Among things that I was not thinking about last night when I went to bed were out-of-state weddings other people I know have attended and ineffective raingear I have owned. Instead, I was thinking about procrastination and Rome (Geoff Dyer book I was reading), the effects of slow, loud guitar played backwards over ethereal vocals (the Sigur Ros album to which I was listening), the reason my stomach was growling (a martini, a bowl of edamame and a dish of chocolate pudding does not a satisfying dinner make, though I had been very satisfied by putting the pudding into a verified 1950s pudding dish my mother gave me) and how I really should get out of bed and write down the line that had just come to me, since like a one-night stand, there is no guarantee that a line will be there in the morning. But apparently at some other level of my being I was thinking about out-of-state weddings other people have attended, because that is what I dreamt of all night long.

I have many plane tickets jammed into the pocket of the completely-not-waterproof Gore-Tex rain jacket I gave up wearing years ago. Just as they always did in real life, the little notches on the left-hand edges of the plane tickets get stuck on the edges of the pockets. The tickets are for a complicated flight pattern from New York to North Carolina to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I am to fly to these places to attend weddings. At the airport on the first leg of my trip, I wait by the baggage claim for a while until I realize I have not checked any baggage. I am annoyed. What a waste of time! But I do have a backpack that I brought as carry-on luggage, which I take over to an unused baggage conveyer and completely unpack. I become absorbed in many projects having to do with the stuff in my backpack, and suddenly I realize I'm not in North Carolina, but only in Washington, D.C., waiting for a connecting flight. The flight is in ten minutes and I can't pack my backpack in time. I am not going to make it to North Carolina or to Milwaukee after that, but suddenly I realize I don't even know who is getting married in those places, anyway.

I woke up with the sinking feeling of having wasted a lot of money on unused plane tickets to North Carolina and Milwaukee. And then I remembered--it was not me, but my friend Megan who went to weddings in North Carolina and Wisconsin, last year, or the year before. I was familiar with this knowledge only in the vaguest of terms--"Haven't seen you for a while, Meegs!" "Oh, Luke and I were at a wedding in Wisconsin." So why is my subconscious mind using these details, seemingly meaningless in my own life, to project experiences into my conscious mind while I sleep? Why am I not flying or winning Olympic gold in the uneven parallel bars or replacing Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider? Why am I getting stuck in the airport on my way to Milwaukee?

I know the theories on this matter. There is some deeper, hidden meaning in these seemingly meaningless details. Some meaning that I only I and perhaps Sigmund Freud could discern, about anxiety, lateness, time, out-of-state weddings. Except I do not readily discern these meanings. I don't understand, and what I don't understand is a product of my own mind. How are we meant to understand anything anyone else says or does if we don't even understand ourselves? How does it really work in there? How is it that information we never dwell upon is floating around somewhere, accessible to the subconscious mind? How can it be that the concerns of the subconscious are so radically different than our own? Does the subconscious choose what it chooses for a reason or is it random? Is it that much smarter than we are? Is it that separate? Is it for us or against us?

I've had many dreams that are no-brainers. People I admire beckon me into boats and empty bathtubs. People who broke my heart lead me up mountains and abandon me there. The old, literally textbook teeth-falling-out and naked-in-homeroom nightmares. Trying to drive a car from the backseat (recurring), tunneling under a barbed-wire fence, digging my brother and I out of a concentration camp. My parents are senators and I am a young Congresswoman and I give a speech that leads to the impeachment of Bush, except Congress meets at my grandparents' country house. I hail a cab in London and the driver is the waitress at the sushi restaurant we frequented in high school, and all the waitresses at the restaurant are part of a an international narcotic sting operation and have set me up in a coke deal, etc., etc., etc.--but it's the ones in which the mundane details I didn't even know I knew about other people's lives become mundane details of my own life that confuse me sometimes. What does it all mean? What's going on in there?

Time for my coffee, scourer of the subconscious. Coffee exists so we can forget our dreams and live in the now. For some of us, that's a relief. For others, it's just as bizarre.

I wrote you something new, but it's old, so it's here.

The events of the past 24 hours have been rife with life lessons. Observe:

Last night Rebecca and I went to hear our favorite band play. When we first came to know this band, we called them The Only Band In the World, not realizing the homage to the Clash we were making in the process. We began referring to the leader of this band as Our Leader, not realizing that this too was an homage, to the Woody Allen film Sleeper. After the show, when we went to greet Our Leader, he introduced us to his friend as "The Zen Twins of Wiliamsburg," an homage to one of the band's own songs and the one with which they'd closed the show. I think that's what postmodernity is, but I was never quite sure.

We were in fact the Zen Twins of Williamsburg. We were both wearing the same black crocheted tights, identical except for the quarter-sized hole in the right thigh of mine. I knew I would rip my tights if I went into the pit, but when the band was playing the song we know as "Zen," a song whose chorus is "Pirates and bankrobbers/not lawyers and CEOs/Stockbrokers ain't your heroes" I could no longer remain on the sidelines with the other old people. Into the pit I went, and snagged upon the metal parts of a teenaged punk's clothing my crocheted tights became, as well they should have. In the rock-paper-scissors of subculture, punk rips hippie every time.

