One week in between days. My darling apartment, I inhabit you lavishly. I’m back in New York for a week before I go on The Road again for two, and here is what is happening.

Things change in a Manhattan neighborhood in 1.5 weeks time. The building, the multi-trillion dollar behemoth outside the window, continues its ascent. There is a new Whole Foods down the block and it is a sight to behold. The fanciest, prettiest, most exciting supermarket. If you like exciting supermarkets. Or you believe supermarkets have the power to excite. There’s this sushi bar that involves a little conveyor belt from which you pluck color-coded plates of sushi and dim sum as they whiz past. There’s an actual bridge on the second level that leads to the healthy living gift shop where there’s a ton of crap no one needs like fancy yoga bags and scented candles. And those padded wine gift bags that are everywhere and baffling and look like gore-tex jackets. Do you know what I mean? Maybe I can find a photo.

You know what I mean.

I have started to consider two lives and how to stock them: my real life, and my suitcase. If I change moisturizers in my real life, then I need to change moisturizers in my suitcase. If I wear those boots from my suitcase in my real life, I have to remember to put them back in the suitcase when I’m done. I am laundering and dry cleaning every second I am home. I am calling airlines and trying to get window seats because I live in fear of ending up in an aisle.

I have developed a burgeoning mug-buying habit. I have a fervent desire to get rid of all the crappy mugs I have and drink my tea only from high-quality mugs that are either attractive or have sentimental value. I totally uncharacteristically bought a weird mug in Texas, and since then I’m on the lookout for mugs. This is like those people who buy little silver spoons or tea towels in every city they travel to. I wonder if I’m trying to manufacture sentimentality, to take a mass-produced piece of place back from each of my stops. Mugs?! Once, while in NYC, Peter O. gave me a beautiful mug from the International Center for Photography. “Here, I got you something.” The look on his face was one of regret, like he really didn’t want to part with the mug. “This is such a beautiful mug!” I said. Then, seeing his face. “Do you want it?” He snatched it back and admitted he really wanted it. He collects nice mugs. It’s become something of a joke between us, how he ungifted the mug to me. But since then I’ve been meaning to stop by ICP and get myself the mug. And now that I’m becoming a mug person too (HELP! SOON I’LL BE COLLECTING MAGNETS!), it’s even more crucial.

This is the ICP mug. It’s pretty good looking.

Last night there was loud, loud music sort of permeating the neighborhood. This was totally separate from the construction situation. I was reading in bed around 2 and “Idiotheque” by Radiohead came on. Instead of being annoyed, I tried to imagine what it would be like if I lived somewhere where lullabies were broadcast on a PA system every night. That would be weird. Kind of like a cult compound. I love that Radiohead song though. “Everything all of the time.” My old friend Ken C. and I, when we used to work soul-deadening office jobs, would get on Instant Messenger, start “Idiotheque” at exactly the same time on WinAmp (this was pre-iTunes, my pets) and type the lyrics to each other while we blasted the song on our headphones. This reminds me of when I’d call a friend in grade school and we’d try to get our Madonna cassettes to start at exactly the same second, the desire to be listening to music with someone and have the same experience, the same response, at the exact same moment, even though you’re not in the same place.

It now occurs to me that Ken, Sandra and I used to all get in one Instant Messenger chat room and do the same thing with George Michael’s “Freedom ‘90.” Three people, three offices, all blasting George Michael on headphone and furiously typing the lyrics. Dorky. Exhilarating and also supremely dorky.

So there’s noise. Night music and day construction, and a new Whole Foods and an old Trader Joe’s, where I also went today, on my bike, because one other thing that has changed since I was last home is it became spring. I missed the last gasp of frosty winter. Or I hope I did. I’ve been mourning summer’s passing since last October. Not actively, but still. I wonder how they remain so cheerful at Trader Joe’s. I’m sure if you snarl at a customer or get in a tiff with a co-worker they cheerily drag you into the back room and fire you. But no one is uncheerful there. They are constitutionally good-natured and nice and chatty and friendly. And it’s the biggest mess of people clawing for the honey glazed cashews you have ever seen. I couldn’t work there. I can’t even go in there without the iPod. I have to go into my own little cocoon and not come out while I shop at Trader Joe’s, otherwise I might deck someone.

