History's least-dramatic 'Why I'm Leaving New York' announcement

Hello, blog-readership. The rumo(u)rs are true: I'm returning to Toronto. And pleased, very pleased, to be doing so.

I had expected to arrive back in my hometown and never, ever want to leave. That didn't happen, for reasons I could pretend have to do with the new New York, with its craptastic subways and its current state of beyond-gentrification, but that only partly relate to anything that general or objective. Yes, the city's unaffordable, but when was it ever otherwise? More so these days, sure, but the principle's the same. (That said: the school fundraisers where you have to pay $35, $55, $700 to sample tiny portions of food from local restaurants, and, upon realizing this, shuffle quietly away from what you'd thought was just a street fair? Those are, for the record, Why I'm Leaving New York.)

It's also not because of the current sorry state of my nation's politics, but in some sense not not for that reason. I'm moving to Toronto for the usual work-personal reasons, and not - as is often assumed - Because Of Trump. I will say, however, that I was on the cusp of purchasing a couch - from a thrift store but still - the evening of the election, but woke up and, yeah, decided against. I never really got comfortable again here, literally. 

Mostly I'm just relieved: The bureaucratic complications of living kind of in Canada, kind of the US, are... far too boring to get into, but at any rate wound up sort of eating up much of the year. ("Bureaucratic" implies a lot of paperwork; this went beyond that.) While there are professional reasons for me to consider the time back in New York a success - I published a book! I got to work for a great publication! - it occurred to me, not infrequently, how much of this could have happened from Toronto.

But it's also that the New York I was picturing was some mix of one that no longer exists and one that never did. It was, in my mind, some mix of the best parts of late high school and the post-college years, crossed with the sheer exhilaration I felt, living in New Jersey, when I'd leave Penn Station and be in the city. In my mind, every friend I'd ever had in New York, every café I'd ever frequented, everything from categories Stuff and Experience alike, all was just there, preserved, unchanged, and awaiting my return. Clearly that did not wind up being the case, but I think there's more to it: A sense that I was probably-but-you-never-know going to leave in several months' time made me reluctant to really dive into life in New York. It made me wary of making choices that would make leaving too difficult.

Ultimately the city comparison question hardly enters into it. New York is bigger, but Toronto, not being my hometown, feels bigger. Toronto subways actually work; New York subways actually reach most of the city. Streetcars are lovely! So, too, traffic rules that don't encourage cars to park on the sidewalk. Both (now) have Uniqlo. Both are among the few places in North America that the likes of me - city-loving and driving-averse - is ever going to feel effortlessly at home. Both are great! I'm more than ready for Toronto.

Who is cool enough for Howard Street?

It's never a good sign when, upon entering a store, you hear two young French women discussing how a salesperson had told them (and for this one of them switched to English, presumably the language of the interaction) they didn't have whatever it was in big enough sizes. These women were, you know, slender. Were they talking about the store they were exiting, or another shopping experience? That I can't say.

What I can say is the store this was: Reformation, on Howard Street. This is significant because there's this stretch of southeast SoHo that has this aura of ultimate cool. While I'd like to think I've aged out of being too intimidated to enter certain stores, that part of the city sets off that old apprehensiveness. From Outdoor Voices (been inside) to Glossier (wouldn't dare), Opening Ceremony (dared, for fear-overcoming purposes, really), it's all just so cool. It gets a tiny bit less intimidating west of Broadway, for reasons I don't entirely understand. Agnes b. is expensive, yes, but is not, like, judging me. Oak and Fort might seem minimalist and daunting if I didn't know it from Toronto and, more specifically, from the mall in Toronto.

Anyway. This bit of the city is near the one store where I do actually shop - Uniqlo, still Uniqlo, plus Muji when that's open, plus Housing Works but not the Housing Works in that part of town for some reason - so I decided to take a look. I was feeling confident, for some professional reasons, but also because the trench coat I'd been considering had been on sale in my size and in the color I wanted. (I'd also had luck at a Cosabella sample sale, which makes me think of the lyric 54 seconds into this video.) Maybe these stores... had sale racks? Maybe I would see something gorgeous and splurge?

I started with Outdoor Voices and was reminded that it is - at least to my insufficiently honed tastes - meh, even if the space does look like one of my favorite Toronto coffee shops. (Specifically: Early Bird.) Glossier, sorry, way too intimidating, plus I've already spent too much on things I've heard about on Into The Gloss, so the danger was great that I'd wind up leaving with eyebrow mascara, which is not something I am in fact on the market for.

At this point I was thinking it was time to get food, but I was so close to Reformation and had this vague sense from online that it would be filled with clothes like that French Birkin-esque model-socialite wears/designs. (She'd done a collaboration with them. Why do I know this?)

I went in. And the stuff was gorgeous. On point is I think how I'd describe it if I were someone young and cool enough to shop there. And rich enough. The clothes are (unlike my $60 trench coat, if less than my similarly-priced Theory-via-Housing Works blazer) ethically produced, at least according to the website, which means I can't moan about the prices without either feeling guilty or launching into a rant about how ethical fashion as a concept seems (sometimes but not always) designed to make people who can afford to spend a lot on clothes feel good about themselves.

