Spoons and Knives

What I really want….

To be a cookbook editor

To wander around Florence for the day a month

To wake up as the little spoon with a not-too-bad-looking big spoon

To walk hand-in-hand with someone and feel as giddy as I did when I was fourteen

To have money saved up for a rainy day

To never have to discuss office politics again

What I really need…

To walk hand-in-hand with someone and feel as giddy as I did when I was fourteen

To have money saved up for a rainy day

Want and need. We want the world, we’ll settle for a third floor walk-up in the bad part of town.

For a lady in her mid-twenties, I’m shockingly aware of what I would love my life to be and what will most likely happen. As I look at it, at this point in time, my life can go two ways:

A) I get myself out there and try to find someone who wants the same things I do, and have a good time together for however it lasts.

B) I continue to shoot for the impossible man and end up a very happy older lady with a wonderful career, a nice vacation home and time to do whatever I want.

The first road is undoubtedly harder, dealing with someone else’s craziness, someone else’s neuroses and etc. But as a single lady, there is nothing quite as taxing as being alone. It’s freeing, for sure, but you spend your days consumed with wondering and waiting. Thinking ‘is there something wrong with you?’ Experimenting with new clothes, new hairstyles, and new makeup. Trying to go to clubs you hate. Dragging yourself out to drinks when it has been three days since you’ve gone to bed at a normal hour. Just going to a movie and dinner on a Saturday night.  It is difficult, annoying and you just want to get to the end of the story already (!) but, what fun is there in that? 

This new-found writing experiment has spawned a new-found love experiment as well. I live in New York City. There are beautiful women walking around by the dozen but I’m no country bumpkin and there’s no reason a nice girl can’t find a nice man to be the big spoon and to hold hands with. Looking for love isn’t necessarily fun but one’s got to look at that list of needs and wants and realize there’s more to life than the job and the vacation. One's got to decide if they'd rather be a knife alone or a little spoon together with a bigger spoon--or the bigger spoon together with a smaller spoon, if that's said spoons preference. Ok. Sappiness, check.  Single Female Rant, check. Romantic Comedy Quality, check. 

This is probably one of those ‘early-blog-posts-I’ll-later-come-to-regret’ things but, at least it's something....damn you, Mr. Bradbury.

Take Me Home, Mr. Bradbury

        Mr. Ray Bradbury, the recently deceased wordsmith and science fiction heavyweight, believed in starting every day with writing. Whatever it was, story or thought, however it came out, junk or gold, he started his day with his pen to paper (or rather finger to key). While Mr. Bradbury undoubtedly influenced many of those in my generation and the one before mine, there is good reason to believe that those of us, who absorbed Ray’s words in our childhood years, do not heed his words as adults; myself among the best of them.

The week before his death, The New Yorker released their Science Fiction edition in which Bradbury had written a one page essay on his induction into the world of the fantastic and mysterious. The article, somewhat sadly (and ironically), titled “Take Me Home”, is about Mr. Bradbury’s entry into the science fiction business and the belief in other worlds, particularly his young self’s most painful desire for them to “take [him] home.” The way young Bradbury coped with his earthbound prison was to write; to write every day. Being a (self-described) writer, the article hit me hard. I do not write often enough and when I do, it is no more than streams-of-consciousness or half-baked short stories. With the corporate life I lead and the eight hours I am stuck in a grey cubicle, I simply cannot summon the will to go to that pen and paper (or finger to key).


With my self-pity in one hand and the need to further torment myself; I started reading about my new-found teacher. After years of reading his fiction, I found out a lot about his reality, and his convictions and his influences but most importantly that he never attended college. Instead Mr. Bradbury liked to say that he attended libraries, which he viewed as his own version of college. He read and devoured the sections (quite like Rohl Dahl’s little literati Matilda) in the libraries and denounced formal education.

While I did attend college, I understand Mr. Bradbury’s sentiment about formal education. I learned a great deal about the worlds of socializing and networking over my four years in University. However, in payment I had the literary stuffing beaten out of me. Every conviction and every notion I came up with from the books I read to the great thinkers I listened to, was lost in the vain hope for higher grades and recommendations from professors, who valued my ‘comments’ in class but ridiculed said comments with poor grades discreetly on my papers. I seethed through my first semester and quickly learnt the game there was to play, and thus graduated Magna Cum Laude. From there I spent a summer trying my hand at my other passion, pastry, in a New York restaurant but gave it up to go back to my true love, literature. I thought that I hit the jackpot when I landed a job in the publishing sector. It has been there that I have furthered to shred at my convictions and my passion for the preservation of literature, in a world of blogs and talking heads.

            It has been a long two years of self-discovery, self-pity and second guessing. Through trial and error I have chipped away at the core of who I am, at the literary mind I always knew was beneath the veil of uncertainty and at the heart full of conviction I never would have thought could stop beating in my chest.  You can see it my face, in the tired circles beneath my dull eyes and in the sudden slump of my shoulders, heavy from carrying the burden of my failed efforts and the bounty of my regrets.  Which is why from today on I am going to heed Mr. Bradbury’s advice and I am going to write every single day. No matter what it is, no matter how it sounds, I will write it and I will print it (and hope that nobody finds it or, god forbid, knows who I am). It may not always be long and it may not always be of literary value but, at least it will get me going and hopefully, revive my poor passion-deprived heart and mind.

Day One.