I have never decked anyone. Things to do before you die.

Oh while in Trader Joe’s a song came on my iPod that I hadn’t heard before–”Give It,” by X-Press 2. I don’t know where it came from, a mix someone made? Some free Pitchfork download? It’s the best song I’ve heard in ages. I listened to it a million times in Trader Joe’s. Grind coffee, bend down for soy nuts, say what the hell to a four-pack of Meyer Lemons — “Guess I should give it, give it, give it, a little more tiiiiiime.” Soundtrack for shopping. Where did it come from? I love it.

Some research tells me that it’s a collaboration with Kurt Wagner from Lambchop. I think I’m in the mind of appreciating singles since finishing Love Is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield. I don’t know if I adored the book but it did, as the bookseller in Austin advised it would, make me thing about how every second of your life could have its own soundtrack. In the movie of my life today, I am riding my bike down Bowery in the sun and “Give It” by X-Press 2 is playing. It has lots of different parts, gospel parts, country parts, techno-ish parts…and it’s about as long as a day, too. The song, I mean. It’s long and good.

Am I allowed to post mp3s on my blog?

As you may have guessed, I happen to…HAVE SOME STRONG OPINIONS ABOUT NAIL SALON CLEANLINESS. Namely, they better be hospital sterile, glistening, autoclave clean. We’re talking about feet, lots of people’s feet, their toenails, their foot fungi, some water, some sloughing. I’m getting queasy. It is possible to get a beautiful pedicure in a space that makes you want to notify the board of health.

As I did. Today. With a friend who’d never had a pedicure, so I’d wooed her with promises of feeling reborn, not recognizing her baby soft feet, the spa environment, the pampering, the massage chair, the STERILITY.

Nail salons need to be free of too much crap. Like figurines and knick-knacks and other dust-collecting brick-a-brack rick-rack crap. Because the pedicure experience is a luxurious one. Or should be. I like my lights low, my space uncluttered, my Sounds of the Rainforest didgeridoo/rainstick/tweety-birds music on low. Not fluorescent light, weird framed photographs of hands with painted nails clasping bunches of hundred dollar bills and Ellen blasting on five TVs.

This one defies description. Yes, that says “COLD, HOT & NAILS.”

I get very creeped out by nail art. But I could get over it. If you would make the water in the tub hot enough. If I wasn’t constantly seeing little casual cups of blue water with random tools sticking out of them instead of the Barbi-something situation they have at the hairdresser for the combs that always makes me feel a little more confident I won’t get lice.

My main beef with today’s establishement is they didn’t put flip-flops or some other foot-protecting item on my feet after the pedicure. You know how they always put flip-flops on you, really thin, one-use flip-flops and you pad over to the driers all wonky but at least you’re not walking barefoot where every Lamisil case in town has trod before you? No flip-flops. When I asked for them, the lady pulled them out and told me it was too late and too hard to put the flip-flops on now that she’d polished my toes, I should have told her sooner. I don’t mean to be a prima donna (Or maybe I do? I need to think about this.) but the flip-flops are kind of a big deal.

They are especially a big deal when the floor is soaking wet and everyone keeps slipping and when I point out that it’s gross to walk where everyone else has walked barefoot the lady responds “Don’t worry, we wash the floors once a day.” They are an even bigger deal when the nail dryers are across the room, the room that has wall-to-wall deep-pile carpet that, since everyone’s been padding barefoot on it from the barely-tepid footbaths all day, is damp and swampy. Like marshland carpet full of shaved callous and athlete’s foot. That’s where you’re going to be walking barefoot. That’s the swamp-carpet on which you will rest your feet while under the dryers. Flip-flops. I ask you.