I didn't care. I shoved my way up toward the front of the crowd, and for one glorious chorus I was jumping on an invisible trampoline under the outstretched hand of Our Leader while we all screamed "STOCKBROKERS KILLED YOUR HEROES!" at the top of our lungs. I require this ritual as often as possible to maintain my sanity in a world in which increasing numbers of people give up on art, anarchy and hedonism and choose law school, liberalism and suburbia.

The show they played last night was on very short notice and yet they packed the house. In New York they always do. This band isn't really a band so much as a cult, which is why I've been to more shows than I can count and there are some people who go to every single show, even the ones in Germany. "I was worried about this show," said Our Leader. "I myself only heard about it four days ago." No matter. We, the legions of this band, check the band's website several times weekly to ensure that we never miss a show. They could announce a show fifteen minutes from now and pack the house.

Since this behavior is youthful and obsessive, many of the band's other fans are teenagers. I accept and applaud this. I work with teenagers, I am allied with teenagers, I respect and share their lack of perspective and sense of rage toward any form of authority. I like teenagers because none of them are lawyers or CEOs and all of them take their passions very seriously. This band is a punk-ska-cabaret orchestra devoted to the goal of International Smashism and I understand this. It is what makes their music so internationally smashing. But the combination of the teenagers and the punk music leads to an inevitable consequence--the moshing.

In theory, I am very pro-moshing. Chaos! Abandon! The freedom of The Body! Yes! Yes! In practice, however, I am getting old. Sometimes I want to stand up close, hear the music, see the players, smell the sweat, dance wildly and not worry that a sweaty two-hundred pound teenager in his underpants is going jump on me from a height.

I know I have no right to be close to the music if I am not willing to earn this privilege by putting my body in harm's way. This is punk rock. Most of the time, I do not fear the mosh pit. It is a vigorous but caring mosh pit. For all my worrying, I haven't sustained that many injuries in the mosh pit. I've actually hurt myself worse when there's been enough space beyond the pit to really dance without the body-slamming. It turns out that my dancing style is so spastic and fast-moving that I can throw out my own neck. The mob actually reigns me in.

Having survived my brief foray into the pit last night in body if not in hoisery, I woke up this afternoon to putter around the house a bit. I climbed up on the edge of the bathtub to readjust the shower curtain. Balanced on the hard porcelain with only the unsteady shower rod to hold on to, I realized I was in a precarious position. I could fall and crack my head open on the tile. (Why did our parents always use the phrase "crack your head open" when warning us about dangerous things? It's so vivid and awful. They always said, "Get down from there before you crack your head open!") But I'm an adult now and it's up to me to stop myself from cracking my head open. Is that why I'm sometimes wary of the mosh pit?

I didn't fall and crack my head open on the tile. Instead, on my way out of the bathroom I walked smack into the door, earning a nice bruise on my right eye. I'm waiting to see if it becomes a shiner. If it does, I'll have to choose between the phrase "you should see the other guy" and more risky and unfunny jokes about domestic abuse. All that worry about the naked sweaty teenagers and their flailing limbs, and I give myself a black eye in my own bathroom.

The black eye is of no concern to me. It will heal. It's the hole in my tights I'm a little sad about. If I were a woman having an illicit affair in some repressed, bygone era, I'm sure the hole would be a source of great erotic fascination for my lover. But here and now it's just an unseemly hole in my new crocheted tights, or, if you look at it another way, a souvenir from the mosh pit.

Battered but not broken, I persevered into Saturday. I puttered, I bought some groceries. I was a little hungover and not really interested in food, but I knew I should eat so I could go to yoga class. You have to eat at the right time so you're not too full in yoga class, but not so hungry that your stomach is growling and you are not thinking about metaphorical emptiness but instead suffering from physical emptiness. I couldn't bring myself to eat and consequently found myself ravenously hungry ten minutes before yoga class was supposed to start, as I was leaving the post office, where I had spent half an hour trying to mail some packages.

I try to see ineptitude on the part of workers as a form of resistence to capitalism and a sign of its imminent collapse, but in the case of postal workers, it really gets on my nerves. I happen to think that delivering the mail is a sacred occupation. The slogan "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" gives me chills, especially the "gloom of night" part. Given my exalted view of the postal service, the actual members thereof tend to let me down. Today was no exception. At the end of our agonizingly slow transaction, the guy who mailed my packages held onto my change for several minutes while he debated his break schedule with two of his co-workers. Then he looked down and realized that he had miscounted my change. Then he slowly, slowly shuffled off to get some quarters. On the way back to his window, he had some kind of revelation and stopped to tell his co-worker about it. The whole time the customer at the next window was yelling, "Please speak up! I don't hear so good! Please speak up! I don't hear so good!" It was a typical trip to the post office.

