i can no other answer make but thanks. and thanks.

so it's thanksgiving morning. i'm holed up on the couch in a t-shirt i haven't rocked since the age of 15, probably, drinking coffee and watching buzz lightyear and snoopy float by serenely back in the city i narrowly escaped from yesterday.

it's thanksgiving!

and as such, i suppose i should discuss what it is that i'm thankful for.

after i listen to cheyanne jackson sing.

i am thankful for..

- my family. obviously. but as a get older, i realize how incredibly fortunate i am to have grown up smothered with love by both sides of my big, loud, family. the big thanksgivings of my childhood are a distant memory now, preserved only in grainy early-90's home movies, with my grandma's face too close to the camera yelling something about more turkey and my uncle steve flipping off my dad behind the camera. the big christmases when i got to hand out presents and gorge myself on my nana's special manicotti, are so far from me. but i will never forget them. they've made me who i am, giving me an appreciation for family, and the security of such a giant network of people behind me always. and emily, of course. my little emily. she has taught me more than anyone about love, patience, and unrelenting compassion.

- my childhood friends. my new friends. my second family. the people i meet and interact with every day, be they great or small presences in my life. they change me, they affect me, they make me who i am. so thank you. to 6B, to pipeline, from california to saratoga, boston to brooklyn. i love you.

- seth. my seth. the hilarious, kind, giving, loving person i've saddled myself with for a solid year and a half. he has made me whole, and constantly supported and encouraged me. i could not have survived this year without him, and my fears for the future are quelled knowing that i will be facing it alongside him. so thanks, seth. for making me dinner, learning about our forefathers, coaching me, taking stupid pictures with me, drinking with me, and sometimes pushing me a little beyond my comfort zone. 

- theatre. of course. who i would i be without it? what would i talk about, think about, write about? what would i have had to hold on to as a child with big teeth and a box full of dress-up clothes? what would my college career have been without the study of it? so i am thankful for my home away from home, be it in the form of a playscript, cramped studio, or a wide open stage.

- sweet things. cupcakes, ice cream, brownies, cookies. i could list forever the confections that i have been a faithful follower of since infancy, but everybody knows i'm a die-hard desserter.

- home. peterborough. new york city. the notion that i always have a home to go back to, surrounded by people i love. be it my cozy little peach-colored bedroom with a window overlooking the driveway covered in leaves and the basketball hoop not used since 5th grade.. or my little nook, plastered in pictures, with a fire escape and a window that looks out over 19th street, the bit of the skyline i'm privvy to, and the nasty pig mens' boutique.

- dlisted, facebook, the new york times, apple trailers, time out new york, new york magazine, and my blog. for keeping me up-to-date, informed, and hip to what's going on around me. i'm not afraid of getting lost.

- words words words. i am thankful for all the books i have had the pleasure of reading, and those i have yet to read. i am thankful for all of the beautiful lyrics that people like joni mitchell, regina spektor, bob dylan, and stephen sondheim have penned for my little brain to mull over and fall in love with. i am thankful for all of the poets, all of the writers, all of the speakers, and all of the singers that keep me floating and aware of the fact that i'm not alone in all of this.

that's it. i am thankful for so many other things. those moments in which i feel like a kid again. new york city. higher education. musicals. my record player. 'the office.' the fact that you can get anything delivered at any time of day. mass transit. my jobs. skirball. mojitos. coffee. bacon & eggs. dark chocolate. my closet. the fact that i had beaumont for 10 long years. nature. 

i could go on forever. suffice it to say i am thankful for my LIFE. and that is what today is all about.

we can only said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. - thornton wilder

playing games with the faces.

okay so when i said i wanted to travel, i don't know if today is quite what i had in mind.

ten hours. it took me ten hours to get from 19th street and eighth avenue to arundel road.

i left the apartment at noon hoping to beat the mad rush at port authority and have time to grab a sandwich before my 1:30 bus. a bus.. why did i ever think that would be an okay idea for today? whatever. i was on the bus bound for new england from 2 pm - 9:10 pm. then an hour back home. never doing that again.

i could have flown to europe with time on either end.

but i did make a lot of new friends today. it's funny; bus travel brings people together like no other means of transport. there's this camaraderie formed in the waiting and commiserating. there's a noticeable absence of any feelings of entitlement or preferential treatment. this is, in a sense, the basest form of mass transit. it doesn't have the luxury of a train, the expense of a plane, or the novelty of a boat. traveling by bus is synonymous with discomfort, frustration, and the overwhelming urge to reach one's destination while not enjoying the ride. there is, however,  something kind of romantic about it, in a very 1950's "walk off to look for america" type of way. that sense is best gleaned from a peaceful, traffic-free ride during daylight. not in the pitch-black rain of northern new england.

regardless, here were the new friends i made: 

-john & devie, an older couple who have homes in brattelboro and manhattan. they talked a lot about their granddaughter and were very interested in my future as well. john was happy to have a young set of eyes and ears alongside him in line at port authority. we met in line at 12:30 and all disembarked in vermont at 9:10. john came and found me on the bus just to make sure he wished me a happy thanksgiving and good luck with my future.

-the sassy, attractive black power-lesbian in line behind john, devie, and myself. we talked a lot about the economy and lady gaga.

-liesel, lee, and damion. we were the four 20-somethings in the back of the bus heading north. all students, all from new york, all desperately trying to get home. liesel is a sweet-faced girl getting her masters in early-childhood education. lee is a hipster with a beard from brooklyn who works for a non-profit company. damion goes to columbia, drinks pelligrino, and friended me on facebook via his iphone. we all talked about school, about the horrors of bus travel and various journalistic publications in new york city.

-the pakistani kid who sat next to me for most of massachusetts. he didn't understand the concept of thanksgiving but was going to visit his sister for the weekend. "so you just eat?" he said, "then what?" i colored my explanation with talks of football, the parade, and descriptions of what it is one actually consumes. he didn't really get it. but he did ask me to have coffee with him when we got to northampton, where he disembarked. when i informed him i was, unfortunately, going to new hampshire, he looked puzzled and i had to explain my state's relationship to maine using my hands and ipod. i hope he has a nice non-holiday weekend.

so that was my day. full of colorful people with colorful stories. it was surely less boring than many other sojourns i've taken with greyhound. it just took 10 hours. unnecessary. but i returned home with brian, kathy & emily and was soon joined by friends, warmed up with tea and energized with a clementine. all is right with the world. 

i can't wait for tomorrow. i've already requested at least one board game and one home movie. and that we dress for dinner. and ample time in front of the tv watching the PARADEEE. get excited.

HAPPY HAPPY THANKSGIVING.

[omg turkey, 2007]

forever on thanksgiving day, the heart will find the pathway home.  

-wilbur d. nesbit

1967.

I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.

Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street.

It would be a long while because, quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.

Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about. I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of them would count.

 I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing.

- joan didion, pieces of "goodbye to all that"

it is a great art to saunter

i don't know what i should write.

unlike the last time, there's nothing coursing through my brain at the moment. my proverbial soapbox is collecting dust in the corner. as is my literal squirrel tail.

thanksgiving looms. the thought of kathy manfre's mashed potatoes & apple pie are making me long for wednesday so hard. 1:30 pm, i will be on a bus bound for grovers corners. all i want is acqua bistro, the toadstool, and the smoky smell of my fireplace. i love my home, and i am so thankful to have it to go home to. new york and peterborough are such wonderful compliments to each other. 

there's so much i want to do in the coming weeks. i hope that, for the first time in the history of my collegiate career, my academics (ew) don't stand in my way. is it really necessary to have a final AND a final paper due just days from each other? no, art history department. it's not. but then again, neither is this class. god i'm so lazy. the department of journalism, in a strict partnership with the tisch school of the arts, have rendered me entirely unable and unwilling to do any semblance of schoolwork.

speaking of. i am officially 179 days away from being an alumnus of nyu. terrifying.

all i want to do is travel. that is what london gave me as a going-away present. a nice taste of cabin fever. all i want to do is hop a train/plane/side-car to go somewhere beautiful and exotic and different. it's so funny to think that where i live, my "hometown" (if you will) is the travel destination of millions of people. people save for years to spend 5 days in my neighborhood. what i consider to be the worst possible place in manhattan to spend even 10 minutes, is where tens of thousands of people spend whole afternoons staring at really vibrant advertisements. i guess it's the same everywhere - there will always be clueless tourists and their overrated destinations - though i feel like once you've gotten a grasp on the metropolitan mind-set, you can survive cooly wherever you go. 

i miss europe. i miss legoplanes and exotic cuisine and drinking because it's cheap and going on guided tours of everything and buying postcards and tesco and pub food.

but new york will be forever irreplaceable to me. all i did in london was compare it to new york. all i did was huff around at not being able to get a sandwich at 2 am. and that i had to pull out my fucking oyster card every 12 seconds. and that i never quite knew exactly where i was going. and that every time i used my debit card, my soul died a little bit. new york is my home. well, it is my current home. my home base at the moment. it is where i have made my own little corner of the world. it's where i sit and type from at this very moment. it's never truly dark. it's never truly quiet. and i like that. i'm not quite sure why.

but i sometimes nab a copy of time out: london at my internship. just to keep up, you know. just in case.

there is magic in that little word, home; it is a mystic circle that surrounds comforts and virtues never known beyond its hallowed limits. - robert southey

i believed in folk lore and made wages for peanut butter sandwiches.

i'm sitting here in my art history lecture wishing with all i have that i could be back in bed.

my mind has been racing these past few days, with a combination of schoolwork, pre-holiday excitement, a sudden envy of young hollywood, and general confusion at the weather, due dates of my assignments, art history, etc.

it all started last week when something big happened. something major. something i swore would never happen. late last wednesday night, after "studying" for my "quiz" in my art history recitation, i did it. i watched 'twilight.' i was suddenly overcome with a cavalcade of emotions. it was sexy. it was horrible. it was brilliant. it was bizarre. but whatever it was, people are all over it.

all of a sudden, after living 21 years in a relatively un-obsessive bubble, i am now very intrigued by the notion of fangirldom. this 'twilight' thing is unparalleled in my recent memory. i know boy bands were big when i was small, but that level of fanaticism wasn't as prevalent in quiet little peterborough. we'd just sit around spinning "black and blue" and occasionally watch an episode of "making the video." but now, in this big, gaping city with its millions of residents and very accessible suburbs, i am in the hotbed of marketing and fandom aimed directly at the 15 year-old that dwells somewhere in my gut. and she's there. the katelyn that wishes slightly that she cared about anything as much as some of these girls care about 'twilight.' the katelyn that wishes that it wasn't shameful to be slightly intrigued by this shitty vampire romance novel, or to have a secret love for the squeaky cleanliness of taylor swift's infectious lyrics, or to be entertained by the bright, sparkly colors, and comical chipmunk cheeks starring in 'hannah montana.'

i'm pretty sure the word "tween" wasn't invented until after i was one, but that culture has always fascinated me. perhaps it's because i was sent careening into my adolescence with very little grasp of who i was or what i liked, armed with nothing but a striped gap t-shirt and a set of braces that could take down an empire. it was a time of so much embarrassment, of so much ridiculousness, so many tears. but now, there's facebook (myspace is so 2006), and twitter, and hair straighteners, and the jonas brothers and a whole culture, a whole marketing system dedicated to that age group the way it wasn't dedicated to mine. maybe i'm bitter. maybe i'm wishing that i could wash away all those years of unpleasantness. but whatever the reason, i am both fascinated and fearful of fangirls. plain and simple.

for the past week, skirball has been playing host to the japanese-american musical "talk like singing." it is, i assure you, a horrible, but brilliant butchery of the notion of american musical theatre. not the point. the point is, it stars the japanese equivalent of justin timberlake, shingo katuri. shingo is the front-man for the intensely popular boy band, SMAP (stands for: sports music assemble people or.. super modern artistic performance; i've heard both). it just keeps getting better, right? anyway, SMAP has been around since 1991 and their popularity in japan rivals that of the beatles at their peak. there have been masses of fangirls awaiting shingo's arrival and exit every night at the stage door, with their cameras, cell phones that miraculously call japan at all hours, signs, flowers, gift baskets, etc. but last night was extra-special. three other members of SMAP came to see the show. after sneaking them in when the lights went down, they made their presence quite known at the end, waving and cheering before making a quick exit.

the rest of the house cleared, most wanting to wait for shingo at the others at the stage door, booking it there to get as close as possible, but one girl remained seated in the house. as i approached her, i realized she'd been sitting, unmoving for a solid 5 minutes with a handkerchief over her nose. was she bleeding? was she sick? i quietly asked if she needed help. no answer. just a shaking hand slowly placing the handkerchief back in her bag. finally, after staring at her for half a minute, one of the japanese tech guys came over and asked her if she was alright. she nodded and slowly stood up and left the theatre. he said she wasn't sick. just.. overwhelmed by the whole experience.

it was beatlemania again. but i had never been privvy to beatlemania. before the show i'd walked by shingo backstage. we made eye conatact and smiled weakly at each other. how many millions of people would have killed to be me?

after the show, ian had those of us left over go upstairs and be crowd control at the stage door. due to the presence of the other SMAP members, NYU security needed backup. so we went and stood in front of the adoring fans who had crowded the sidewalk and were well into laguardia place. after nearly an hour, shingo and another member left. some assistant had hailed a cab and brought him up right next to the crowd. the look on this cab driver's face when he saw the throngs of screaming girls and how they beaned luke on the head, smacked us around with their signs, and flashed our faces with their camera bulbs. shingo didn't look around him, he just booked it to the car. the girls converged. they started again with the flashing, the sign waving, the screaming. all the while this poor cabbie had no idea what the fuck was going on or who the fuck was in his backseat.

it was mania.

the point is, i have been trying to dissect this notion of american fangirldom (japanese is a whole other animal) and i have realized the following: at the age when one is considered a "tween," you don't have much. your computer, your scheduled social time, and school are all you have as links to the outside world. this is a time, mind you, when most teenage girls are pissed at their parents, want more than anything to go out and do their own thing, but have no actual means of doing so. you're too old for the lame, childish stuff, but you're too young for the cool, badass, older stuff. by the age of 16, you can drive. by 18 you've found some way to procure some alcohol, you're into parties and "relationships" and the rest. but at those ages down low on the teenager totem pole, you take what you are handed. when i was that age, we were given britney and christina and jessica and n*sync and bsb and a whole bunch of shitty movies. no wonder we've bred a generation of sluts and heartbreakers. that was a time before anyone felt ironic about the neuvo-youth of the 21st century. it was before tina fey busted the mean girls. it was before the entertainment industry realized that there was, in these lost children, and un-tapped marketing source and if they could just gear some of this shit at them, they'd make millions. and it worked. this is a time when individuality isn't viewed as cool. the pack mentality is so much stronger here than in high school, where everyone tries to figure their shit out and plan for a future with like-minded individuals. when you have discovered very little about the world, you take what you are given and absorb it for what it is. it's a good thing. not a bad thing. i think it's keeping kids from growing up too fast. they can be in love with the hottie vampire. they can party in the usa. they're not getting drrty or becoming a slave 4 anyone. that's what's important.

that was so much longer than i expected it to be.
dude. this blog thing works.


you don't have to suffer to be a poet. adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. - john ciardi

back to then.

i'm back. 

it's weird. i guess i thought the blog thing died out with my adolescence and my livejournal. apparently not. apparently it's cool to have a blog again. i guess if i'm not using excessive emoticons or abbrevs. i should be okay.

so hello again.

after this first, rather disappointing fall semester of my senior year of college i have decided to begin anew. i'm getting tech-savvy, i'm registering for part-time student hood right.. now. and i'm part excited, part terrified to embark on this new chapter of my life. but it's here, i'm ready. and this blog will chronicle my thoughts, feelings, insights, ideas, and whatever i else i feel like marking down on virtual paper for all to read. 

i don't use capitol letters unless it's absolutely necessary. deal with it.

there is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start. -baudelaire