My Dad Used To Want Open A Diner Called “The Big Toe,” and Another Anecdote About Diners

I’ve lived next two diners which have claimed to be the inspiration for Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner.” 

Currently, my apartment is around the corner from Tom’s Diner in Prospect Heights. This diner has no actual connection to the song, it’s just a restaurant with the same name. On the other hand, Tom’s Restaurant in Morningside Heights is just blocks away from Barnard, where Vega and I went to college. Vega has stated this restaurant was the inspiration for the song. 

Both of these diners attract a strange demographic of tourists. People line up around the corner, in fact, up to my very apartment building, waiting for Tom’s in Brooklyn. And it’s true, their pancakes are delicious, and if you’re ever backed-up or hung-over, their coffee and sausage can be a big help.

Still, the wait for Tom’s surpasses the wait for equally priced and more interesting restaurants in the neighborhood. And I think this is because people in Brooklyn can get tired of fusion cuisine, and occasionally want a meal that reminds them of the food that is making everyone in their hometown fat. Incidentally, my window overlooks the backyard of Tom’s, and my room smells like bacon right now. 

In the case of the fan base of Tom’s in Morningside Heights (where the pancakes are average, though the milkshakes are pretty good), the exterior of restaurant was used in Seinfeld, and quite simply, people miss the 90s. 

Coming Soon: #Eugenidesfreud?

It’s just something that happens when a well-regarded male writer releases a book every ten years. Watch, Jeffrey Eugenides will get the same treatment when his next novel comes out. 

-A friend of mine who does publicity for a publishing house on the attention Jonathan Franzen received for Freedom. 

Well friend, we’re about to see if you’re right. An excerpt of Jeffrey Eugenides’s new novel,The Marriage Plot, is in this week’s New Yorker. I’m not going to lie: I’m pretty excited to read it.  

FML

Ok, after the Royal Wedding, what’s more human interest than conjoined twins? It’s not like the situation in the Middle East, interest rates or any athletic achievement can mitigate our interest in twins who aren’t completely separated. Consequently, (television) magazine stories about conjoined twins are evergreens.

Last week’s pair in the New York Times Magazine was especially interesting, as these twins are connected at the thalamus in their brains, and to varying degrees, they share responses to stimuli.

In the accompanying video, the Tatiana and Krista seem miserable (and wouldn’t you be, if the person attached to your head ate ketchup and you could taste it too?). I wondered if conjoined twins, like the royal family, exist only for our voyeuristic pleasure. In the example of Tatiana and Krista, National Geographic has already documented the first year of their lives, the New York Times Magazine published a feature on them, and now their family is in talks with a reality TV producer. They’re not part of the circus like Chang and Eng, but aren’t they?

The article mentions another set of conjoined twins, Ladan and Laleh Bijani, so miserable at 29, that they took the even odds and tried to separate. They would rather be dead than conjoined, and that’s what happened: they died in surgery.

 And yet, out of the history of conjoined twins, they are the only ones to elect such a procedure. So maybe a shared and observed life is better than none at all.

Improvements Over Time

If you do something four times a week for four years, you’ll get better at it. This seems obvious, but it’s something I didn’t appreciate until I started running. More accurately, it’s something I didn’t appreciate until I got better at running. 

After the marathon and the epic winter, I was a little tired of the sport. But a bum knee kept me from running regularly in the spring. With the time off, I remembered how much I love running both as an excuse to get outside and a justification for replacing the cream in Oreos with peanut butter. And now my knee is getting better and it’s summer in Prospect Park. After the break and with the heat, running feels new.

There are very few things in life where growth is quantifiable. I think the short stories I’m working on now are better than the book I wrote, but I don’t have any proof. But I just bought a GPS enabled watch, so at least I can gauge my progress in one hobby. And while I don’t have any way to measure my writing, I’ll keep working on it, knowing that with more time, I can’t help but improve. 