I came out of the post office with a dilemma. I was really, really hungry but I hadn't been to yoga in three days. Did I say fuck yoga and go get a sandwich? Or did I suffer through what I know from experience could be an hour and a half of teeth-gritted hunger in which I salivated for a sandwich while making little progress toward enlightenment? I stormed up and down the block, making and unmaking the decision. We all know how it works with any kind of regular physical exercise. There's always an excuse, and if you give into it, the whole thing falls apart. On the other hand, it is really painful to be trapped on a rubber mat stretching and breathing when you haven't eaten in nearly 24 hours and all you can think about is food.

No, I decided, I'm going to yoga and that's it. You have to commit to the practice. I'll feel better afterwards. Besides jumping up and down screaming "STOCKBROKERS KILLED YOUR HEROES!", yoga is the other thing that may or may not be keeping me sane.

I marched off toward yoga, mumbling to myself about self-discipline and focus and "the practice." As I neared the yoga center, I suddenly had a thought. I had planned on going to yoga, there was no way out of this. In an anarchist society we all make our own laws. No one will force us to do anything, and so we are responsible to make things happen. I don't have to go practically anywhere or do practically anything. This is a freedom and concurrent responsibility most people don't want precisely because they fear they would never get anything done. I have taken it on, to show that it can be done, that you can be free without being lazy, the laziness is an evil borne of forced labor. I have taken it on not so much out of a desire to prove something but out of necessity, since if I were in an office building all day I would throw myself out the window, which is why in many office buildings, the windows don't open. Therefore, it is incumbent upon me not to be lazy and not to fall apart completely since there is no boss and no law that I recognize to keep me in line. And it all starts with attending the yoga classes which I intend to attend. But my thought was this: what if they were having some kind of party or workshop at the yoga center today? What if it was closed, if the class was cancelled? Then I could have my sandwich. I would have had the intention of going to yoga class. I realized that this was a sneaky way to evade the responsibility of existential freedom, but I didn't care. I really wanted the sandiwch.

I approached the yoga center and found the usually empty room deocrated with streamers and paper lanterns. The yoga center was having a Chinese New Year party and class was cancelled. My wish had come true! Guilty and relieved, I skipped off for my panini.

After my panini, I felt much better. I realized my postal rage and yoga indecision had been a result of low blood sugar. It was a beautiful afternoon, unseasonably warm and breezy. I walked around, puttering in the neighborhood the same way I putter in my apartment, absently touching scarves and book covers, contemplating eating a large chocolate chip cookie. The L train is out this weekend and we are all trapped in Williamsburg with our overpriced vintage clothing and our panini. Not a bad place to be while we all wait to die of the avian flu.

I decided I would like that chocolate chip cookie after all. I decided to spend the waning daylight hours outside, since in winter my exposure to sun is so limited that it might cause seasonal depression, to go with my undiagnosed adult ADD, subclinical OCD and what I think is a mild case of manic-depression. I headed off toward the coffeeshop with the large chocolate chip cookies, whistling my way up and down quiet, battered side streets that are waiting to die of a redevelopment project.

I was whistling this little song, making it up as I went along, and somehow it became a round and I could not get to the end. Every time I thought it might end there was instead a key change or some kind of musical ellipsis and it would pick back up again. I was walking and whistling quite pleasantly in time and couldn't very well stop moving until the song was done. Each time a new movement of my tune began, I would walk another block out of my way. The tune was jazzy, a kind of ragtime (the best thing to whistle) and soon I was swinging in time to it. There was no one around on the streets zoned for redevelopment and I was free to conduct myself, pointing at imaginary members of my imaginary orchestra as my song reached ever greater crescendos.

After a while, I found myself at the waterfront. The sun was just about setting and I picked my way through some junk and broken glass to get to the sordid beach where the entire skyline spreads out before acres of unused real estate just waiting to be inhabited by lawyers and stockbrokers. I gathered my coat around me and sat down on a large concrete slab to enjoy the show. The sound of the East River lapping at my concrete slab put me in a kind of trance. Looking out at the city as the color drained away, I felt an exquisite lonliness. I could see so much of the world, so many lights on so many cars and in so many windows, but somehow by seeing it all at once I felt further from it. I couldn't really fathom that each of those lights was a person, whistling a meaningless tune that never ended, that no one else would ever hear.

...Or, Writer's Block, College Admissions, Migraine Headaches and The Music Indsutry

1:00 a.m. Give up on the words that are blurring in front of me. Give up on the simple words I've tried to read and write to coax myself into reading and writing more complicated ones. Give in to desire for martini that's been nagging for the better part of an hour. Remember one time something was due and unwritten that I drank a martini and magically wrote it in an hour. Decide a martini is the way to go. Martini will evaporate crippling anxiety that is preventing writing of any kind.

1:04 a.m. Mix martini and sit on floor of hallway that connects my room to R.'s, loosening brain and tongue with idle conversation as we have been doing for the last thirteen years.

3:30 a.m. One and a half martinis and half a bagel with cream cheese later, crippling anxiety is evaporated, but so is verbal ability. Go to sleep with shades open, to take advantage of sun as alarm clock.

10:40 a.m. Awaken refreshed, normal knot of anxiety in stomach (today is the day I must write magnum opus and solve all financial problems so I do not die of bleeding ulcer or stress-related aneurysm!) pleasantly replaced by slight hangover, in stomach only. Alcohol is murder on the stomach. It must eat the lining away or something.