Okay. So my friend is in love with her pedicure, which is a good thing, because it is indeed lovely, and the massage chair was nice and I am still a little sick about the cleanliness thing but I just won’t go back to that place. Can I get a witness?

PS While we’re on the subject, I would like to say that pedicures, in sterile environments, are a very fine treat if you can afford it. There is nothing quite like having your feet scraped and buffed and moisturized. I have very few girly musts, but one is that I not show my mangled jogger’s toenails to the world without a pedicure. I stand by this.

As I’ve mentioned, I went to college in Charlottesville, VA, and attended the Virginia Festival of the Book as a student, so it was slightly surreal to be back in town participating. Friday I made it to Peter’s panel/reading from The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo at the New Dominion Bookstore, which was great. If you ever get the chance to hear Peter Orner read, you should definitely go. He’s funny & charming & engaging.

Saturday, I was on a panel of women writers. It was tremendous to read to a crowd of eager book lovers, to sign books in the UVA bookstore where I once bought textbooks (actually, I’m not sure this bookstore was even built when I was in school here, but it still felt strange and strangely good). I’m proud to report we sold out of the book, which was exhilarating, and the woman who got the last copy told me she had a twentysomething daughter, but was getting the book for her twentysomething son. I was totally thrilled. (PS If you didn’t get a copy of the book, they should have some at the C’ville Barnes & Noble; if you want a signed copy, there will be a new shipment in at the UVA bookstore on Tuesday afternoon and I’ll be going back to sign them. Leave a note with the manager if you want me to make it out to someone special.)

I posted Sunday about my Rivanna Trail run. I met up with Catherine afterwards who brought me the local newspaper, The Daily Progress, featuring a big, fun review of Girl’s Guide which you can no longer read online for some weird reason.

This morning I was on Good Morning, Charlottesville, not to be confused with Good Morning, America. I’m enjoying ferrying myself about in a Chevrolet Malibu. I would make some sort of dumb Malibu Barbie reference, but I have to say, as much as I am thrilled to be driving a rental car, the Malibu is one of vehicle-land’s least attractive rides. I’m sort of amazed it made it off the assembly line. Barbie drove a Corvette. This car is very un-Barbie, but I’m in love with it anyway. It’s gold. Which makes it even more precious.

A Few Minor But Very Important Remarks on Hotels
I’d like to say a few words on hotels, as I’m becoming a seasoned business traveler.

1. I like Omni’s Select Guest Club. Heck, I love any club that doesn’t have rules about keeping people of a certain race out, but I have to love a club that is free to join that has so many perks. Like I get my choice of two beverages brought to my room each morning (I have had coffee and a very posh glass bottle of Evian) at the time of my choice. They will either deliver it or knock and leave it outside the door. I like this treat very much. I also like the turndown service, whereby I arrive in my room to find my ice bucket filled, my bed turned down, the lights down low, a chocolate on my pillow and the TV tuned to the “Meditation” channel.

2. Who decided what to stock the bathrooms with in hotels? I understand shampoo and conditioner, and appreciate body lotion. But I think it would be good if they gave me toothpaste. If we’re talking about necessities, I would forgo the body lotion (and the mouthwash and shower cap and sometimes Q-Tips) for toothpaste. It’s the one toiletry item without which you’re really sunk, that you are going to have to go out and buy if you forgot it.

3. I have gotten very used to two perks of hotel rooms that I don’t have at home: a 500x magnifying mirror that shows every pore on my face and a bathrobe. I think a hotel room without these two things is a slightly inferior hotel room. I like to put on my robe and look at my pores. I mean, who doesn’t?

4. I finally understand those foldable wooden thingies that you’re supposed to put your suitcase on. I use them. I also use the iron and ironing board and I like a tiny bottle of spray starch.

