It Hardly Matters

I'm Baaaaack...for American Idol

2008-05-21T20:07:00.011-04:00

8:15. So this year, for the first time, there was something happening in my life more compelling than American Idol: my grad thesis. (As I type that, I shed a tear for that pathetic truth--but truth, no matter how pathetic, is the way I'm trying to roll these days.) I missed almost all of AI after February in order to work on my thesis, which now that it's handed in, I kind of feel like was a bigger waste of time than watching American Idol religiously. But I digress.

I'm home tonight, watching the Two Davids duke it out. And oh, that opening number cheesefest! And the live feeds from the Davids' respective hometowns featuring former contestants Mikalah Gordon and Matt Used-to-Be-a-Marine are making me think about how insane it is that reality TV has given these people some semblance of careers.

Let me break the live-blogging to say that I love David Archuleta and have since the first time I heard him. I feel like he's this little conduit to purity, which is rare in reality television and in actual reality.

This Mike Meyers racist promo is making me choke on my navratan korma. No shit, I am eating it right now.

OK, I thought that Seal was Chikezie. Now I'm officially on Chikezie watch. Side note: Syesha is as compelling as a Jasmine Trias. From your reaction I can tell that I am right.

8:30. Only 90 minutes left!

YES. Castro doing Buckley. Watching him in the opening number--singing "Get Ready" while enthusiastically snapping his fingers--was downright painful.

More blatant promos. How delightful. I love that people are clapping for two strangers getting free cars.

Look how multiracial the girls are this year! It's like a United Colors of Barbie pitch meeting at Mattel. Speaking of the girls, my favorite is the skunk-haired nurse, even though she just butchered Donna Summer beyond recognition. Oh SNAP! Queen Donna herself!! OK, now I'm happy. BRB after the Queen brings it.

I lied. Let's talk about blingy microphones. And by "let's talk about" I mean "I love."

8:34. Paula's boobies! Donna's last note!

8:40. Carly Smithson & Michael Johns singing this cornball arrangement of "The Letter" is basically the producers going: hey if you don't like either David, these two could be valid singing stars, and they happen to look cute together, too. Another From Justin to Kelly, anyone?

Finally. Chikezie. Wait, I forgot about that stripper guy! YES CHIKIE BABY. Souling up some Bryan Adams. Why are D&D dressed alike? Damn, they're making Cook sing the song that started Archuleta fever. Rude. No, Lord, please, why the actual Bryan Adams? He looks like one of my high school boyfriends mixed with Doug Savant and a little meth, and sounds like the lovechild of Castro & skunk-haired nurse. Of course Bob Ice is digging it. (Update: dinner finished. On beer #2. It's a special occasion.)

8:54. I love that Jordin Sparks/Chris Brown song that's all over the radio, "No Air." Good for Jordin and her Lane Byrant spokesmodel self. I'm so happy that "they" haven't starved her and stuffed her into inappropriately tight clothing like they did to Kelly Clarkson.

ZZ Top is awesome and I'm not just saying that because I played a ZZ Top tribute show at the Annex back in October and won the "Best Legs" contest. Really. God, this song dragging on forever. I'll take this opportunity to speculate on who will come out to sing with Archuleta. Stevie Wonder? Sean Lennon? Smokey Robinson? Maybe Kelly Clarkson.

9:00. Brooke White and Graham Nash. Nap time.

9:06. Who the hell are these people? The Jonas Brothers? I think this where I draw the line, I mean I like to know what the kids are listening to but these dudes and Miley Cyrus can kiss my old, withered ass. Chill, tambourine child, chill! See Pat? That's me.

9:12. My ears are bleeding from this kid in the cape. I feel badly for the USC band for having to back him...and....he's been cut off for a commercial. Perfect.

9:18. God this whole being old/writing a thesis thing is still inhibiting my enjoyment of this program as I listen to something called One Republic, something I have never heard of. Thank the angels they've dragged Archuleta out. A word keeps repeating itself in my brain: Coldplay...Coldplay.

9:23. Here comes darling Jordin, cute and wearing a golden dress, like a mix of Beyonce and Jennifer Hudson going to the middle school Winter Carnival dance. Another problem in addition to the dress: her song sucks. BRING OUT CHRIS BROWN NOW. Boooo...commercial. A Coldplay commercial!

9:32. Why am I laughing at this stupid Pips thing? I blame Jack Black.

Here comes the Goddess Carrie. True glamour and class. She is THE Hotness. It's a shame I can't listen to her annoying gnu-country songs. But she is the real deal--she even has the Whitney microphone hand slap move down. Question: Does she kind of look like the hottest marketing manager/manta ray ever in that outfit, or is it just me? Another question: Does she ever blink? I wonder how Bob Ice is feeling right now.

9:41. Did I just see David Archuleta in his underpants?

Here come the Top 12 doing a George Michael medley. That might be the gayest sentence ever written. More Skunk Nurse and more Chikezie!!! So thrilled, so happy. Holy Hell, GM has arrived from the heavens like Frankie Avalon in the "Beauty School Dropout" number in the Grease movie, except dressed in black, not white, and wearing some $10 H&M women's sunglasses. His voice is sounding a leetle shaky, friends.

Who is singing with Archuleta??? Did I miss something? Did he and Aretha trade fours on "Think" while I was stirring my curry?

9:56. Come ON, already! Losing stamina/interest/brain cells.

9:59. OH SHIT. No way. Cook, really?? This is total crap. See what happens when I don't vote?

OK, now I'm off to cry myself to sleep.

Until next year!

Why Do You Only Do That Only

2008-02-22T00:20:00.004-05:00

If the video doesn't work, try this.

Big Girls Don't Fall

2008-02-21T18:28:00.003-05:00

My sweater smells like mittens and icicles or a wool scarf caked with miniature snowballs after an afternoon of sledding or skating. It's the scent of being two nanoseconds away from burning your tongue on death-defying sips of too-hot, powdery hot chocolate served in a palm-sized Styrofoam cup that you just drink right there with your skates on. When you bite on the pliant lip of the cup a plasticky chaser cuts the sickening sweet of the molten lava you've just swallowed, and you wait for the warmth to travel to your fingertips and toes.

When we skated on frozen New England ponds, we looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting--no joke--with the horses and sleighs and muffs and skating skirts transmuted into silver sliding discs, 1980s Day-Glo snowpants, and those gloves that changed color with the temperature. Rental skates were always either too tight or too loose. They were tragically, obviously, not yours. But you were excited to at least get white ones, however scuffed. The alternative pair were the color of spoiled eggs, which meant a lackluster performance over the cracked and rippled ice.

Was it Look Park? Forest Park? Either way, the lake was huge and flat only in the middle, where boys had scraped smooth a rectangular area on which to play hockey. These weren't neighborhood boys, these were high schoolers with scholarships and double-blade racing skates. They were boys to be avoided for fear of notice and/or body checks that could send a ten-year-old to Mercy Hospital. So I'd break free from my little sister, a Weeble in wool and Gore-tex, tottering alongside my mother, and my Dad practicing his long, low strides in black skates he's had since college, and go exploring.

I'd scrape along the edge of the lake. Low, leafless branches reached desperately toward my feet, looking for spring. After a few minutes, I'd attempt a twirl in a secluded nook, careful no one could see in case I fell. That was my goal: not to fall. This was easy at first, in the cautious beginning, but after three successful twirls and a hitch twist into my backwards stride, I'd get heady, start picturing myself in a spangly leotard and a matching hair scrunchie panting through a smile as I rounded the rink into my final triple lutz. My parents and sister, on their feet behind the giant ice arena sneeze-guard, looked meaningfully at each other in between chants of support. I was gunning for World Champion and everybody knew I was going to do it. I'd be the American Dream, face on a box of Wheaties.

When you fall and your skull bounces on four inches of ice like four winters, you see black, then white before the Polaroid of your brain develops into a landscape of stars. It's a graceful fall, the Nike swoop of falls. In your whole head there's a cold pain, not a hot one like needles or scalds. Your father picks you up, and you say you're okay even though your head feels like a split melon. There's no blood, but you feel some phantom ooze warming the back of your neck, just where your scarf is wound tight. You cry, even though you're a big girl.

Self-Referential Revelations

2008-01-14T13:14:00.000-05:00

Molly tagged me.

1. What's the story behind the name of your blog?
It has everything to do with the intersection of listening to Mates of State on repeat and my own lack of courage. The only way I could start writing was if it didn't matter.

2. Why did you start blogging in the first place?
Massey made me do it. He, like me, was bored at work and told me to write for him, so he could have something else to read while he, like me, was supposed to be editing reading passages.

3. What has been your best blogging experience? What about the worst?
Best: It got me into grad school. Worst: I posted an old story and my family called me in alarm because they thought I was morbidly depressed. I had to explain that no, I was morbidly depressed last year.

4. What do you think will happen to your blog in 2008?
I hope to trick it out and focus it more on music writing.

Now I'm tagging: Lauren, Devery, Jeff, Adam, if you please.

The Tooth Fairy

2008-01-10T11:38:00.000-05:00

Eleanor’s hair was always in pincurls: tiny black buns swirled through with streaks of white fastened with bobby pins close to the base of her skull. A single pink spongy curler contained the few hairs that constituted her bangs, creating a sort of duckbill protruding from her hairline. Eleanor smoked long, thin, brown cigarettes that she mashed, half-smoked, into an olive-green metal bowl affixed to long, thin, olive-green metal stand. When my mother sat in Eleanor and Harold’s driveway, her gleaming white Salem 100 butts—smoked to the quick—nestled awkwardly into a pile of brown.

Harold was a mechanic. He worked out of his garage, which smelled so strongly of oil and stale smoke that I felt it might explode at any moment. A glossy calendar featuring curiously enthusiastic blonde women (reading a book, or straddling a motorcycle) in very little clothing hung on the wall, higher than my eyeline, but low enough for me to see if I stood on tiptoes. Once, alone in the garage, I moved close to the calendar. I noticed a clear plastic overlay, curling at the edges, and after looking over my shoulder twice, lifted it. Miss September’s clothing peeled up and away from her pink limbs, revealing a pelvis adorned with a strip of what I figured was pubic hair, and two shiny breasts that seemed to smile psychotically at me like a deranged woman I had once seen at the mall. I dropped the overlay like it was on fire, looked over my shoulder again, and casually strode to the other side of the garage to inspect what I suspected was a car engine leaning against a pile of uncut two-by-fours.

Eleanor drove a 1978 VW beetle, sunshine yellow. It was always parked outside of Eleanor and Harold’s yellow-brown house on Quaker Road, just around the corner from our house on Roanoke Road. From the rear window, a bumper sticker proclaimed: You Bet Your Dupa I’m Polish. My sister and I loved that car, and when we begged my mother to trade in her puke-green Ford Granada for one, she’d sigh and say, “It is a cute car,” then exhale toward the closed windows in our living room. When I asked my mother what “dupa” meant, and she explained that it was the same thing we called “fanny”, but in Polish.