10:45 a.m. Espresso. Accidentally let the cat out of espresso shop as I open door. The cat is black and it does indeed cross my path.

11:00 Eat other half of last night's bagel with cream cheese, kiwi, orange juice. Refresh yerba mate in gourd I am curing, a gift from R.'s trip to Uruguay. In the last month, I have received both coca tea and yerba mate from South America. Drinking the coca tea constantly and yet sparingly, using each tea bag three times, I have achieved new heights of energy and lost some of the holiday-lethargy bulge. More energy, however, leads to more anxiety and compulsion. By combining my coca tea regimen with a yerba mate regimen, in addition to the daily espresso and nightly green tea, I expect to become super-charged, or have a nervous breakdown.

11:25 a.m. Despite promises to "get immediately to it," become distracted compiling a list of ideal SAT-prep materials for use in imaginary highly regimented and web based SAT tutoring program I have yet to design or implement. Current SAT prep methods consist of going to kids' houses, assigning them sections and problems from old exams while advising them to try carefully calibrated combinations of guessing and skipping to achieve maximum score, and then admonishing them gently but firmly for not doing them, while handing them thrice-Xeroxed New Yorker reviews of WB shows to build their reading stamina with complex sentences, which they actually do read. Future SAT prep methods will involve careful internet surveillence of students using their Instant Messaging handles, personalized high-level reading packets compiled from my Complete New Yorker DVD-ROM set, and complicated charts and graphs of their progress I will generate in Microsoft Excel to impress their parents. These charts and graphs, combined with my resolution to stop wearing t-shirts and ridiculous hats to tutoring appointments, will justify my New Exhorbitant Rates, which will in turn justify my new exhorbitant wardrobe, and new exhorbitant health insurance.

12:00 p.m. Time for my Total Shower. I simply cannot write any essay of any kind until I have had a Total Shower. A total shower involves every product in the bathroom and every part of the body.

12:35 Total Shower is complete. Every part of me has been approrpriately scrubbed and treated, but while acrobatically shaving my legs, I have made a terrible discovery. I have these weird visible veins on the back of my left thigh. They aren't, like, sticking out (God forbid!), but they are kind of purplish-reddish, like the veins on an alcoholic's nose. I believe they are called "spider veins." My mom has them on her otherwise unchanged-since-the-age-of-30 legs, but I thought they were from pregnancy or some other bodily trauma one can inflict upon oneself when one is done being young. I didn't know they could just sneak up on me like this! I'm not done being young! Are they from crossing my legs? Walking? Thinking evil thoughts? Oh, God. This is so horrible. I don't want to age. I don't want to die. Is there an afterlife? Then how come nobody ever, ever contacts us from it? We say we can feel people from the afterlife, but really, it's pretty vague. I've dreamt of dead people, but isn't that just me imagining them? Why is the barrier so impenetrable between this life and the next? Or is it more permeable than we think? I haven't felt its permeability in so long, but then, I haven't taken any hallucinogens in so long, either. Or maybe I should just meditate more, and then I will know the afterlife without the anxiety or nausea. But maybe it's all that cross-legged meditating that gave me these spider veins in the first place, which are now giving me this existential anxiety and fear of death. What is the problem and what is the solution? Sometimes it's very hard to tell.

12:40 p.m. Resolve to wear mascara every day.

1:00 p.m. Write other things (like this meditation on my own neurosis), besides the things I'm supposed to be writing (meditations on our society's neurosis).

1:25 p.m. Lunchtime. Reheat gingered kale and tofu from last night, with some leftover polenta and avocado. Soak some feta in olive oil and enjoy with walnuts. Finish off with a grapefruit with some honey and some 78% dark chocolate. Nutritious and delicious!

2:02 p.m. Now that I am fed, washed, clothes and twice-caffienated, now I can get right down to it.

2:03 p.m. Google "adult undiagnosed ADD".

3:37 p.m. It occurs to me that I am drowning in words. Words are the building blocks of my whole existence. I write to live and live to write. My whole life is built around reading and writing, carving out the time to do it, entering the world through it. I carry a notebook everywhere I go. As soon as a student is engrossed in a math problem, I open it, write in it. Something happens and I write it down. I overhear an amusing conversation and I write it down. My walks in the city are organized by the locations of bookstores. I can hit two or three in one day. I keep meticulous lists of books I've read, books I'm going to read, books I want to buy, books I've lost and need to replace. My most frequent recurring nightmare is that I'm in a bookstore and I'm going blind. My mother says that when I was a kid she'd have to drag me across the street because I'd be reading a scrap of newspaper floating in a puddle. If I sit down to eat alone, it's always with reading material propped in front of me. I don't leave the house without something to read. I don't go to the bathroom without something to read. I've had glasses since I was eight and been legally blind in both eyes since I was ten, and still I squint away for hours a day at tiny letters on a page.