Day 1: Approaching Colorlessness

Austin started grayly. As in it was gray/grey. And I was too. Sort of off. I’d heard how beloved the city is, how much everyone there loves it, how New Yorkers, if they were to move anywhere would move to Austin, Austin has SXSW, Austin is a liberal bastion in the midst of Big Red Tejas, Austin is maneuverable and has good weather and people are both cool and nice. I arrived in the morning, rainy and hot, my clothes were too heavy, I sweatily explored on foot.

This was the view from my window. I called my friend Annie, who was briefly a grad student at the University of Texas, and she directed me to South Congress Street and Barton Springs and all her other favorite sites in Austin. I wandered for hours. I considered taking photos but felt sort of bereft, sort of Here I Am in Austin, What Now, What Now. I was dying to have a blast, this was the city where people have blasts, but having a blast alone in a city without transportation and feeling slightly agitated, it wasn’t happening. I wanted to be of use, I had no immediate obligations and that encroaching you should be writing, you should be having more fun guilt. This sticker was on a telephone pole:

Electrifying. Or something. An outlet. I needed one. I wandered in boutiques, it rained hot Texan rain. I bought colored pencils made out of branches. This is not something I would ever think to buy except when wandering aimlessly in Texas. I looked for someplace authentically Tex-Mex to eat dinner, or drink margaritas, or hear live music. There is the strange beverage they like you to try in Austin called a Mexican Martini. It tasted like a margarita, it came in a very large glass that I was meant to pour into a martini glass that contained olives and that seemed gross. Unlike in Phoenix, my attempt to have a cocktail by myself didn’t seem especially hilarious, it seemed a wee bit depressing. Here is my Mexican Martini. I’m slightly depressed to even be posting this. It’s a sad photo.

I’d like it to be noted that I have not been drinking wildly/depressingly, or really at all, on this tour. I have this secret dream of being an easy fixture at a hotel bar, but it’s so far not proven to be in my nature. I wonder if other authors drink on “The Road.” I like the idea of it, but in practice, drinking alone in strange cities seems best confined to country songs. I love a few country songs. I don’t want to populate one. Is there a country song about a writer in Texas who sips a Mexican Martini at an outdoor bar where the women are wearing a lot of makeup and tee shirts with triple-strands of pearls and she colors in her notebook with little branch pencils then goes back to the hotel? I think we can all agree there should be.

Day Two: Things Get Better

Okay, still a little weirded out, I went to lunch at the hotel restaurant. I tried to capture the melancholy of this hacienda-in-a-Hyatt restaurant, but I’m not sure the photo truly does it justice.

The hostess was very excited that I was taking photos and insisted I get a picture of the longhorn mounted on the wall inside. That’s an antler chandelier. She said if she ever leaves her job, she’ll swing from that chandelier first. I told her she should do it before then. She was my first taste of Super-Friendly Texas. Oh wait, that’s not true. Annissa, who owns Prima Dora, the shop where I got the pencils yesterday, was super-duper nice and pointed out all her favorite spots on the Austin Fun Map. Prima Dora sells cute gifty stuff, pencils made from branches, and tempur-pedic beds. I have no idea.

I got a text message from Grant that said only “Is everything bigger?” and I didn’t understand what he was talking about. I may be the only person on earth who has not heard the expression “Everything Is Bigger in Texas” but after texting back “Why would it be bigger?” my lunch order arrived — fajitas, at the passionate recommendation of my very kind waiter who insisted the Hyatt has the best fajitas in town and so I thought hey why not, let’s have some fajitas, let’s have Austin’s best fajitas. One order of fajitas could have fed a small town. Or perhaps a large town. There were enough fajitas for about sixty people. I think there were about 30 tortillas in the little stone tortilla dish. I retexted Grant: “Yes, hell yes.”

My media escort, Kristen, was beyond fun, and took me all over Austin to sign books, and we even stopped at a Sonic drive-up restaurant so I could have a Diet Cherry Limeade, which was very sweet but also very good. We met many chatty fun booksellers and I experimented with arrogance, which I’m not great at, but Kristen supported my responding braggily and over-confidently to questions about my book and seemed to think it was a good experiment. She even forgave me for not knowing what a 4-Runner is. (I know, it’s a Toyota SUV, it came to me dimly after some research in my brain’s TV commercial archive.)