For whatever reason, every time I had a loose tooth, my mother would send me to Eleanor’s house. I’d have been complaining for weeks, jiggling an incisor with my tongue every waking minute, trying to loose the tooth from its stubborn root. Once in a while, I’d taste the metallic rush of blood when I’d managed to rip away one of the dead tooth tendons, simultaneously revolted and stimulated by the taste of my own blood. After two days of complaints, my mother would scream, “Let me look at it!” and I’d wail and cry and run away, knowing that if I’d let her anywhere near my mouth, she would have ripped it out of my head, causing me excruciating pain and suffering. After this display, I knew I’d either have to get it out myself or be sent to Quaker Road to deal with Eleanor.

I must have been 11. I’d been wailing over a loose tooth for a few days. After dinner, my mother had commanded, “Go over to Eleanor’s so she can look at that tooth.” I protested, citing the inconvenience of the after-dinner hour. “What if she’s busy?”

“She’s not busy,” my mother stated. After some thought, I agreed to go—I had the brilliant notion that Eleanor, a neighbor, would never inflict harm on a girl of 11 that wasn’t hers. I’d be safer with her than with my mother, who was clearly sick of my whining. So I trudged out of our dead end, took a meandering right onto Quaker Road, pushing and pulling at the nearly-ejected tooth the entire way. When I skulked up Eleanor and Harold’s driveway, my heart raced as I tried to talk the tooth into breaking off: Come on! Get out! Just break off already! But it hung there, stubborn as a stain.

Eleanor and Harold’s doorbell was illuminated with orange light. When I pressed it, I could hear a deafening BONG BONG from where I stood. I flushed with embarrassment for interrupting whatever Harold and Eleanor did at 7 o’clock at night. Thirty seconds later, Eleanor opened her heavy door decorated with a mustard yellow valance. Her curler was firmly in place, a freshly lit cigarette smoldered between the index and middle fingers of her right hand. She wore a polyester sleeveless shift with a pattern of repeating ovals—brown, beige, brown, beige.

“Megan! Hello!” She said this as if she had been expecting me.

“Um, hi, Eleanor.”

“Hi Megan!” Harold called out jovially from an unseen room. The din of a television enveloped my name.

“Hi Harold!” I screamed.

Eleanor opened the door all the way. “I hear you have a loose tooth. Come on in!”

I walked into her kitchen, a foreign and oppressively beige place. An overhead florescent light cast a greenish hue over the room. I stammered, “Well, my tooth has been bothering me for a while, so my mom thought I should come over here so you could take a look at it.” As the words escaped my mouth, I knew I was in for it—Eleanor was going to rip that tooth out.

I stood there, Eleanor’s bulk hovering over me, her mouth a smile but her eyes all business. I opened my jaw against itself and jiggled the tooth with my tongue for effect. She peered into my mouth. “Ahhh. Yeah. That needs to come out.” She rested her cigarette in a small yellow dish on the counter.

“Uh huh.” My mouth was still agape. My heart still pounding.

In a flash, Eleanor reached her surprisingly nimble fingers into my mouth, clamped on the doomed tooth with her forefinger and thumb, and yanked.

It was over. An acute sense of freedom cloaked my body as my tongue frantically prodded the space between two shockingly secure teeth. Eleanor wrapped the tooth in a shred of paper towel she ripped from a wooden paper towel holder adorned with mushroom decals. She bent down and handed it to me, smiling. “Put this under your pillow tonight for the Tooth Fairy. Now go on. Say hello to your mother for me.”

“Ok!” I was out the door, running toward my house which was darkening to midnight blue in the last shreds of September light. I heard Eleanor and Harold’s door bang shut as I rounded the corner onto Roanoke. Visions of quarters were in my eyes, the tooth no longer part of me, but a foreign object wrapped in paper in my hand. A foreign object worth exactly fifty cents.

Love, Williamsburg Style

2007-12-30T19:07:00.000-05:00

Davey Is the Greatest

2007-10-28T21:16:00.000-04:00

My man Davey is still keeping it real. That has to be the L train.

Davey Dance Blog - 28 - NYC MTA - The Sunshine Underground - "Put You In Your Place" from Pheasant Plucker on Vimeo.

A Bit of Stevie

2007-10-26T15:21:00.000-04:00

So I'm trying to write about Stevie Wonder. It's difficult. But here's what I've come up with. For my grad school friends: it's part of a longer piece (wink), called Prescriptions for the Soul.

Track 1: Fingertips Pts. 1 & 2

For fans of apt introductions. For enthusiasts of raw talent. For prepubescence. For rhythm and commands from bandleaders. For blindness and vision, extrasensory perception, the feel of cool ivory under your fingerprints. For witnessing something important. For articulation. For the beginning, the beginners. For people who like things in parts. For promise. For hope. For permission.

I’m watching a black and white video from the early 1960s. The music starts immediately, mid-harmonica solo. He’s lip-synching but no one cares, if they know. He is high-pitched, and young. He’s standing in a bible-salesmen suit on an empty stage, no band, feet close together in shined shoes. He can’t stop moving, he’s electrified. The audience, mostly female black teenagers, claps along, slightly out of time, slightly bewildered. They smile teenaged smiles colored with embarrassment, self-consciousness and fear. Several of them are wearing cheerleader sweatshirts with large white Es on the front. He sings to them, asks them to clap louder, and they do. (Robert Plant will borrow this vocal riff from him years later when he sings, “lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time” on “Rock and Roll”.) He’s a child, but I suspect he already knows things we don’t know. I’m watching him and I’m thinking: thank you.

(Stomp your feet, jump up and down, do anything that you wanna do!)

It'll go on from there, through every track on the 4-disc set, At the Close of a Century. Oh, and here's the Fingertips video.

La Lotta Continua

2007-10-25T16:14:00.001-04:00

Today I find myself utterly, crushingly distracted by the memory of someone who once told me he loved me. Or, more accurately, by the memory of the moment he told me. It's a physical memory, detailed, and warm, next to me from the moment I awoke until this second. I'm pulled by it, neck snapping up and to the left.

It's curious, with all its power and pull. How can he walk around knowing that he said it? With all that guilt and meaning, if, in fact, he meant what he said? That's what's astonishing me, the fact that I'll never know if he meant it, if anyone ever means it, those three words we long to hear. I have a mind to believe that once they are said they just float into the universe with all the other words and are rendered meaningless.

Does the curiosity of this love-day mean that I love him too, in some obtuse way, out of some deep soul-stirred dream? Or is it love that I love, I miss, that fat glowing thing?

I try to convince myself that love exists only when someone makes a move, does something, creates a real connection with another person, a life, not mummifies it in memory or art. Although Caravaggio could convince me otherwise.

Sleepless

2007-10-10T12:18:00.001-04:00

When I can't write, or won't, I can't sleep. So I've been up to all hours lately. Instead of applying my anxiety to my work (my new mantra, thanks, Jo Ann), I sit and stew in my own juices for hours on end ingesting various media: music, TV, films, books, magazines. I try to turn the level up a notch during what are supposed to be "writing hours": watching touching PBS documentaries about inner-city kids performing Shakespeare at London's West End Theatre, reading Lucy Grealy's harrowing medical/psychological memoir Autobiography of a Face, listening to The National's two albums on repeat, finally popping The Lives of Others into my DVD player instead of letting it rot in its Netflix sleeve on my coffee table. All this in search of my soul.

The kids in the PBS documentary (My Shakespeare) were having trouble. They weren't actors. They had never read or seen Shakespeare. They had no hope of success in any tangible way. But after a month of intensive rehearsals and constant guidance/encouragement from filmmaker/actor/director Paterson Joseph, they pushed through adversity (thank you ESPN, for that phrase) and connected to their characters, wrenching emotions like love, lust, and betrayal from their souls and getting them out on stage.

An actress friend of mine once told me that she had to stop acting because the ability to access and control emotions, though she could do it, was too much for her. She couldn't stop feeling them after the scene ended. I think this kind of direct access to and control of emotion is necessary for all art. But writing isn't a performance. It's just always there. So if you're attuned to your emotions when you're writing, if you're ripping your heart out, when and how do you put it back in?

Last night, I caught American Beauty on TV, uninterrupted, unedited. I remembered going to see it in the theatre with Jane, when it first came out, when she still lived here, when she made me go see the best films. Afterwards, we clutched each other and sighed with overwhelming wonder at the Wes Bentley character: how gorgeous, how real. The plastic bag dancing in the wind. We probably cried.

It's so easy (too easy?) for me to access my emotions. It's wrangling them into art that pins me to the couch. What good is all that emotion with no means to get it on the page? So I'm up all night, feeling stuff, staring into the night, the flickering television casting a frantic shadow in my bedroom, wondering what to do.

My Dreams Have Come True

2007-09-26T20:33:00.000-04:00

Stevie Wonder, Boston, MA, September 20. Section 2, Row N, Seat 21. Words can't describe...

Six Years

2007-08-24T12:03:00.000-04:00

It's weird. I keep forgetting that every year in late August I start getting a permanent migraine, become absent-minded and dull, and just want to sleep all the time. Joy, happiness, or even plain old laughter is hard to come by. At first I chalk it up to end-of-summer stress, financial woes, loneliness, and more recently, back-to-school trepidation, but after about a week of feeling weird and out of it I remember that it's because it's approaching the beginning of September, that beautiful New York month when the humidity drops but the sun still shines and there's hope and renewal and football and new notebooks that is then shattered by hatred and death and destruction and fear.

I'm not ready to write about September 11, but I hope to at least attempt to do so, someday. For now, I'll just rant for a minute.

What the hell is happening at Ground Zero? It's a disgusting tourist-laden pit of stagnation and emptiness. I try to follow the "plans" for "fixing" it, but they are so convoluted and pointless and long overdue that my brain becomes mush.

The number of firefighters that have died because of what happened on September 11 has climbed to 345. Two firefighters died there last week, trying to stop a fire in a building that has stood broken and empty, blackened and shrouded, for six years. This week, two more were seriously injured, helmets shattered, by a falling 300-pound jackhammer that slammed into a FDNY work shed at 75 miles per hour. The FDNY was our country's army, our defense, on that day, on- and off-duty firefighters rushing toward the unknown and into the hell that was the World Trade Center to try and stop it, to try and save people.

So how is the current state of Ground Zero acceptable? How can our city and our government not feel the outrage that I do and make steps toward change, toward clean up, toward moving on, toward respectful remembrance, toward honor and decency? I may be uninformed about what's really going on down there, but the fact remains: it's still a hole, a pile of debris, an open wound.

I don't care if it's a park, a building, a giant fucking slab of concrete. Please do something with that space. It's been six years. At this rate, on the tenth anniversary, we'll all still be staring through a chain-link fence into a pit. Is that how we want to honor the dead? Is that their legacy?

Wave Report

2007-07-31T18:50:00.001-04:00

I couldn't go a whole month without posting. I've been away, busy, depressed, whatever. Plus, they are jackhammering outside of my apartment and my beautiful backyard looks bombed out and depleted. In my brain, I've given the whole less-than-peaceful-in-my-own-home thing a month. It's all about September 1: the apartment repairs should be complete (outside plus the downstairs floor which has half a moldy carpet and an open sewage drain), and school starts again. It's been a summer of tidal waves, none of which are actually comprised of water. One day I'm baking in the sun in a affordable-but-cute-as-hell baby doll dress, drunk at 4:30 PM, listening to a great band (for free) at McCarren Park with various and sundry lovely and festive friends, loving summer in the city. The next I'm so depressed I'm nearly incapable of figuring out how to possibly feed myself since I keep all of my food in the kitchen and not within reaching distance of my bed. One day I'm talking about ideas and love and Edith Piaf and traveling to Peru with a gaggle of beautiful and well-toned people who happen also to be above-average cooks and funny. The next I'm watching a Hey Paula marathon and wondering if it's still weird to cry on the phone to your mother when you are 33 years of age.

