100 mundane sentences without punctuation beginning with “I” of things that I did between 6:15 am and 2:30 pm on November 29

On Facebook there are lists circulating asking details about a person’s interests, reading habits, memories, etc. with a request that they tag others to participate. Does anyone read the lists of anyone? Maybe someone they have a crush on for clues, but otherwise? I like questionnaires. I think they’re fun and ego gratifying to fill out but I don’t participate in the Facebook lists because afterward I feel like, “why did I do that?”

I like making lists. Here is my list of 100 mundane sentences without punctuation beginning with “I” of things that I did between 6:15 am and 2:30 pm on November 29.

1. I woke at 6:15 am
2. I leaned way off the bed to turn off the humidifier
3. I can take only so much of the humidifier noise
4. I know a humidifier is good for my complexion
5. I pet the dogs
6. I pulled my nightgown from beneath Roxy
7. I poured coffee
8. I use a Mr. Coffee-style automatic programmable coffee maker
9. I don’t care that there are advances in coffee-making techniques
10. I think Mr. Coffee is like having a servant
11. I got back into bed
12. I read a few wedding announcements in the Sunday New York Times
13. I decided the gay marriage might last because they’re identical
14. I read the entire article about Coty buying OPI nail polish
15. I read this because I have a keen interest in nail polish and I was half asleep
16. I turned back to the part where it said it was for 1 billion dollars CASH
17. I learned that OPI was a dental product company Odontorium Products Inc
18. I read a chapter from a friend’s book
19. I turned on my office computer
20. I got more coffee
21. I made a mental note to water the plants
22. I read email
23. I responded to a writer who wants references for me as an editor
24. I played Lexulous
25. I went into my bedroom
26. I stared at my workout clothes
27. I got my client book and gym bag together
28. I walked past the barking dogs
29. I forgot my iPhone
30. I walked two blocks to the F/G trains
31. I had to wait through two F trains before the G train arrived
32. I noticed the train was unusually packed with post-Thanksgivingers
33. I got hit in the shoulder by a woman’s large bag swinging over me
34. I told her to move her bag
35. I said please
36. I tripped off the train at Fulton Street
37. I got my foot caught in a man’s suitcase handle
38. I yelled “Jesus Christ!”
39. I walked the two blocks to David’s house
40. I was 5 minutes late when I buzzed his buzzer
41. I walked past the dog statue and unpainted canvases
42. I turned on the lights in his gym and inspected my flyaway hair
43. I took weights off the bench press while waiting for him to come down
44. I had a conversation with him about the Baldessari show
45. I asked questions about who was at his Thanksgiving
46. I told him I saw Tiny Furniture and what Theo said about it
47. I listened to him describe an article about a 91-year-old woman athlete
48. I admired his pecs and triceps
49. I take the credit for how good they look
50. I took the G train
51. I got off at 4th Avenue and 9th Street by habit to go to the gym
52. I went to the gym before I had time to talk myself out of it
53. I read the article whilst on the Lifecycle about the 91-year-old woman athlete
54. I ran on the treadmill and almost skipped over Amoreena by Elton John
55. I then remembered Piper asking me when I knew I was a writer
56. I listened to Elton sing “living like a lusty flower” and “…puppy child”
57. I thought to tell Piper that words that hooked me made me write
58. I pushed myself harder on abs and upper body
59. I want to be an athlete at 91
60. I walked home taking big steps and not stepping on cracks
61. I walk faster that way if I make it a game
62. I said hi to my upstairs person on the stoop and the dogs barked
63. I put on the happy dogs’ leashes and we went out the gate
64. I walked alongside a man the size of a tree in a suit
65. I wanted to get ahead of him but the dogs stopped to pee
66. I thought he didn’t see me behind him on the narrow sidewalk
67. I texted Jenny a philosophical question about sex
68. I read her reply that it’s not that simple and she was on a conference call
69. I brushed the dogs teeth and gave them treats
70. I took a shower
71. I leaned against the shower tiles and several were loose
72. I thought of Young Frankenstein when Gene Wilder spun around in the wall
73. I didn’t put on eye makeup
74. I am only going out again to walk the dogs later
75. I put on lipstick because I can’t not wear lipstick once I start my day
76. I wore stay-at-home rather than hit-by-car panties
77. I don’t know if #76 makes sense to anyone
78. I looked at my ass in the mirror to see if it is heading further south
79. I made oatmeal with pecans, cranberries, and ginger syrup
80. I read another chapter from another friend’s book
81. I read a review of Steve Martin’s book but I don’t know
82. I thought apropos of nothing that I hate the concept of flash mobs
83. I think they are fascistic and conformist and militaristic
84. I told Theo that idea last night while we ate at Romans and he said hmmm
85. I paid ConEd and At&T bills
86. I debated whether to buy gloves online that let you use an iPhone in winter
87. I compared dog food prices online
88. I looked at artsy candlesticks that I want
89. I don’t use candles but maybe I would one day
90. I screwed around on Facebook
91. I wrote out a schedule for the rest of the day
92. I do this so that I will schedule writing and then stick to it
93. I sat down to write this list
94. I should be writing my book
95. I wrote “write 1-2pm”
96. I am writing but not what I’m supposed to be writing
97. I am bad at enforcing my own rules
98. I made coffee
99. I think this list is pretentious
100. I will ask Jenny