The world is kind to my addiction. Bibliophiles enjoy an exalted status, far above movie lovers or videogame afficionados. There are box book superstores to oblige our every whim, internet book-shipping services awaiting our orders. (It is my most treasured dream that I will one day be solvent enough to sign up for "Amazon 1-click," and no longer have to compulsively rearrange the items in my shopping cart to fit my budget. Instead, I will click once and books will arrive at my doorstep.) The Brooklyn Public Library allows me to demand that any book be sent to the local branch library across the street, sends me emails when they arrive. There is a row of fifty books behind this very computer, a floor-to-ceiling bookcase filled with fiction, a hundred or more academic books stacked on the floor and more than a dozen books I'm "currently reading" piled on the nightstand. And that doesn't include the weekly allotment of the New Yorker, the Sunday Times, Harper's and various sundry periodicals. Not to mention the not-exactly-printed words of the internet, the endless Googling, the information gluttony of Wikipedia, the articles and essays and columns and stories and of course, the blogs.

No wonder I feel as if I'm always behind on my reading.

And there's no reason for me to even read, because if I'm not reading, I'm writing. I could be marooned on a desert island and not lack for reading material, as I could scratch notes in the sand with a stick in the morning and read them over in the afternoon until the tide came to wash them away. "I think that howler monkey hates me. This coconut reminds me of a feeling of lonliness I had as a child. Essay (?) Collapsed dichotomy: the fantasy of escape and the nightmare of abandonment. Silliness of palm trees." I make notes, I write things down, and so, too, am I always behind on my writing.

I don't mean for you to think that I'm well-informed, or knowledgeable, or that my vast amount of reading material is anything I'm proud of. Quite the opposite. I'm an addict. My eyes must flick from left to right across and eight-inch page, my brain must fill with words, and these words must come out in a different order on another page, or I will cease to exist. Or maybe it's the other way around? Maybe I am not devouring the words, maybe the words are not so much my fuel as I am theirs.

No wonder I am so bad at meditating. No wonder I have spider veins.

4:35 p.m. Some of the people you used to know can be found immediately on the internet, and some of them cannot.

4:55 p.m. Is ten minutes to five the time I told myself I should leave to arrive in the West Village at 5:30, or the time I should start to leave? Is that the clock I set five minutes fast so I would be tricked into being on time? Or five minutes slow so I would be so paranoid about being late I'd be tricked into assuming the clock is ten minutes slow? Am I early? Am I late? What is time?

5:30 p.m. My student, a shy, serious, awkward eleventh-grader with radical politics and an oddly formal way about his speaking and writing, has decided he wishes to attend a very prestigious university. For some reason, his test scores are quite low and belie his actually extremely collegiete intellect and manner. Possible reasons for this include that he doesn't really study, doesn't listen to me when I explain how to do things, might have some undiagnosed visual or auditory processing disorder (not to be confused with obstinate laziness), or in typical teenaged fashion, is so mortified that this arcane skill does not come easily to him that he has yet to admit to himself that he actually needs to study. I try to gently explain to a student that you can only go to very prestigious universities if you are a huge, giant, superhuman, perfectionistic-to-the-point-of-being-suicidal grademonger with near-perfect SATs, and he, both fortunately and unfortunately, is not.

The college admissions process has become subject to a horrible form of inflation in both competitiveness and capital. Schools that were safety schools of elite students ten years ago when I was applying are now "reaches" for those students. The cost of tuition has nosed up from $30,000 a year to $40,000. I work for families with college funds squirrelled away somewhere, families willing and able to provide their kids with $160,000 educations. Most of the kids I work with are average-to-above average students. Having been one of those perfectionistic, nearly-suicidal grademongers myself, having gone to one of those impossible, expensive schools (a complicated experience as a result of which yes, minds were opened, and yes, doors have opened, but wasn't worth the enormous cost of anxiety, money and what I now realize could have been my childhood), I assume that there are plenty of colleges to attend if you are not the snot-nose I was. There aren't. The minimum score on the SATs is 200 in one section. The maximum score is 800. That would make the middle around 500. If you get a 500 on every section of the SAT and you come from New York City, your choices are severely limited. Your parents will be hard-pressed to find a satisfactory school they can pay $160,000 to send you to, where you can drink on their dime for four years.

That's where I come in. I'm supposed to motivate (that means, wheedle, cajole, force, frighten, sweet-talk and otherwise maniuplate) resistent teenagers into working their asses off toward a vague goal they have little interest in achieving. Oh, they want to go to fancy colleges and are hurt and angry that it's not an easy road. But they don't want to be who they need to be to get in, which is not exactly a well-rounded scholar-athelete who cares about the world. It's a sniveling, antisocial perfectionist who stays in Friday night learning obscure vocabulary words, who is also a well-rounded scholar-athelete who gives the impression of caring about the world.

