None of these stories relate to the Guggenheim, but the spiral dome looks like a vortex!

According to 2010 United States Census, New York City is the most populous city in the country with over eight million people.  Furthermore, according to NYC’s official guide, over 40 million people visit this city annually.  You might begin reading this thinking “It’s a small world” but by the end, I wonder if you would think that is the most appropriate phrase.  I am by no means a math major, but I feel like my most recent trip to NYC over President’s Day weekend has to be a statistical anomaly.  In fact, I think I may have flown in and out of a vortex.

Friday

After a visit to the 9/11 Memorial, my sister and I made our way to a late lunch at a pastry shop that she had just tried the other week, Financier Patisserie.  We had a couple of detours and got there sometime in the mid-afternoon.  I would find out later that we were at their first location on Stone Street, but there are 11 locations in New York.  I mention this because this wasn’t the only Financier Patisserie we could have gone to and that we weren’t exactly there for the typical lunch hour either.

I sat enjoying my soup and sandwich when I noticed a familiar face walk in the door.

“Kimberly?”

I already knew my friend Kimberly would be in New York City the same weekend I would be, we had no plans to meet up or visit the same tourist spots together.  If I had run into her at a tourist spot, perhaps the story for this particular day would even make some sense, but there we were in Financier Patisserie.

“Kimberly!”

At first, I wasn’t sure it was her because she hadn’t heard me – too preoccupied by the desserts behind the glass.  After verifying with my sister that this was my friend Kimberly (via a Facebook photo nonetheless) and her significant other (also in the same Facebook photo) – essentially that I wasn’t seeing things – I got up to order coffee.  When she turned around, I waved.

Cue: Girl squeal and insta-hug.

To add to the strangeness, it turned out that we had both been at a NYC tourist destination, having gone through the 9/11 Memorial earlier in the day.  But our timed tickets were differentiated by at least an hour, so odds were that we wouldn’t have met there either – let alone nearly half a mile away from the Memorial in a pastry shop.

Kimberly would later post a photo of us on Facebook where some friends suggested that we had planned meeting up.   After finding out otherwise, they thought this incident was as crazy as we did.  I wonder what they would say about the rest of my trip.

Saturday

One of my favorite places in New York City is the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The first time I made a visit there years ago, I went there specifically to look at their permanent collection of armor (long story short: I used to be a fencer…as in epee, not stolen goods).  This second time through the museum I was able to go through what felt like Ancient Egypt had been transplanted, the American Wing of amazing Tiffany glass, and the collection of historic musical instruments from around the world.  I had a glimpse of the musical instruments collection before my more thorough exploration that day; in this glimpse lies my second vortex story.

I left my sister in Ancient Egypt to go find a bathroom – and of course, didn’t take a museum map with me.  Though we really weren’t in Ancient Egypt, my museum wanderings for a bathroom felt like I had traveled across time and space.  I eventually found myself at a stairwell and thought that perhaps I could find a bathroom on the second floor.  When I got to the second floor, I got distracted from my journey at the sight of glistening golden organ pipes.

As a church member of First Congregational Church of Los Angeles – home of the world’s largest church organ (based on the number of pipes) – I wasn’t surprised that the sight of this instrument made me detour on my mission.  What I was surprised by was walking into this area for a closer look at the organ and finding Bryon, one of my church choral members, standing by it taking pictures.

“Hey – what are you doing here?”

“What are YOU doing here?”

Neither of us had known the other was in New York City, let alone expect that we would run into each other in front of the organ of a very large museum.  It was fitting though, that of all people I would run into in front of an organ in New York City, it would be someone affiliated with my church.  There are a few things that help diffuse the oddness of this incident – we were in a tourist spot, we both had a vested interest in organs, and we would later run into each other again in the museum.

Small world?  Perhaps.  Adding to the story from the day before?  It’s beginning to look a lot like a vortex.

Oh, and a note: if you happen to be lost in the Metropolitan Museum of Art without a map and looking for a bathroom – just ask a museum employee.  Though perhaps not as adventurous, it’s easier.

Sunday

One of my favorite dessert places in NYC is Serendipity 3.  Partly because I love the movie, but really because their frozen hot chocolate is worth the wait.  I had made plans to go to lunch there – to meet up with my friend Sarah who I hadn’t seen in five years.

It would turn out that Serendipity 3 was a two hour wait – so we ended up not going there for lunch, but perhaps we had already used up the serendipity of the day earlier.

We were both running late.  There were text messages back and forth.

The train my sister and I were on stopped so that people could transfer to the other car.  And apparently we were among the people that needed to transfer.  So my sister and I headed to the train cars across the way, entering the one exactly parallel to the one we were in.  Prior to leaving the train car, we joked about who I would run into next.

