May 22, 2001
Yes, you get used to it: the office. The getting used to, our remarkable forte; our grievous loss. At one desk a man, who physically resembles the great Irish political hero Charles Stewart Parnell - and apparently shares some of his personal problems - is conducting his divorce and custody battle in hushed tones over the phone. This renders the xerox machine dangerous territory and I feel both thrilled by the voyeuristic opportunity and embarassed that I am partaking, however peripherally, in the denoument of this man's family life.
Punctuation marks of brief pleasure provide fuel for enduring the day and the week: lunch at the coffee bar of Sant Abroeus on Madison Avenue, standing, to counteract office bottom. The best cappucino in town, mouth manageable sandwiches, and the illusion that one might be in a European capital. The five o'clock escape, the Friday escape, interregnums made bliss by the desert of office life. The Upper East Side, the diametric and diagonal opposite of the Lower East Side, here one is rendered a perpetual tourist by the availibility of museums, the park, a variety of cocktail outlets, consumer items completely out of one's league, and the potential for chance encounters with benign strangers.
Later, May 22, 2001.
In trying to assess why I was reduced to a sentimental heap after an evening in the company of an old friend visiting from Dublin, I began wondering about the nature of those old friendships that are no longer sustained by intimacy and long periods of time spent together but that still take up huge shelf space in terms of emotional volumes. B. and I spent the wildest and most gleefully hysterical years of our girlhood together. Our estrogen fuelled adventures began over an influenza epidemic in boarding school at the age of twelve. We were the last to contract it and spent two weeks with raging fevers entertaining each other with stories of our families. It appeared that we shared certain peculiarities as far as family went, an odd mixture of the Bohemian and the Victorian that was markedly different from our other contemporaries who were the daughters of farmers and doctors and other pillars of a dwindling Irish Protestant society.
I don't recall that we laughed when we met last Saturday. We were notorious for our laughter, likely to implode at the most inconvenient of times, indeed suffering many punishments for our shared indulgence. We were able to transport ourselves into a state of breathless intoxication merely by looking at each other. We also enjoyed similar bouts of intoxication on witnessing a good sunset.
Maybe I just miss her. Or miss being a girl. Or both.
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Yes, you get used to it: the office. The getting used to, our remarkable forte; our grievous loss. At one desk a man, who physically resembles the great Irish political hero Charles Stewart Parnell - and apparently shares some of his personal problems - is conducting his divorce and custody battle in hushed tones over the phone. This renders the xerox machine dangerous territory and I feel both thrilled by the voyeuristic opportunity and embarassed that I am partaking, however peripherally, in the denoument of this man's family life.
Punctuation marks of brief pleasure provide fuel for enduring the day and the week: lunch at the coffee bar of Sant Abroeus on Madison Avenue, standing, to counteract office bottom. The best cappucino in town, mouth manageable sandwiches, and the illusion that one might be in a European capital. The five o'clock escape, the Friday escape, interregnums made bliss by the desert of office life. The Upper East Side, the diametric and diagonal opposite of the Lower East Side, here one is rendered a perpetual tourist by the availibility of museums, the park, a variety of cocktail outlets, consumer items completely out of one's league, and the potential for chance encounters with benign strangers.
Later, May 22, 2001.
In trying to assess why I was reduced to a sentimental heap after an evening in the company of an old friend visiting from Dublin, I began wondering about the nature of those old friendships that are no longer sustained by intimacy and long periods of time spent together but that still take up huge shelf space in terms of emotional volumes. B. and I spent the wildest and most gleefully hysterical years of our girlhood together. Our estrogen fuelled adventures began over an influenza epidemic in boarding school at the age of twelve. We were the last to contract it and spent two weeks with raging fevers entertaining each other with stories of our families. It appeared that we shared certain peculiarities as far as family went, an odd mixture of the Bohemian and the Victorian that was markedly different from our other contemporaries who were the daughters of farmers and doctors and other pillars of a dwindling Irish Protestant society.
I don't recall that we laughed when we met last Saturday. We were notorious for our laughter, likely to implode at the most inconvenient of times, indeed suffering many punishments for our shared indulgence. We were able to transport ourselves into a state of breathless intoxication merely by looking at each other. We also enjoyed similar bouts of intoxication on witnessing a good sunset.
Maybe I just miss her. Or miss being a girl. Or both.
- rachael 5-22-2001 5:44 pm