Who are the women who wear these dresses? This one, say? They're young (as in, I would feel, at 33, too old for that one specifically; this I think I'm just the right age for, but a foot too short), but they have $200 to spend on a dress they couldn't wear to work... or could they? What are their jobs, or are they just professionally fabulous? They're presumably not women who'd be too intimidated to go into the Glossier showroom/store/whatever it is, but I suspect they're so cool they're on the list to get sent the eyebrow mascara for free.

La femme tribecoise

There's a way I'd look if money (and time, and vanity-qualms) were no object. I suspect the same is true for most women, but what exactly the result would be varies by region, subculture, etc. But I'm thinking of things like cosmetic dermatology. Or corrective hair color that doesn't involve a Manic Panic box. Or working out properly not every few months (with bursts of being better about that) but several hours a day. Also a diet with more kale and fewer custard-filled donuts.

The no-stone-unturned version of my look (as I imagine it in my head) exists, and it's the Tribeca Woman. Throughout Tribeca, there are these women who, yes, look rich, but not Upper East Side rich, with obvious designer items and plastic surgery. Slim, but not UES-emaciated. Toned. It's this kind of understated everything's-expensive, where you just know the fact that the best-fitting pair of leggings cost $400 wouldn't have stopped a woman from purchasing and working out in those. They look modern, not preppy or fussy.

Every last one of these women has below-the-shoulder hair, thick and shiny, often tastefully highlighted. This is a zit-free land, wrinkle-free, cellulite-free, but also strangely no-nonsense. These are women who work, but who majored in something sensible in college, and are in dual-income households making I can't even imagine.

They are, in other words, in not just their looks, the result of making all the right life choices. But it all manifests itself in their looks, looks which suggest that despite the proximity of Shake Shack, they're not having a burger and fries for dinner. Choices, yes, and luck. For example: They're all six feet tall. I'm... not, and I'm thinking that's not because I failed to study economics.

Ah, but it feels like it's just about choices, somehow, when I see them in their leggings, hair shining in a way that suggests they've never had a chocolate bar for lunch. It feels, in the moment, like if I just got up at 6am to work out and added more leafy greens to my diet, that's what I'd look like in two week's time.

Returns

I'm writing this from a coffee shop near my high school, and not so far from the apartment my husband and I will most likely be moving into, in a building we'd also lived in once before. (No, not in Tribeca. The other direction.) Until "most likely" becomes definitely, I'm staying with my parents, and sorting out all the usual relocation checklist items before the catching up portion begins.

New York has been a bit of an emotional whirlwind, to put it mildly. Unlike Toronto, which is still a blank slate in that regard, here, every location reminds me of something. All of Carnegie Hill puts me back at 11 years old. Downtown is more complicated. Being near my high school doesn't much make me feel like I'm in high school, because I'd lived near it for part of grad school. But it does make me think the years between mid-late grad school and now somehow didn't happen. Which... they sure did, and a lot happened during them! But, like, this iced coffee from the place that was always nice to sit in but a bit more expensive than I'd brace myself for, while a tiny bit less expensive than I'd have guessed, tastes exactly as I remember it from 2010 or so. All time is one.

And then there's the obvious. The globally obvious. I have no political agenda on this, no National Convention speech to give, but was an 18-year-old kid about to leave the city to start college on 9/11, and being right there still unnerves me. Yes, despite living next to it for two years. I'd read about the Oculus, and was near it and figured I should enter. But the mere act of walking into a building marked "World Trade Center," in that location, pretty tremendously freaked me out. I normally find malls and mall-stores and such very calming environments. (Not actually shopping, just walking around in them.) This, though, not so much. I remembered being in the mall-type area beneath the towers a couple days before 9/11, in 2001, and didn't panic, exactly, but let's say didn't stay long enough to find out whether said mall did or did not contain a Sephora.

Mainly, though, I'm just struck by the fact that New York is a hometown. It isn't often discussed as one, but it is. This is the only place where I fit in culturally without trying. Where I can immediately tell who's part of which subculture. Where I effortlessly know the rules of stranger chitchat. (A group of women told me about a free pop-up manicure. A woman with a pink poodle told me Bisou would look good blue. One woman in the Uniqlo dressing room told me not to get that size jumpsuit; another asked me about the fit of a slipdress she was trying on. Note: I do not know any of these women personally.) I know how to cross the street here. I know where to get $5 lunch. All of this is even before getting into the people aspect of this. 

Ingrown branches

Every so often, I'll make some pronouncement about how, from that point on, I'll start only reading books that put me into different situations and different experiences. (As in, not that of Jewish women from New York who at least dipped a toe into humanities grad school.) Usually doing so is a way of guaranteeing that the used paperback I picked up on a whim for $2 somewhere, knowing little about it, will turn out to be the semi-autobiographical recollections of a woman with my exact life experience. There are, of course, demographic reasons for this (New York sells, or once did; graduates of literature programs are drawn to writing), but that's not the point of this post.

