You haven’t heard from me for a few reasons—I got a new job, it’s hard and time-consuming. My boyfriend and I broke up after my first day of work. I also read Lonesome Dove, which he blames somewhat for the breakup. Sometimes you read something so devastating you don’t have a lot of emotional power to put elsewhere, I guess, maybe especially when the thing is already fragile. I cried for a few days about the book, and then a few weeks for the boyfriend. I wrote about organic comforters in the meantime, and drank a lot of wine, and went to a few solo dinners where I ate and stared and thought about my life. I tried reading Intermezzo but was smart enough to put that down about halfway through. Sally Rooney is bad reading for someone going through a breakup.
“You’re popping off” and “You look exhausted” are mostly what I’m hearing these days. My life, as ever, humbles me. With one success comes a failure, with one compliment comes a neighboring critique. I’m grateful, in a hurt way, for the balance. This is my way of saying for the time being orzo bimbo will have to be something else—something more bulleted in its diaristic approach, indulgent in a different way. I feel a little afloat, honestly, with the new job, which is exactly what I wanted but had made peace with not being cut out for. I was thinking very seriously of leaving the city, looking at upstate apartments for rent just three weeks before the job came in. My lease renewed November 1 and I wasn’t sure if I was staying, and how to tell my roommates I might not.
Much of my writing about New York has had to do with my being on the fringe of it—a bit of a socioeconomic reject, and how disturbing I found that a white woman with middle class parents, a private college education, and university town upbringing could still not quite make it here; my confusion at who the hell, then, could? With the fast success of saloon and the job at AD, I’m faced with a strange new chapter, which is: I made it in the ways I hoped to, and as a result signed on to a few more years in this city. My responsibility to my writing and identity and efforts here have, it feels, suddenly shifted: I’m no longer on the outside looking in. I’m taking the long way around to the bathroom to avoid Anna Wintour’s gaze because I’ve worn a red tie-dye long-sleeve to work.
I realize the way I’m talking about having “made it” is ostentatious, perhaps embarrassing, being only a commerce writer at AD. This is, anyway, my personal concept of “making it.” Since perhaps a few years ago, I knew that my “making it” was to be paid to write, to consider myself a strong writer, and be known as such. That’s not even something I’ve wanted consciously for very long, but when I landed on it, and stopped feeling embarrassed for wanting it, it felt like suddenly there wasn’t another option. I had to be a paid writer, and at a reputable place. I needed that to feel validated in my pursuits and identity. I don’t condone that point of view, necessarily, and actually still find it a bit shameful. I know better than to place my values on reputation. But the throughline, in the end, makes sense. I have always been interested in the following: art, glamor, ambition, material. As a kid, I liked to play games that felt high-stakes, high-profile, incredibly busy: I was a Receptionist at a Fashion Magazine, who found time to sketch designs while answering phones, creating schedules, planning trips, organizing shoots; I was head chef at a restaurant that sold exclusively strawberries with sugar, but were in impossibly high demand—Maureen and I could barely keep up with our orders.
I also was obsessed with creating lucrative projects: I found too many seasons and occasions appropriate for a lemonade stand. We would often go to a watering hole called Sugar Hollow outside White Hall, where I tried to peddle the smoothest and most round rocks I could find—dipping them in water to make them sparkle in the sunlight, and look, as I thought then, more like precious stones. At 12, I sold dog treats at the farmer’s market until I got a cease-and-desist from the Federal Trade Commission addressed to Slobberyworthy Dog Snacks, destroying my faith in entrepreneurship and economic mobility for some time, though then I didn’t have the words for it. Even younger, around 5 or 6, I sat outside the restaurant my mother worked at selling my artwork for 5 or 10 cents a piece. I met someone recently at a party in Charlottesville—she’d worked at that restaurant with my mother—who had once bought my artwork.
All to say, I’ve always been obsessed with finding ambitious, artistic, and lucrative work. It’s felt like the only accessible and tangible purpose to me. That’s me saying I feel most comfortable in a capitalist system, I know. It’s a sickness.
Otherwise, purpose—as I learned it—was abstract, religious, and limiting. Still, ever-approaching 30, I feel that way. A family feels impossibly far away, especially living in the nation’s capital of fintech bros and radio DJ’s. The idea of living in faith or for an unknowable greater good haunts me but not enough to become actionable. Christianity, in almost all its public expressions, has become so political and embarrassing. Now I mostly read Alan Watts and piece through various books on mindfulness. I wonder about how to find internal peace and think of everyone’s goodness as a glowing orb that, with practiced focus, can be shared and transferred to create greater light in other people. I mean that—that’s really where I’m at with belief. In 10 years, I’ll be impossible to talk to.
At the moment, I think, I live for art, reputation, and community. I’m only being honest, I’m not saying it’s right.
For the time being, orzo will be strictly about what’s going on in my life. I mean, as it ever was, but now I mean the events I’m attending, the things I’m reading, listening to, enjoying, buying, trying out. Less idea-driven personal essays, maybe. Hopefully less theoretical, too, as I need to put together a new understanding of myself in a place I’d not thought I’d actually ever land, and what that means for me. 27, single, in New York, working at Condé Nast, commuting to Manhattan, running a community that’s also a very tiny business. Having a martini at The Odeon after work. Constantly on email, wearing kitten heels to work.
It’s a version of myself I am in equal parts proud of and also wouldn’t necessarily defend the optics of—which feels like the strangest place I perhaps have ever been at with myself, who was always so sure of who she was.
you encapsulate nyc so well
really beautiful writing
blue suede shoes <3