So Here’s the Thing…: Notes on Growing Up, Getting Older, and Trusting Your Gut(12)

I had not considered this at all. The prospect of abandoning the Meow Coat to the depths of the overpriced coat check was unthinkable. I began to bargain.

I first made an appeal to personal liberty. Why should I have to pay an additional ten dollars when I would be happy to keep my coat on in the club? I didn’t want to hand over my pride and joy to the bored coat-check girls; I preferred to keep it on my person at all times.

The door girls were unyielding.

I tried a more ontological approach. “It’s not a coat,” I said, gesturing to its impractical single button and demonstrating its relative thinness to the implacable doorman. “It’s my outfit.”

Investing too much emotional energy in your clothes will only lead to disappointment and inflexibility. My friends were all standing in the doorway beyond, looking sad for me but also, Just check your coat like everyone else so we can get our gin and tonics, they were saying with their eyes. The door girls shook their heads. Removing the Meow Coat and revealing the boring top and bottom beneath felt like a defeat. When no one talked to me—but couldn’t stop chatting up the rest of my friends—I was convinced it was because my outfit sucked. I left at 11:30 before the fireworks and ate a slice of pizza on the walk from the South Street Seaport back to SoHo. On top of everything else, the coat wasn’t warm enough.

1 I was going to say that it seems weird that everyone loved to wear sweatpants in high school, but then I remembered that everyone wears sweatpants (or leggings) now, too. The roll, though—you don’t really see that in places that don’t have lockers.





SEVEN THINGS IN MY CLOSET





Grateful Dead wool sweaters from Granted sweater company in British Columbia. I hope they live forever. And even if they don’t, I’ll probably still keep them.

Lots of jeans that don’t fit and never will again, but because they were expensive and fit once, I hold on to them.

Woolrich plaid overalls.

A few memorable shirts, including my Kate Spades, that I would wear regularly at the White House. All my other White House clothes went to Dress for Success years ago.

Matching sweats from the Great, which I wear like real clothes out in the real world.

More clogs and Birkenstocks than are probably reasonable.

Warning: eye-watering price tag ahead— my Valentino Couture hand-embroidered wedding dress that I guiltily and stressfully paid $13,550 for (on a serious payment plan…) and ended up not wearing to my wedding (or anywhere else) because it seemed too fancy. I know this is going to make me seem extremely fancy. I promise I will wear it someday.





What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting to Ride a Motorcycle Hundreds of Miles Along the Japanese Coast



I didn’t sign up for Introduction to Japanese during my freshman year of college for any good reason, which is sometimes the best reason. It was neither a bad idea nor a good idea—it was just an idea, inspired, as both bad and good ideas often are, by the sighting of a hot guy.

When I was in college, we registered for classes the old-fashioned way: by physically lining up behind a table in the gym so you could write your name down on a list. Priorities were critical; you might forfeit every other choice by wasting the precious first minutes of sign-ups to pause and think about whether you’d prefer Lesbian Vampires in Film and Literature or the History of Beer. However, because I like to see where life takes me, I planned only my core classes, and by the time I registered for all of them I had one wildcard spot left open. I was wondering what to do when I looked over and saw him.




There’s no other word for how he looked but groovy. He was about 6 feet 4 inches, with wild, curly blond hair, and despite being really hot, he exuded friendliness. (Hot people are usually intimidating, right?) And he was standing in the line for Japanese 101. I sidled up behind him. Maybe it would be fun.

His name was David Fogel, and the bonds of sharing introductory language course humiliations meant we became fast friends (though I remained, spoiler alert, in the friend zone—the same humiliations that create lasting platonic connections probably also snuff out romantic sparks). We stayed in touch after I transferred from the University of Vermont to Wisconsin, and when he graduated and moved to Hokkaido, in northern Japan, to teach English, he told me I should come visit.

I had spent a lot of time and energy to learn pretty decent Japanese, and I felt like I needed to go.1 I saved my paralegal overtime, combined with all the American Airlines miles I racked up flying back and forth between Madison and New York during my last two years of college, and went. Booking plane tickets is so easy now—if not exactly fun—but twenty years ago you did it on the phone, with no twenty-four-hour window to change your mind. Because this was so much money to me—all my money, in fact—I made my dad help. Unlike the time when I was around fourteen and my parents made me use my newly acquired French to book the hotel for our family vacation to Paris—setting my destiny to become a scheduling and advance person—he agreed.

David and I had been emailing in preparation, and he’d told me to dress warm. Since it was April, I assumed that meant bring a jean jacket and a sweatshirt. Famous last words. There was no way for me to look up the weather in Hokkaido at the time, and I’d skipped buying a guidebook—the pickings back then were slim. But to be fair I’d also not counted on David picking me up on his motorcycle.