The point is that I've just now outdone myself in non-branched-out reading. And it was, in this case, kind of intentional. I'd heard interviews with Jessi Klein, whose excellent book of humor essays, You'll Grow Out Of It, was the culprit, and knew enough to realize that this was going to be one of those books that I could relate to a lot. See the last paragraph of this article I wrote, about straight female desire? Imagine a much-funnier (and less apologetically handwringing towards potentially offended populations) version of this, and that's the "tom man" concept. In this era where all female beautification is presented in 'I do it for me' terms, I knew there'd be something deeply relatable about a woman's experiences being attracted to men, but not being naturally drawn to certain aspects of conventional femininity, and thus adopting whichever primping rituals strategically (if subconsciously), to increase romantic prospects.

I knew she's a Jewish woman from New York. I knew that this was not going to be Knausgaard Volume Who Knows or Americanah. I knew what I was getting into.

What I hadn't realized was that Klein went to Stuyvesant. We went to the same high school.

A strong contender for most productive day ever:

-Did more grading than I would have thought possible when teaching one section of about 16 students, plus various other teaching duties where applicable. Anything's possible! After an iced cappuccino with two sugars.

-Booked a headshot appointment (finally).

-Set up a spreadsheet (as vs. a bare-bones Google Doc) for freelancing payments.

-Ordered the second Neapolitan novel. Ferrante... It took a while to get into Book 1, but then I couldn't put it down.

-Came up with a grand theory (actually, two) about why the neighborhood where Clinton did best is the good old Upper East Side. (If anyone should know...)

New York in almost-2016

-The biggest difference between New York and Toronto relates to ease or lack thereof of crossing the street. In Toronto, with the huge streets, the tram tracks, and the right-on-red, as well as just the driver-centric culture, every intersection's a gamble. Here, the gambles are there, but not quite as substantial. And you're more likely to be swept up in a crowd crossing with complete indifference to the light, the cars (not drivers, cars) fully aware that they've been outnumbered.

-The food. The food. Lots going for the cuisine in both places (and I think I'm undecided on the NY vs. Montreal bagel question, and there are no French pastries here even close to Nadège, and custard tarts...), but this is home, so I've had a... few more years to know exactly where to get everything. Pizza. (At Freddie and Pepper's on Amsterdam, to be specific, but any place of the sort frequented by 14-year-old boys will probably sell the right kind.) Chelsea Thai. Dos Toros. Shake Shack. Sobaya. Doughnut Plant. Mozzarella from Murray's Cheese. And more. Everything (with the exception of the pseudo-Ronnybrook milkshake from Chelsea Market) has been even better than I remembered it.

-US money seems so different. I'd almost forgotten what it looked like! And also, knowing the exchange rate (0.72), it's so... euro-like. As much as I know that Uniqlo is cheaper than basically any place in Toronto, and that there's no Strand where I live, it's like... maybe a bit of restraint is in order. (But, but, making mental note of all remaining exciting shops that I vaguely remember liking or being curious about.) The whole Shopping Trip From Canada idea (the ATMs I use in Toronto have ads for this activity) must have made sense a couple years back.

-True to stereotype, I suppose, but I hadn't quite been expecting it: there's so, so much more lively squabbling. People are constantly arguing with strangers, but not in a menacing way. Also just strangers making conversation - about which bread to get at a bakery, about anything and everything to do with dogs, etc. That, or people do this in Toronto as well, but I seem too foreign (or too American) to be included in it.

-Most of the city (that I've been back to) seems about the same as it did six months ago, as one would expect. But Williamsburg! My goodness! I'm not going to say that it just got gentrified, because it was hip when I was there in high school, which was a thousand years ago, and far too expensive for me to rent in when I lived in the city, which was merely 500 years back. But... the handful of stores I'd had fond memories of... browsing? probably not shopping at... are at any rate now not just too expensive but priced out in favor of still-fancier options. Also, the hipster thing seems kaput, there and elsewhere. The Toronto drapey-clothing/man-bun thing seems either never to have happened here, or to have come and gone.

Adventures at the French-themed food court

When I read that a Bon Marché-type French food hall would be coming to lower Manhattan, I was (I, ahem, may have mentioned this on Facebook), torn. Part of me was like, where was this I lived in Battery Park City? Another part of me thought this sounded like some bizarre, Vegas-style recreation of Paris, as well as the final step in a finance-ification of what is, yes, the Financial District, but still. It's an area I knew quite well before 9/11, given its proximity to my high school; avoided (for obvious reasons) for a while after; then ended up living in through one of those flukes of New York real estate where affordable-for-grad-students apartments pop up in unexpected locales.

Because of course, Le District is located exactly where there used to be that sneaker store that gave discounts to bankers. Those were, it turns out, the relatively simple days. In the time since I was there last - which was maybe last summer? - the rest of the Financial Center mall became super-high-end. No more Banana Republic, Starbucks, and Ciao Bella. (It was never exactly shabby.) Now it's Hermes, Gucci, and others of that ilk. The relatively-accessible options are (another "of course") J.Crew and Lululemon. Lululemon had a woman - as in, a real woman - stretching in the display window. When I say "a real woman," I don't mean in the sense in which "real" is used to distinguish regular women from those who are or resemble models.

