You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September, 2006.
I was once told that in Manhattan, every girl needs a guru or a gay boyfriend. Someone ostinsibly of the opposite sex, can (hopefully) provide an iota of insight into the male mind, relationship advice, and in general – provide direction in this chaotic life.
My guru, is Z. A guyfriend my age, but graduated last year and is now working in an extremely prestigious hedge fund, making the big bucks. Z and I have one of those really comfortable, platonic relationships. I haven’t become so jaded as to believe that men and women can’t simply be friends – but I have come to realize that they are indeed, far rarer than when we were children who didn’t know we could be anything more. He is in many ways, my confidante and his loft in CT is my tree house to which I run away from the problems of city life. There is a deep mutual respect, but every time I’m around him, I definately feel a positive influence in my life – whether it’s career advice and keeping me focused academically, or just someone to have fun with.
Last night, Z made an observation. D is changing me. According to Z, he is one of the of the catalysts forcing me to grow up. He said if the tables were turned and I were a guy, he’d be patting me on the back. I’m young and I should enjoy it.
I think I understand now, why girls spend so much time talking. It’s not only because we possess two speech centers, one directly connected with the part of our brain that stores memory (apparantly, men have one speech center, and located on the opposite hemisphere of the brain. I’ve heard this used as a physiological explaination of why women give long winded answers about their day, and men give shorter ones – though I can’t verify the veracity of this argument.) It’s not that we’re inherently catty and back-stabbing. It’s we simply don’t know what to do. There definately are some borg-like tendencies among women – a collective consciousness – shared experiences of being dumped, being cheated on, being used for sex, or the complete opposite – being a tease, being in control, or being involved in a fling. At least sometimes, that’s what I feel – being surrounded by so much estrogen (hello, sorority!) I have friends who are virgins, friends who are pregnant, engaged, had abortions.. (not many tomboys though.) And in some way, I also feel like I have a grain of insight on their situation – simply because we all talk so much.
Amidst all these different experiences (and my lack of them) – perhaps it is simply that I am in college, and this is a period of change and personal growth. Emotional puberty, you might say. Being twenty-two, I really thought I would have more answers. But maybe my good-girl-ness was by default, not necessarily by choice. Truth is, I haven’t had much opportunity to confront the questions that many of my girlfriends have. How far to go on a first date, who to date, how to tell if someone’s interested in you. There is a huge part of my psyche that is so undeveloped because I’ve had to spend so much of my life worrying about what’s practical and frankly, it scares me.
I’m really uncertain about what I want. MidgetRockStar is a nice guy, but I don’t know where any of this is going. As testiment to my fear of being clingy, I wrote his number on a post-it and threw it behind a bookshelf, and then deleted it from my phone. I think this eliminates the impulse to call or text-message (kind of like making myself jump through a hoop) because I know we are both busy, and plus, I don’t have that kind of time to waste on uncertainty. Not wanting to seem anxious or desperate – well, that’s a given.
I need to get a grip on this. Seriously. This year was supposed to go off without a hitch – right? Be focused. Compartmentalize your life and manage what’s important. Prioritize. This year could make or break my career and chance to get to an ivy-league law school. I definately over-think. Unnecessarily so. But right now, I am so uncertain of what I want, what my standards are, and how to avoid the messy pitfalls of life (is that even possible?) All I can say is, I really hate dating. And I’ve barely started.
My best friend Ada used to say that when it comes to the YaYas, it doesn’t rain – it pours. There’s some truth to that. Freshman year, Steffie had a record-breaking eight upperclassmen after her. Ada, after a difficult break up in sophomore year, got into a serious relationship the year after and is now engaged and living with her fiance (whom we all love.) Of the four of us, Vannie seems to be the one most on track. That’s something I’ve always admired in her – the ability to keep smiling and moving on through life, ignoring the drama and leaving the past behind.
And me? Well I’ve discovered that I’m the token basket case. Tomboy turned career-driven executive wannabe, the kind of drama I put up with on a daily basis could make a small mini-series. And that’s not including any of the issues from Greek life, or college life. It’s just family crap alone.
But the one thing I envy of all my girlfriends is their perspective on love, men, dating and sex. It’s frustrating how far beind I seem to be in that area. Not withstanding the fact that my beliefs are essentially old-fashioned and outdated. I’d really just like to be able to go on a date, or accept a kiss without hyperventilating because I’m over analyzing the situation. After all, it’s just a kiss. And I’m twenty-two for crying out loud. Girls my age have slept with more men than I have kissed or held hands with.
There’s not a whole lot that I can say is definitively Chinese or Western about myself. I’m usually a healthy mix of internationalism. But my views on sex and dating – not only are they very culturally Asian, they probably date back to the Tang Dynasty. I realize I hold myself to a double standard. The rest of the world can date, can be physically intimate – but not me. Not without going into deep anxiety and subjecting myself to POW interrogation.
I realize its only been two weeks since Ace. But the truth is, we’re twelve timezones away and it’s really been nearly four months. How’s a girl supposed to handle all this stuff anyway? I mean, why bother dating if you’re not head over heels in love?
When it comes to men, I like all my answers up front. Do you like me? Why? Are you a good person? What do you want from all this? What am I to you anyway? All of which, I realize, are incredibly premature and not something that can be answered on the first encounter.
So where am I going with all this..
D.
My boss has been trying to set us up for a while. I’d describe him like Johnny Depp. Not someone that I am immediately attracted to, but I find him intriguing and worldly. He looks like your typical New York indie-scene musician. He’s a music producer. A graduate student (a TA, incidentally.. to a class that I took last year. How creepy would that have been?) He’s one of the few people I know who can immediately top me on travel experience. He’s backpacked Cuba, Europe, Latin America – literally, every continent except Antartica. He’s an international relations and finance graduate student. His father’s a nuclear physicist at MIT and his mother is teaching peace keeping and Middle East politics at Harvard. He’s Israeli, and actually grew up there. We spent seven hours straight together yesterday and haven’t run out of things to say. We have a running competition on who knows more useless facts. And I think, he’s actually winning.
Good Lord I’m so confused. I mean, shouldn’t all this be over? I’m not in middle school. I really should be focusing on my work. Crap. You know, the past few weeks – I’ve been doing really well, getting my life on track, keeping up with my classes. And now there’s all these other things occupying potentially productive space in my head. As if I need more unanswered questions, or new questions popping up in the first place. Good grief.
September is a special month. New beginnings – school year, apartments, relocation, new jobs. It’s the busiest month for mothers and children, and at least for the first eighteen years of life for a typical first-world adolescent, it is September that marks the new year, not Janurary. It is also the month of my birth.
Ironically, every break up (both formal and informal relationshios) I’ve ever had occurs in September, and ironically so do the reconciliations. Last September it was Veer, this year it’s Ace. The year before I moved to New York for the first time, effectively the beginning of the end to my sort-of relationship in Jetsonville, one that probably should have never waded to those deeper waters to begin with.
And there is something about this particular September that is set apart from the rest. Maybe it’s because de facto, it marks my last before I enter the world of adulthood (though I think, I will always be a child.) Maybe it is the fact that it is senior year that is forcing me to reconcile with all that has passed since entering college.
Really, it doesn’t feel like it’s been all that long. Senior year of high school felt so far away from freshman year of high school. But I remember my freshman college days as if it were yesterday, and I am still that awkward eighteen year old. But it has been years. And I have grown up – even if I don’t feel it. It’s in my outlook, in the choices I make, in the relationships I keep.
This month has been one digging through the past. After a near three month silence with RG, the Cold War ended with a tearful voicemail, and a much calmer text message the following morning. Veer and I have been writing – and in his last e-mail he spoke of phone calls. He’s done so phenomonally well in law school – top 10% and will be arguing in front of the Supreme Court this year. Dang. And Ace, after a week of self-imposed silence, I sent a text message – just “hey, how’s it going.” That relationship was definately not as long and drawn out as the rest, but has issues of its own.
I’m not sure what it is about my personality that compels me to seek resolution from conflict. Maybe it’s because I feel that my parents were so unsuccessful in managing “les petit cacas” in their lives that makes me want stability in all of my reltionships. In particular, its alost as if because dad left, I can’t leave – anyone. I have trouble making a conscious decision that so-and-so is no longer a positive presence in my life, and can’t stay. Once you’re in, you’re in. You become an integral part of my existance, and I will always miss and want you, even as things cool to a platonic equilibrium.
And what of this train. These three men of the past that I’ve somehow in twenty-two years seem to have accumulated. Granted, there’s really only one prior significant-other, but these are nonetheless numbers. Notches on the therapy post. In some way or another, these men have left a mark on my life, for good or for worse. Sometimes neither. Sometimes it was just a change, a twist in the road, onward to maturity and experience.
Truth be told, I am fearful of getting too long of a train. If the people who enter our lives – especially romantically, have such a huge impact on the course our lives take, on the hope that resides in us, the belief in true love, then we better darn well be careful of who we let into our heads and psyches. Is there a meter, a limited measure of faith that dwindles with disappointing relationships over time? Or are we expected to keep trying until we get it right, or become too jaded to care? They say that youth is wasted on the young – and in my case, I’d have to say that there’s some truth to that. When it comes to matters of the heart, I play it safe. Hope is too fragile of a thing to waste, and better to pass up the wild and crazy dates, the rollercoaster ride for peace of mind. At least, this is what I rationalize, when I’m single.