But such is life. How boring would it be, otherwise? I'm learning, slowly but surely, to harness these floods of emotion into my work, not to be torn down by them like an inexperienced boogie boarder in the surf. Wish me luck...

I've Been Tagged!

2007-06-13T17:12:00.000-04:00

By Mol. Yes. So in the spirit of all things blogilicious, here are 7 random things about myself.

1. I am, regretfully, not related to Melissa Gilbert.

2. I once played Mrs. Claus in a school play but lost the role of the Statue of Liberty to Heather Friedrich and never forgave her for it.

3. I have every issue of the New Yorker since 1995 in my apartment.

4. Fish create real, irrational fear in me, kind of like snakes do to Indiana Jones.

5. I hate going downtown near Ground Zero and every time I do I feel that sick, acrid air and begin to cry from grief and disbelief.

6. I read three personalized horoscopes for myself every day.

7. If I could die and come back as someone else, I'd be a wide receiver in the NFL or Aretha Franklin.

There you have it. And Lillet, Katie, Tiny/Shiny, Saint Peg, Spillah, Baldur, and Alice, consider yourself tagged.

Egypt Story: The Wedding

2007-06-04T14:23:00.000-04:00

In honor of the fact that one year ago, I was sailing up the Nile, I'm posting a snippet of a story I wrote about my trip. It's not done, it's not perfect, and the characters are confusing, but here it is. (For a bit of context, this section describes El Gouna, the wedding, and the last night of the trip.) Happy Anniversary, Yasmine & Josh! And much love to all Egypets...

From our balcony at the Ocean View Hotel in El Gouna, we could see Saudi Arabia, a grey-blue mass floating beyond the man-made lagoon’s rock walls and the Red Sea. I didn’t know it was Saudi Arabia until Meredith told me. She was much better at geography than I was, but I was better at it than some of the other people on our trip—at least I knew that Egypt was in Africa. (Before I left New York, I had checked the atlas, just once, to make sure.) We could also see Wang and Rich on their balcony, up and to the left, resting their arms on the ledge, looking at us.

“Hello, ladies,” Wang singsonged, followed by his infectious laugh. Rich, his roommate and sidekick, waggled his fingers at us and grinned.

“Hi boys!” Meredith trilled, the words taken by the wind. I waved, rolled my eyes, and went back inside our room, where I stretched out on one of the twin bed’s scratchy sun-bleached blankets and waited for our luggage to be delivered. I smoked, because a cigarette was the closest thing to food I could find, and because I was lucky enough to be in Egypt, where I could smoke anywhere I liked. Two days later, Mer and I would sing “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” in our bathrobes to Wang and Rich as a thank you for a love poem they had dropped down onto our balcony. It was written in pencil on a small piece of graph paper and featured a drawing of a unicorn.

This was the relaxing bit of our two-week trip, which included three days in Cairo, a three-day private cruise up the Nile from Aswan to Luxor, five days at El Gouna, a Red Sea resort, and a final two days in Cairo. In Gouna, there were no early-morning tours or lectures, just beaching and drinking and waiting for the reason we were all in Egypt--Josh and Yasmine’s wedding. At El Gouna, we had to deal with something that we had completely forgotten how to deal with: unstructured time. Ahmed, our brilliant and beautiful tour guide, had left us to return to Cairo and prepare for his wedding. When he told us he was engaged, six girls blinked almost imperceptibly, including me. Our other tour guide, Omneya, the one that made the single men blink, turned off her meter and accompanied us to the beach, torturing the boys by wearing a bikini and telling them about her apartment near the airport and that she was studying music in graduate school. Without Ahmed and Omneya telling us what to buy at Khan Al-Khalili (and how to buy it), or how long to stay in the museum, we were lost. Meredith and I missed the tours, the stories of the goddess Nut giving birth to the sun each day and the heretic sun-worshipping king Akhenaten and the slashes ripped across his likenesses after his death. Now, our time was spent figuring out if we should sit by the beach or by the pool, and whether 12:30 PM was too early to order a bottle of Sakkara with our lunch. We always decided that it wasn’t. We napped in the sun, pale bodies slathered with 45 sunscreen, newly-purchased Naguib Mahfouz books perched on our faces.

By this point in the trip, all 30 of Yasmine and Josh's friends were comfortable with each other, the friends from college, the DJs from DC, the web designers from San Francisco, and Yasmine's brother Sherief's guests from New York, of which Mer and I were two. We’d run into each other down by the marina, in the gift shop of the Ocean View, or returning towels by the pool, and embrace as if we had known each other forever, or at least had spent a summer at camp together, crowded around firepits in the dark, telling each other secrets.

****

The night of the wedding, I dressed in my never-worn green chiffon halter dress, pleased that I had lost five pounds as I lay in bed the entire day, suffering from what Omneya called the “Pharoah’s Revenge.” Earlier, Erik, one of Josh's friends, had knocked on my hotel room door, having heard of my illness, and had offered Meredith, my de facto nurse, a Japanese root that smelled and looked like dung. I had swallowed it as if it were a truffle-covered lobster tail and washed it down with a bottle of Baraka, praying for the dirt and dung to clean me out and make me better. Now, lightheaded, I zipped my dress, pushed my earrings through my earlobes, and dusted gold powder onto my eyelids. I was in a dream, dirt on my tongue, everything in slow motion. I was going to make it to the wedding. I had to; I had promised Wang and Rich a dance each. Not to mention William, the three-year-old. It was going to be fun—well, as fun as a wedding can be for a dateless 31-year-old who had spent the last five hours puking.

And, like everything else we had done in Egypt, it was fun. The ceremony unfolded sweetly under a rising moon, the reception outdoors, around an Olympic-sized pool. Immense palm trees were lit dramatically in reds and oranges, a few shades darker than the bride's pale gown. Pots big as manhole covers were stuffed with lilies and starflowers and swirled in the pool, nudged along by the wind rushing off the Red Sea. Photographers crouched; chefs tonged falafel and lamb onto waiting plates. Champagne was gulped by Josh’s friends and sipped by Josh’s parents. The Egyptian aunties glittered. Fatima, the mother-of-the-bride's best friend, wrapped in coral silk, told stories to eager clusters of guests, her husband’s hand ever-present on the small of her back. Yasmine and Josh looked at once the most exhausted and the most beautiful I imagined they would ever look. Sherief was beaming and handsome, the prince. He started dancing the second the band sounded their first note and didn’t stop until the last guest was gone. Meredith flitted, filled with whiskey and merriment, one minute twirling on the dance floor, one minute whispering in the ear of a Bulgarian drummer. Rich, sickly like me, poor dear, munched on a roll and giggled next to me for most of the night. “How you feeling?” he’d ask every so often. "Better," I said with each sip of iceless gin.

A wedding cake was presented on pillars by five smiling waiters. The DJ played "Ain't Nobody" and I had to get up and dance. I picked William up and whirled him around. Mer and I danced together like old ladies. Wang and I did an interpretive dance to that song from Dirty Dancing that’s always played at weddings. Someone even attempted the lift. Healed by the gin and champagne, the dung pill, and the night, I was okay. I danced, fingering the hem of my dress so it would explode when I spun around. Everything was going to be okay.

****

Our last night in Egypt, Rich sat next to me on our midnight felucca ride on the Nile. About 20 of us, fresh from a weepy Egyptian feast at a fancy Cairo restaurant, were seated along the wooden walls of the boat, passing cans of beer and joints in lazy circles, mirroring the full moon overhead. The felucca driver wore a brown galabaya and a dusty white turban. Sherief had said something to him in Arabic, and we had climbed aboard. Nothing else was on the river.

There was a guitar, and so we sang. The couples touched each others’ hands, squeezing just enough to imprint the memory of this night into their lover’s palm. The uncoupled devolved into their beer, their hash, into their private grief, wishing they held something besides liquid or fire in their hands. Rich whispered, “I’m cold.” I gave him half of my pashmina. The guitar filled the interior of the boat and rung out over the water. I was grateful. For this night, for the guitar. For Sherief, for Meredith and Wang and William. For Fatima. For Rich. For Josh and Yasmine. For

Egypt

. For my life, a continent away, but under the same moon.

I Heart Andy Pettitte

2007-05-05T22:30:00.000-04:00

Is it weird that I'm home on Saturday night watching YouTube videos of Andy's postgame interviews? Yeah, I know.

I have a renewed interest in the Yanks this year. Too bad Andy's the only one pitching. I don't know if he can drag the Yanks' season out of the toilet, but he's making my spring better.

Welcome back, baby!

Spring In Brooklyn

2007-04-20T17:45:00.000-04:00

Inspired by Lillet.

I Didn't Break Up with You

2007-04-12T13:49:00.000-04:00

Hi, friends (meekly), how are you? I still love you, and ithardlymatters. But I've been hired away to write about music on zoom-in.com. It's fun, and I'm writing a lot, which is good and excellent and fulfilling. In fact, right now, I'm supposed to be writing for them, but instead, I'm writing here. About them, granted, but it's something!

In other news, the light in my bathroom is out, my wireless router died, my phone is not holding a charge, I had to get the Cruiser jumped a few weeks ago, my iPod battery had to be replaced, my printer ink is getting dangerously low, my debit card was apparently used at a retail merchant where "security lapses occurred," so I have to activate a new card, it took my 2 hours to figure out my NY state tax forms this morning, the soles of my favorite boots are coming apart, and my therapist can't see me next week because of a scheduling conflict.

What happens when everything breaks, needs new parts? At first, it's a giant pain in the ass. But then the new parts arrive or are attached, and the sense of accomplishment and newness overwhelms you with a warm swoosh breathing future as it passes. Breaks beget growth. You're supposed to snap off the wilting heads of flowerpot pansies so new ones will sprout. You get your hair cut. You get a snack during the commercial break. You can only become friends after you break up.

So I've taken a break, but I'm back, better. Like my boots will be, with new soles.

I Love Rock and Roll

2007-03-12T22:24:00.000-04:00

I'm weeping. Over the 2007 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony being held at this very moment at the Waldorf Astoria. I love to imagine Ronnie Spector and Patty Smith and Michael Stipe and Grandmaster Flash and whoever the hell is going to show up from Van Halen (not Dave or Eddie, we know that much) getting drunk backstage and talking smack and maybe even tearing up a little. It's a big, commercial, musical lovefest, and I'm loving every second of it.

Van Halen is one of my favorite bands. Mostly because they were the favorite band of my three best friends in junior high: the boys. The boys were in a little band of their own, Addiction, that rehearsed in one of their attics. They were a fearless threesome, drums, lead guitar, and vocals. One of them had printed out a banner in computer class: ADDICTION in zeros and ones on oversized, perforated 1980s printer paper, which hung over the drumset. It was hung there so that when they made VHS tapes of themselves performing, people wouldn't mistake them for the actual Van Halen.