Le District itself is, apart from a really nice cheese shop tucked away within, kind of a mess. I'd been expecting a market (and a companion who shall remain nameless had been expecting a chocolate mousse bar), but these things don't seem to have opened yet. Existing dessert items were a bit all over the place price- and quality-wise. (A chocolate mousse cake was something like $3 and apparently really good; a Liège waffle was $5 and... not.) The main thing about the place was how polished-and-finance the people there looked. Even by new New York standards. It didn't help that I was still in my I-work-from-home clothes, featuring gingham flannel. (Heritage-chic? Pajamas? You be the judge.) The place seemed to be an after-work finance-sort hangout. Which, fine, but then maybe it wasn't quite the NJ-Transit-worthy replica-of-Paris destination I'd imagined it would be.

But despite all the intimidating spiffiness, the prices themselves weren't all that high. Or maybe they were, but I was expecting them to be so much higher. We ended up having kind of a big meal unintentionally - an attempt at getting a post-dessert-as-dinner snack at a wine bar (the more casual of the two dinner options) led to a variety of service mishaps (not 'the waiter didn't smile' - more like we didn't get our food, then saw the fur-coat-wearing woman next to us who'd arrived later receiving part of our order), which we didn't actually complain about, but a waiter who eventually asked about our order felt bad about this, and suddenly appeared with extra food on the house. That, plus the (large, and also unsolicited) cheese samples the cheese place was handing out meant this was arguably one of the most affordable feasts in New York, although, again, for reasons unlikely to replicate themselves.

Will I return? Perhaps - it's trip into the city that doesn't involve Penn Station, or even going outside. (NJ Transit to Newark, then the PATH, leading to an underpass, then there it is.) But seeing as they also sell cheese in New Jersey, I can't imagine I'll be heading back any time soon.

The normcore appeal of Midtown

There was apparently a time, in New York, when everything cool happened below 14th Street. Then came the mallification. These days, whether you're seeking to avoid mall-stores or (as I am, on occasion) looking for the nearest Uniqlo, it hardly matters which part of Manhattan you find yourself in, or indeed whether you're in Manhattan or Edison, NJ.

These days, a fine case could be made for avoiding lower Manhattan. There's the practical case - i.e. Prince and Broadway is even more crowded with frantic shoppers than 34th Street. Also the subjective one - I have to get into the city through Penn Station, and after two hours of complicated travel, there needs to be some reason to add an additional leg to the trip.

But apart from all of that, there's something just more pleasant about Midtown. Busy, yes, but not pretending to be anything other than what it is. In the Village, you're meant to feel that your clothes-shopping is somehow artistic or bohemian. That because whichever chain store is expensive and on a side street, you're doing something different from a mall-shopper. In Midtown, it's straightforwardly corporate. The tall glass buildings don't lie. Midtown feels - pardon the expression - fresh.

All of this points, unavoidably, to normcore. Midtown has it, and SoHo, etc., do not.

Observations from a day of menswear-shopping

-Men's clothing stores have exactly the same impact on me as the theme music to "Frasier" or "The Bob Newhart Show," which is to say, I feel an urgent need to fall asleep. Something about Banana Republic especially, although it was in the more upbeat Topman that I finally collapsed onto what was, I think, some kind of display lamp, but rectangular, and thus vaguely bench-like. Maybe the drab horribleness is particular to the US, where the idea is that masculinity is asserted by dressing in a way that suggests that one finds clothes-shopping torturous?

-What happened to lower Broadway as a tourist destination for French people? Where was the c'est pas cher brigade, with their bursting shopping bags full of relatively inexpensive Adidas? Probably something to do with the euro's relationship to the dollar.

-When the Yelp reviews of a bagel place say the bagels will be tiny and expensive, they will be both of those things. It's not often that I've regretted walking a couple short blocks out of the way for a bagel, but... let's just say the hipsters didn't need to reinvent bagels. The supposedly inauthentic, puffier bagels of Bagel Bob's and so forth are far, far better than what Nolita's offering. (Yes, yes, "and the portions were tiny." But they were!)

City dog

Since I didn't feel like being the last (wo)man standing in Princeton, Bisou and I have taken a trip to see what the bumper stickers would call her grandparents. (Hadley Freeman would maybe agree?) This isn't her first experience of being a city dog, but it's my first seeing her as one for more than, say, an afternoon. Thoughts thus far are below.

Pros:

-If you have a fluffy little dog, you will have to converse with every other person walking a fluffy little dog. Given the area, that is a *lot* of people. Women of a certain age, but not exclusively. And... it's kind of nice! They say that people are friendlier in the country/suburbs than the city, but the thing is, there are actually people around in the city, so even if a smaller % of them are chatty, there's so much more chatting going on. Plus, being on my home turf, I must give off a vibe of familiarity. Even to socialite-seeming women! Who are oddly not put off by my choice of years-old Gap-nightgown-as-dress. Maybe it's the vaguely-Chanel-looking thrift store bag I'm using until my regular bag is repaired, but you'd think these would be exactly the women who'd know what's what in that department.