wanted, objectified, exploited

“She had gone along with what the piano teacher wanted because she felt sorry for people who wanted things so badly.” ~ Alice Munro, Corrie

There was a time in my 20s when I felt obliged to respond to most anyone who was interested in me. If a man turned to look at me in the street, I checked my posture; if he smiled, I smiled back. This behavior was in contrast to how I was otherwise, which was pretty self-possessed. It was a closet behavior. I don’t think people who knew me knew that I behaved like this.

The irony is that I thought when a man was looking at a woman stranger lasciviously or he made noises or comments, that he was a weak man; infantile, responding to juvenile impulses. And so, like Alice Munro’s protagonist, I felt superior ... but still obligated to respond. This, of course, is crazy logic. Men who ogle women are just ill-mannered boors.

My feeling of power came from being sexually used by men when I was a child and teenager. You'd think that would make one feel powerless, but their lack of control made me feel in control. Underlying the perversions and desperation of unjust people is vulnerability from fear or from wanting something so badly. They seemed like simple brute animals to me. They could take my body, but not my mind, and I quietly watched myself being exploited, like a child sociologist gathering information.

Around 1980, while I was living in West Hollywood, I got an obscene phone call. It started with heavy breathing and “dirty” words muttered in a vaguely English accent. I listened quietly and then he stopped because I neither hung up nor spoke. There was a moment of silence and then I said, “What do you want?” He repeated, “cunt”… “fuck” … whatever he was saying. It was trite, run-of-the-mill. I said, “No, what do you really want?” He hung up.

A few days later he called back. Same thing: breathing, muttering. I greeted him with a cheery hello as if he were an old friend and asked again what he wanted. This time he was quiet and after a moment I hung up. Over the next year he called often and we developed a rapport. He said his name was Jeffrey, which I spelled as “G-e-o-f-f-r-e-y” in my head. Sometimes I’d say that I was busy and couldn’t talk. If I had a friend over I would hang up and casually say, “Oh that’s my obscene phone caller.” But other times I spoke to him for maybe an hour. Our interaction was thus: He told me his sexual interests and I would tell him how mundane they were and guide him toward more perverse, “advanced” interests. He’d give them a yea or nay and then I’d pry into why these things did or did not suit him. It was a power game in which I was the authoritative, confident woman and he was the weak, insecure man. I became the obscene respondent to what became an almost demure caller. He relied on me; I could tell.

I even went so far as to tell him to meet me in public. I chose Book Circus, a pornography bookstore patronized mostly by gay men, at the corner of the street where I lived. I told him we could play a game: we would guess who the other was and when he called next we would tell one another what we thought. I went to Book Circus but he didn’t and when he called again, he told me he was afraid. I felt sorry for him. I was the one in charge of this perverse exchange.

Recently I was reminded that when I was a teenager I had a group of friends who were boys who did not sexualize me (although I was having sex with other guys at that time). Our bond was over music; British rock to be specific -- Humble Pie, Small Faces, Slade, Manfred Man, etc. I was accepted as a person with music knowledge, rather than as a chick. A few of the guys went on to be in heavy metal or punk bands that had minor success and I eventually worked in the music business. The most successful friend was my closest pal, Kevin, who was the lead singer in a Billboard-charting heavy metal band, Quiet Riot. Before all that, before he was even in a band, Kevin and I would sit in his room afterschool listening to albums and studying the sleeve notes, or spend hours in records stores. We also got pretty good at stealing records.

One day Kevin told me he met a girl who said she put lotion all over her body everyday. He told me this as if I were not also a girl who perhaps did the same thing. There was something pantingly, pathetically sexual about his wonderment and it felt like a breach of our unspoken boundaries. It made me feel embarrassed as a girl. After that he paid attention to me differently and one day asked me to take off all my clothes so he could “just look.” This is what I think 4 years old do but he pleaded and I felt sorry for him so I obliged. That was the beginning of the end of our friendship; that, and also because he went to a psychic who told him he would become rich as a singer so he stopped dissecting records with me and spent hours learning how to sing. That was so boring. He died a few years ago of a drug overdose in a Las Vegas hotel room, as a rich singer.

I grew up in that generation in which women were supposed to be delighted and validated by male overtures. I found it really hard to rebuff an advance, or not respond to a hiss, a gratuitous smile, a muttered comment, a direct stare without feeling like I would be labeled a “bitch.” I can’t say why it mattered more -- not just to me, but many women -- what went on in the mind of a male stranger rather than my own peace of mind. Maybe it’s mostly uneducated women, or women who were sexually abused, or feminine women, or proletariat women, or heterosexual women -- but I know I’m not the only one who, in my 20s an 30s, responded to men with a culturally ingrained feeling that I was chattel despite my innate feminism.

In the late 1980s I had to make changes in my demeanor. I had a baby daughter who I was entirely focused on, I really wasn’t paying attention to boorish male behavior. I started feeling panicked about the way men responded to me. At the same time, I had a wonderful husband who I trusted, who treated me and other women as equals, and while I chose him as a husband because he was such a good guy and this is something I knew in my gut, I didn’t have a gut instinct for dangerous or predatory men. In the few short years that I wasn’t paying attention, I was the recipient of behavior that ranged from a man commenting, while I sipped coffee over a book in a restaurant, that he got vibes that I wanted to sleep with him, to being molested twice in stores in broad daylight.

It’s just a basic truth that New York City is a man’s town. Men move way more freely in the city than women do and they commandeer public space. It really is virtually impossible for a young woman to get from one place to another without having her thoughts interrupted by male attention. But that’s just the way of the city. My solution in the 80s, was to be on hyper-alert all the time and ignore every man who paid attention to me. This wound up making me angry. I’m a social person and I need to live socially with other human beings. When I came out in the mid-90s, I went through a spell of “man hating” although that didn’t feel right either because there are several men who I love very much, so I ditched that bad idea.

What I learned fairly recently is that I don’t belong to anyone other than myself. It took decades of lessons for me not just to know this, but to feel it. Starting over again here in New York City was about reclaiming my body, my personhood. I lost sight of that. For too many years I had been able to disconnect, dissociate and go along with being objectified and exploited. When I moved back here six months ago, I made a pact with myself to interact differently with people based on integrity, which I’ve always wanted to have so badly. I don’t let lovers and friends choose me, I choose them. Maybe that sounds callous but it’s about not feeling obliged to owe something to anyone who shows an interest. Basically, I’ve learned how to say no.

Italians, artists, professors, Brooklyn. (Postscript: To which class do I belong?)

When I lived in Manhattan in the '80s-90s I was not really aware of class but of living in New York City after a lifetime in LA, and how diverse NYC was. In 1985 I lived on Mott St between Houston and Prince in what was then Little Italy and now is Soho-adjacent. I found my apartment, with my then very Italian-from-Long-Island boyfriend of a few months, Michael, by passing myself off as Italian. I still had the last name of my mother's Sephardic Jewish husband, Modiano, and like he did when it was convenient, I could pass as a nonJew Italian. We found the apartment because I had the idea of going to an area that I liked and asking in the bodegas and delis if anyone had a place for rent. We didn't even talk about moving in together when we hit the jackpot in an Italian sandwich shop on Mott. They knew the building owners and said right up front that if we were married and Italian they'd call over and say we were coming. Of course we were married and Italian!

Michael and I lived on the 4th floor of a 4-story walkup with 8 apartments. The building was inhabited by old Italian women and one young family direct from Italy across the hall -- since we were the only ones who could make it up the stairs. One of the old women, Maria, still had a husband. His name was Mike. They owned the building with their son, who paraded around like a hit man with this 90-mile-an-hour haircut, cashmere trench coat, black suit and tie in the middle of summer, and spit-and-polish shoes. Mike and his wife got into rip-roaring fights that you could hear all the way up to the 4th floor in which he would accuse her of being a whore and sleeping with black men (though he did not say it quite like that). This is a 70-year-old woman in a housedress we're talking about.

My relationship with Michael turned sour after a few months and we were the ones in a rip-roaring fight. After I took his keys, threw him out and locked the door behind him, he returned through the fire escape making all kinds of ruckus. The next day I encountered the usual assemblage of old women in lawn chairs in front of the building -- Maria in her housedress and the rest in black, mourning the long dead husbands. The one in the apartment directly below said, "I heard you last night. I'll bring up some macaroni and gravy." (translation: pasta and sauce). I asked why no one called the police. Maria said, "we thought you were having a fight with your husband. DID YOU HAVE AN INTRUDER?!" No no, just a fight with my husband. sigh.

I found a roommate after running it by the women and Mike. Yes, they said, but no girls who date "n*ggers." I felt a little queasy about not telling him that he and his prejudiced ass are going to hell but I had to keep up my ruse as a good Italian Catholic in her 20s soon to be a divorcee.

I met Russell at the end of '85 -- on the street and because of a book. One day I stopped to talk to Fred, a contractor, who I met while he was building a new Agnes B. store on Prince St. He looked just like I imagined the contractor to look in the book I was reading, House by Tracy Kidder (who years later, coincidentally, I lived near in Northampton, MA) and I told Fred so. It was a great pickup line. Russell, knowing Fred already had a girlfriend, crossed Prince St to see who I was. In short time I moved the few blocks over from Mott St to Crosby St into Russell's loft. He is an artist and Soho was then not the swank shopping mecca it is now, but an artist's area of studios, lofts and galleries.

We were married about a year and a half later. I was 4-months pregnant. I met lots of women who were pregnant in Soho at that time, several who are still my friends. It was right during the baby boomers' baby boom. I had my personal training business and was doing freelance copyediting. My friends were all college-educated, though I was not, and were artists and writers mostly. I was happy. I felt like I belonged although it was being pregnant and married to an artist that gave me the in -- not my lack of education nor, as it turned out, my sexual orientation.

In 2000 I moved to Northampton, Massachusetts. I envisioned a place where lesbians roamed free and met for coffee everyday and had intellectual conversations about things that went on in the 5-college community. I knew my children would be happy and I thought so would I. Soon after I moved my relationship broke down and once more there was a lot of ruckus. This time it wasn't a bunch of old ladies in lawn chairs but a street of uptight New Englanders in perfect houses with manicured lawns who did not want to associate with someone as excessive and prone to trouble -- with my mannish-looking partners -- as me.

Ten years I was an outsider on that street. My lipstick was just a little too bright, my heels a little too high. I knew they thought I was lesser than but I so much did not want to be like them that I was okay being the femme queer in the small imperfect house with the poodles and dykes and the menorah at Christmastime and the daughter with a nose ring and the crabgrass lawn.

But man o man was I happy to get out of there.