I told my sister, “Well, now that you said it, it’s probably not going to happen.”

The train car we had walked into was standing room only at that point, so my sister and I stood by the filled seats.  It was then that I noticed a familiar face, seated right between where my sister and I were standing.

“Sarah?”

She looked up from her phone and though we hadn’t seen each other in five years, neither of us had changed much.  It was definitely Sarah.

Was this serendipity?  Maybe.

Was it my strange New York Vortex?  Probably.

Monday

This part of the story extends beyond New York City limits, but I was still in New York City when it happened.

Although I was on vacation, I needed to complete a class observation for my teaching course.  As my doctorate program works with both face-to-face and online instruction, I was able to ask my friend Virginia who teaches in Virginia if I could observe her online course.  Unfortunately for my vacation, the class met on Mondays and didn’t observe Presidents Day.  But the day had been busy with dim sum and ice cream in Chinatown and wandering around The Strand – one of my favorite bookstores – so it was actually nice to just settle down in Columbia’s International Affairs Building to do an online class observation.

At this point, after everything that had happened the last few days, I thought that if anything I would find out I had a friend at Columbia that I didn’t know about – that perhaps I might see this person walk into the International Affairs Building while I was sitting on the main floor.

This did not happen.

This is what happened: I logged into Virginia’s class as a “guest” – not wanting to be too distracting to the class, but of course she introduced me anyway.  After a few brief questions about my background, one of her students wrote “I love your poems.”

It turns out that one of Virginia’s students was a friend of Private Danny Chen and she had read my An Invisible Handshake poem that I had written after reading about his story in New York Magazine, shared to me by a co-worker.  This poem is incredibly special to me because of the sad situation that inspired it, but also after I had shared the poem on my tumblr, one of Pvt. Chen’s cousin had contacted me directly stating how much she appreciated the poem.  So hearing similar sentiments echoed again from a friend of his speaks a lot to me as a writer and a human being given the topic of my poem.

I can’t even really begin to express how this moment alone is astounding and crazy and touching, let alone adding it into the sequence of events of my New York vacation.  And the numbers I have on hand only add to how odd this is.  I don’t know exactly how many people have read this poem, but according to my site statistics, less than 100 people have visited the specific page where this poem was written.  Even if that number gets doubled for anyone who might have reblogged the poem on tumblr or seen it in passing, the fact that one student – in a class of almost 30 people, taught by a friend of mine in another state – knew this poem is mind boggling….

…and it’s also special.  So I will leave it at that.

Tuesday

Perhaps all of this vortex is related to my lost sense of time given time zone shifts and lack of sleep during travels.  I woke at 5:30 am to take the Subway and then AirTrain to a 9:00am flight at JFK.  By the time I got on this airplane, I was pretty exhausted from the specific adventure of getting to the airport and from my crazy whirlwind trip.  Needless to say I fell asleep for the first hour of my flight – I hardly remembering our take off into the air.

I woke up having to decide between homework and a book – having packed my heavier books (I went a little crazy at The Strand) in my overhead bin carryon, I had kept a lighter paperback in my purse to read.  The book was called On Love by Alain de Botton.  Though an international bestseller first published in 1996 and again in 2003, I hadn’t heard of it until I found it on a table at The Strand.  The beginning looked promising enough and I loved how the reviews focused on Botton’s great sentences (Literature Nerd Note: Sometimes there’s nothing that can compare to a great sentence.).

But by the time I got to Page 15, I realized that my “not knowing” the book wasn’t entirely true.  In the evening as I was packing, hours after I had already purchased this book, someone I followed on tumblr had posted a quote from Page 15 of this very book.  I remember this quote not because of the author (which was mentioned) or the title of the book (which wasn’t mentioned) but because I didn’t necessarily agree with it:

Every fall into love involves [to adapt Oscar Wilde] the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping that we will not find in the other what we know is in ourselves – all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise and brute stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one, and decide that everything that lies within it will somehow be free of our faults and hence lovable. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through union with the beloved, hope somehow to maintain [against evidence of all self-knowledge] a precarious faith in the species.
-Alain de Botton (via kateopolis)

Perhaps it’s ironic that I close with a quote that I don’t agree with (primarily because I think our flaws should be embraced because they make us who we are).  But in talking about a vortex where all these crazy events happened, I think this story requires lending oneself to “hope over self-knowledge,” not for the sake of falling in love with a person, but falling in love with the possibilities of life.

Maybe there wasn’t a vortex and the weekend was just filled with coincidences.  Honestly, I don’t know.  I just know that life seems to always ask me to lend myself to magic – and I’d rather believe in a little magic than none at all.