-A far, far longer walk is feasible when there's actually stuff to see. With all due respect to nature. The deers, etc., are great, but relatively infrequent. Whereas glamorous Italian tourists (who don't talk to me, obvs) are pretty much everywhere here.

-Thanks to those first two, headphones are not needed. I'm way behind in my podcasts, and thus extra-prepared for NJ Transit being useless.

-No ticks!

Cons:

-There's so, so much on city streets for a dog to surreptitiously ingest. I'd like to think so far, so good, but who can say?

-The dog run is a nice idea and all, but walking Bisou to the run, as vs. driving her there, means she's exhausted by the time we get there. And while I'm sure Bisou wouldn't be the first poodle to ride the crosstown bus...

-A country dog has certain... requirements, having to do with the need for a patch of grass.

Of "The Goldfinch," "Gossip Girl," and "Girls"

And now, the airplane reading: Donna Tartt's "The Goldfinch." Click on the post title for spoilers and more.

Pedestrian humor

Humor is subjective, and anyone who has, in her adult life, chuckled aloud to "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" and "Keeping Up Appearances" and "Two And A Half Men" is in no place to judge. That said, I really don't see why "Pedestrians in Bars Eating Toffee," the parody of Jerry Seinfeld's "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee," is supposed to be better than the original. Didn't get through all of it, so maybe it gets amazing at the end, but even if it does...

I mean, it starts out strong - a description of someone's circa-2001 worn-out sneakers, where on the original there'd be a discussion of a hyper-luxury car. So you sort of think, OK, the gimmick here is, these are pedestrians, real people rather than impossibly rich ones. Because that's been the criticism of the original - that it's basically rich people being rich in fancy cars. But then almost immediately, in the parody version, we learn that these are young men who live and grew up in nice parts of Manhattan. They're talking about growing up on the Upper West Side, and having gone to school on what sounds like the Upper East. While this is not Seinfeld-level wealth - and while these specific young men, for all I know, may have gone to public school and grown up in rent-controlled apartments - Manhattan of today, even Manhattan of when these guys were growing up, is just not scruffy enough for the contrast to work.

WWPD, ahead of the curve

The great dream of wandering around Williamsburg was finally realized. It only happened because I picked the only plausible day to go within a span of X weeks and made a haircut appointment for that day, namely today. But this non-spontaneity meant going a) when it was leggings-under-jeans-level freezing out, and b) while still recovering from some variant of the seasonal ailment seemingly affecting everyone lately. I'd recommend going in a more robust state, and in better weather, but still! So much excitement!

What you, oh jaded New Yorkers, see as a so-last-season condo-filled mall, I - someone whose usual options are actual malls - see as the epicenter of cool. What, the epicenter shifted, and is now in Bushwick? (I suppose it had while I was still living in the city.) Somewhere cooler than Bushwick? Perhaps so, if you want the best parties or galleries. But Google Maps-level planning suggested that for a day of urban leisure, for glamor before 11am, the L to Bedford (but straying off Bedford itself) would do.

First there was a flat white, this special Australian cappuccino-type thing with denser foam, from a suitably New Williamsburg establishment, Toby's Estate.

Then there was a haircut at Commune Salon and Gift, whose website seems to be down. It's in any case a super-chic Japanese hair salon, where I got a super-chic Japanese haircut.

Then it was time for lunch. My initial thought had been that of course I'd get the hamburger from Diner, but with Samurai Mama, a much-recommended Japanese "tavern," right next door, that became the obvious answer. I got the yakko (cold, custard-like tofu) with seaweed tsukudani, a condiment (?) I'd never had before, but that was delicious and can now go onto the list of Japanese dishes to try to recreate at home. Then I had the vegetable gyoza, which come in the small frying pan they were (presumably) cooked in, with some kind of batter connecting all the dumplings into one pancake. This came with an amazing dipping sauce, as well as a spicy chutney (?). Fabulous, and I can already say, impossible to recreate at home. I mean, the gyoza I could manage, but who knows what the webbing between them was made out of. It was too early in the day for tavern beverages (a novelty - NJ's very BYOB, not that I can even bring any B, what with the driving needed to get anywhere), but I hope to be back and try some of those - and basically all the other dishes - as well. No idea if my Princeton friends will read this, but if you do, let it be known you will be dragged there the moment it's not this cold out.

Then came some more Williamsburg wandering around, being generally freezing and blah, navigating icy streets, noting that the beard trend (so very absent in my part of NJ) lives on. I tried on nail polish at the Woodley and Bunny "Apothecary," but didn't buy any. (The royal blue Uslu Airlines was tempting, but then I remembered I have that color from the Rite Aid in the shopping center.) I noted that the some of the shoes in a "curated" store off Bedford were a brand with a store on the main street in Princeton. As always happens, I start to see the area again through jaded-New-Yorker eyes, and start wondering if maybe I should have just gone to Zabars and been done with it. Except no - that whole bit on Grand Street was probably worth the trip.