I know it's not like this everywhere. I know New York City is a sick, competitive bubble where people fight like dogs for commodities--restaurant reservations, movie seats, spouses--that are readily obtainable elsewhere. It's only because New York City is what it is that I can live here. It's most ironic, really. It's the worry, anxiety and ruthless competition that I so bemoan, and it's the worry, anxiety and ruthless competition that makes my life possible. In a city where most people struggle more than any other, I can survive (and by survive I mean share a 500-square-foot apartment with one other person by turning the living room into her bedroom and keeping a couch in mine) and some months even thrive (and by thrive I mean go out to dinner and save several hundred dollars at a time) here like the parasite I am when anywhere else I'd be a financially dead little social pathogen. I'm like a weird species that can only live in the climate of New York City. Anywhere else I'd be working 40 hours a week, making phone calls at the command of a middle-aged parent of two. Only in New York are parents so terrified of failure--their own and their child's--that they will pay me as much as they do without batting an eye. The price I pay is that I'm doomed to repeat my high school experience over and over and over again. It's like a horrible nightmare in which I'm forced to use average-scoring proxies to try to reproduce my own freakish test results.

The joke is, all of these so-called "average" students are really quite brilliant. They have interesting things to say about almost everything. The SAT doesn't measure this, doesn't really measure anything except if you can be frightened into paying attention to something boring for 3 hours and 45 minutes, which, come to think of it, is a perfect prerequisite for life maybe not in, but after college. It's almost like a lottery, because there has to be some way to pick out a fraction of an applicant pool to receive the honor of buying a piece of paper for the cost of a medium-sized house.

7:10 Leave tutoring unusually exhausted. Why should these teenagers listen to me? Why should they work so hard at something that doesn't come easily to them, that they don't love? Why shouldn't they bubble in their answer sheets so they spell out "FUCK YOU"? If I had it to do over again, I'd probably do that. And then I find myself unfairly agitated with them, agitated that they expect to reap rewards for work they're too lazy to do. There is something about resenting teenagers tied up in the American consciousness. There is no more villified, fetishized demographic on earth than the American teenager. Most days I have endless empathy and patience, I am their ally, the good fairy on their shoulders, the life coach they both hate and love and somewhat trust. But on bad days I am annoyed, I think horrifying, adult thoughts. "Life is tough! Get used to it! It's not all fun and games! Life is work!"

7:30 p.m. I have a full-on migrane headache. It feels as if a stake is being driven into my right eye, another into my right temple and a third into the bump on the right side at the base of my skull. They meet together at an intersecting point in my brain and that point is the epicenter of al pain in the universe.

So I go to a loud rock and roll show.

My brother's friend, who became my friend when we all took a road trip in Northern California together in the summer of 2003, has started a band. In addition to starting a band, he has started a record label and a distribution company. I'm not quite sure of all the details, but in a Dave Eggers/McSweeney's-esque way he has begun a process of self-promotion that could, if all goes well, end in personal success and indie art-promotion bliss. He is independently wealthy and has been able to make his band's first record with a number of trappings unavailable to first-time bands, like producers and unlimited studio time and dramatic hirings and firings of drummers.

This evening the record label (which is really just the band) is holding a showcase in a recording studio somewhere in Chelsea. In a black box of a room, they are playing to several dozen people, a mix of hipsters and the middle-aged men who try to discern what they like.

Genre descriptions mean nothing to me, but if I were to take a stab, I'd say they sound like U2, but less anthemic. Like Pink Floyd, but more energetic. Like Led Zepplin, but coming down from acid. I don't know. They are loud. They are fast. The songs are long. I hear that on their album there are more electronic elements, but in person, they are a rock and roll band. Music is so entropic these days I'm almost terrified to say anything about it. I listen to things people put on and either I feel like having an orgasmic crying jag, jumping off a bridge, plugging my ears or continuing to read The New Yorker. I love music, I love rock and roll, I believe that music, especially live music, is the most powerful tool of emotion and liberation available to us and anyone who lets music take a secondary position in their life has let living take a secondary position in their life, but I hesitate to engage with music beyond the momentary experience of listening to it. Reading and writing about music is incredibly boring and unsatisfying to me. Reading and writing about what happens where music is played and among people who play it is another story, but finding the exact combination of [other band's name] on [drug] to describe something new depresses me.

From what I could hear through my migrane stupor, the band was radio-ready. But what interested me the most were the two videos they had made, which were projected on a screen after their set. The front man of the band knows several people in the movie industry, including a girl I once met a paella party he threw, who shot the two videos. This girl is no joke. She has shot for this band two full-length totally professional MTV-ready videos, one of which stars Domonique Swain, a bonafide movie actress (she played Lolita in the contreversial remake of Lolita). She is also someone's friend's cousin.

What fascinated me about these videos is that they were perfect executions of the entire vocabulary of the music video. The band plays unplugged instruments in a desert while the camera pans in full 360. The band is frozen in time while a single leaf continues to blow. Domonique Swain, a little older and less Lolita-like, is nonetheless dressed in sexy-girly clothes and flirts with the bandmemebers, an intergalatic group of space travellers who stop off at a desert supermarket to buy milk. They take Domonique Swain onto their spaceship. A painfully beautiful girl swings on a swing inside a jail cell. There are naked dancers. There are white feathers. There are strange syncopations of time with music. I'm not sure I even watched these videos with sound, and yet they had a rhythm and sound in their images.