That night, I found heaven at Book People, the very coolest bookstore I have ever been to, and, as is becoming clear, I ‘ve been to a lot of bookstores. It’s massive, it’s full of gorgeously curated books and cool accessories and handpainted signs and smart displays (e.g. Birds for Spring) and nearly every book seems to have a handwritten bookseller’s recommendation card. I wanted everything, book and non-book, in there. I’m salivating as I type this.

I talked with a very cool group of women about friendship and dating and feminism. They all expressed absolute disbelief that I did not have a garbage disposal. A very savvy bunch, they couldn’t understand how I lived without one. I keep having these ah-ha moments about New York, how cramped and frill-free living can be in a supposedly elegant city. I was glad to be able to shock the audience by informing them that a garbage disposal was not even near the top of my list of things I’d like in my apartment. I don’t have a bathroom sink; I can’t even imagine what I’d do with a garbage disposal.

I asked the guy working at Book People for a book recommendation, as I have been doing in every independent bookstore I visit, and he recommended Love Is A Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield. I’d seen this book, and hazily remember Rob Sheffield being a grad student when I was an undergrad at UVA. I’ve been reading it in Charlottesville, which is semi-perfect as he talks a lot about different C’ville spots and I can kind of map his journey around town. They kindly gave me 20% off at Book People, so I also got The Complete Essays of Mark Twain as well as Twain’s The Diaries of Adam & Eve. I’m trying to reclaim my Twain associations from multiple grade-school trudges through Huck Finn. It’s going okay.

I got up the next day at 3:45 to switch my flight to Virginia, as Peter O. was reading in the Book Festival that evening and I wasn’t meant to get in until 9:30pm. I got on a 6:45am flight out of town, feeling ambivalent but slightly in love with Austin.

And I thought I was experiencing “the outdoors,” “nature,” or “fresh air” in New York City. I have just come from a run on the Rivanna Trail in Virginia and I am here to say: “East River Park, you are not good enough for me.” I am here to say “Hudson River Park that people call gorgeous, you have nothing on real, actual, bona fide nature.”

It was quiet, shady/sunny, winding, by a river. Mountains in the distance. Cardinals, moles, two feral cats (I assumed they were feral…what were two calico kitties doing lying in the sun in the woods?), quiet, no exhaust, no tall buildings, no one around but moseying Sunday strollers and their big moseying dogs. It was enough to make a girl use the word “moseying.” Twice.

In both Austin and Charlottesville, everywhere people running, everywhere paths along bodies of water. In Austin, paths around bodies of water in the middle of a city. I look at these runners legs, their faces deep in running thought, and think “I am one of you” and remember the majority of my life when I didn’t run, and how I didn’t understand it. Now I look at them, and think how lucky we are to be a part of the not-at-all-secret society of people who know there is peace to be found in moving briskly through space carried by one’s own legs and breath.

This was mostly triggered by the fact that I hadn’t done any exercise for over a week and had been dreaming nightly, guilitily, about running, having dreams in which I suddenly realize that if I run, I will get places faster. I break into a jog and it feels like I’m flying. This is in my dreams.

The Rivanna Trail starts by some strange warehouses at the end of Market Street in Charlottesville called Woolen Mills. In college, I rode my bike to Woolen Mills and remember riding home in the cold, lagging far behind my boyfriend, a boyfriend I don’t think or talk about very much anymore, but who is inextricable from my experience of Charlottesville, one that started 15 years ago. This is odd, but expected. I keep passing Lee Park where I once fell asleep in the sun and got sunburn on my legs so bad that I still have a faint scar where my socks hit my ankles.