An active fantasy life

I have deadlines. Once the most urgent of those are met, I want to reward myself. And the object of my desire is, of all things, a day of pampering in Williamsburg. I want a haute hipster haircut. Long hair (or as long as it is, which is shoulder-length, minus a trim) with bangs. I want the bangs to have at least begun somewhere not in New Jersey - I can maintain them here in one way or another. What I have now is starting to look very much like the non-haircut I had in high school. What I want is, apparently, to look like Anna Karina in her prime. But not 1960s costumey. This, but without the beehive-type pouf in the back.

(There's this part of me that's like, you know how exactly you want these bangs, you have scissors, what's the problem? That I'm not going ahead with that tells me that I have finally reached the brain-has-fully-developed, impulsiveness-free stage of adulthood.)

Next, I want to look at the "apothecary" in the salon in question and maybe even buy some nail polish.

I then want to sit in a coffee shop and be insulted by a barista before sitting down with my laptop and working on the deadlines that remain. The coffee will be city coffee, and better than what I can get here. Some kind of dense-foam drink (a flat white? a cortado?). A pastry "sourced" from somewhere really precious wouldn't hurt, either.

This is my great dream. I think about it as many times a day as the proverbial 19-year-old guy thinks about sex. But because it involves a drive to a train to a second train to a subway to a second subway, and then the same thing once more, it keeps getting postponed. Work gets in the way, as does weather. But the first possible day, it's on.

Character

It's always good to know you've had an impact on the world. Mine thus far consists, in part of course, of being cited on a college-admissions-coaching website. One with the optimistic name, "The Ivy Coach," located in the snow-heap that is De Blasio's neglected Upper East Side.

Anyway! The people who will get your child into HarvardYalePrinceton appear to have missed that my objection to holistic admissions was based on the argument that colleges can't actually make them. Not shouldn't - can't. "What on earth is wrong with judging personality and character?," asks the Coach. Nothing - but how on that same earth could people who only have access to admissions materials - and that may include notes from an interview - do anything of the kind?

But then it gets interesting. Their defense of holistic admissions centers on... the Unabomber. "Some admissions officer(s) at Harvard mistakenly judged the character of Ted Kaczynski and offered him admission to their university." The post is illustrated with a photo of Kaczynski in handcuffs. College should judge character, I *think* the argument goes, because if not, they'll get Unabombers. Or even if so, they may misjudge (or, like, fail to predict the behavior of an applicant many years after graduation), but they should still try. After all, ever since the Unabomber, Harvard's stock has plummeted, right? But really - how could schools spot future Unabombers? Wouldn't this mean going down a potentially dangerous path of stigmatizing those with certain mental illnesses or radical political viewpoints? Was the Unabomber's issue really one of character?

(The post goes on to make a comparison with dating - the very comparison that most demonstrates the problem of "holistic" in an admissions context. "If you don’t feel it, you just don’t feel it. It’s that simple." Yes, on a date. But what does an admissions committee "feel"?)

What does it say, though, that an Upper East Side tutoring firm is so devoted to holistic? For one thing, it suggests that holistic is - as I've suspected - more about benefitting the academically-mediocre children of the rich than it is about serving as a cover for quota-based affirmative action, or recognizing achievement in the face of obstacles. It could also be that for a place like this to get customers, it needs students (parents) to believe that anything's possible. That your child - who you, of course, think is special - is special, and will be recognized as such by any college that gets to know them.

Accoutrements

I recently took the BuzzFeed quiz about the city that's right for you, and was not at all surprised to learn the answer was Tokyo. I've still never been to Tokyo, or Japan, or East Asia, or Asia except for Israel, but Tokyo's so obviously where I'm meant to live. As someone stressed by not being in a dense, busy city, and who wants to eat Japanese food basically all the time (I think my "sushi" answer determined the outcome, although sushi's the least of it), this seemed so right.

But Japan is far from New Jersey. Much closer, but potentially more expensive: the Dover Street Market. Others have spelled out exactly what it is, but the short version is, it's a seven-story Japanese-ish concept store from Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. The clothing was a mix between gorgeous (the Simone Rocha section may as well be named the What Phoebe Would Buy If She Had More Marketable Skills wing; some of the other stuff was space-age and great), Edina Monsoon-ish (outrageous and kaftan-y, with a designer label), and street fashions at a concept-store price point (the inevitable over-$100 t-shirts, and I say inevitable because one of my other experiences at a concept store, in Paris, involved balking at a 90-euro plain white tee). There are CDG knick-knacks that look like the cheapo Marc Jacobs stuff they used to sell (or still do?) on Bleecker Street, set off in its own section, even, except that it's all expensive as well. There were also plastic salad dressing (?) containers, at $25 a pop, in the sadly limited housewares section. I have no idea.

But don't think of it as a store. It's a fascinating space, and an avant-garde clothing museum. One of the men working there was so chiseled I genuinely thought he was a mannequin. Many others were wearing the kind of clothing (was this the Rick Owens?) that could only plausibly be worn by someone whose job is to sell that clothing: medieval potato-sack skirts, or black pants whose crotch is almost at the floor. It's the kind of "store" where the anticipated bourgeois response (and one that I, a bourgeoise visiting from New Jersey, duly provided) is 'gee gosh would you look at that? How weird! How impractical!' When I thought of it as a store (and noticed the twelve-foot-tall, gorgeous woman who'd bought a ton), this was my reaction. When I did not, I had a fabulous time at what may well have been the best fashion exhibit I'd ever seen.

