Brandon Stanton's Blog, page 210

“I don’t see me living past forty. I’m just too tired. Even at...

“I don’t see me living past forty. I’m just too tired. Even at twenty-eight, I feel like I’ve lived one thousand years. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been alive since biblical times. The only reason I’m living is to survive. I work as a janitor now on the Upper East Side. Staying away from people helps keep me from going crazy. Everybody is always at each others’ throats all the time. I just wish something would wipe us off the face of the earth. I mean, I don’t want it to be painful for anyone. I just want it to be over so we can all just get some rest. Unless there’s a hell. Then maybe we’re better off here.” (3/3)

“My mom knew I was getting picked on at school. I tried not to...

“My mom knew I was getting picked on at school. I tried not to tell her, but she’d see me come home unhappy every day. She’d open up my binder and see the notes I wrote about hating everyone. She’d tell me to trust in God. And that God was always with me. And not to fight back, because God was working out justice, even if I couldn’t see it. She was the closest thing I ever had to heaven. She was like Mother Theresa. When I was around her my anger would go away. Not completely, but almost. She died when I was twenty-one of esophageal cancer. I feel like The Flash sometimes. His mother was murdered when he was a child, and he’s always obsessing about going back in time to save her. I wish I could go back to a year before they found the cancer, and say: ‘I know you don’t feel anything right now. But you should go to the hospital and get your throat checked.’” (2/3)

“I was one of three white kids at the school. I’m actually not...

“I was one of three white kids at the school. I’m actually not even white, I’m Hispanic. But I look white. Every single day I had balls of paper thrown at my head in class. And there’s nothing I could do. If you tell the person to stop, then you’ve got three or four people threatening you. If you tell the principal, then you’re a snitch. And ‘snitches get sliced.’ I saw one kid get beaten really badly on the subway platform. I kept having to transfer classes. The principal asked me why it was me that kept getting picked on. I didn’t know what to say. There were two other white kids, and it wasn’t so bad for them. But they were more ‘street’ than me. So people respected them. I was weak. One time a kid asked me if I smoked weed, and I told him no. I said that I thought drugs were stupid. He shouted to his friends that the white boy called them stupid. And I’ve got four kids around me shouting: ‘Fuck him up!’ ‘Fuck him up!’ I carried so much anger inside of me. I’d watch horror movies and imagine that I was Michael Myers, and I was slaughtering all the people who bullied me. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’d imagine that we were living in Nazi Germany, and I could report these people to Hitler. I’d never do anything violent. But these were the thoughts I was having. The closest I came to snapping was one day when somebody pushed me in the hall and said: ‘You don’t belong here. This isn’t Columbine.’ And I said: ‘You don’t belong here. This isn’t Rikers.’ But that’s the most I ever pushed back.” (1/3)

“I’m working at a preschool where we let the kids determine the...

“I’m working at a preschool where we let the kids determine the curriculum. Say we’re learning about rocks, and one of the children uses his rock to smash a nearby gourd. Instead of correcting him, we ask ourselves why he likes to smash things. Maybe he’ll be interested in planting the seeds we find inside the gourd, so we’ll try to plan a lesson around that. If that doesn’t hold his interest, we’ll just find more things to smash.”

“I just finished applying to 27 law schools. I can...

“I just finished applying to 27 law schools. I can recite my personal statement word for word.”

“I lost a baby at the end of May. I was just a little over two...

“I lost a baby at the end of May. I was just a little over two months into the pregnancy. I wasn’t showing or anything. And I hadn’t announced the pregnancy yet. So I don’t think that the baby seemed real to anyone else. But it was real to me. Every time I passed a children’s store, I’d look in the window and smile. I began to look closely at all the different types of strollers people were pushing down the street. I bought a little monkey for the baby that I carried around with me. I started planning our life together. Then one day it felt like someone was stabbing me in the lower abs. I went to the doctor, and they told me that I’d had an ectopic pregnancy, and the baby was lost. I felt really alone afterward because most of my friends hadn’t even known the baby existed. They couldn’t understand how I felt. Part of it was my fault. I didn’t want to talk about it. Yet I still expected everyone to understand.“

“I wish I could go back to college for the rest of my life.”

“I wish I could go back to college for the rest of my life.”

“Chris didn’t tell me he was HIV positive until he began to...

“Chris didn’t tell me he was HIV positive until he began to get really sick. It was 1991, so there wasn’t much that could be done back then. It was the only time we ever argued. I wanted him to take care of himself so he could live as long as possible. He wanted to keep traveling, and drinking, and eating whatever he wanted. He kept working right until the end. Even when he was so sick that he had to be hooked up to an IV feed, he was making plans to go to the Netherlands to choreograph a show. He’d located a doctor there and everything. But he never made it. He began to lose his lucidity toward the end. One night he began to direct us. There were three of us in his hospital room, and he told us to arrange the lamp a certain way, then he had us lift him into the air. He seemed to be somewhere else. I think in his mind he was actually on a stage.” (3/3)

“A lot of times being a costume designer is drudgery. A...

“A lot of times being a costume designer is drudgery. A director will tell you that he wants a pink dress with blue ruffles, and you just have to follow orders. But the process was so much more with Chris. It was something intimate. He was the creative. He liked ideas, and colors, and shapes. I was the technician. I handled the nuts and bolts of things. He’d tell me that he wanted something ‘crisp.’ Or he’d cut things out of magazines that inspired him. Or he’d play a piece of music that he wanted me to embody. Sometimes he’d just point to an old brick wall with peeling paint, and say: ‘Make me something that looks like that.’ Our work represented our relationship. It was all about the process for me. Chris was more about the accomplishment. I remember how excited he was when one of our shows was featured on the front page of the New York Times’ Arts section. He felt that he was finally starting to be recognized. But it was bittersweet, because he’d started to get sick by then.” (2/3)

“I was a costume designer, and I joined a famous dance company...

“I was a costume designer, and I joined a famous dance company shortly after moving to New York. On my first day, one of the dancers told me that she’d met her best friend while on the job. I remember wishing that I could be so lucky. When I met Chris, he was still a dancer. But he was so talented that soon the director was giving him his own shows to choreograph. We worked together on everything. We could not have been more different. I had no interest in being famous. I grew up in a quiet family. I didn’t want to have a famous name or make a million dollars. But both of Chris’s parents had been Olympic skiers. So Chris wanted to win. He wanted his name in the paper. He’d always say things like: ‘That job should have been mine,’ or ‘I could have done that show better than him.’ I’m a born assistant. I didn’t have that drive but I enjoyed being close to it. It was like this breeze was coming off him all the time. He brought 100% of himself into everything he did. He was the kind of dancer that you’d pay to watch him walk a dog. I think he valued me because I was a willing participant in all his schemes. It was exciting just to be around him.” (1/3)