I was one of the only girls allowed up in the attic. After a while, they even let me sing the "Hey Hey Hey!" part on "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love." I never told them this, but that was pretty much the greatest thing I did in seventh grade. I was in the band. For five minutes, but still. Up close, I got to see Dan tap out the guitar solos, Bret do the work of Alex and Mike by drumming and singing backup vocals, and Diamond Jay leap around doing his best Diamond Dave impression, minus the mesh bodysuit.

Only Mike Anthony and Sammy Hagar showed up tonight. Eddie's in rehab, Dave refused to show, and Alex is lost in the Bermuda Triangle or something. Mike and Sammy played "Why Can't This Be Love" with Paul Schaeffer and his brass-laden band, which was pretty painful. Then Velvet Revolver covered "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love." At the "Hey Hey Hey!" part, I was transported back to the attic, and I couldn't help but think that the boys sounded just as good.

Live, from Springfield

2007-03-10T15:14:00.000-05:00

There's a VHS tape labeled "Family" that sits in my parents' entertainment center. It was filmed in 1987, when my dad borrowed a 30-pound video camera recently purchased by the Springfield College Athletic Department in order to record basketball games and gymnastics meets. He was the Assistant Athletic Director, so was allowed to take this newfangled toy home for a weekend. It was larger than our dog, and had a gold plaque screwed to its dull grey side on which was etched "Property of the Springfield College Department of Athletics." As my dad lugged the awkward camera through the front door, looking like a member of the Channel 22 Eyewitness News Team, my sister and I, aged 8 and 12, leapt from the couch, our squeals mixing with dog barks and the banging of the screen door. We had a VCR and a Commodore 64, but this was a whole new technological adventure. Now we can be on TV! I thought.

As soon as the initial excitement wore off, we went to work on our scripts. All of us: me, Kim, Mom, and Dad. We decided that a Saturday Night Live format would suit our creative vision best, and began brainstorming story arcs, characters, and musical numbers. We were going to be stars.

Because the camera was school property, only Dad was allowed to touch it. We watched, fascinated, as he set up the tripod, hoisted the camera onto his shoulder, then gingerly screwed it onto the mount for some steady-cam action. My mother, my sister, then busied ourselves with setting up the mis en scene for our first skit: a scene in which I adopted a Mr. Roger-like demeanor and welcomed special guests, including my sister as Mrs. McFeeley, and her special delivery: the dog. My mother sang the theme song from behind the camera, where she functioned as the director of cinematography. "It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day in the neighborhood..."--you know the rest.

The camera had to go back to the Athletic Department on Monday, so we had to pack all of our ideas into two days of a creative-binge and-purge session. The rest of the skits included a piano recital by my sister, a saxophone recital from me (cringe), a lesson in dog grooming starring my mother, the dog, a wire brush, and a pack of cigarettes, my dad (Ray) lip-synching to Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" wearing a sports jacket and a determined expression as my sister and I (the "Ray-ettes") danced behind him, a thrilling demonstration of my science project (a question-and-answer circuit box I had thrown together), and a highly embarrassing solo dance number to Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" by yours truly.

The "Family" tape was clearly a work of inspired genius, a synergy of genetic talent (think of the Wainwright/McGarrigle clan, or the Barrymores, or the Zappas) that had been festering for years with no outlet only to be unleashed all at once for our adoring public: ourselves. What was captured that weekend was not only an hour of material that could be used to extort four people for the rest of their lives, but also the fun that those four people had together, despite being related. I'm sure the Springfield College gymnastics meets were compelling, but I bet that our weekend with that camera was the most fun it ever saw.

For Fun: 1993

2007-03-08T12:50:00.000-05:00

special advance cassette.

yes, I'm wearing black chunky shoes.

Bimbo's, San Francisco.

Thanks to Milk Milk Lemonade. Rock on, people.

iPod I Ching

2007-03-07T21:32:00.000-05:00

Fine, I'll do it too.

1. How does the world see me?

Freaky Black Greetings, Mos Def

2. Will I have a happy life?

The Red Lagoon, Devendra Banhart

3. What do my friends really think of me?

All Mixed Up, The Cars

4. Do people secretly lust after me?

Please Apply Yourself To Me Sweetly, Phantom Planet

5. How can I make myself happy?

Not Right, The Stooges

6. What should I do with my life?

Supernova, Liz Phair

7. Will I ever have children?

Hair, PJ Harvey

8. What is some good advice for me?

Creep, Radiohead

9. How will I be remembered?

Nuthin’ But A “G” Thang, Dr. Dre

10. What is my signature dancing song?

Reno Dakota, The Magnetic Fields

11. What do I think my current theme song is?

Area, De La Soul

12. What does everyone else think my current theme song is?

Overjoyed, Stevie Wonder

13. What song will play at my funeral?

A Head With Wings, Morphine

14. What type of men do I like?

I Walk The Earth, King Biscuit

15. What is my day going to be like?

Use Me, Bill Withers

Now you know everything about me. No comment. (Except #9: yes!)

Nothing Better

2007-03-02T12:32:00.000-05:00

You know it's a smashup Valentine's Day when at 9:10 pm you are rudely awoken by an MTA employee repeatedly screaming "Please leave the train!" through the loudspeaker of the Metro-North from White Plains. You cuddle into the seat a bit more, for warmth, thinking it's all a dream, then realize that you are indeed cuddled into a Metro-North train seat and everyone else has abandoned the train for Grand Central. Yes, you are the sleeping person on the train. And they want your ass off.

Your eyes pop open and you leap as gracefully as an elephant with an inner ear problem from your seat, clutching your 20-pound schoolbag and muttering "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry" to no one in particular. You lurch off the train and your feet hurry along the platform, unused to moving in this particular way, like an untalented skier ejected from a ski lift.

A few minutes into this perambulation, you begin to understand that you are going to have to suffer through the two-train subway ride home while trying to push an overwhelming urge to vomit out of your esophagus. You kind of cry. The lingering taste of the free gourmet potato chips and pomegranate-flavored vodka martinis you consumed for the last three hours hangs stubbornly in your mouth. I can do this. Just keep moving.

**

It had snowed that day. Well, it had iced. Me and my fellow graduate writing students at Sarah Lawrence had fought through delayed trains, unplowed snowdrifts, and ice pellets that caused minor facial lacerations to get to our morning classes, after which we were informed that the rest of the day's classes were cancelled. Most students left for the comfort of their sofas, calling taxis to get them back to the train station. My friend Melissa and I had meetings with our professors, though, and had to stay on campus. So we decided that we'd get a drink up in Bronxville as soon as our meetings were over (we had originally planned to go to a poetry reading that night, but the poet was stuck in Virginia, airports closed because of the storm). We had nothing better to do that night.

We got a cab to downtown Bronxville, entered "the fancy place" in town, and ordered two fancy drinks at the bar. We were the only customers and the only women in the restaurant. The handlebar-mustachioed bartender and the Italian owner took a shine to us and brought us chicken dumplings on the house. Around 6:30, during our second round, the couples started arriving, women in turtlenecks clutching single roses wrapped in cellophane followed by men with slicked back hair and expensive overcoats, here for an indulgent Valentine's Day dinner. Here we go, we said, and rolled our eyes.

Melissa and I laughed and clinked our glasses, happily slipping into the minority of the clientele. We didn't need an expensive dinner with an expensive guy, just expensive drinks and good conversation with a like-minded writer chick. We were on a date with our new lives. It was the best Valentine's Day I'd had in a long time. Maybe ever.

Until the train part.

For Jimmy Honey

2007-02-12T23:08:00.000-05:00

“And I know, I know

And I say, oh, I say

That no matter where I go, no,

I will always see your face.”

Fat Camp

2007-01-30T11:35:00.000-05:00

This past weekend I spent at my parents' place in Massachusetts. To stave off the bitter cold and 400 pages of reading for class, I watched a fair amount of cable. On Friday afternoon, I stumbled across the following gem: Fat Camp, an MTV documentary about, well, a Fat Camp in the Poconos. From the first weigh-in, I became mesmerized by the trials of Petey, the King of Camp, and Marisa, the object of his unrequited love and recipient of several love letters (including the following endearment: "When people were calling you a ho and a slut and saying you were fat, I was always there saying you weren't." Ah, sweet love.). And then there was Dianne.

Dianne sported the unfortunate combination of a body shaped like a prize-winning tuber and the personality of a mewling piglet/sadistic high school lunch monitor. Unapologetically whiny, she waddled through camp against a backdrop of kids earnestly playing volleyball, kayaking, and running, complaining of the constant activities and her lack of friends. Dianne didn't play well with others (we find out at one point that she has been home-schooled). During the camp-wide "Color Wars," in which two teams battled each other for four days of activities, we found Miss Dianne prone in the infirmary, a cell phone somehow strapped to her right ear, proclaiming that Color Wars were "stupid" so she "opted out" in favor of laying on her ass in the air conditioning. Now, Dianne, what kind of attitude is that for a Fat Camper?

For all her complaints, she dished out punishment with swift swaths of her meaty little fists. When her bunkmates suggested she take a shower, like they all had, she went ballistic. She screamed her little pink head off, offended to the point that she inadvertently released her grasp on the towel she was clutching (apparently she had caved and decided to wash), and, well, you can imagine what happened next. The towel fell, the other girls laughed, and Dianne marched straight to her counselor's room to tattle. Poor Dianne.

At the end of the documentary, those geniuses at MTV redeemed our little friend. The camp sponsored a concert night where what I imagine was a local high school cover band played hits like Blind Melon's "No Rain" and Lynard Skynard's "Sweet Home Alabama." Surprisingly, this second ditty was a hit with Dianne, so much so that her raised hands formed little round devil's horns and her stringy blond hair flapped back and forth as she headbanged and sang "Oh sweet home!" in all the right places. Yes! Our Dianne was a rocker chick! The film crew captured her in all her glory, rocking out, and losing a few pounds in the process. Now that's more like it, honey!

At the final weigh-in, everyone had lost weight. Petey, Marisa, even Dianne. Camp was over; everyone cried, traumatized by the thought of going back to school. I cried at the prospect of this show being over, which meant I had to go back to my reading. I clicked the TV off, opened my book, and thought of Dianne in her black T-shirt, joyously flinging her hair back, not caring about how fat she was, or how alone, and gave her props. She was going to be okay.

Letter from the Coffee Shop

2007-01-23T18:47:00.000-05:00

I spend so much time in the house now that when I go out, it's like I'm being stabbed by everything and everyone in every sense receptor I possess. Gravel, sunlight, human voices. Why is everything so bright and sharp and loud?

Speaking of loud, this girl's voice (sitting next to me, of course) has no business crossing the normal decibel level for human speech. She's asking her friend a question every other girl on the planet has asked at one point in her life (well, at least since the dawn of the telephone): "So, should I wait for this guy to call me back?" She asks it in a loud, dead, Valley girl monotone (do Valley girls still exist?), which makes me think that she shouldn't exactly hold her breath waiting for the phone to ring. I'd screen the bitch, so I'm assuming this dude would do the same.

An L train just let off the 9-5ers and they stream past the storefront, stylishly bundled against the cold, heading to the deli or the video store, preparing for a night in, warm, in comfortable clothing, excited about the season finale of Top Chef. It's my first time outside today. Which is what I wanted, this life is what I wanted. I chose to remove myself from the morning commute, the corporate meetings, the $12 lunches, the after-work 2-for-1 drink special. And I'm okay with leaving that stuff behind. I think I'm just surprised at how there's no one here on this side, just me.

