infinite east williamsburg

The next several weeks at work are going to be rough but it feels good to all be in it together and collectively freaking out. Today everybody on the team was in the office and there was such a strong atmosphere of camaraderie that it made the situation feel not so bad and a little fun. During meetings we joked around with each other with our mics muted, and Eric made a meme using the shot in Memento with the polaroid that says "Don't trust his lies." Alex and I gaped at each other and burst out laughing when a manager made a passive aggressive retort at the person running the meeting. "I'm in the kitchen," Mike slacked us. "We're in a war," Alex responded. This morning I woke up like in the Norm Macdonald joke about the moth--"I wake up in a malaise"--except the primary feeling was stress and the malaise was coming from knowing this is how I'll be waking up for the next couple weeks. Katie observed it perfectly yesterday, "waking up with an elevated heart rate," and I haven't felt this way since college. Monday morning I was so sleepy in the office and tried to gently hype myself up with a mix of cold brew and Talking Heads (as opposed to peak bpm techno, which was too aggro for 10am and which I wanted to save for 11pm). It was my first time going home from work and immediately logging back on, working straight until midnight with almost no breaks. My room is a mess, I really need to clean and run errands this weekend. When I was in SF sitting at Juhi's dining table I had a couple moments where I thought, I can't believe this is my life, I can't believe I'm here right now. I got that same feeling of when I was in Hawaii and felt terrible without understanding why--I wasn't unhappy, I just felt so far from any reasonable understanding of reality, on a vacation I'd spontaneously agreed to and had barely thought about in the four months between when I'd bought my plane tickets and my flight. Trapped wasn't the right word, and dissociated didn't feel extreme or specific enough. Maybe I've been doing too much in the past couple months, too much traveling between extreme settings and too little alone/reset time in the couple weeks I spent in NYC in between, and it culminated in me feeling impotent and disembodied while playing Dominion with Jeffrey and Reed at 5pm on a Wednesday after two hours of playing it on my laptop against two bots. Saturday night I had one of the best nights of my life. I don't know how much weight this statement can hold given that I can't even remember where I've been going out in the past six months besides Good Room and the occasional Nowadays/PR jaunt. For most of Sunday I was afraid the whole experience might lose its weight and float away, but this morning I continued to think back on those magical hours between 11pm and 6:30am, how serendipitous it was that everything which fell into place felt like a culmination of the past six months of my life, just after I'd been reflecting on the excitement of the fall. While I was at dinner with Xander, I was clued in that I might be seeing the LOML* that night and I died right there and Xander watched patiently while my giddiness rose then subsided. Seeing him was even better than I imagined; during that night and through Sunday I thought I might have been making up what I felt was transpiring between us but, reflecting on it this morning, I think it was real. I want to be careful about keeping this person in the LOML category rather than getting invested enough to have them pass into crush (read: bad, painful) category, so I'm going to try not to think about it anymore until I potentially see him again. Between Nightmoves and Nowadays I told the group in the Uber XL about "infinite Pennsylvania" and how it felt like we were in "infinite East Williamsburg." Teddy kept changing the song just as soon as we had listened to enough of the song to start anticipating the beat switch. At Nowadays there was a moment where I was worried the non-ticketed half of our group wouldn't make it inside because of the line, and it felt touch and go for a moment, I was so anxious that they would leave while we were inside that I kept leaving the dance floor to use my phone to text them. Robby and I talked about the ocean, and I told him about those pure ten minutes I spent at Ocean Beach with Jon and Juhi.The dawn light made the clouds appear milky, like gossamer, the kind of colors you see in an American landscape oil painting from the 1800s. I felt some awe watching the Manhattan skyline as my Uber driver Cesar and I crossed the Williamsburg bridge, the mix of brick and skyscraper glowing in the orange early morning light, thinking of Betsy and "drive into New York with me." A sense of homecoming welled up within me as we drove through the Lower East Side and Soho, mostly still deserted. I turned the faucet up all the way and stood shivering as the scalding water turned my skin red but I remained chilled, my teeth chattering as I got into bed, insufficiently toweled off. Xander and I are going to make a zine about LOMLs vs. crushes vs. fun situations vs. unfun entanglements, let us know if you would like to get involved. * For a brief explanation of LOML and its connotations, see: http://www.moodring.nyc/post/140