MY WEEKEND:

I keep meeting strangers. It's very surreal. I think there might be something in the air these days that walks and talks like good karma. This revelation comes in tandem, of course, with a lot more time spent in transit between Brooklyn and Manhattan, and a lot more time spent at parties thrown by students of the New School, and a lot more time spent gunning down fading summer afternoons in Union Square Park alone. Still, I find myself in the unusual position of having to convince The Rational Brain (Martha) that it's all a coincidence and there is really nothing holy at all about the man yelling hooey from the Bible's back-pages up and down Fourteenth Street on a Saturday. Nor is there anything profound about the man beside him (they seem to be friends?!) who's trying to convince every single woman in the park to sit on his face for 'big laughs'.

I went to see a friend's show this weekend, and it made me sad. It was supposed to, on the one hand, and on the other I was in that weirdly vulnerable mood that sometimes steals in on Saturdays -- the sun was shining, and beautiful couples seemed to be congregating on every corner, and I was awkwardly hemming and hawing through an intermission where I realized I didn't have enough conversation to string between fifteen friends and ten minutes. After the play I went to the park where I watched a man I'd once given my phone number to seduce and destroy some other hot young thing, and then the sun was setting straight into my eyes like a fire, like a brilliant cracked egg. I went underground, feeling morose, and someone complimented me on my shoes, which is to say, Wagner filled the air and small cherubs danced from between cracks in the mosaic and filled the world with fairy dust. And no, no one was ever lonely again. At Franklin Avenue, an art collective was putting up murals all along Eastern Parkway when I got off the train.

That night, I went with some friends to a patently Weird Party, and met a personal trainer and a Pilates teacher and a bunch of other people crouched under the insulation of an attic. Someones and Strangers. I tried halfheartedly to make sleepy eyes at a loud person, but the evening wanted to end in an overpriced cab around 4am, sleepy roommates drunching on glorified Easy Mac and smiling at the wood paneled walls that weren't bouncing with stupid comments or spilled tequila, were silent, belonging to us. We watch Dazed and Confused, and a few episodes of Freaks and Geeks, and I weep with jealousy over the memoirs of Pamela des Barres as I fall asleep reading. Before I really enter Lala Land I register feeling nostalgic for high school, when days were long and pointless but discernibly and objectively hilarious. Not always, but most of the time.

And on Sunday, Someone I already Knew agrees with me about Annie Hall being a terrifically optimistic movie, actually, and she articulates it loads better than I ever have: because the beautiful part about life is actually transience and if there is any kind of proof for true love it must be in the fact that perfectly happy, complicated, wonderful relationships fail where others with the exact same ingredients can succeed. We sit and talk about love and existential crises while rolling around on a studio floor, leaving something due Monday abandoned.

At a dinner meeting, I am asked 'what I want to do with my art', and somehow manage to concoct something. I realize only once I've said it aloud that the mission is so so so right, even if it's a little pretentiously worded: "I want everyone to find the hilarity and lovability in their neuroses, flaws and weirdness."

And that's the end. This has all finished happening. It's Monday now. Writing it down it doesn't read like God. Maybe that's the bizarre thing, actually.