I was never a watcher of music videos. Most of the bands I liked didn't have them. And so I still regard them with a mix of illiteracy and enthrallment. They are, as far as I can see, pure fetishism. They are fashion layouts come to life. Leaving aside the beautiful girls, the naked male dancers, and the almost secondary images of the band themselves, whaling on instruments connected to nothing, I am still transfixed by lurid perfection of the inanimate objects in every image of the video. The milk that the intergalatic spacemen/bandmembers buy is perfect milk, and they take it from the shelf of a perfect refrigerator, which is lit in perfect, greenish, dream-supermarket light. The leaves that blow away from the ground to reveal a beautiful girl (or do they reveal dust?) are perfect leaves. The feathers on the skirt of the girl on the swing in the jail cell are perfectly white and perfectly soft-focused.

I predict their album will sell.

Am I the only person on the internet who uses a serif font?

My own personal War on Christmas has been reprinted at Mr. Beller's Neighborhood.

For a slightly less thrilling fracas than the last one, my latest Huffington Post, "A Patriot (At Gunpoint)" is here.

Comments, as always, are amusing. Some wish to spit in my face. Some wish to take up arms to defend my right to provoke them to spit in my face by writing about their desire to spit in my face or coerce me with arms. Others wish to take up arms against those who would take up arms to defend their right to spit in my face for not appreciating the sacrifices they would make for me by taking up arms.

This kind of internet hyperbole is a luxury. The people who write about how thankful I should be that someone is taking up arms are not the ones taking up the arms. The father of one of my students leaves tomorrow for his second tour of duty in the Sunni Triangle. His daughter, Amber, is smart, adorable and nine years old. I didn't ask if he would spit in my face if he knew I didn't stand for the flag. I didn't ask if he was taking his gun to Iraq for me, or for his daughter, or just to pay the bills. I hope, for Amber's sake, that he comes back soon and whole.

It's hard being a neurotic ecstatic, because while you are dancing wildly in the shower you are bothered by the faint but nagging fear that you could slip, hit your head on the tile and drown in two inches of water. Persuing a state of ecstasy involves striking a fine balance between abandon and self-preservation.

I'm currently coming down from a spectacular high on my favorite drug, caffiene. All my life I've been searching for the perfect chemistry, tinkering crudely with this neurotransmitter and that one to achieve a few fleeting moments akin to a state of grace. I make the odd lucky discovery, but repeating my experiments usually introduces too many variables. Doing conscioiusness research on yourself is inconvenient science, with the added insult to scientific intergrity that the observer and the observed are one and the same. Still, I persevere, hoping to make some small discovery of use to humankind before I take some clumsy misstep and am culled from its ranks.

Today's happy accident yielded some interesting observations. It wasn't just the caffiene that produced my state of shower ecstasy. It was my empty stomach, which is returning to normal size after the holiday gorging. It was the promise of Monday morning, of a new, clean week, the first one in a long time free of holiday interruptions. It was the unseasonable weather. It was the comedy that unfolded as I drank my espresso at the Mafia-run coffeeshop.

A tall, bald gentleman of about sixty is drinking his espresso when one of the cafe proprietors enters from offstage. "Do you know what your nephew wrote on my bill?" booms the tall man.

"Which newphew?" says the cafe proprietor.

"Biag." I deduce that he means Biaggo, one of the younger guys who works in the family business. "Look at this." He takes out a folded invoice for $1653.00, the total re-written in pencil large enough for me to read and circled emphatically. "He says, 'Take off $600 to get John a hairpiece.' Do you believe that?" He guffaws loudly. The uncle howls. The girl behind the counter titters. The bald man grabs the uncle mightily and hugs him, slapping his back, their deep laughter echoing in the marble interior of the store. I exit to the smacking noise of a benignly lecherous kiss blown at my back by the man who holds the door. "Let the lady by," he admonishes his companion, "let the lady by." The lady is wearing her glasses, askew on her face, a men's undershirt, a floor-length sheepskin coat and wool clog slippers that she doesn't so much wear as kick ahead of her with every step. She thanks the man who holds the door, makes a gesture somewhere between a nod and a curtsey.

How did it all come together? Was it the bemusement of seeing something so cinematic and yet real unfold before my eyes? The satisfcation in being an extra in one of the rare moments when life imitates art? Ever since I was a kid made nervous by social gatherings, I told myself I was an observer, and this somehow allowed me to participate. I'd narrate the story of what I saw to myself, and only by writing myself into it could I become an actor. This process has become so seamless that I no longer notice a gap between observation and experience, between living moments and storing them away to try to live a second time in the telling. I'm sometimes perturbed by the inevitable self-absorption of the act of creation, looking outward into the world to record what is there and then inward to see how it's come out. The phrase "tortured artist" has become quaint, but it is torture to sense that you have witnessed some beautiful truth or told yourself an even more beautiful lie and to try to get it out of you intact and whole to share with others. Everyone from Jesus to Freud has tried to articulate the simoultaneous shame and excitement in the idea that we conceal in our bodies and minds some secret that if we exposed it to the world might be extraordinary, but might also be grotesque.