The most pleasant facet of this coffee shop experience is the cuteness in a fedora peering at me over his girlfriend's blond shoulder. That's my lot in life: across the room from any potential human connection, across another relationship, across some weak-ass girl who can't carry her own groceries. (Sorry, Blondie, you're in the wrong place at the wrong time. I'm sure you carry your groceries and are a totally liberated woman, an inspiration for young females across the face of the planet, etc.)

The question is: do I put myself here, just out of reach, reclining on a settee licking grapes, or do the men? I honestly don't know. And if I'm the culprit, I didn't mean it. So, I'm sorry for not intending to position myself as the Other Woman, the Unattainable, but somehow ending up in that role. I really am sorry.

Ten of the Most Disturbing Self-Help Book Titles on amazon.com

2007-01-21T15:39:00.000-05:00

1. How to Get Your Husband to Talk to You

2. How to Get Over that Bitch and Grow Balls They Can’t Resist

3. How to Get Your Competition Fired (Without Saying Anything Bad about Them)

4. DogSense: 99 Relationship Tips from your Canine Companion

5. How to Read a Book

6. How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking about It

7. How to Make People Like You in 90 Seconds or Less

8. How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion

9. Self Help for the Bleak

10. How an Idiot Writes a Self-Help Book

Satisfaction

2007-01-18T13:23:00.000-05:00

Like a crazy half-woman, half-squirrel nerdpants, I've been saving every issue of the New Yorker since 1995. They sit in boxes in my parents' attic, take up valuable real estate in my Brooklyn apartment, rest in glossy piles in my bedroom, and fall on my head when I open the hall closet. I never quite knew what I was saving them for. But today, I figured it out.

When I was a young associate development editor in California, I had a meeting with three textbook authors and a more senior development editor in San Diego. I was flown down there from San Francisco to check in with the author team (i.e., make sure the Table of Contents for their introductory Public Speaking text was in order, buy them an expensive dinner in La Jolla, and wander aimlessly along the boardwalk in business clothes--thrilling, I know). The other editor was a pro--she'd been freelancing for years and had been handling some of my publishing house's more complicated books. At our meeting in my hotel suite, she off-handedly mentioned that she had an archive of New Yorkers in her apartment that she referenced frequently. The authors looked at her quizzically, while an exclamation point lit up inside my head: me too! Maybe I wasn't so crazy after all.

Newly committed to my hoarding, I maintained my collection. Every Tuesday, I'd read my new issue like a rabid animal, then, trancelike, place it in a pile "to be filed," meaning, "to be put in another pile or into a box in no particular order." I shamelessly forced my poor father and several of my friends to carry boxes full of magazines whenever I'd move apartments. But I never, not even once, cracked open one of those boxes.

Until today. See, what I've found, now that I've left my publishing days behind me and am back in school, is that every professor in my graduate writing program is, not surprisingly, and not unlike me, obsessed with the New Yorker. Several of them worked on the editorial staff and/or had their articles and stories published inside. I've read at least one New Yorker story in every class I've taken so far. My new workshop is no exception: of about 20 required readings listed on the syllabus, three of them are New Yorker stories. So instead of printing out 40 scanned pages on my feeble printer, instead of going to the library and making photocopies, I just gleefully busted through a dilapidated Staples box and unearthed the two issues from 2003 that contained my required reading.

I guess I was doing something worthwhile those 12 years. Sorta.

The Birth of the Blue Hawaiian

2007-01-08T00:15:00.000-05:00

No matter how pretty you are, when you ask a bartender if they have Blue Curacao, they always look at you like they want to strangle you.

In 1997, my best friend and I were relatively newly-minted members of the drinking-aged population. We had survived three years of high school together, drinking wine coolers behind Kevin Jackson's house or warm beers from a 30-pack that Joe Mangone's older brother bought for us. But, being AP students and closeted goody-goodies, we never went to bars together because possessing a fake ID seemed somehow much more morally reprehensible than hovering over a 4-pack of Bartles & Jaymes near a firepit, hoping one of the borderline retarded boys we scrounged up to hang out with would ask us to the prom. You see, we were pretty and smart, so we were all but invisible at our high school, where in order to be popular (or even accepted), you had to choose one or the other. We were just waiting for college, where we were pretty sure we'd be appreciated and popular, equally comfortable with 4.0s and 40s.

That pretty much happened, thankfully, and although she was in Chicago and I in Boston, we faithfully wrote each other letters (how quaint!), hers detailing the Spring Formal and organic chemistry exams, mine extolling the virtues of Lansdowne Street and 20th-century British poetry. We worked at remaining best friends, taking every opportunity to visit one another and to plan overlapping trips back to Happy Holden (see previous post). On one of these occasions (Christmas, maybe), we made plans to Go Out. We had recently received the go-ahead from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles to drink legally, which we had done with our college friends, but never together. I borrowed my mother's sporty two-door, picked her up, and drove our overly mascara-ed selves to Boston for a night on the town.

I think one of us was wearing a skintight faux-snakeskin rayon short-sleeved mock turtleneck. In fact, I know one of us was, I just can't remember which of us, because we both had one. Anyway, we looked cute, for 1997. We decided to try the Wonder Bar, a swanky anomaly in Rock City (aka Allston, Mass.) where my ex-boyfriend happened to work. We were looking for a free drink.

We sat down, said hello to Sean, and beamed at each other. We were grown-up fabulous women at a posh joint ordering posh cocktails. Take that, Everyone Else from Our High School! (They were all still drinking in the woods.) We discussed what to order. She liked Scotch, me, gin. But we wanted to order the same thing, to commemorate our maiden outing. Wine? Nah. Vodka cranberry? Boring. Beer? We were too dressed up for beer. The waitress came over and my best friend asked her if she "had any suggestions for a festive girly drink." She looked at us, and uttered two words that we had both certainly heard alone, but never together: "Blue Hawaiian." We had no idea what it was, but we glanced at each other, and nodded and said enthusiastically, "Sure!"

The drinks looked like pint glasses of windshield wiper fluid garnished with pineapple rounds and maraschino cherries on red plastic swords. Perfection. We clinked glasses, already drunk with giddiness, and sipped the blue liquid through bendy straws. We had found Our Drink.

That night, we shared a bottle of champagne with some guy named Chuck and his vest-wearing friend, slept on my ex-boyfriend's futon, drove over a parking median, and took pictures of our blue tongues. Since that night, my best friend and I have shared Our Drink at O'Hare Airport, various swing bars in San Francisco (swing dancing--give me a break, it was the late 90's in San Francisco), the Jillian's in Worcester, Mass., downtown Chicago lounges, various swanky New York bars, and a few pubs in London. We had figured out what was in Our Drink, and when we went out, would scan the rails for that florescent blue bottle with the gold lettering. We rarely found it, but when we did, we saw each other in our rayon shirts and blue tongues, shared a secret smile, thanked God for Blue Curacao, and for each other, then gave the bartender extra-luminous smiles as we placed the weirdest drink order of his night.

Frome Massachusetts

2007-01-03T22:41:00.000-05:00

I think every kid in New England is required by law to read Ethan Frome in high school. You know Ethan Frome, that uplifting tale (warning: spoiler! (I've always wanted to write that)) of massive snowdrifts, repressed sexuality, failed suicide attempts, and lifelong misery set in a place called Starkfield--an aptly-named, but fictitious Massachusetts town.

Judging from my high school experience, set in a place called Holden--an uncreatively named and unfortunately not fictitious Massachusetts town, I surmise that we were forced to acquaint ourselves with poor tortured Ethan, sickly, angry Zeena, and that whore Mattie Silver so we could deal better with Holden's gas station attendants, Big Y produce managers, dog groomers, and neighborhood kindergarteners. And you know, I gotta say, it kinda worked. Thanks, Ethan. I made it out. Snowdriftless, sexual, alive.

Ten Thoughts While Swiffer WetJet®-ting my Kitchen Floor the Day After my Holiday Party

2006-12-20T18:19:00.000-05:00

1. “This sucks balls.”

2. “I’m waiting 45 minutes to text him back so he’ll know that I’m busy and am not about to rearrange my schedule for his nonsense.”

3. “When I’m done I’m going to watch that 'Dick in a Box' video again. Shit is hilarious!”

4. “I wonder if my grandmother already has a Swiffer WetJet®.”

5. “I don’t remember serving figs.”

6. “If he doesn’t text me back immediately after I text him back, I’m never texting him again.”

7. “OK, who left their Santa condom under the oven?”

8. “I don’t remember puking, but I’m not ruling myself out.”

9. “‘Step One: Cut a hole in a box.’ Baa-haa! Genius.”

10. “I love my Swiffer WetJet®.”

Happy holidays, everyone!

First Sight

2006-12-16T12:13:00.000-05:00

I finally got one. A missed connection.

I've been trolling the craigslist missed connections for at least seven years. For those unfamiliar, it's a public forum where the lonely souls of the city can post cryptic notes for random strangers they pass on Eighth Avenue or stand next to in line at the Best Buy in White Plains in the hopes that they will rekindle their 30-second relationship over drinks on the Lower East Side. They go something like this: " You were wearing a blue top walking to dunkin donuts & back - m4w - 38 ". And they are wonderful.

I say that I semi-obsessively peruse MCs (the preferred abbreviation for posters) out of some innate voyeuristic tendency, or to see what the kids are up to (there is a high percentage of posts from the Williamsburg hipster set, which was more entertaining before Craig or whoever created a new section called "rants and raves" where all of the raging debates over whether or not Asian men do it better or the best remedy for athlete's foot now live, separate from the usual "saw you on the L train - m4w 24"), but deep down, I'm looking for a post for me. From that guy at brunch who looked at me twice as he sopped up hollandaise sauce with the nub of his biscuit. From the guy in the deli buying Pocky and olives who said "pardon" as he brushed past me. From that guy on the train reading Lolita who lifted his eyes from the page, disguising his outright lust for me by pretending to ponder poor Double H's dilemma.

Scrolling through the posts, I find myself morphing into the "red head on Graham Avenue - m4w 31." My hair does look reddish in certain lights. Certain reddish lights. Of which there are several on Graham Avenue, if you happen to know the street. I was riding the LIRR wearing a blue beret and tights yesterday, right? (Answer: no, not in a million years.) That's what makes MCs so addictive: the posts are so random and unspecific that you just feel like you have to get one someday. After all of the eye contact with strangers I've participated in over the last seven years, I deserve one, damn it.

So. Here's the story. I was reading Philip Larkin's Collected Poems on the G train two Sundays ago, traveling to Brooklyn Heights from Williamsburg. Just before the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop, I closed my book and looked up and to my right at a blondish man wearing a black winter hat and a black pea coat. Cute, and sort of smiling at me. My face contorted into kind of a death mask and I looked down, busying myself with putting Phil back into my bag. I looked up again. He was still smiling, this time a bit wider, but still no teeth. I smiled with my eyes only, then leapt from my seat and jumped off the train (I had to transfer, I swear). Once I landed safely on the platform, I glanced back into the car I had just left. A broad grin from the smiler. Since he was at a safe distance, sealed into the train car, I responded with a real smile, teeth and eyes and everything (which feels wholly unnatural anywhere on the MTA, but that's neither here nor there). His train pulled away and my face resumed its normal masklike status.

Cut to Monday morning. I checked my nine email accounts, my horoscope, the New York Times. Then I checked craigslist. There it was, like a shiny penny on a cracked mud-gray sidewalk: "On the G train Sunday night - m4w 28". Click. What unfurled before my misty eyes was Philip Larkin's "First Sight," and one other sentence: "I was wearing a black coat and a black hat." I was in love. I was the lamb in the snow.

We emailed; we met. On the Lower East Side. He was a coffee connoisseur (read: snob), a curiously staunch defender of the west coast (we talked about San Francisco and apparently he was offended by the fact that I didn't love it as much as he did, or something), and was moving to LA in two weeks. This last nugget confused me: why make a highly romantic overture to a complete stranger just before you are moving 3,000 miles away from said stranger? I figured it was to get laid, which insulted me and my romantic sensibilities. Lamb in the snow, people!

I left the date, underwhelmed and drunk and definitely not in love with this guy. But I was still in love with the way we met. So despite the outcome of this story, later this afternoon, when I go to the deli in my blue beret, I'll eye-smile at my future husband as he reaches for a hunk of mozzarella or a bundle of fresh basil, then run home and check missed connections.

Shits and Giggles

2006-12-08T15:59:00.000-05:00

At this very moment, there is a large man wearing headphones making grunting noises standing in front of me picking a wedgie out of his khakis. Seriously.

OK, so I've been really, really, trying to stay in my house for the past couple of days to get some work done, and to save money. I had an auspicious start: I stayed in the house from Wednesday night until about 40 minutes ago (please, I beg you, don't ask me if I got a lot of work done). But after two days of so-called self-discipline, I started to lose it. Caged animal syndrome. I had to get out. Of course, it's like 12 degrees outside today, which doesn't make for the best strolling weather. But despite the potential discomfort of 40-mile-an-hour wind, I pulled on nine layers of clothing, grabbed my computer, and headed to the cafe for a change of scenery.

I arrived, pissed off partially because of the cold and mostly because of the lack of stimulation. But I felt a good mood peeking through, ready to embrace the familiar cafe: tunes of the 70s streaming through the speakers, laconic yet sweet waitresses, a $3 bagel with cream cheese. Calm, lovely, not too stimulating, but way more stimulating than my room. Nothing wrong with that.

But then the grunting man. The sounds he emits every 23 seconds are shivery, consonantless, reminiscent of something you might hear coming from a bathroom stall in a restaurant that serves a particularly heavy brunch. I think he's wearing headphones so he doesn't have to listen to himself. But I have no headphones. I'm two tables over (he moved back to his seat), typing like a madwoman, shoulders clenched, face furrowed and closed. Why did my goddamn headphones have to die two days ago? I think to make me listen to this dude. To punish me for spending $3 (plus tip), for blogging instead of doing work, for being in a bad mood.

I don't know what's wrong with this man. I feel sorry for him. I also feel sorry for me. But I can guarantee that he and I both came here for the same reason. To get out for a bit before we head home again, to that empty place where no matter how much noise you make, no one hears.

The Joy of Writing

2006-12-06T22:32:00.000-05:00

Today in conference with my new writing mentor, I figured out that writing is like breaking open your skull and your chest and stabbing whatever's inside. Repeatedly. She didn't articulate this; I came up with it all by myself.

Being a writer is a mirthful blend of stress headaches, weeping fits, cable TV, and a dash of drinking alone. Oh, and we can't forget the constant self-flagellation, burgeoning narcissism, and pathetic praise-clamoring that occurs on a daily basis. Attractive.

Christmas is coming. I have to send cards. Buy gifts with my zero money. Be jolly. Decorate. Go to parties. Look fabulous. All that, and write. How can I possibly do both?

The Nerve

2006-11-19T15:56:00.000-05:00

I've been trying, people! Internet dating. It's, um, interesting. After each hope-crushing encounter at a swanky martini bar or divey pool hall (depending on our online personaes' proclivities, conveniently located under "Interests"), I've tried to take away some kind of lesson, an insight, a tidbit of advice for the male crop. Here they are, one for each first and last date.

1. Sit up straight.
Doing so demonstrates several things, the most important of which is that you do in fact own and use your spine. It's also polite. Talking about Jonathan Franzen to your bald spot as you recline into the seams of a musty couch, feet propped on the arm of an adjacent chair, is inappropriate for a first date. This kind of display makes me want to smack you. No date two.

2. Turn off your laptop.
Don't get me wrong, I love computers. I'm typing on one right now! If you must take your laptop with you on a first date because you're a colossal (but possibly endearing) nerd, keep it in your Manhattan Portage tote and just sit there and wait for your date. Don't worry, it's not cheating if there's no physical contact. And if you continue typing code for 15 minutes after your date has arrived, you won't have to worry about that.

3. Say something.
Looking contemplative when dining alone or riding the subway is a totally acceptable (necessary, even) practice. But thinking really hard for 45 of the 60 minutes of a first date is not going to get you laid, brother.

3. Say something nice.
I don't care that you hate fiction because "ultimately, it's not true." I don't care that you hate San Francisco, where I once lived. In fact, I'm mildly offended by these statements. What's next, do you hate my mom? Not that I'm all puppies and rainbows, but Jesus.

4. Shut up.
Keep in mind that I already know that I like olives and read the New Yorker. Don't recite my profile back to me. It's bad enough that I have a profile, so reminding me of it puts me in a bad mood. Also, lengthy theories about why you support the gentrification of the Lower East Side and stories about your horrible relationships with your ex-girlfriend, your father, your former roommates, your boss, and/or your dog, do not make for light and witty first-date banter.

6. Wear something flattering.
I'm putting on eyeliner and shit. The least you could do is break out your best sneaks and a sweater that doesn't make you look like Grimace.

I keep telling myself that this dating nonsense makes for good material. One can only hope.

My Favorite Wiking

2006-11-13T23:00:00.000-05:00

B sent this to me today:

And he dared me to post it. Nyah nyah.

Off Stride and Full Moons

2006-11-10T21:21:00.000-05:00

I'm out of it. Rabid astrological forces or some angry gods have me between their teeth, and they're shaking. I'm battered and bewildered. I can't make sense of anything. I can't get any work done. I only want to be sleeping or drunk. And I don't know why.

Maybe it was the Halloween that passed by with no demarcation, unusual for me. Maybe it was the flu that chewed me up and spit me out in a wad of Kleenex. Maybe it was the bad $17 udon soup or the nine episodes of Forensic Files I ingested. Maybe it was writing about love.

What I do know is that, by Monday, I have to read 100 poems, by the greatest hitmakers of poetry, starting with Bill Shakespeare and ending with Bill Knott. I'm up to Sylvia, wonderful Sylvia. My thoughts are fragmenting into poetry bits.

Up the untended stairs,
prepared for darkness,
but it's light, and warm
for mid-November.

Through a minefield
of turds and trash,
city birds banshees in the trees,
I limp toward home, nothing but work waiting for me.

Sorry for that; Sylvia I'm not. But when poetry happens, caesuras and enjambment and end-stops demand attention. It's just not up to me.

I wish I were in better form because this, above all, is a commemorative post. A year ago today I typed ithardlymatters and pressed "Publish Post." I've said it before, and I'm saying it now: thank you, Massey, for making me do this. It changed my life.

And another thank you, to everyone, for reading. It means everything.

Tricky

2006-10-31T18:07:00.000-05:00

I just hid from some trick-or-treaters. I was sitting on my bed watching Oprah and underlining the funniest bits of a David Sedaris story with my green pen, when the doorbell rang. I leapt up, rolled the plastic blinds shut, and ran to the back porch clutching my pack of Parliaments, hoping the goblin or Elmo on the front stoop didn't see me.

Before you call me a horrible, child-hating, unfestive, soulless cretan, let me say that I'm a girl, and I'm home alone. And I live in Brooklyn. Which means that day or night, if my doorbell rings and I'm not expecting someone, an electric bolt of fear runs through my body. It's a sensation similar to the pre-wretch shiver I experienced every hour for the three days following the plate of bad Thai shrimp I ate two Easters ago. Cause: Doorbell yelps. Effect: I freeze, and weigh my options. Should I climb to the top of my closet and retrieve the illegal taser my male friend FedExed me this summer, after my roommate was mugged in our doorway? Slowly reach for my phone and dial 9, then 1, then wait for a reason to press 1 again? Run to the kitchen, grab a steak knife, and run out the back door screaming? In the case of fight or flight, I fly. I flee.

After my cigarette, I figured I better prepare for the doorbell ringing again. I put on my new coat, walked down my dark hallway (lights of any kind only encourage them), and headed to Fine Wine and Liquors. Outside, I navigated through mini Minnie Mouses, kids in street clothes and skeleton masks, parents fishing through orange plastic bags for razor blades, fairy wands tucked under their armpits, clowns on skateboards, and hipsters that were either dressed up or just wearing their regular clothes. Fine Wines and Liquors was brightly lit and contained a basenji, a wine salesman, and two scruffy employees eating soup from large to-go containers.

"We're out of candy," the wine salesman droned in between his pitch. Dejected, whatever little ghost or surgeon had tramped up the steps turned back toward his or her bored-looking parent and yelled, "They don't have no candy!" I handed Scruffy #1 my $20 and walked out. The sun had almost completely set.

Now I'm sitting in my dark apartment, trapped. I just remembered that I have a bunch of Dum Dums in a candy dish on one of the side tables in the living room. But it's too late now; the Elmos have given way to the big kids, the ones with no costumes except menace. I'm getting egged, I know it.

Schoolio

2006-10-19T19:07:00.000-04:00

I just wrote for four hours. I feel like my head was squashed by a large truck. But I feel good. I'm learning to just sit my ass down and write. A lot. Dialogue is a new thing for me, and, working with it now, I'm realizing how essential it is. It provides a moment of rest from the relentless paragraphs. It lends a quality of the real to the piece. I can't believe I just wrote "a quality of the real." I guess grad school is worth the price of tuition.

My backpack that I swore I wouldn't carry to school is breaking because it has been repeatedly packed too full with a laptop, plugs and chargers, a notebook, my phone, and a million books. Now I have to pay the Russian shoe guy five dollars to fix it. Can I write that off?

I'm in love with being back in school. It's my new boyfriend. It makes me think, gets me out of the house, makes me feel like I'm on fire. It gives me a reason to jump out of bed at 8 AM and a reason to go to sleep reading Alice Munro stories. It gives me compliments. For the first time, I can't imagine the relationship ending. But of course, it will, in 17 months. And I'm already depressed about it.

I like asking my writer friend Katie if she's "on campus." I like swiping my ID at the copy machine in the library and seeing that it says I have 494 copies left for the semester. I like copying the liner notes of by Delta blues CDs I have to listen to for my History of Jazz class. I have a girl crush on my workshop professor.

I even like that I hate an aging beauty queen numbskull that somehow got into the same program as me and sits in my workshop class exclaiming "In this piece, the city is also a character!" about every goddamn story we read. If she's the only negative thing about school, I can live with it. Little does she know (for she hardly knows anything), I'm already thinking of her as a character in one of my stories. That's how I'll get my revenge (palms rubbing together, eyebrows raised, the evil writer chick--me--rears her power-thirsty head). I just knew that her first story was going to be about the Holocaust or something. Oh wait, I'm sorry, it's about September 11th. I'm serious. How dare she.

Enough of her. Anyone know of any good student discounts in the Tri-State Area? My loans are dwindling and I may have to make collages out of Brooklyn Lager bottlecaps and New Yorker poem fragments for Christmas gifts. But I wouldn't have it any other way.

Way, Jose

2006-10-11T11:36:00.000-04:00

Last night, after being a bitch to my newest friend because she was 30 minutes late to meet me outside the Brooklyn Lyceum, I saw God. I just said that for effect. What I really saw was Jose Gonzalez dressed in monochromatic navy blue perched on a chair in the middle of a spare stage playing the bejesus out of his acoustic guitar. And singing.

He looks like a potential terrorist, or a parking lot attendant, or both. Before he opens his mouth, before you hear it, you might imagine that he is on a watch list somewhere. With his cheap, dusty black shoes, close dark beard, and downward glances like a bashful deer, he is a poster child for unjust subway platform searches conducted by first-year policemen in spanky new uniforms, guns tingling on their hips.

But he's not a terrorist. He's a musician, and he's amazing. Katie and I repeated that word--amazing!--so much that it became meaningless. Fingerpicked notes fell to the ground like crisp leaves on asphalt. When he hit the low E string, it sounded like all of the instruments in an orchestra burst out together, coming in at the exact moment of crisis, lending weight to his spare, wistful songs. His voice was a cross between Medicine Head and Christopher Cross, if Christopher Cross had never sung a pop song and grew up steeped in the Delta blues.

The more he played and sang, the more my bitchiness melted away. Jose had mesmerized me, and everyone, but a guilty panic was threatening to squirm in and ruin everything. I felt guilty for being annoyed earlier--which is annoying. I looked at Katie, legs curled on the floor below where I was sitting at an uncomfortable angle on a partially-hidden guitar amp. She looked up, and smiled. We were still friends. It was amazing.

Make Out

2006-10-05T23:31:00.000-04:00

We’re on the deck, my startling Brooklyn deck. I'm giving him a tour: my landlady lives there, the morning glories are there. Then he talks. I nod and laugh.

After ten minutes of this, I figure he’s either gay or scared shitless. If it takes him more than ten minutes to kiss a girl lit up with white wine and moonlight, he might as well be both. And a space alien.

There have been other men on this porch. Ones who have wanted to kiss me but wouldn’t dare, ones who kissed me across state lines from their girlfriends or wives, ones who kissed me once but never kissed me again. They all sat in my plastic white deck chairs. One even feng shui-ed the place by moving the circular table to the corner with more sun. I moved it back after he left.

I tried to plant things on the deck, once. An Easter package arrived from my suburban mother containing seed packets and small rust-colored pots. I was supposed to loose soil from tightly-packed disks with a table fork, water, and wait. Oh how I waited.

Weeds grow, though, freely, fearlessly, from a shallow Chinese porcelain pot my roommate’s boyfriend bought when he lived with us. One morning I came outside and the weeds were two feet tall, fed fat by the May rainfall, fed tall by the delicious spring sun. I ripped them out with a metal spatula, then washed it in scalding water so I could flip my pancakes.

The sky is clear and the moon blindingly full. He’s still talking but I can’t make out the words. I can’t make out, period.

Open Letter to Jack White*

2006-09-27T12:36:00.000-04:00

Jack. Jackie. I love you. Watching you play (the verb pales, Jack, pales) guitar makes me hotter than a thousand suns. It's as if the top of my head has popped off and been replaced with spotlight beams reflected by your Gretsch (is that what you play?) and an afro of light springs from my head. I balance all of my weight on my ten tiny toes, which hurts and is wobbly, just so I can see you over the six-foot-one bitches in front of me. They are annoying. They are wearing flowy renfair shirts with peek-a-boo backs and baby clips in their ropey brown hair. Their faces are small and the only reason I can say anything about their faces is because they keep looking back at the crowd to see who is looking at them. Like someone would choose their drab drunken faces over yours. The only way that would happen would be if some cultural anthropologist happened to be scanning every venue in New York City to locate an Edie Brickell circa-1989 look-alike for some hippie-rock research project. Then, maybe, I could see someone looking at them over you.

Question: Why do tall skinny girls always have loud tinkling laughs and the latest-model cell phones? Also, they never wait in line for drinks or carry shit. They have long hair and an air of absolute power mixed with carefree nonchalance. Oh, and jeans. Always with the jeans.

So, Jack. Off topic, off topic--I know. It happens. Anyway, your guitar playing. Right. It's fast and sloppy and sure and your whole body gets behind every note and bend and you don't care if your hair flops in your face or your shirt gets twisted in your guitar strap or you trip over PA wires and you're always perfectly in time even though your fingers are all over the fretboard. That was a boring description, but you get the idea.

Wait a minute: I just realized something. Why the hell would you need me to describe your guitar playing to you? You live it--you do it. I am officially crestfallen. Because if we were to, say, bump into each other outside of a venue or near a big gold tour bus on 50th Street (they always park around the corner--duh), or in the hallway of a Midtown hotel (let's say the Righa Royal), you would look right past me and my feeble description to the girls trilling on their cell phones with the long, ropey hair.

But I'd still stand on all ten toes to see you play.

Sincerely,
Me

* After seeing you play with your band, The Raconteurs, at Roseland, NYC, September 26, 2006.

Stirring

2006-09-18T21:43:00.000-04:00

It might be raining. It’s dark, and I’m sitting on my deck under an aluminum awning, presumably attached to the wooden slats over the back door of my apartment by my landlord, Joe, when he and his wife lived in the entirety of their family home. It has since been sliced into four apartments, where a family of three live upstairs, my roommate and I live downstairs, and next door, their son, Tommy, our handyman, lives in the unit above his father and mother.

The house used to be grand, for this part of Brooklyn, with a large front sitting room, in half of which I now sleep on a hand-me-down mattress. I imagine Joe and Marie, just married, moving into her family’s house just after their honeymoon down the Jersey Shore, maybe Florida. Every Sunday, her mother cooked veal in the kitchen and looked out her bay window onto what is now my deck. I would bet a hundred million dollars that she wore a white apron over a housecoat, and would win. Marie and Joe probably took over our part of the house, setting up their married salt- and pepper-shakers and butter dish in a light-finish hutch that stood where my kitchen begins. They were happy because they were supposed to be happy. They were married because they were supposed to be married.

I realize now that the crackling I hear is not rain, but the sound of someone frying something jumpy in a pan near the back window of a Grand Street apartment, across my landpeople’s landscaped backyard upon which the Virgin Mary forever stands quietly in her husk. It’s eight-o’clock, and someone is frying something for someone they love. From their kitchen window, this formless wife or husband can see the same morning glories that I see when I’m up before ten, the ones that wind thickly through a now-obscured fence and up an ancient iron ladder that was once used to adjust newfangled telephone wires.

In 1962, Joe waved to the telephone man and slammed specialty nails through my aluminum awning. His hair was black then, and done up with pomade. He was handsome, and gentle, the perfect complement to Marie’s curls and demands. She told him to put up the awning. He wouldn’t have thought of it himself, even though, like all of us, he wants to emerge from the rainy street, shake his umbrella twice, maybe three times, before he unlocks the door to his house, his warm, yellow home, where his wife will stand, sweaty from the stove, not looking, but stirring, waiting for her husband to enter.

The Right One

2006-09-16T12:49:00.000-04:00

I'm sitting in the backyard of my neighborhood cafe. It's noon on a sunny Saturday (a time and condition second only to noon on a sunny Sunday in the race for busiest brunch times), and the touseled people are here, post-coital, smiley, and sharing grapes. I'm hogging a 2-top, using the cafe's free WiFi, and ordering $4's worth of food and beverage. The waitstaff hates me. I have no napkin, no ashtray. They scoot by delivering huevos rancheros to tables of hipsters, glancing disapprovingly at me, my laptop, and my iced coffee. What do they have against my laptop? It never did anything to them.

I've been on those delicious, disheveled, day-after brunches. In fact, the last one was here. I can't remember if it was with my once-adored Jersey boy or with an awkward friend who had crashed on my couch and tried to get into my bed in the middle of the night in a drunken haze. I had given him a pillow, shut my door, and lain down when I heard a knock. Frantically pulling on my robe, I tripped to the door and opened it a millimeter. He peered up at me. "Um, would it be okay if I slept in here with you?" My hand tightened on the doorknob. My head slowly shook from side to side. "No." He did not move. As the door shut, his face was pale and humiliated. I locked the door, bad feelings flickering through my nervous system, and returned to my big, safe bed, my liferaft. And after watching Taxi, I fell asleep and dreamed of moonlight and kisses and the big, warm body of the right one.

The Results Are In

2006-09-16T11:42:00.000-04:00

5 things I don't suffer from:

Amusia
Anorexia
March Madness
Medorthophobia
Wonky Eye

5 things I do suffer from:

Acarophobia
Dyscalculia
Fantasia (Barrino)
Internet obsession
SAD

Zomezing Nice

2006-09-08T11:50:00.000-04:00

A few years ago, I was invited to a wedding. This isn’t so extraordinary, except for the fact that the invitation was bestowed upon me via cell phone from the French-Canadian boyfriend of a fashion designer friend of mine. Which is to say, the invitation went zomezing like ziz:

Me: Hello?
Andre*: Ello, Megun?
Me: Hi!
Andre: I want to invite you to my wedding! It will be next Zaturday night at me and Michul’s place. Can you come?
Me (shocked): Sure! I mean, I think so! What time?
Andre: Zeven Zirty. We are aving a little zeremony and we would love for you to be there.
Me: Ok! Great! What should I wear?
Andre: Zomezing nice. It is not black tie but there will be many colors and food and dancing. Zo zomezing colorful would be nice!

Etcetera. Now, I hadn’t seen these boys in months and had no idea they were getting married. Sure, they had been living together for a few years and were happily coupled, but knowing Michael, I thought that his wedding, if he ever had one, would be a society-page event with Marc Jacobs performing the ceremony and invitations printed on scrolls packed into silver mailing tubes arriving six months in advance. But, hey, who am I to judge? So, I wrote down "Andre & Michael"s Wedding" in my calendar, dug out some flaming-red stilettos, and purchased a $5 wedding card at Kate’s Paperie. I was ready.

Zaturday night arrived, and I dolled up and called a car to bring me from Williamsburg to Tribeca. It was a hot night with a sunset that lasted for three hours. This was to be my first gay wedding, and I was excited for my friends and honored that they would want to include me in their celebration. I figured their fashionista and model/dancer friends would be lounging around their apartment looking like wrought-iron floor lamps from Pier 1 Imports wearing unfinished couture and holding glasses of Sauvignon Blanc. I’d be, by far, the largest human being in the room. Which is totally fine. Totally fine.