I want to talk about being back in C’ville, about the tremendous experience of the Book Festival here, about Austin and how everyone loves it and it’s hard not to love it too, even if you are struck by a crushing loneliness there. Which I think I was. A rainy, humid loneliness that vanished as soon as I got to Virginia, where there is a book fair, where there are my dear friends Catherine and Peter Orner — someone with whom I never thought I’d drive in a car in the dark of night on country roads in my college town. Strange collisions.

The best bookstore on earth, fascinating facts about garbage disposals, returning to my college town and more, within mere moments, my friends. Sit tight.

Okay, I’ll admit my attachment to the public library is slightly unhealthy, but it's a cruel joke to go thieving my long-awaited, reserved copy of Him, Her, Him Again: The End of Him off the reserve shelf. I have a system, my fellow New Yorkers, and I'd appreciate it if you’d not crap it up, especially the night before I hit “The Road” again. It’s probably a good thing I’m going away, as there’s likely to be a turf war down at the ‘brary if I don’t hightail it out of town.

I’m trying to pretend I’m prepared to go to Austin and Charlottesville but in fact I haven’t packed yet. I do this. I dread packing for two climates, I like to think I’m becoming one of those “throw-three-things-in-a-carry-on-and-go” people, I leave it to the last minute, it’s always a bad idea. In the meantime, I’ve been up to a few things.

I was in the Jill Anderson “Idolls” Show. Ten women played music, read stories, poems, etc. in celebration of Jill’s 11th anniversary of her totally irresistible store in the East Village. I reviewed it for Citysearch eons ago. Here’s Jill, from the back of the room.

 

I went to Melanie's house and played Wizard of Oz. I was Dorothy (naturally). Melanie was the Scarecrow in a long blonde wig. I think Bee was Glenda.

 

My wine club met at Heather's house and tasted South American reds. Heather made steak, which is somehow amazing to me. I have never made steak.

 

I watched Children of Men and fell into deep and everlasting love with Clive Owen.

 

Someone stabbed me in the back at the public library. Grrr.

The whistle-stop tour continues this week. I’d love to see you in Austin, TX or Charlottesville, VA. I’ve never been to Texas, but I don’t plan to mess with it. All I hear is how fantastic Austin is, and how incredible Book People, the bookstore where I’m “appearing” (like magic!) is, so I’m quite excited.

I went to college in Charlottesville, so I plan to don $3 thrift store dresses, combat boots and moon about outside the Creative Writing department, perhaps weeping inconsolably over one or another of life’s crises, as I did, to great acclaim, during my stint at UVA back in the roaring ’90s. Just kidding. I’ll be doing that live on stage. Don’t miss it. Especially the crying part — it’ll be gloriously macabre.

Thursday, March 22, 7pm
Book People
Austin, Texas

Saturday, March 24, 12pm
Virginia Festival of the Book
University of Virginia Bookstore
Charlottesville, Virginia

See the whole tour schedule >>

What kind of flowers do you think these are? Ranunculus?

Ranunculus are my favorites. These Maira Kalman spreads in the Times make me want to write naively. There’s this odd phenomenon of grown people who write in this faux-ingenue voice, it’s common among poets, maybe bloggers. Like “What is this world, I’m a stranger here, everything is so foreign and beautiful and sad so I’ll describe it like a precocious child would and then I’ll get a gold star.”

It appears that I have acquired a zit in my ear. This, along with a strange throat tickle and the inexplicable need for up to 11 hours of sleep a night leads me to believe I may be suffering from exhaustion.

I am thinking I need a month or two in a very fancy Lindsay Lohan-style facility in Malibu to recover. Ear zit! How infrequent and not fun. I blame it on my in-ear earphones.

Tonight I’m appearing in the Jill Anderson “Idolls” Show. Jill is one of my favorite designers (well, probably the only “designer” that I wear with any regularlity). This, I gather, is her version of American Idol, except I won’t be singing. Or competing. I’m wearing her “Italian Widow’s Dress,” of which I can’t find a photo, but here I am at my book launch party wearing another of her gorgeous creations. She is not responsible for my hair, which is doing a few bad things here: