She said she used to count the seams in sidewalks to distract herself during her twenty-minute walk, possibly on her way to college, or practiced her conversations in Spanish, repeating “bored to death” with each hurried stride.
Or counting out, until she came to a dog or pile of dog shit,
“Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t,” she wrote in a poem from that time. “Either way it’s the same twenty minutes it would have been.”
In a very James Joyce moment, she hears instructions about how to hold her shoulders straight. “like the normal ones” in a town where to make it apparently you need to fit in.
Her poem back then shows just how little she has actually changed over the decade between college and her budding career as a writer, and how conversations, she claims, are always better when there’s no one to talk to.
“Sure, you get a few odd looks, especially when your face twitches,” she wrote.
But those who judge her do not realize just how many times she had treaded that sidewalk, and they might have sympathized if they knew.
As later, she seems to have a low opinion of herself, claiming she would look at herself funny, if she wasn’t herself.
But all this introspection does not reduce the time it takes to make the trek, perhaps if she went a different route, and again contemplated her practicing her Spanish, although how appealing is the concept of dying of boredom?
How many of the strangers in that yuppie town even understood what she was saying as they hurry by her, something she finds funny enough to laugh about out loud.
Yet, she is never free of worry, or about how false conviction is.
Then, she speculates, perhaps she might take a bus.
The poem written in college isn’t as complex as her later poems, but there is a strong voice, and a sense of being isolated from the world, observing it as if she does not belong it, and those few interactions she has with other people make her seem strange.
She is traveling in what she calls a “yuppie city,” which is likely Manhattan’s Upper West side where her college is located, the hub of Eastern liberal thought.
There is something flippant about the poem, but also utterly serious, showing how isolated she felt even back then, not quite normal, not in touch with the everyday people around her, an alienation from them she is not completely sad about.
She is counting her life out in sidewalk seams as opposed to the coffee spoons the equally alienated T. S. Elliot measured his life out in, desperate to occupy her mind as she travels this wasteland of concrete populated by judgmental strangers, her head bent, looking for the cracks as she steps, occasionally encountering a dog.
The fact that she prefers to talk to herself than to other people furthers this sense of alienation, as if she has nothing in common with the people and the society through which she has to navigate, drawing from them questionable looks.
None of them really understand her – how can they when they are strangers? But if they did know more about what goes on inside her, they might be more sympathetic.
She almost seems to provoke these looks, when she talks about her boredom in Spanish, picturing as she points out “the Spanish-Savvy” who actually know what she is saying, she laughing as they hurry past her, only making her worry a little.
“At least, I said it with conviction,” she writes.
But then, people – the masses, the public, the strangers, falsely sport conviction like a fad.
This poem like many of her later poems deals with two realities, her internal realm where her real self lives, the thinking self who is observing the world around her as if inside a bubble. The second reality is the external world the strangers occupy, the judgmental masses who see her as a bit odd for talking to herself, counting the cracks as she walks, or speaking to herself in Spanish, or even for her laughing out loud as apparently nothing.
These two realities coexist, but never mingle. They remain separate. She can see the real world, can interact on some fashion, but never in a meaningful way. There is always a disconnect, a language barrier, a failure of the world to fully understand who she is and why she is doing what she is doing.
She is bored with mundane reality, and there is a sense that she just passing time.
She needs to get from here to there, but the journey takes her through a wasteland that offers nothing for her, and she can’t shorten the journey, it’ll always take the same amount of time to get from this place to that place, boring her to death.
This reflects in some ways her vision of living, of a journey that ultimately ends in death, but with almost nothing worth noting along the way, just strangers and their odd looks.
The poem raises a lot of questions about what her life was like back then, her friendships, her hopes and dreams, and how she hoped to break out of the bubble of her life.
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