An Offensive Environment

Even as someone who enjoys throwing apples out of moving cars, eating meat, and other environmentally unfriendly pleasures, I hate bottled water. 

It’s not just that New York has one of the best acqueduct systems in the world, it’s also that there’s really nothing worse for the environment than bottled water. Obtaining the water messes up irrigation systems, and transporting and chilling these bottles creates a huge carbon footprint. I suppose the only benefit is that once you finished your water, you can leave the earth a forever gift of a plastic bottle. 

So whatever, water bottles are bad for the environment and the only real excuse for using one is laziness. Fine. But I noticed today that Poland Spring is going green and making bottles with “50% smaller bottle caps.” That’s a reduction of maybe 5% of the overall plastic used in a water bottle, which doesn’t really change a thing.

I get water bottles are convenient and people like spending money on things which are otherwise free. But can we not pretend that smaller bottle caps make up for all the damage of bottled water? 

Capitalism: It's the Tops

There was a really interesting article in the New Yorker last week about PepsiCo. To get you up to speed, America is fat, and one of the ways they got there is through PepsiCo products (soda, potato chips). So while not blaming her delicious products, the CEO of Pepsi Indra Nooyi wants to make her treats less salt, sugar and fat-laden, though of course they’ll still taste that way. In the piece, she quotes the CEO of Citibank, who said something stupid before the crash about as long as the music is playing, you gotta dance. Her point is that people are fat, and eventually they’re going not to be. If PepsiCo still wants to sell potato chips—and they do—they need to make their chips more healthful. 

It’s not like she’s interested in the body mass indexes of Americans; she just knows eventually fear of type II diabetes is going to drive consumer decisions. So health products are now a brand. Look, there was an article about false claims of healthfulness in the Times on Sunday. Here’s the link. And it’s the same with the environment. Green is the biggest brand there is right now. People totally love buying things made from recycled materials.  

My best friend is in Bulgaria right now, and she visited this village where there was just nothing. No jobs, no industry, no food, nothing to recycle and nothing to buy. When she told me about this, my first reaction was that a factory would just totally change everything in that town. My second reaction was, crazy how I think the solution to capitalism’s failings is more capitalism. It’s like that Henry David Thoreau quote, “There is no remedy for love but to love more.”

It’s not that I’m against capitalism. I’m not at all. I love things. Buying them, owning them, the whole experience of them. So in a way, I’m glad PepsiCo is trying to make money from lower sodium salt content and people fetishize green products. It’s better than the alternative. I’m just saying that the only way to get people to do something is get them to buy something.

In Reexaming Pull Quotes News

After the New Yorker’s 20 fiction writers under 40 came out, I quoted Phillip Meyer on this very blog. So to review, what made him go from a guy with two failed novels living in his parents’ basement to someone Deborah Treisman picked to be one of the best voices of a generation under 40?

[I began] to seriously question my writing. It occurred to me that I couldn’t even define literature—not even to myself. I could give very erudite and intimidating answers to other people, the sort of bullshit that anyone with an English degree can throw up as a smokescreen, but I didn’t have a substantive answer that I believed in. I didn’t know why I liked the books I liked. So I decided I would throw everything away, everything I’d heard in college and everything else. I decided I would trust only myself—what I really believed and felt to be true. Which, of course, didn’t exactly occur overnight: it probably took the better part of 2004. But it was a very conscious effort. That was when things began to change. I think of it as year zero, though it was actually year ten. 

And I think what he’s saying is that to be an artist, and not just a curator of ideas, you have to have a real sensibility of what art is. This is more than having an aesthetic, though that’s part of it. It’s making a decision about art’s purpose.

I’m still trying to make those decisions myself. As far as I can tell, a good story builds to a moment where something true happens. What that truth is depends on the writer. Part of the reason Maile Meloy’s collection Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It works so well is each story builds to the truth of conflicting desire.

David Grann, who for my money is the best non-fiction writer around, also has a clear idea of how long form journalism should work. All of his pieces use experts to prove and disprove each other, until he gets to the truth of his case.

For right now, I just want my fiction to reveal some truth. The thing with novels versus short fiction (and the triumph of short fiction in this year’s Pulitzer) is that the novel is set-up to do something fundamentally impossible: explore a whole world. Short fiction attempts to just reveal part of it.

Ok, off to work on my new collection of short fiction: Feelings That the Author Effortlessly Makes Seem Universal. 

Just A Thing I Was Thinking About After Signing My New, And Soon To Be Used, Passport

I remember going to the supermarket with my dad when I was a little kid, and watching him sign his credit card bill, and thinking his J… A… signature was a pretense. I was like 7, and had probably signed my name, I don’t know, four times in my whole life. No one could really be as lazy as my dad with a signature. 

And yet adult life gives one countless opportunities to sign things. And my signature is usually something like R… A… While signing my passport forty minutes ago, I tried to spell out the whole thing, though I got disenchanted somewhere around “au.”

Boring story aside, I just bought a ticket to Sofia, Bulgaria.

Nothing Faster Than Feelings

So that marathon, how’d it go? It went great, actually. I broke 4 hours, which was my goal, and after the race, took a long bath with a Bloody Mary and a Vicodin. I don’t think I’ve ever been higher in my life. 

A time that was low for me was about 90 minutes into the race, when I realized that after running for 10 miles, I still had 16 more to go. The next 6 miles were both depressing and slow, until I realized that if I were going to break 4 hours, I had to hustle. The next ten miles were difficult, but I picked up the pace and finished at 3:57.

(Also, people looking to PR on a marathon, may I recommend Ocean Drive? It’s a flat course with no crowds after the first mile.) 

I’m a mediocre athlete by genetics—either the best of the worst or the worst of the best—but I put a lot into this race. Actual blood (from chaffing), sweat (duh) and tears (there was a small breakdown after a long run I couldn’t finish) went into this marathon, and they all came from me. That I broke four hours might have had something to do with the course being flat, but nothing to do with anyone else. I’ve never been more unequivocally proud of myself as I was when I crossed the finished line.

A week after the race, I banged my knee on a table and I haven’t been able to run since. This is frustrating for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which is that spring, along with fall, is really the only time running in New York is blatantly pleasant. Otherwise, it’s too hot or too cold. In the summer and winter, I can only do my best to stay hydrated or wear the proper layers, and try to find some joy in running through the thick heat or cold winds.  

Since my injury, I’ve been swimming, putting off seeing a doctor, and going for walks in Prospect Park. The spring in the park happens at a maddening pace—if you miss one day of it, you will miss whole trees coming to bloom. And on my walks, I see people who haven’t run all winter who probably thought 20 minutes earlier, “It’s such a nice day, I should go for a jog,” and a jealousy flows through me that I am not so proud of.

20th Wave Feminism

I guess what makes me a feminist is reading the Anna Faris profile in The New Yorker, and being upset that a “good” role for a comedic actress is one about financial disempowered woman who gets insecure after reading in Marie Claire that no woman who has slept with more than 20 men will ever get married, and this character, having already slept with 20 men, decides the only way she can find fulfillment and regain her integrity, is by resuming a relationship, and ultimately marrying, one of those men she has already rejected for one reason or another.

And I guess, also finding it upsetting that studio executives thought a woman who slept with 20 men couldn’t be likable. 

After the Race

For the past few months, my mom and I have been looking forward to this week. On Tuesday, she got a new hip. On Sunday, I will run my first marathon.

There are staples running along her right side, but she’s doing fine and can still wax metaphysically.  When I visited her yesterday, she said, “I had March 22 in my head for so long, I’m not really sure what comes next.”

I feel the same way. For the past 18 weeks, this race has entered my head one way or another. And two days following the race, I’m going to Portland for a week. I must have thought I would just fall off the calendar after the marathon and my trip, because the rest of spring feels distant. Plans for mid-April feel a dream.

Until spring feels real, I recommend the Haruki Murakami short story “U.F.O. in Kushiro,” reprinted in this week’s New Yorker and also available in the short story collection After the Quake.

Open Door Policy

When I was growing up, we didn’t lock our house. Along with the good public schools, this was the greatest benefit to Westchester living. We had faith that ADT systems of our neighbors would deter any criminals, and for 29 years, that worked.

About two years ago, my parents were robbed. And if you do the math, the cost of what was taken was less than what an alarm system would have cost. Of course, had we even locked the doors, we probably would have avoided the whole mess. But isn’t there a certain luxury to not needing locked doors? What’s the price of not worrying about someone coming into your house?

This is all to say I don’t spend too much time locking up my bike. I sometimes even forget to take the light off of it. And my excuse is that the cost of a new light is worth the freedom of not worrying about what will happen to it. 

Patience, Humility, Fortitude

There are a lot of things about marathon training, but one that is especially frustrating is that there’s no one run that makes a difference. It’s a cumulative experience of long runs, pace runs, and runs that once seemed long but are now just 8 miles. There’s no way to cram for a marathon.

My first marathon is in ten days, and Hal Higdon has told me to rest. This makes me anxious.

I’m so used to running structuring my time, getting me into Prospect Park and clearing my head, I’m not sure what to do with myself. I feel all this energy building up in my legs, and I have to store it up for a week and a half.

The other thing about racing is that unless you’re fast, and I mean superhuman fast, it doesn’t matter at all. On my last long run, I literally ran into a friend (I suppose literally is too strong—we didn’t hit each other, but we were both running and we saw each other) and then ran with him for an hour. I was talking about the race, and to check myself, I said something about how it doesn’t really matter. I’m not an Olympic athlete; I’m just some chick who likes long term goals and fresh air. But my impromptu running buddy reminded me that even a local elite runner, whose goal is to finish about 90 minutes ahead of me, would still finish about 20 minutes behind the real runners. Even for the very fast, it doesn’t matter.

It’s hard to admit to caring about something with no greater purpose and it’s hard to run 20 miles and not get a t-shirt for your effort. And until March 27, it’s hard to wait with nothing certain but more waiting. 

But I Didn’t Have Anything To Drink …

The hatred over splitting a bill with a big group at a restaurant is as universally shared as bad weather or traffic. But splitting a bill is something everyone has control over. I mean, it’s not like the sun didn’t come out: individuals miscalculated the tax and tip on their dinner. Splitting the Bill, The Problem, has an obvious solution: everyone pay exactly what they owe. Traffic patterns can’t be solved this easily.

But what’s also weird about splitting bills is that the people who actually profit from group meals presumably hate the experience, too. 

The Porcupine Principle

For a long time, I’ve thought of Swiss international policy as a life guide: whatever the problem, stay out of it. And while I took it for granted that Switzerland didn’t get involved in any conflict, I didn’t realize until reading John McPhee’s book La Place de la Concorde Suisse how hard Switzerland worked to make their neutrality more than a cute idea. During WWI and WWII, the entire country was armed to prevent Germany, Russia or anyone else from making them fight. And even now, if a country ever invades Switzerland, the army is ready to go guerrilla. From John McPhee:

To interrupt the utility of bridges, tunnels, highways, railroads, Switzerland has established three thousand points of demolition. That is the number officially printed. It has been suggested to me that to approximate a true figure a reader ought to multiply by two … Nearby mountains have been made so porous that whole divisions can fit inside them. There are weapons and soldiers under barns. … There is food, of course, and needless to add, munitions … there is Swiss Army bread that lasts two years.

Life, like international relations, often doesn’t let you choose if you want to stay neutral. It takes work not to get worked up, not to get involved and to stay cool.

The Swiss definition of neutrality absolutely includes the army, because the task of a neutral country is to defend its territory. … “We want peace, but not under someone’s conditions.”