Category: Life

My friend, Ron, meets me at the ferry every morning and every evening. He’s the man who takes my ticket and sees to it that I aget across the Hudson safely. Ron is from Newark and worked in hospitals for 17 years, most recently in Springfield, Mass (a place he describes as “too slow”). He considered getting trained as an EMT, but his split shifts running the ferry makes that impossible at the moment.

My commute is a little ardusous now, subway to bus to ferry to car. All in all about 2 hours. though seeing Ron makes it easier – he’s my halfway mark. We usually chat during the ten minute trip, he wishes me a good day, I do the same, and off I go. It also helps that I love my job – it’s worth the commute. Once I move to my new digs in August, I’ll drive door to door in roughly half the time. I know in a previous post I said there was no way I’d drive across that GW bridge to commute. It turns out the ferry to my car isn’t any less time, and actually uses even more gas (and create even more pollution) thanks to NJ traffic around the ferry terminal. The environmentalist in me can’t even make a case for the ferry. I’ll miss Ron.

In this week of commuting, I’ve noticed some curious patterns. NJ drivers, without question, are the most aggressive, road-raged people I’ve ever seen. I’ve been pushed out of my lane, flipped off, and crused at more this week than I have been in all the others years of my life combined. So as I’ve been sitting in traffic, I was considering why this might be.

There’s some mentality about being in a car on your own that makes you think it’s you against the world, or at least you against all the other @!#$%&*s on the highway in front of you. On public transportation – subway, bus, or ferry – you’re all in this together. One great moving mass trying to get from point A to point B. On the NJ highways, it’s anarchy and the one with the loudest horn, most aggressive style, or biggest middle finger, wins.

During my commute, I’ve also been thinking a lot about endings – arriving at my destination, the end of my sublet in Queens, the last Harry Potter book. Though I am looking forward to a shorter commute, I’ll miss being in the mix of public transportation, everyone trolling along together. Endings are always nostalgic for me – whether the ending is a welcomed thing or not. I’m a Pisces, the last sign of the zodiac, so this feeling is only natural for me. Endings are just so, final. Times change after them and no matter what there’s no going back exactly the way it is right now. We can’t get this very moment back, ever. In an instant, everything, EVERYthing can, and eventually will be, gone. And that helps settle my anger when someone cuts me off on Route 4 or pushes me out of my lane on Route 208. “This too shall pass….and I might miss it in some strange way.”

It’s amazing what we will do to make up for lost time. One reason I came back to NYC was to be near my mom after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. My boss came back East to be near his family, particularly his kids who had moved here. We want to recapture time we’ve lost with people we love, or at the very least make a change going forward so we don’t lose any more time. I feel that way about New York, too.

I rode on the top deck of the ferry yesterday – a beautiful view of the NY skyline as the sun was coming up. Give it a shot some time — it reminded me just how beautiful our city is. I have been away for too long, and I’m glad to be making up for that lost time by being here now. If you hurry, you may even get to meet my friend, Ron. Just look for the guy with a big smile and an easy-going attitude who’s grateful for his job, despite his commute (longer than mine) and the split shifts. Please give him my regards, and thanks.

I was upset today for about ten minutes. Because I graduated from school in May and just started my job this week, there has been a bit of an income gap in my life as of late. Luckily, I come from a creative industry so I can apply that creativity to my finances. When I first got out of undergrad, I began squirreling away money in a Roth IRA knowing that I could withdraw my deposits (not the interest earned) at any point without penalty if an emergency arose. This current gap in my income – just the emergency I’ve been saving for!

So I took a trip over to the bank that has held my IRA since 1999. Granted, the funds I am invested in have not performed that well. My financial advisor has been all but non-existent. And, foolishly, I just assumed that the funds would make a come back by the time I turned 59.5 and would begin making withdrawals. My investment used to be accessible on line until it was recently sold to a clearing house by my bank. I decided I needed to become a more active investor and wanted to put all of my money with one financial institution. More importantly, I needed some money to fill in this income gap I’m in. I went into the branch that holds my IRA and explained that I was disappointed with the funds I was in, the lack of service, and I wanted to liquidate the fund.

There was a financial advisor there who talked me out of this saying that she could get me into some better funds and would “personally handle my liquidation to make sure it got rushed through.” She said she completely understood my current state of finances and would gladly help me. I thought, “Wow, now this is service. Maybe I’ll move all my money over here.”

Well, that was over two weeks ago. She didn’t handle anything personally or professionally. I never got the money transfer into my checking account because this financial advisor who was going to “personally take care of me” did anything but. She filled out the paperwork incorrectly, sent it late, and used a fax machine that delivered faxes so dark that the bank’s investment arm was unable to read them. I have called her three times in as many days, and she has never returned any of my phone calls.

I was upset because I realized for the first time in my life I would have to carry a balance (albeit a small one) on my credit card until my first paycheck comes in. Not the worst situation to have. I wouldn’t have the money in time to pay the bill and at this rate I’ll have my first paycheck before I see any money from my IRA. That lasted five minutes.

The first five minutes of my unhappiness came this afternoon when a woman from the investment arm called me at my desk at work to break this news to me. Thankfully I am in a work environment that is so focused on learning that I am now constantly using every single experience as an opportunity to discover a new insight.

This bank incident aside from being annoying, taught me about the multiplicative power of good (or poor as the case may be) customer service. Intellectually, I have understood this though after this event it is much more real to me. I am writing about this event on my blog. I will tell this story to anyone who will listen to me. I will encourage my family and friends that bank with this institution to switch their accounts to another bank. I will roll over my IRA to another bank, as I originally planned. They didn’t just lose my current business, they lost my future business, my family’s business, and my friends’ business. All because one employee said they’d take care of me and didn’t, and then hasn’t even taken responsibility for dropping the ball. It turns out that when you take care of one customer, you actually take care of a whole circle of people. And conversely, once you lose one, all of the other dominoes begin to fall too. There is no such thing as a small account or an unimportant transaction or interaction. They’re all much bigger than we will ever know. Lesson noted.

I was one of those nerdy kids whose favorite pastime was going to school. I liked to sit in the front of the class, raised my hand often, and asked so many questions that even my own mother grew sick of me. I went to a public school that didn’t particularly support the love of learning, though I was careful to choose an undergraduate school that did (relatively) and a graduate school that not only encouraged active participation, but required it!

After two years of graduate school that forced us to question numbers, regard “facts” with skepticism, and break rules, I have found that I am almost unable to hear statistics of any kind without jumping into analytics mode. This happened recently when a good friend of mine started a exasperated conversation with me after she read an article in Time Out New York that lead with “In February, National Geographic published a fairly stunning statistic: There are 185,000 more single women than single men in the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut urban areas combined.” GASP!!! No!! How could this be??? No wonder I’m single.

I did some digging on line to find out the numbers behind the numbers. I couldn’t find comprehensive numbers of single men and women in the tri-state urban areas so let’s assume, absolute worst case, that the entire 185,000 singles gap between the genders live in New York City. Here’s how it breaks down:

2.9 million single men live in New York City. 1.75 million of which are “unattached”, meaning they are not in a serious dating relationship.

Since the population is fairly evenly split, let’s assume that there are also 2.9 million (plus the additional 185,000) single women in New York City. That’s roughly a total of 3.1 million single women.

Also, given that our population is evenly split, let’s assume that there are an equal number of men and women in New York City. The total population of NYC is just over 8 million. 4 million male, 4 million female.

Basically, we are getting ourselves all wound up because the 72.5% (2.9 million / 4.0 million) of males in New York are single and 77.5% (3.1 million / 4.0 million) of females are single. Are you kidding me? A worst-case 5% differential is a “stunning” statistic? On principle, I am boycotting Time Out New York until they get someone on their staff who can work a four function calculator and doesn’t abide by the principle of “let’s twist some numbers around to create sensationalism to sell more magazines!” Ridiculous.

Single ladies, get out there with your head held high and have some fun. Don’t get bogged down by people trying to tell you that you’ll be single forever if you stay in this city. Bologna. There are 1.75 million unattached men in New York for you to meet – you better get a move on! That’s an awful lot of dates.

Some of you may know that I have had lifelong insomnia. I get it from my mother, who has also had lifelong insomnia. All these years, people have just assumed that I have a good work ethic when in actuality I can’t sleep with any semblance of regularity. Since one of my pet peeves is idleness, I try to be productive at almost every minute. It all started when my mother began driving my father to the train station very, very early in the morning so he could go to work in New York City. This happened as far back as I can remember. I would hear them wake up – my father had this strange notion that once he was awake so was the whole world (or they ought to be) so he could make as much noise as he pleased. So, my mom and dad would head off to the train station, I would wake up, make myself some oatmeal, and when my mom came back we would watch I Love Lucy reruns. My insomnia was born.

As a teenager, it drove my crazy – literally. I thought not being able to sleep was just about the worst kind of hell a person could live through. And then an amazing thing happened – I made my peace with the condition, it subsided slightly (I can usually get, on average, about 5 hours of sleep now, though I wake up quite often during the night), and I learned how productive I could be since the lack of sleep did absolutely nothing to dampen my enthusiasm or need to be useful.

Now I have a new reason for my insomnia. My new job. Now, it’s not what you’re thinking. I have had some good jobs, great jobs, in the past. And I’ve had some really lousy ones; I’ll take a moment here to apologize to those of you who had to receive my phone calls when I occasionally had to be talked down off the proverbial ledge because my work situation was so unpleasant. This new job and my situation there is a different case entirely.

I love this job. It’s amazing – I get there, I have fun ALL DAY, and when I leave I can’t wait to get back to work. There is always something new to learn, and there’s no end of that in sight. I never knew I could love a job this much. I had no idea a job like this even existed, much less did I ever think I’d be able to call it my own. My lovely boss keeps apologizing that he’s not spending enough time with me when in fact he’s giving me more guidance, support, and encouragement than any of my other bosses ever dreamed of giving me! This is the longest commute to work I’ve ever had, and the only thing that upsets me about that is that it cuts into the time that I could be at work learning. Oh, and they’re paying me. How did this happen? Where did this gift come from?

A number of years ago, I read a book called Women Who Run with the Wolves. In this book I first came across the phrase, “She who does not howl will never find her pack.” I got my current job because I howled so loud that the whole world heard me – you may have heard me also and just mistaken me for a coyote of some sort. After months of job searching and not finding what I wanted, I went into my career counselor at Darden and described the exact job I wanted – “in retail, working on innovation as a project manager, in the New York metro area. New product, new services, new store design. Anything new that adds value, I wanted to be a part of it. I want it to be a fun product category that I can relate to. I’m interested in improving anything that touches the customer – which is just about everything. I’d like X number of dollars, I’d like to start in July or so, and I really need to have a boss who believes in me and values my experience.”

My career counselor, bless her heart, said, “Christa, that sounds amazing. What a great position to have. I just don’t know where you’d find it or how you’d get it.” In a few weeks time this same person would provide me with the contact to get me this exact job – the job I have now. And then when I called that contact at my company, he asked me to pitch what I’d like to do and how my experience might relate to my career goals. I howled again, even louder than I did the first time. I was completely terrified, and I just couldn’t help myself. Finally, finally, something inside me broke and I was no longer able to settle for just A job – I needed a place where I could make an impact, I needed to be in a place where all my skills and abilities would be completely maxed out. I needed to be in a place that needed me.

I wonder if in every life this happens – when some dream, some idea takes hold of you and you just can’t help but live it. There is no plan B, there is no substitution. There is no room inside your heart for settling for whatever life offers you. You want what you want and there is no substitute. There must be a point when howling is just about the only thing you can do, and your pack comes running. My friend, Monica, told me a long time ago that time and time again in her life when she made a leap of faith, the world always seemed to stretch out its hand to grab hold of her and pull her up to safety. In my mind, I see the image of that outstretched hand coming from the moon, answering my call to help me live the life I imagine. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll give it a shot. You may be surprised who hears you.

As a general rule I avoid politics. My first job out of undergrad was working as a Legislative Assistant for a Congressman in Wahsington D.C. My first day on the job, the Monica Lewinsky scndal broke and the issue I covered for the Congressman was “executive branch activities”. A total nightmare.

Yesterday was the first time I registered with a political party (previously I was the registered as an ever-mysterious NE – non-enrolled.) However, given the importance of the upcoming presidential primaries, I felt I had to be a part of that. I finally had to stand for something in politics. I believe we are about to witness possibly the greatest turning point the executive branch of this nation has ever seen.

It is with this new found spirit of activism that I went to see the movie Sicko, Michael Moore’s latest creation. I’ve never seen one of his films, largely because they are so political in nature. This one was not partisan – it was raising the alarm on what’s happening in our nation’s health care system. And it’s frightening. It would be comical if it weren’t so true and so sad. Moore made me laugh, and then he made me think. Why does nearly every other developed nation, and many not so developed, have better health care than we do? Why do prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, many of them known terrorists, have better health care than most working class people in this country? Cuba itself has a better system than we do? Given our abundant wealth, how is that possible?

I won’t give away parts of the movie because I hope everyone who reads this blog will see the film. If you have even the slightest bit of interest in health or health care, please see the film. Because I just graduated from business school, I am obsessed with efficiency and incentive structures. We’ve got it all wrong here in the U.S. We reward insurance companies, hospital, and even doctors themselves to provide as little care as possible in order to take costs out of the system. For all the talk about a “paperless” office, there are more and more forms every day that we must fill out in order to receive even mediocre care.

Moore sounds the alarm with humor and solid research. And I hope it’s an alarm that will be heard ’round the country by the people who can make a difference.

I am reading The Tipping Point. I know that Malcolm Gladwell is now a revered man and that nearly everyone in America has read this book, as well as its sequel, Blink. I had never gotten around to it until now.

The Tipping Point sounds to me like a point of no return, the point at which you cannot dial back life’s clock to five minutes ago. The inertia is too strong to be humanly stopped. Nature will take its course, with or without our consent. As one of my graduate school professors liked to say, “It’s happening folks. It’s happening.”

The tipping point can be positive or negative. Hush Puppies are fashionable again. The crime rate sky rockets over night. Both have a tipping point.

I am also reading a book entitled Stumbling on Happiness. It’s led me to consider whether or not there is a happiness tipping point that we stumble upon. A moment in which we find that our lives are overflowing with joy. In yogic terms, this would be the point when we are in sync with the energies of the universe. We feel as if everything we touch turns to gold. We are coookin’ with gas. (I’m only on page 50 so Gladwell may address this later on in the book. If he does, please don’t tell me. I like surprises.)

This morning I spent a few hours walking around what will soon be my new neighborhood. And I am deliriously happy with it. If two years ago someone had told me that I’d be living on the upper west side between Riverside and Central Parks and working for the most fun company in the world doing exactly the work I dreamed of doing, I’d have asked how much that life costs because I’d need to buy it. Lives like that don’t just happen, right? Thankfully, I was wrong. They DO just happen. Somehow all the ducks got in a row, into one gorgeous, perfect line just when I needed them to.

In my state of happy delirium, I took myself downtown to the theatre district. I had a ticket to see Vanessa Redgrave in The Year of Magical Thinking, a play based on a book with the same title by Joan Didion. I read the book in March of 2006 while on spring break, just as I turned 30.

And that was the beginning of what would be a very rough year for me. I would learn that some people whom I considered close friends were anything but. I thought the man I was dating was the love of my life and instead he broke my heart in a million pieces. Later, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and my sister with cervical pre-cancer. And I would interview for what I thought was my dream and learn through the interview process that it is the last place I’d ever want to be employed. All of this could generate a good deal of self-pity, something I refuse to have regardless of circumstances. So I did the only thing I knew how to do – I kept going, and showing up, and smiling.

In her book, Ms. Didion considers how fleeting happiness can be. One minute we are overjoyed with life, and then the next minute, everything has fallen apart. We search for clues, for answers. How and why did this happen? How do I get back the life I had seconds before. She is talking about a tipping point of sorts, too.

I don’t know if there are ever signs of drastic change that we can see coming in our own lives. It’s possible we are too close to the situation to tell. It is possible that denial is too powerful to allow us to even entertain the thought of change when we are so happy with the way life is, in this moment. Maybe we can’t control or contain happiness. Maybe it is bigger and stronger than us. It is possible that while it may be within our reach, it will never allow us to actually catch it and hold it. The most we can hope for is to be in its company for a little while.

There is one certain thing I have found about happiness – it always returns. Even if only for glimpses of time, with long gaps in between, for all of us, happiness will always find us so long as we stay open to it, as long as we actively seek it. And maybe that’s the trick. Maybe what we need is to really want happiness to stick around, to want to make it part of our daily lives. Alternatively, maybe happiness is something we need to create and nurture, just like a job or a family or a friendship. It needs attention and care.

It is ironic that on this day when I was so happy to just be living my life that I would reminded by Ms. Redgrave about the fleeting nature of this emotion. In a sense her performance and Ms. Didion’s writing served as bookends to my own year of magical thinking, when so many chips were down that I barley knew what to do except play the hand I had, hoping that the next deal would give me something a bit better. I do know that after this year I am more grateful for happiness than I ever have been before. And maybe that’s what happiness requires – our gratitude. Just like a person, when happiness is appreciated, it’s likely to stick around for a while.

My lease is signed, sealed, delivered. It’s mine. My savings, well that’s another story, for another posting. I want to make sure I spend as much time as possible in this fabulous moment of victory over the New York rental housing market. I’m glowing.

My landlords seem lovelier every time I speak to them. Joe reminds me of my Ethics professor from Darden, Ed Freeman. Like Ed, Joe is mild mannered, a bit shy, intensely brilliant. A professor. As easy-going as they come. His wife, Ann Marie, is equally as kind. She is a photographer who has just had her first book published. Together, they are that kind, interesting couple living in a multi-floor apartment on the Upper West Side that I have heard about, though never actually met. Going into their home, I feel like I am stepping onto some sort of movie set where I will learn some very valuable life lessons. (I’ve, perhaps vainly, cast myself as the young ingénue striving to get her life together in the big city while fascinating people with their own stories come to her aid. However, this is my life so I feel a certain sense of artistic license in creating it.)

Some times I look to the rain as an inconvenience, something I need to slog through to get my errands done. Most of the time though, I am grateful for a rainy day. Actually, if I go too long without one, I tend to get nervous. One because I am obsessed with water conservation, and two because I like to have an excuse to stay inside and putter around my home reading, watching old movies, and cooking comfort food.

Tonight the sky opened up just as I got off the subway and was on my way to sign my lease. I got drenched and I was rushing to make sure I wasn’t late. With my umbrella flapping with the wind and my soggy, squeaky shoes, I should have been annoyed at the timing. And instead, I was grateful, gleeful even.

I like to think of the rain as literally washing away what needs to be washed away. It’s a fresh start. I also like to think that it’s the Universe’s way of blessing us, of reaching out to us so we know she is there, guiding us and watching over us. And this rain in particular seemed to me to be holding out its arms and welcoming me to this new neighborhood that I have honestly dreamed of living in for quite some time now. For the next two years at least, this will be home.

After the deal was done, I measured the main room, the only room, of my apartment to get a feel for dimensions as I consider furniture, decorations, etc. I stepped outside, soaked and surprisingly tired. Though it was all in a good way.

The rain continued, but not nearly as much as when I first arrived at my new digs. I was supposed to meet my friends Katie and Monika for dinner after signing the lease but I was soaked through to the skin, making the prospect of sitting in public like that more than a little uncomfortable. I considered cracking out the umbrella and instead, put it away in my bag. I let the rain wash down over me, letting it carry with it all the anxiety I had built up around finding a job, an apartment, and beginning to build a new life in a new town that is at once familiar and also still a mystery. The Universe has been acting in my favor these last few months and I wanted to drink it all in while I have the chance.