Lunch was at Kayser - French, not Japanese, but with branches worldwide, including Japan. I ordered something that was smoked salmon, a soft-boiled egg, and "accoutrements." I asked what the "accoutrements" consisted of, and learned that "accoutrements" meant bread. (My husband's salade niçoise did not come with accoutrements.) When the food arrived, we noticed that the lox was piled high. Was there something underneath it, we wondered? No - it was something like a pound of lox. The entire dish was $15 - pricey for brunch, but less than this much lox would be at a store, even without soft-boiled egg and accoutrement toast. Despite my valiant effort - and my husband's help - I have finally encountered a quantity of lox that is impossible to finish in one sitting. We - and Bisou, in a sense - got the rest to go.

There may have been a trip to the Strand where a Japanese novel by someone other than Murakami may have been purchased. But on a non-Japanese note, there was also a visit to a place I'd been very excited to see, and which ended up being maybe not so worth the trip. There's an Australian-by-way-of-Williamsburg coffee shop and Strand pop-up in the Flatiron Club Monaco. Club Monaco, meh, but coffee! books! I did notice they had (priced absurdly high, though) the vanilla glazed Doughnut Plant doughnuts, but given that Kayser was the next stop (what post-lox pain au chocolat? I never get into the city...), I restrained myself. The books, though... I mean, you can just walk a few blocks to the actual Strand. This was Strand-as-curated-boutique.

And then of course, Sunrise Mart. I was convinced that I'd need to horde more Tsubaki after the NYMag story encouraging people to buy it, but lo and behold, not everyone had gone and done so. I got a bit more of the deep-conditioner, just to be safe. And some groceries, or as I prefer to think of them, accoutrements.

The airing of self-directed grievances

Noreen Malone said it best: "Before you ask people about resolutions tonight, consider whether you'd ever ask them to list the things they hate most about themselves."

I'd considered writing another resolutions post, given that last year's went if anything better than I'd hoped. (Except the pasta thing. I don't function well without DeCecco.) But where to begin? Do I want to announce my goals, or my flaws? To what end?

In the age of constant online image-crafting, posting a resolutions list is extra-fraught. Too much candor and you're either admitting something that's a liability (do you want your boss to know that you procrastinate? do you want potential dates to know that underneath your clothes, you have a tremendous if well-camouflaged gut you plan on addressing in 2014?) or just boring everybody. In 2014, you plan to work out/eat more vegetables/floss daily? Wonderful, but of interest to you and you alone (unless the non-flossing had gotten out of control).

It's tough to hit the right balance - not too humblebrag or overly sincere, nothing that suggests you're already this perfect being who can merely strive for further perfection. But also nothing that announces any genuine problems with you as you currently exist. It's like the college essay - you need to tell the truth about yourself, but not really. Resolutions are self-centered... except when they're not, which can be narcissistic in its own way. If you resolve to be kinder to others or start composting or whatever, that's, again, awkward to announce. Like everyone else, I want all that is professional, personal, aesthetic-about-my-person to improve in the new year. I'll leave it at that.

So I'm not announcing any resolutions for 2014. I will instead announce that the first read of 2014 is Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. 2014 is thus off to a not-so-good start in the avoidance-of-cultural-consumption-I-find-overly-familiar department. This is (thus far - haven't finished it yet) a book about a Jewish woman from New York who gets married and goes with her husband to a part of the U.S. where one needs a car (she can't drive), and to Heidelberg. Heidelberg! Who is, knows she must be, a writer, but ends up in a literature PhD program in New York, as one does. And there I was, thinking this was a 1970s feminist classic I really ought to have read, not some kind of semi-autobiography published ten years before I was born. What I'm trying to say is, I'm currently taking recommendations for novels set somewhere I'll find unfamiliar. Nineteenth-century France, for obvious reasons, doesn't count.

Brownstone Bildingsroman

It's generally accepted to the point of cliché that certain worlds are overrepresented in contemporary literature: New York (esp. certain parts of Brooklyn), fancy colleges (esp. Harvard), literary circles, white people (esp. straight Jewish men - Jewish because Roth). The poignant suffering of the upper-middle-class youth when first confronted with the real rich people - say, at Harvard.

Adelle (not to be confused with Ayelet) Waldman's The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is pretty unapologetically all of this, the twist being a female author with a (convincing, at least to this female reader) male protagonist. Or, that - as I vaguely remember seeing in a review a while ago - it's actually a parody of that genre. It is, in that "Girls"-ish way, familiar. Sometimes I thought I'd mistakenly picked up Ross Douthat's Privilege, so familiar was the protagonist's sense of outsiderness upon meeting the country's upper-upper-crust in euphemistic Boston. And the overly-cerebral young Jewish man's first real relationship, with a no-nonsense wholesome blonde... it's just that a lot needs to be done to make a story told so many times worth, in effect, repeating.

But it's a very good book, regardless, and one whose plot I'm going to not spoil. There are amazing sentences, the sort that really precisely convey a universal human experience. One that comes to mind is about particularities of beautiful young women in conversation, the other about how families define themselves with respect to the outside world, but not spoiling means not quoting directly. There are also some very spot-on observations of dating dynamics - the way people who see themselves as such individuals fall into the respective gender roles the other sets out for them.

It must have been a good read, as I read nearly all of it today and barely put it down. And from a literary perspective, it's plenty interesting - we get the protagonist's views on women, and on women's writing, and have to periodically stop and ask whether the book itself supports or contradicts his hypothesis. That the answer may well be "supports" is what makes it intriguing.

"They're men with jobs, Jerry" - George Costanza

Finally saw "Frances Ha." Greta Gerwig - allow me to spoil the movie - plays an aspiring dancer who's reached the age (27) at which it's either going to happen or it's not. And it's not. In a city where (as is remarked upon in the movie) an artist is generally someone with an outside source of income, Gerwig's income really is what she can earn from her art. At the very beginning of the movie, she's offered an easy way out - moving in with a wealthier, maybe older boyfriend whom she's not all that in love with - but turns it down. She does the same (at first) when offered an office job. She's deeply committed, but to what? To art, to her best friend, or to the idea of staying a college student forever?

-I'm not sure I need to see another on-screen rendition of my recent-college-grad years living with roommates in Prospect Heights. It was on the cusp of, did they actually film that in my old apartment?

-So is it just Variations on "Girls," with Gerwig the Dunham character, and the friend who works in publishing the slimmer, more uptight Marnie? Google reveals a similarly nepotism-charge-inspiring cast (Sting's kid and Meryl Streep's!); this, too, is a New York without racial diversity. ("Ha" isn't an Asian last name, but what happens at the end of the movie, when Frances can't fit her full last name, Halliday, into her mailbox label. And the Chinatown she briefly lives in gives no hint of having non-white residents.) The big, whopping difference from "Girls" is that here, the protagonist is 27 and - as is remarked upon throughout - not such a recent grad after all. They're both, though about an adult who identifies - against all odds, and all sense of reality - as a child. Which is apparently very millennial, or something.

-Age. I'd mentioned before (before seeing the movie, that is, in reference to an interview with Gerwig) that "Frances Ha" apparently deals with the not-so-recent college grad, and indeed, it does. At one point fairly early on in the movie, a woman Frances meets announces that Frances looks much older than she is, but acts much younger. And it's clear that this insult has stung. There's a life stage where everyone kind of pretends to be bohemian, but what they really are is young. Money's stupid! Marriage and kids are for squares! And then a lingering, earnest few in each friend group will be taken off-guard and will feel betrayed when it turns out these were not everyone's hard-and-fast values, but just young people being young. But the older you get, the more awkward it is for you to cry 'sellout!' every time a friend gets engaged. Frances has a bit of the Holden Caulfield about her, sniffing out phonies, but then her refreshingly non-Botoxed face reminds us that this is a grown woman in her late 20s. When she finally takes the desk-job she's been offered, you're at once relieved and stunned that she hadn't done so immediately.

-Money. The movie's been praised (where? I forget) for being really honest about money in a way that feels fresh. The $3 ATM fee scene is apparently a thing. (I was so expert at avoiding those!) It's a great big exploration of the line between broke and poor. At one point, a friend tells Frances that in calling herself poor, she's being unfair to actual poor people. You sort of agree with him (ahem), but then you remember that he himself can always turn to his family, while she's on the cusp of something that goes beyond broke. It's not entirely clear - she has a family that can't support her life in New York (as vs. Ms. Horvath's family, which won't), but they seem to have a home she could move back to. Because of whichever forms of non-economic capital - connections she's made in the arts world, being white and pretty, whatever - she's never entirely out of work, or at least not for more than five minutes.

-Age, class, and money: What was most interesting was how the movie gets at that time in life when trajectories diverge. Because Frances is still hanging around with college friends, there's this sense of camaraderie mixed with the underlying fact that some people have family money or finance jobs (or both), while others, not so much. So it's not just that people with different situations are hanging out. It's that they're half under the illusion that they're all in the same boat.

-Online neurosis: The thing where the best friend moves to Tokyo with her banker-bro fiancé and starts a cringe-inducing couple-blog about it is just spot-on. And of course it turns out the friend was miserable at the time.

-I liked "Frances Ha." But I kept thinking of advice I got in grad school, that whenever you're writing something, you have to ask yourself, what are the stakes? Here, it seemed like if you look at the protagonist's trajectory, she goes from one artistic pursuit that isn't quite right for her (dancing) to another that is, and that has a longer shelf life (choreography). A great life-and-career crisis that lasts for all of five minutes, and that occurs at 27 rather than 22, but still within the decade when such things are socially acceptable. It's not that the problems depicted are too "first-world," exactly. More that it's never entirely clear what's stopping Frances from getting her act together, making it that much less surprising when, by the end of the movie, she has.