So here I am in Brooklyn. I live in a garden apartment in a lovely brownstone. Above me are the owners of the brownstone, my "upstairs people" as I call them, a little Jewish guy and his gorgeous black wife. Two of my personal training clients are on this street. They are upstairs people. The upstairs people in north Park Slope are the gentry and us lowly renters are the proletariet. We're the personal service people, the struggling writers, artists, musicians. They're the lawyers, business retirees, doctor, executives, Writers Who Made It Big.

Like when I first lived on Mott St. it's not about class but about being in NYC. I love having access to art, music, performance; the amazing food; random humanity; anonymity among the masses; not being easily readable or transparent; not clearly wealthy nor poor; meeting strangers over dogs or food or on the subway; passing the dancing Cuban man while running in the park; walking through hundreds of school kids to get to the train; wandering through bookstores; meeting my son for dinner; going out at night in a little black dress and feeling pretty, not like a freak; being so close to the ocean.

To which class do I belong?

While walking the dogs through Prospect Park recently, I had an overall sense of gratitude. It wasn’t to anyone or for anything in particular but about how, after five months of floundering in Brooklyn, unsure of what the hell I was doing, reeling from the craziness of Northampton, and thinking I was pushing my luck starting over again at 53, I’m doing okay. Better than okay; better than I imagined. My work is steady and promising, I have uninterrupted time and peace-of-mind, my life has taken interesting turns, my body feels strong, I adore my old and new friends, my apartment feels like a home, my dogs are happy, even my plants are happy, and I’ve been able to write for the first time in years. And I’m in New York City again. Sometimes I can’t believe I made it back here.

So while I was wandering and daydreaming and thinking about where I’ve been and what I’m doing, I thought about what class I might belong to. I had an idea -- that now embarrasses me but I’ll say it anyway -- that I am a modern-day bohemian. I was pleased with this idea until I did a Google search and found that “bohemian” has strayed far from its 19th century origins and “modern bohemian” is now an aesthetic that reads something like “wealthy California faux-hippie neo-Republican.” I scrapped the idea.

Class is really a mess. And its applications are suspect. If I look at the charts that divide class, I’m closest to Lower Middle Class; however I have more of an education, less of an income, and more autonomy than the usual definition. I also refuse to be ordinary, complacent, normal, marginal, fade into the background, or work at something I don’t care about.

Freedom matters to me more than money. I can’t be a cog; I’m a terrible team player. I’ve tried it. It’s not that I’m an “I don’t take orders” kind of person. It’s not arrogance, it’s that I can’t follow what it is I’m supposed to do unless I have a personal interest, and boredom is something I don’t tolerate. I can’t remember the last time I was “bored.”

Oh, I do remember: It was with my mother when I was about 12 and we were on one of our jaunts into the city from the Valley. We were going to Fairfax, the old Jewish section (if anything in LA can be called “old”), to Canter’s deli and then to Farmer’s Market where they sold everything from fresh horseradish to moccasins. We usually wound up at Dupar’s for coconut or banana cream pie at the counter. But this day she wanted to stop at a furniture store. The store was the size of a warehouse and they sold the plastic molded tables and floral couches cheaply. It was a sea of beige. She flirted with the salesman, ignored me and I was left to wander this deadeningly boring place that offered absolutely no visual or mental stimulation whatsoever. I wound up sitting in the car, blazing hot from the California sun, and crying with fury. I displaced boredom with anger. After that I never went anywhere without a book.

So how does this relate to class? While I’m not a team player, I’m also not an entrepreneur. Well I guess I am in the sense that I’ve started two businesses 25 years ago – personal training and freelance editing – and they’ve sustained me since, but I don’t have the “entrepreneurial spirit.” I’m terrible at self-promotion and I’m not an opportunist. If I make it big it will be because the book I’m writing is a hit, not because I am a Professional. None of the things I am or do fall into a particularly class.