Being single comes easy to me. There are some girls (and guys) who cannot stand being alone. Maybe my issue is that I don’t know how to be. To draw boundaries of dependence and conduct in relationships, seem so limiting, though necessary. Everyone I know keeps urging me to date, and I’m like that last kid at a pool party, tentatively testing the waters. Somehow, everyone around me seems to have gone through the anxiety of dating and relationships, and I’m still wating to go through puberty. Because in spite of having been in a fulfilling relationship, there is still a new fear: the fear that nothing else will quite compare, and the fear of settling.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.
But that’s nothing new. I’m always thinking. And re-thinking, and analyzing for that fact. It means a lot of blank stares at the ceiling, and probably at you even – depending on the time of day.
This whole waking up at seven in the morning is really refreshing, and invigorating – as incredibly strange as it might sound. No really, it is. It seems to be the only way I’m able to get any work done, and I’m wondering how I ever managed to survive college when my days seem to hold so few (productive) hours. Life is short, why spend it unconscious?
So what you get now, is Verity 2.0. A faster, more productive, fuel-efficient engine. It’s like I’ve been redesigned by the Japanese. Heh. I’m more informed because I make an active effort to educate myself and read the paper every day. I’m not as stressed out because I try to get my work done on time – still working on that. What I need to do more, is to get out with friends because I missed two parties this weekend, and I don’t want to start turning into a hermit.
I don’t remember if I wrote about this before, but I’m interning as a paralegal in a litigation firm. I spend half of my week in court, usually on landlord-tenant cases. Right now we’re embroiled in a lengthy one, in the trial that never ends – and it has never felt so good to be alive. Sure, court can be long and tedious, but I am getting to see first hand what it means to be a lawyer. My bosses’ are incredible. Not only are they excellent attorneys, but they push me and treat me like I’m one myself. I attend cases, sit at counselors’ table. They ask my opinion in the middle of cross-examining a witness (I almost fell out of my chair). I don’t ever need to wonder if I’m networking enough with judges and lawyers – we’re on first name-basis now. That’s a little frightening, no?
A combination of working at this firm, being a senior and all that jazz is starting to make me think about the kind of law that I want to practice some day. I thought I wanted to go into international human rights, but I don’t think that it’s something that I can do long-term. For all my idealism, I know that the world isn’t as black and white. Peace can hinge upon granting amnesty to perpetrators of crimes against humanity. What I want to spend my life doing, is fighting for a better world, and meeting human needs. I think a lot of that can be remedied by better relations between states, and better laws that govern trade. Economic growth is a necessary but not sufficient factor for development – which unto itself, is distinct from growth. As I refine my career and long-term goals, I realize that though I’ve always wanted a city/country or even continent to call home, I’ll never be happy unless I’m fully immersed in the international community. That’s kind of whata happens when you’re from everywhere and no where at once. I think I’d like to work in international trade law. I recently read an article in the Financial Times about kids of my generation. How the word “career” is taken not as singular, but plural. I fully agree. The truth is job security is a thing of the past. And good ridance. I can see myself doing a huge variety of things. Someday, I’d like to be published – not so hard given the internet and the birth of push-button publishing and blogs. I want to be a diplomat, a negotiator, a lawyer, own my own practice, start a think tank, advice and critique policy. I want so much more than just one country has to offer, and I realize that I will never get elected anywhere, being that I am essentially from nowhere.
Most of these thoughts came up because I was writing my personal statement to a lawyers’ mentoring program. And just for kicks, you can read all about it below.
What I will miss most about college a mere few months from now is the constant atmosphere of learning and enrichment. The past two days, I’ve attended a debate on globalization between Joe Steigliz (last year’s nobel laureate) and Thomas Friedman (pulitzer prize winner & an extrodinary author). Friedman wrote “The Lexus and the Olive Tree,” “The World is Flat” and “From Beiruit to Jerusalem.” By the end of the debate, I think my inner groupie was edging out of my seat, and wanting to run down the aisle, to throw my self at his feet and cling to his knees. Yesterday I went to a panel discussion on America’s post-911 relations with the world and the keynote speaker was Gillian Sorenson, assistant to Kofi Annan. Given the discussions happening uptown in the UN and the atmosphere the global community – it was a really apt time. I’m really glad I went.
Lately I’ve taken to waking up at 7AM every morning. At first it seemed so ridiculously early, and I don’t even remember why I started doing it. I’m just glad I did. I’m no longer blurry-eyed for class, nor am I late. I get up and clear my inbox, answer all relevant emails and make to do lists. I spend a leisurely hour taking care of myself, making sure the room is clean and tidy, and stroll out to a quaint little coffee shop in the West Village for coffee and the Financial Times. I’m getting enough sleep, meeting interesting people and (try) to get my homework done on time.
