Getting Dashboard Confessional

Over a pint of ice cream at the 24-hour Gourmet Heaven deli on Broadway. Cynthia, Becca, Ryan and I sat around a tall table telling long, not-tall, tales for 5 hours until 4 in the morning. We started with truth or dare, soon phrased truth or truth, soon a flow of phrases about relationships with people and pets and god. After we exhausted ice cream but not conversation or each other, we licked peanut butter out of cups and ate leftover lasagna imported from the successful dinner party. Eyes' contacts dried up but not the stream of stories, questions thrown rippling thoughts and spilling over guts in a give and take of own human history, currency for connection. We traded our divided, individual opinions for what we wanted to wade all night in, contact with other I's. I saw separate selves sit together tearing Styrofoam into statues and talking till past the thought of the work we all had in the morning seemed relevant. To keep my eyes from falling out, I made saline solution by stirring salt in my water. Dipping twice into bitter herb memories, they dissolved at once in sea of sharing experiences with my non-profit people, my President's Public Service, wanna change the world friends. Felt like fellowship and best all-night end to New Haven summer days.

Delightfully Improper Dinner Party

Holding a very merry unbirthday party tonight in honor of my going away. A coming back soon party. An excuse for cooking, feasting, and delicious laughing in the circus of a kitchen. It'll be a food farewell to summer. A final cook something up and chow down amidst the wildlife and scenery of the Greeneryhouse. Last 10 hours and 45 minutes of work; 10 things and a million mintutiae to take care of first.

Don't worry, Mom, I'm not running near the park anymore.

On guard since Chief Yale guard warned about attempted abduction of a jogger a week ago,  I sped up when a tree yelled hey this morning. But a blond, dyed, woman with a microphone, channel eight, emerged. She stepped around the tree and started asking questions with follow-ups as a camera followed her up to me slowly. Is there a better time to be interviewed for the local news than after you've run a mile and a half? Than after you've found out a woman was raped in broad daylight in the park you were running, now standing, soon to be leaving in. It was on Sunday in broad daylight, she stresses the wide word, then repeating the phrase, in broad daylight. I don't think of the people, the deranged danger, just the way the light looks on the park mornings. As dawn goes down to day, the trees are stained glass windows. Leaves transmit green gold as I come around a bend and the trees are backlit. I guess I won't be back.

Running away, realize I am the stupidest student I know. The Central Park Jogger. Should have known. Been prepared not to be scared. I sprint unsure if I'm running from feeling insecure in my city or insecure in their camera. In flight, I fight thoughts that this is a safe place. They have free jazz concerts here. There is a playground with kids. Their dogs get walked. I only ever skirt the edge of the park, always in sight of street, never deep in dense trails. But I will be on the 11 o'clock news as the Yale student foolish with youth enough not to know but to run the park. Not any more.

From the trees of Edgewood park, this isn't the word springing from the Bushes. Terrorism is a conscious, concerted effort to make you change habits, regard others, vote out of fear. This is different. This makes me change the of course of running, think twice about where I go, everyone I pass, look with no liking of any stranger, but there's nothing but individual anger and insanity behind it. The shootings, the almost abduction, this raping are not part of a plan to scare women in New Haven. So go about normal routine and talk it away. It is a city even if the power lines ride above the traffic, traverse the sky. Things happen but it's unlikely if you keep your head. Ride the minibus home two blocks from friends. Don't walk alone after dark. Don't run in the park. Go to work. Look over shoulder. Just be smart. Terrified.

Waiting in a humid train station

in a city in a summer, I felt like Lily Bart. A weekend with well-to-do friends didn't change that. I am the Lily Bart working girl, going up to famous sights on the Sound, seeking invitations to country houses, escaping the heat of the city for the cool of the chic country. And the rich house is always freezing even when some temper is boiling over. It was a lovely weekend but Wharton would have had a field day. My friend picked me up from the train station in a Mercedes, her Mercedes. (But since it's illegal to drive a Mercedes at liberal hippie schools, she's taking her father's Volkswagen convertible. Much better.) Enveloped in the smell of leather we arrived at her crisp white house and went around the back to say hello to her crisped tan parents sitting sipping ice water by the pool. Two skinny hands waved hello. When they asked about my summer I resisted any Torres temptations towards shock-value by detailing life at the Greenhouse, a pleasure dome for the masses.

For dinner, she took me to a delicious sushi restaurant where in the parking lots Mercedes kissed or had mixed marriages with BMWs. Two blond zeroes proved that being tall and anorexic was a marketable skill outside of modeling as they greeted and asked for our reservations. I had some, but as sat at the sushi bar staring at raw fish flopping and flipbooking from past to present stories with my old friend, I forgot what a trendy place with what trendy people we were surrounded. It's not her fault she was thrown in a world where daughters' sociological compassion must wear Anthropologie, Gucci, and dress down in Versace and Mercedes daily; she is a sweetheart. And the wonder is how she came from a perfectly nice workaholic who plays tennis on the weekends and an obsessively organized, eating disordered compulsive cleaner who anxiously watches what her daughter, overflowing humanity, gracefully exuding mess of being eighteen and feeling and thinking things, eats. And I think she is proud.

Sunday sailing on a Sound, saw between ships how this'd be a nice way to see the sky. Outside the rarefied air of the airconditioned house, there are a lot of nice beaches and waves that belong to you if you're from not just any port in a storm. Controlled the sail and the steering and I laughed as caught the wind and plunged the craft into waves. We plunged into talk about religiously conflicted regions around the globe and thought about how it was a nice place to come in the season, how it might be easy to steer a course from here, set out to see the rest of the world and see it better off in off-season, if you have a soul. And she has a soul. So did Lily Bart; it undid and almost saved her.