As a personal fitness trainer, I don’t work in a gym, am not "certified" (a marketing scam started about 15 years ago; the field is unregulated); nor do I work with just anyone or many people in a day. I don't make videos or sell products. I started my business 25 years ago when there was no such thing as a “personal fitness trainer.” I was offered money to teach a recording artist what I knew about exercising. Since then I’ve taught others what I’ve tried out on my own body. I know how to reshape a body. I love the challenge. Exercise is a passion for me. I take the “personal” in personal training seriously. That is always what it has been to me. I’m not an industry. I’m not a guru.

Then there’s my education. My skills don’t add up to expertise in one area and my education is unusual: BFA in Dramatic Writing (playwriting) and an almost-PhD (missing a dissertation) in the theory field of Performance Studies. I did all this schooling at NYU in my mid- to late-30s and while the degrees are fairly useless since I’m not a playwright nor a professor, the education made me a more scholarly and well-rounded person. That’s why I went to college. I wanted to learn how to see the bigger picture: how to make connections between concepts; the difference between the disease and the symptom (institutionalized poverty and crime, or sexism and prostitution); the difference between sex and gender, how hierarchies function. I was always a smart person but I grew up in vapid surroundings and just eked by in high school because I didn’t pay attention and never went. (I still don’t know enough about the branches of government or wars or great literature.) I always wanted to go to college.

Early in life I belonged to a transient class: Jews moved into neighborhoods of poorly constructed tract homes in the early-60s San Fernando Valley. There were blocks and blocks of us. The vibe was “fake it ‘til you make it.” Everyone wanted to be something more than they were. We were Jews! The Chosen People! It did not feel like a community of settled people. Maybe it was still soon enough after the end of WWII and the birth of suburbia for Jews to feel like assimilating to an ordinary non-persecuted life was enough of a goal. The feeling in my neighborhood was that one should aspire to be of a better status – though things like integrity, values, ethics, were secondary. Status was about having enough money to look rich regardless of what you did or how you got it. It was all about girls marrying well and boys making money. So instead of being pushed toward an education, I was pushed toward May Co. department store. I learned how to be of use for a man, but not how to balance a checkbook or support myself.

revisiting my childhood home in 2004. The window behind me was in my bedroom.

But class is about access too. My mother has a curious, lively mind, and she took me to plays, dance and music performance, museums, galleries, strolls in Beverly Hills where we could pretend to fit in – but she also took me to ethnically-marked neighborhoods to eat, look in shops, observe people. I’ve lived that way since – with access to culture both high and low, to homes I could never afford to live in, to wealthy people, to restaurants and vacations I couldn’t afford unless I was taken, and so on.

Some things from October

This isn't much of a blog entry. I've been writing about class -- What Class am I? is my question -- and also about sexual justice in the US based on a conversation I had with a friend who boycotts Woody Allen movies (and probably Roman Polanski). I boycott neither. I've been having a hard time writing and I have to think about it and get out of my rut. So for now, these are some things that happened in October -- great, weird, and other -- that have shifted my consciousness:

*My personal training business took off. One of my clients is a former client. We were in our 30s when we worked together last and we’re now in our 50s. I know his body well and it’s all very poignant and self-reflective to see a body that I in part constructed, age. He’s also one of my favorite painters and to be around his work again, and the work of other creative clients, makes me feel I’ve returned from a long exile. (Though at the same time, I loved my Northampton clients. They were what made me feel connected to a bigger world of ideas and experience while I lived there.)

*Old friends and people from the past keep popping up, especially from Los Angeles in the 70s and 80s. Those were sybaritic times in a hedonistic place. Everyone was young, self-absorbed, and fucked up from drugs or fame or the glimmer of it. Now we’re all a little vulnerable. Less interested in the next pursuit and more interested in knowing and being known. And far more interested in love.

*My childhood sexual perpetrator cracked. Suicidal wishes and possibly a suicide attempt put him in a psych hospital. I’ve been informed that he talks about me obsessively to psychiatrists and anyone who will listen. He’s haunted. This new revelation made it hard for me to write. I have a tendency to depersonalized people who betray me. They stop in time. I refer to them by a term rather then their name. I don’t imagine their personhood. I don’t give them humanity. With other people this ended when I reached a point of indifference, but that never happened with him. This new information reanimates him. I don’t like it.