-cct

My Shoe Calendar on Friday the 13th

I figured I’d squeeze in this post before the end of the first Friday the 13th of 2012 (the first of three such days this year separated by 13 weeks). Perhaps it’s my empathetic spirit, but 13 is actually my favorite number. It is partly because it has such a bad rep that I thought to make it a favorite number a long time ago. But while this is how it started, adopting 13 as a favorite number has grown to shade my perspective beyond this numeric empathy.

If I look back on my day today and my Friday the 13ths in the past, the good and bad of that history is probably mixed. Today in particular, I had a few bad things – woke up late, troublesome clients to contend with, worked even later when I got home – but there were also plenty of good things to appreciate of the day. I have great and supportive co-workers who made the day enjoyable, connected with a few friends about things going on in their lives, and one of my co-workers even helped me get a lovely (but large) floral arrangement I received the other day home.

My take on the number 13 is that while I believe superstition isn’t unwarranted, I also think it’s healthier to adopt an attitude that recognizes that bad (and not-so-great) things happen…they happen all the time. And fully recognizing that, fully embracing it, allows you to appreciate and look out equally (if not more so) for the good.

One of my New Year’s resolutions (#7 actually!) states:

Live every day focused on balance and maintain an outlook toward beauty even when things aren’t quite beautiful.

I think embracing the good and bad of 13 helps me do that. Now – the number 4 on the other hand – don’t EVEN get me started…!

-cct

I bought these earrings myself.  $25.  Church silent auction.  They’re butterflies – something anyone who keeps up-to-date with on this blog realizes is a favorite symbol of mine.

But despite the lack of cost (and let’s face it, almost lack of diamond), there’s something about being able to tell myself that I bought my first diamond earrings all by myself.  There’s something in that message that I’ve always found empowering.

I find many jewels beautiful, but the diamond has this reputation that’s hard to shake as being a gemstone of worth in society.  My earrings are certainly not like the baubles on the fingers of celebrities that roam this town.  And that’s fine.  I grasp not at the diamond as this visual object since obviously most people would likely not see them in my earrings without squinting (maybe), but rather how much this fraction of something could hold more worth than even the largest diamond.

Don’t get me wrong.  If someone wanted to give me the Cullinan diamond I wouldn’t necessarily say no, but my desire for that would be monetary.  I don’t love these earrings because they’re $25.  I love them because they remind me that no matter where I am in life and the future, achievements don’t have to be grand; they don’t even have to glimmer like diamonds in the sun to be worth more than even the largest diamond in the world.

Ultimately you define for your own self what it means to be successful and happy.  If it’s about getting the largest diamond in the world (or heck – the universe!), by all means go ahead, but remember the steps that took you there and enjoy every minute of the journey as if they were tiny diamonds you bought all by yourself.

-cct

The other night I stayed up watching documentaries on Netflix and working.  When I’m up late I know better than to watch paranormal anything (though I make an exception for anything with cryptozoology because I don’t think Big Foot exists in urban Los Angeles and Nessie is obviously not going to attack me).  Not that my documentary choices weren’t a little spooky – The Miracle at Fatima and one about English castles (did you know there’s something called Wood Henge and that castles used to be made wood?).  But they weren’t anything to make my hair stand up on end.

I got settled into bed and then I heard a strange noise in my apartment.

I tried to wave it off, but the problem with independent living is you have to tackle strange noises in your apartment…independently.

After about five minutes of laying in the dark and kind of freaked out, I thought I heard the strange sound again – possibly coming from my kitchen or my dressing room.

I sat up and turned back on my lights and didn’t hear the sound again.

Still, it worried me.  So of course, I did the next logical thing – I grabbed my red katana from Little Tokyo and prepared to make an inspection.

Red katana in tow, I moved toward the kitchen and turned on the light.  Peeking inside, I didn’t see anything suspect.

I moved toward the dressing room, opened the door wide, and turned on the light.  Peeking inside, I didn’t see anything odd there either.  Walking slowly through the room toward the bathroom, I turned on the bathroom light and there was nothing.  The blinds weren’t even moving.

Turning off the bathroom light, I closed the door.  Then looked around my dressing room again and closed that door.

I walked into the kitchen toward the dining area and saw nothing and then looked at my filled dish rack.

Could that be the culprit?  Was my fear seated in a bunch of clean dishes overflowing in a blue two-dollar dish rack from the bargain store?

I began to unload the dish rack – I was up and paranoid after all.  Dishes unloaded, I turned off the kitchen light and went back into living area.

I wasn’t going to pull a Ziva (from NCIS who sleeps with her gun underneath a pillow), but I carefully propped my katana near me.  With a sigh, I closed my eyes and then proceeded to hear noises outside (I live in the city!) and something shifting in my apartment, which might have been my steamer pot attachment that I had a difficult time putting in my cabinet.