Sometime yesterday, I popped my head up amidst all these changes and thought, “what is wrong with me?” What ever happened to the i’mlateforclass rush? Or the sleeping in? Or the erradic eating habits? (Granted, they’re still sort of there..) Maybe it’s because I’m just outside of the dorm environment, and am not surrounded by frantic, over caffeinated kids. I’m making sure I’m getting exercise (okay, not for the past 2 weeks, but that’s because school was starting) – something I hadn’t really ever considered. Maybe moving out of dorm was good. An easing into the next big step of life.
The other day, while walking to school, a little blue tricycle-car wheeled up next to me and stopped at a red light. This being the Manhattan, and the Village specifically, I didn’t think much of it, since the area is notorious for strange sights. I was a little taken aback when I turned and saw a little army of little blue-tricycle cars behind it and paused to take the following snapshots:
Evidently, they were little bicycle-taxis shuffling back and forth between the dorms and campus, and were facebook’s latest gimmick. Join this group and your “plus one” gets a free ride. I gotta hand it to Mark Zuckerburg. That’s some kind of innovation.
Sometime last week, on a date of no particular significance, over an equally insignificant phone call, things between Ace and I ended. They didn’t come to a thundering halt, more like it just pittered out into the inevitable. It was one of those things that just sort of are until they aren’t, and no one really remembers why it started in the first place, and eventually no one really remembers that it ever was.
What I can say about this relationship is that I won’t remember it. It wasn’t one of those life-changing decisions. And the decisions made weren’t really all that significant to begin with. What I have learned about myself is that I don’t really know myself very well. That my go-get’em, determined, focus self doesn’t translate into knowing exactly what I want in relationships. And there are men that will take advantage of it, men that will respect it and give me space, and men that don’t really care. I think Ace was the latter of the three. He wasn’t particularly bad, and he wasn’t particularly good either. He was just an average boy, seeking to satisfy his immediate needs of loneliness, companionship and physical desires. But one thing that I can say with absolute certainty; something that I have definately learned about myself is this:
I’m not an average kind of girl, and I can’t stand the average kind of relationships.
There is something about the combination of youth and ambition that seems to appeal to professionals. Help and guidance seem endless, if you know where to look for it and how to retain it.
This is something that I’ve fundamentally relied on since an early age. Whether it’s because I didn’t feel I was getting the kind of guidance and wisdom from home, or because I just enjoyed the company of people who were older and more interesting – I’ve always had someone older and wiser to turn to.
I like to think of the world in academic terms. Especially economics. I’ve described dating as a series of marginal decisions and sunk costs, and how the first time you date is like being an IPO. You never really understand your true value until a few exchanges on the market, and the natural movements of demand and supply reach an equlibrium. Since I was about 13, I’ve regarded myself as this undervalued security that’s about to go public. And when I do, I’d send profit margins and expectations flying, force up the S&P 500 and throw off the median on any index. I thought of my time with the olderandwiser as investments on their side, and what kind of returns I’d make once I “got there.”
That mentality hasn’t changed much since college. If anything, it’s been heightened. I maintain excellent relationships with former employers and collegues, even while overseas. I network at an amazing rate, simply because I am genuinely interested and curious. As a result, I’ve built up a support network that spans internationally, and a arm’s length of references that write glowing reports. But what I don’t have, is the kind of support that most need to thrive.
I realize that while I may have friends and olderandwisers, I don’t have the unconditional fall-back plan. Things are always at risk with me. In the event of a crisis, I don’t have anyone fundamentally responsible for my well-being. If I were to get into an accident – who would be responsible? Relationships are constantly in flux. When push comes to shove, I’ve only got me. A one-girl army.
I turned twenty-two four days ago. Every year brings me closer to a kind of independence that I’ve been dreaming about since I was a child.
My roommate and I signed a lease yesterday. Both her parents are litigators. Her mother in particular is a suspicious and distrustful woman, who has already been through two divorces. The kind of demands that she has made from me has been borderline ridiculous, including asking for my total net worth, and how I’m able to pay for college. That my parents are not responsible for my well-being, is… different, I know. But I like to think that I’ve done alright for myself. I maintained straight A’s last semester at a world-class institution, was granted scholarships and prestigious internships, travelled to remote and far-off places. I just don’t fit the profile of your typical, daddy’s little princess. I don’t have a single guardian, I have 10 that I turn to for different things. And above all, I will not apologize for being an international student, since it’s not my fault that there’s so much more paperwork and time difference for me to get documents in time.
I feel alone and frustrated, with my back against the wall. And no amount of fancy footwork or sword twirling is going to make a difference when you’re faced with an army alone.
Well, you’ve graced the planet with yet another year of your existence, and you should keep on going.
Happy Birthday
Here’s wishing,
D. Read the rest of this entry »
