it comes to intimate relationships: those who are secure (about 55 percent); those with anxiety (20 percent) and those who are avoidant (25 percent).

This is interesting.

The secure are those who are comfortable with emotions but not preoccupied by them.

The anxious are impulsive types who are obsessed by their own feelings, "prone to fret that their partner does not really love them or will not stay with them. . . . Once they form a relationship, anxious types can readily be beset by fears that they will be left or found wanting in some way."

And avoiders are "uncomfortable being emotionally close, finding it hard to trust a partner or share feelings. They tend to supress their own emotions and especially to stifly distressing feelings. They expect a partner to be emotionally untrustworthy."

Me, I think I've mostly been attracted to the anxious and the avoidant. Izzy was probably the only girl I ever dated who was secure, and she was a revelation. The entire time we were together, I kept thinking, OH! Oh, so this is what it's like to be with someone who's not jealous or insecure. Oh, this is what it's like when someone is neither clingy nor distant, but somewhere in between. Izzy (that's what I've called her in my column) was good for me.

I'm avoidant. Or was avoidant. I don't think I am anymore. I used to walk out when I couldn't articulate my feelings, because I didn't know what they were, really, I just knew that they were bad. I used to get stony in the face of emotional distress. I used to say in bewilderment that I never got angry, that I didn't know what angry was, that nothing shook me hard enough to make me angry.

But I'm no longer avoidant. In fact, I think I'm pretty damn close to secure myself, thanks to an excellent therapist who taught me how to actually feel my feelings, who exposed the deep, secret feelings of shame for things I wasn't even responsible for, who showed me that the thing I was most scared of was myself, and that I didn't have to be afraid anymore.

I'm thinking about this today because I had dinner with Jane last night. It was wonderful and hard. And today, when I was dealing with the emotional fallout, I suddenly understood how resillient I had become---because I was sad, deeply sad, crying-in-the-ladies-room-sad this morning. I let myself be sad. I let myself cry. I let others--including Jane--comfort me and reassure me that I was OK, that it was OK, that the ground is still steady and my heart is still intact. I went to lunch with my sister-in-law and her sister. I ate dumplings. I made them laugh.

And here I am at the end of the day, and I'm all good. Two years ago--five years ago--ten years ago--this would have tumbled me into darkness. But I am all light again, and looking forward to Valentine's Day with the new girl, and knowing, really, for the first time, that even if things don't work out with the new girl, I will really be OK.