The secret of what is inside of us has always fascinated me. Things go into our bodies and come out looking very different, but overall, we get so little evidence of what's really going on within them. I keep an X-ray of my own chest on a light box in a gilt frame on an easel in my bedroom, but this does little to convince me that I am filled with something other than stuffing and tubing that gurgles. So naturally I was very curious to see the exhibit called "Bodies," where 22 real human bodies have been, "carefully preserved and repectfully displayed."

It's somewhat contreversial. Some people say that the bodies weren't all donated to science, that they are not, as the exhibitors say, unclaimed bodies from fishing accidents. There are rumors that the bodies are in fact those of executed Chinese prisoners. There is debate about whether the way they are displayed is respectful. Respectful to what, I wonder? Respectful to life? To death? To the organic matter we are made of? Showing respect for a dead body is nice, but I think in our society we are showing too little respect for live ones.

The exhibit itself was strangely shady. It seemed to come from nowhere. There was no list of corporate sponsors, no posters for upcoming shows. Upon entry to the exhibit, my brother and I were approached by a fellow in a black shirt with the logo of the exhibition embroidered on it. "Hey hey," he muttered out of the side of his mouth, as if he were wearing a trench coat full of watches. "Wanna get five dollars off?" He gave us coupons and directed us to the ticket window. "You got these outside, right? You got these outside."

"We got these outside," we told the lady in the ticket window. She gave us five dollars off. The man with the coupons reappeared as we boarded the escalator. "Did you get the five dollars off? You did, right? I take care of my people," he said proudly. Was he with the exhibition? Was he not? Why were his coupons a secret and if they were such a secret, why were they so readily accepted? It made no sense.

Inside the exhibit, the air of mystery intensified. The walls and ceilings were black, and except for the spotlights on the bodies themselves, the lights were dim. It felt a bit like the set of the Charlie Rose show--a small, lit area in the midst of an abyss.

I was contemplating a skinless body poised to shoot a basketball when I felt a faint rustling behind me. A young custodian emerged from the pitch blackness in a nearby corner, and our eyes met. After the glassy eyes of the displayed body, the living gaze of the janitor was a warm relief. He disappeared again to sweep the carpeting in another unlit corner.

There was just so much flesh, so much interiority, it was hard to process. The whole time my brother and I were chatting, ruminating, wondering, like we always do, but it was surreal. There was no way to deal with it. Either you focused on how the bodies were actual humans who had been alive, had walked and talked and were now dead and had been dissected, had been carefully preserved and respectually displayed, and you felt nauseous and terrified that you would one day be dead, you would one day be so dead you wouldn't feel someone cutting off all your skin and flaying your muscles and putting your digestive system on display, or you didn't. And if you didn't then it was all just so much meat, so much matter, so much flesh.

If the bodies truly are the casualties of fishing accidents, it's most ironic, or appropriate, depending on how you look at it, that they are on display near the former Fulton Fish Market. At the former Fulton Fish Market, a woman named Naima Rauam used to paint the fishmongers. She painted them for years, hauling fish up and down the cobblestoned streets in the dead of night, gutting and washing and selling the fish, sinking their fingers underneath the cold scales, gutting, filleting, flinging. She painted their work clothes, saturated with the stink of stilled aquatic life. She painted the light at a time of day when most people are lying in complete darkness.

The New York Times ran a short piece on how Naima Rauam is negotiating the transfer of the fish market to Hunts Point, in the Bronx. They showed one of her first sketches of the new place, which is huge and sterile and brightly lit, and several of her old paintings, which are dark and dramatic and old. I somewhat wished I could see the paintings of the fish market, smell the stench of so much death, even, instead of these carefully preserved bodies of fishermen. If that's what they were.

New Year's is such a strange holiday, a holiday about one second. A holiday about the impossible incrementalism of time. Still, my heart pounds at any kind of countdown.

We didn't have a countdown this year. We went up on the roof in our matching N3-B parkas with the champagne around 11:55, thinking we'd watch the 2006 arrive in New York City in romantic solitude. But the Scandanavians on the fourth floor were also having a party. I recognized them immediately because I crashed that party last year. I remember a room full of people from countries of which I have only the vaguest awareness--Belgium, Finland and the like. I embarrassed myself by asking them if Belgian is harder to learn than English. There was also a French girl there who referred me to her (French) blog, which I attempted ot read for several days before admitting that I can't really read French, especially the strange tense only used in writing.

Without television or radio, each individual party relies on its own official timepiece. Across the roof, we heard the Scandanavians counting down and whooping, but we were using my cellphone, which has no second counter, and it still read 11:59. We watched it silently, waiting for the moment to appear without fanfare, but some fireworks exploded and we looked up. When we looked back at the screen, it was already 2006 in the innacurate time zone of our own arbitrary adherence.

After we kissed, we wondered aloud, "How many people who've never kissed before are drunkenly making out right now? How many of them will be kissing next New Year's Eve?"

A wise man once welcomed in a year not too long gone by shouting, "New year! New mistakes! New friends! New enemies!" and this is what I wish us all in this very new year called 2006.