I then proceeded to turn my desk light on as a night light and open up my computer to do some work and to troll around the internet.  If anyone was in my apartment, I would SEE and then whack them with an expensive piece of computer equipment (yes, these are the preparations of a paranoid mind.  And yes, I have thought about how I would parry an armed person with my katana to disarm them).

At around 3 am, I saw something pop up on the LA Times twitter regarding Gus Van Sant and Bret Easton Ellis collaborating on a screenplay.  They were going to write a screenplay about the Vanity Fair article on the Golden Suicides.  I emailed my friend Jon about the partnership since I knew he liked their work, and hey, what else was I going to do trolling the internet and paranoid at 3 am?

But in emailing the article, I ended up finding the original The Golden Suicides Vanity Fair article (linked previously), which was ironically about – paranoid people who meet an untimely demise in their own hands (it’s a Van Sant and Ellis project, what do you expect?).

Luckily, I am just an overly imaginative girl with a red katana who eventually fell asleep with her desk lamp on.

-cct

Rejecting w/ Style (or Something)

If you followed my twitter the other day, you would know that I had back-to-back (practically!) rejection letters from two publications (technically it was three rejections – two poems, 1 prose piece).  For the most part, they were good rejection letters (yes, there is such a thing as a good rejection).  But having received a double dose of it today in the great game of “getting published”, I thought I’d take a moment to talk about the art of rejection.

If the bitterness of rejection is like cups of coffee, most of us drink cup after cup without seeing much sugar.  To use the coffee analogy further: the act of rejection presumes that you will get a cup of coffee, the art of rejection is in how that cup of coffee is prepared.  While every person takes their coffee differently, there is a certain amount of general ground rules that can probably fit most people’s taste buds.

“5 packets of Raw Cane Sugar to 1 cup of coffee…”

Dear Jane Doe,
We loved your story and it had great character development.  We think it rocks.  We’re writing to let you know that we don’t want it…

Sorry folks, a lot of sugar ruins a cup of coffee.  I think it’s the sugar that has made a lot of negative children of today – coddled, expectant, and demanding.  You might as well have published the unpublishable story because you gave them that much sugar.  You’re trying to serve a cup of coffee, not a cup of sugar with coffee.

“Venti drip coffee, no room for milk.”

Bad Example:
Dear Jane Doe,
We don’t want you.  Your submission “Cougars R B Rockers” stinks.  Get a job.

Coffee is often served black with the option of creme and sugar, but sometimes it’s best to just serve it black – some prefer it that way.  In the art of rejection like black coffee, the success is in simplicity.

The above – very exaggerated example – is like putting in 4 more tablespoons of coffee in the filter to say what you need to say.  You probably also don’t want anyone to never drink a beverage again – er, write a story.

Better Example:
Dear Jane Doe,
Thank you for submitting your story.  We regret to inform you that we won’t be able to use it in our publication.

While the writer might ask, “why not?”, no room for creme or sugar means the message is very clear.  The “Thank you” and “regret” aren’t necessarily sugar.  Politeness is just a good sign of fine coffee.

“Creme and sugar, please.”

The masters of rejection – I guess in this post, they’re almost baristas – however, learn how to use just the right amount of all possible ingredients.  A great rejection is actually one that provides critical feedback, but this is often hard.  I think the trick here is understanding the difference between conveying your point versus conveying your reaction.

“Cheesy lines” doesn’t really describe what the writer can do to improve themselves; as opposed to “the language is one-dimensional in some parts, you should focus on cleaning up some of the text and providing more depth to what you are trying to say.”  It doesn’t mean the language isn’t cheesy, you are providing the suggestion on what they need to focus on: why you think the language should be changed from the present state and how.

“What coffee?”

This is probably my worst rejection experience (in writing, anyway…).  I submitted my story to a publication that had me use an online system for submittal.  I knew there was a date when they’d make their decision.  So I kept on checking in the system.  Eventually I found out I wasn’t accepted, which was fine.  What was not fine?  I never received anything on an email of any kind.  All I know from this publication are the words “not accepted” in an online submission form.

No coffee?  That’s just rude.

Beyond Writing

Finally, the art of rejection can apply to other life scenarios.  Rejection – like acceptance and compliments – are all about how you communicate.  You don’t want too much of one extreme or another.  If you’re gonna lean to one extreme, I’d say black coffee is always best.  Just like in life, it keeps you wide awake.  Too much sugar can leave you too caught up in the stuff that dreams are made on.  (Like how I’m gonna ding myself now for referencing Shakespeare in my closing…)