I climbed the six flights up to their top-floor three-bedroom without dropping dead from exhaustion or tripping, and opened the door into what looked like a Fashion Week after party. The space had been transformed into a Bedouin tent, with pink, orange, and red Indian silk squares attached to the ceiling and the walls, undulating in the strong, warm breeze let in by the nine open windows. Candles littered every surface, dripping onto saucers or flickering in hurricane lamps. A makeshift wedding arch adorned with gladiolas stood before a low divan covered in white muslin. The Pier 1 floor lamps were draped in deconstructed cocktail dresses and tailored tuxedo jackets over pastel Izods. I recognized a jewelry designer friend and, after a stop at the bar/kitchen, beelined for her. We decided we’d be each other’s date and I caught up on her latest adventures in Bali.

Michael appeared and I ran to him and hugged him, beaming. "I’m SO happy for you!" I squealed. He looked puzzled. "Thanks for coming." "This is so exciting!" I continued, looking deep into his eyes, searching for that look of a person about to be married. Which absolutely, without a doubt, was not there. My smile faded a bit, and I started blathering about how great the apartment looked. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Deborah, Andre and Michael’s roommate, wearing a silver-white slip dress. She was being hugged. A lot. A gardenia was tucked behind her left ear. Curiously, Andre appeared by her side and put his arm around her. They laughed. And looked like a couple. Realization like a two-by-four across the skull: this wasn’t my first gay wedding--it was my first green card wedding.

We danced, we drank, we applauded. Photographers crouched in front of the wedding arch and popped their flashes. Toasts were given. There was a heavily-documented first dance. The silks fluttered, the candles flickered out, and champagne was spilled near electronic equipment hot from overuse and excessive volume. Michael danced so hard that he threw himself on the floor and rolled around to Prince’s "Kiss." I kicked off my stilettos around 2 AM. That night I found out that being a fake wedding guest is as fun as being a real one. And as I surveyed the crowd through my never-empty wine glass, I really, truly hoped that Andre, Deborah, and Michael would live happily ever after.

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Dear Evite

2006-09-05T17:52:00.000-04:00

Hey, E. How's it goin'? Listen, I'm flattered that you want me to simultaneously attend a Park Slope rootftop BBQ and an after-work drink party in Midtown, but, dude, chill your shit. That's not humanly possible. Actually, come to think of it, you wouldn't realize that, being a nonhuman web-based entity serving over a million invitees a day. Sorry. But, please, I beg you, spend a few minutes in my shoes. I have work, and school, and, you know, laundry and shit. I can't be galavanting all over this fair city to see if your gatherings are real versions of the high-minded clip art soiree representations you so casually fling into my inbox.

I think we should see other web-based social-gathering services. I know this is harsh, but, frankly, you're smothering me and I can't take it anymore. I need time to peruse MySpace and CitiSearch. I have GoogleTalking to conduct. I know that you will be okay without me. Fact is, I heard from some of my girls that you have been emailing them and asking them out. So go out with them if you'd like. You are free to do what you please. I'll always have fond memories of the early days when you so tenderly graced my Hotmail account with the first invite: it was for a baby shower, represented by a cartoon fuzzy yellow chick wearing a bonnet and a diaper with a large saftey pin on the left side. Nothing can take that away from us.

Please, don't cry. I know you'll get through this.

Love,
Me

A Memory

2006-09-02T15:41:00.000-04:00

It's fall now, and cold. Sweatshirt weather. Leaves are flying through the gray air and landing damply on my plastic deck furniture, greener up close. They are starting to die.

You're here now, for some reason. You're on the deck with me, seated, and I'm standing over you. We are looking at each other, daring the other to leave, or to stay. We don't know what to do. Your hand slowly lifts toward my hip and it explodes. I'm still. The touch happens, no break in our stare. I love you everywhere, my heart chipping off into pieces then coming back together into a golden ball.

You look like mine. Your hair is blond and your eyes are green. Fingertips, exhale, a sleepy blink. I feel every nerve in my body but am numb with fear. Nothing is said, but our cells reach out toward each other's and little beams of light connect them together for that moment, for a little while, for a few months. Forever, I guess.

It's My Last Week in the Office

2006-08-22T15:58:00.000-04:00

I've been watching clips of The Office all day. Geniuses.

Three more days! See you on the other side.

Seven Years of August Eighteenths

2006-08-17T16:03:00.000-04:00

1999
I arrive at 204 Mulberry Street, Apt. LA, greeted by J and her brindle boxer, Amelia, both smiling and a bit frazzled. J shows me to my new couch away from home in New York City. It's deep purple with massive pillows perfect for fort-building, if 25-year-olds made forts.

J makes tea. She takes hers with lots of milk and sugar like a true European. Mine's black with a spoonful of honey, how my-exboyfriend likes it. My San Francisco friends place calls to my brand-new brick of a cell phone and I don't know how to retrieve their messages.

A cigarette is smoked. Tea is sipped. Get ready.

2000
I'm still dating L, but it's about to end. Not in some horrible way, just an agreement that the relationship is not moving forward. We're not in love. We eventually say these very words to each other at Daddy-O, the corner bar, munching on $9 chicken fingers and sipping gin & tonics. The bartender gives me mine for free, since I'm here so much.

It's fine. I am mature. I wanted something casual after the ex-boyfriend. And, besides, I wasn't used to dating someone who was intimidated by my bookshelf, by my babies, my collected works and my anthologies, my Villon in translation, my book of Nabokov's short stories with the blue butterfly on the shiny spine.

2001
Up late again. Could've left after my shift, but decided to visit R at The Room to keep her company until 4AM when her shift was up. D's there, yelling and laughing, jumping on furniture to entertain us. D, our default bodyguard. We drink Sancerre and turn up the music, hoping the few remaining paying customers will leave so we can hang out without the burden of the duties of a 3AM Monday morning bartender--emptying ashtrays, lighting candles.

Stevie Wonder's "As" blares from the ceiling-suspended speakers. Loving you until the day is night and night becomes the day...loving you until the trees and sea just up and fly away... R says that she once wrote these lyrics down and gave them to her mom. To this day, her mother believes that she wrote them. I'm OK with that.

2002
It's coming up. What am I supposed to do with myself? I don't have a shift at the bar, my friends are working, I have nothing to do but wander around and cry. I wonder if it's going to be as sunny and warm as it was last year. Maybe I'll go down to the West Side Highway and stare south.

They should really give everyone a day off. How do they expect anyone to get any work done when all we can do is picture people jumping out of buildings and firemen covered in horrible white dust and West Villagers dazed, faces covered in masks, carrying last year's H&M clothes and canned lentils to the church on Carmine Street because they need to help? Help what? Help who? There's no one left to help. They exploded into the sky and became stars.

2003
We're finally off campus; we've moved to Brooklyn. From Daddy-O to Daddy's, from Joe's to Tony's. Corner bar: check. Slice: check. Oh, and for coffee we've traded that nucelus of neighborhood activity and intrigue, The Grey Dog, for the rattier, but cheaper, Phoebe's. We're too ratty and cheap for the West Village anyway.

We is me and C and his girlfriend. We don't live together, but explore Via Vespucci together. Well, C and I do. His girlfriend likes to stay indoors until sunset watching reruns of MASH. I used to do that until recently, except with Northern Exposure. But now I'm grown-up and go to work in an office and fall asleep before midnight.

Sometimes I sit in my backyard and watch the planes pass overhead. The people inside are so far from Earth, strapped in, hurtling. I wonder if I'll ever be able to fly again.

2004
It's the Summer of Turning 30. We all have nervous breakdowns of varying degrees of intensity. We also go to Madame Tussaud's, throw roof parties, lounge on a pontoon boat, do shots of tequila, wear fake nails in public, smoke cigars, eat wursts and lobster and cheeses of the world, and generally stay out late. We hug, we dance, we take pictures, we tear up sometimes. There are tiaras and forbidden subway photography involved. I wear red stilettos a few times.

H tells me he loves me. The switch is flipped. He shivers when I touch him and cries every day for a year.

2005
I go to Ikea. I go to baseball games. My 401k has kicked in and I have an appointment to get my teeth cleaned. Dinner with friends, visits with my family in Massachusetts. It's summer.

I haven't seen or talked to him in 3 months. A length of yarn is pulled taut, unravelling at first, then snapping into two pieces of string, carried away into the air. In November, I'll go to MoMA after work on a Friday and then see him once more, the last time.

New Haven

2006-08-09T20:26:00.000-04:00

On the way back and forth between Grand Central and New Haven, I sat in the same seat on the train. It was the last window seat, in the last car before the dining car. Yep, right near the bathroom. I was traveling to meet my parents for a Mom's-60th-birthday weekend in Mystic, CT. Mom had decided last minute, at my prodding, to take a mini-vacation away from the encroaching lakefront neighbors on Lake Thompson, away from the dogs, away from our aging relatives, and stick her toes in the sand and sip on tonic-and-limes until the sun set. Delicious.

Both ways, the train was packed. Families featuring cranky babies and 10-year-old girls with pink Puma backpacks tossed soft coolers containing Sierra Mists and tunafish sandwiches wrapped in cellophane up into the overhead bins. Yalies in worn heather-gray sweatshirts broke the bindings of their previously-uncracked textbooks, then sighed. Downtown chicks in metallic flip flops and flouncy skirts, bra staps defiant and fabulous, texted their friends upstate to say that the train was on time and that they couldn't wait 4 th mojitos! They settled in for the 90-minute ride. I was Sudokuing like crazy, hoping no one would sit next to me. It worked. Well, for 10 minutes.

At Harlem-125th Street, a few people crowded on to the train. A sweet-faced, cornrowed man gestured to me and I moved myself over a millimeter to accommodate him. My iPod was on; no words were exchanged. He was on the phone. Talking loudly. OK. I can deal with this. After a few minutes he clapped his phone shut, rustled around in his duffel bag, produced a 40-ounce King Cobra, cracked it, and looked at me, smiling, offering. It was 10:17 AM.

Yes, I drink. A lot. But 10:17 AM? I shook my head ever-so-slightly: no thank you. Great, an alcoholic thug next to me for 90 minutes. Furious Sudoku.

I had a migraine. The numbers weren't fitting. My iPod battery was dangerously low. My seatmate was shifting, sipping, watching me stare at the grid populated with empty boxes. My jaw muscles flexed, teeth meeting in an unnatural grind. He kept staring. The pressure built, my teeth bricks against sawblades, sparks flying into my brain. I finally broke. Devastated, I flipped to the end of the book for a hint. Motherfucker.

I filled in the remainder of the boxes with excessive force, almost tearing through the paper with the tip of my retractable pencil. Smugly, he looked the other way to see what the dark-haired woman across the aisle had to offer in the way of entertainment. Rumblings. A bit of relief. They were talking. In between songs, I heard: "Are you a vet?" "Yeah." Then more words, like tiny knives stabbing the tips of my nerve endings: war, man, they send you out there and what do they expect? I am a terrible person.

He gets off in Bridgeport, after talking to the dark-haired woman for almost the entire ride. She is nice, she is a human being. I'm an alien with a completed number puzzle, an empty seat, an empty bottle of malt liquor, a folded flag, a broken heart. Bound for the beach, for my parents, my loving, wonderful parents who never had to worry about a son in the war. Bound for gin and tonics and sunset.

What do they expect?

I Just Feel Like Posting This

2006-07-26T14:02:00.000-04:00

April, comes she will
When streams are ripe and swelled with rain

May, she will stay
Resting in my arms again

June, she'll change her tune
In restless walks she'll prowl the night

July, she will fly
And give no warning to her flight

August, dies she must
The autumn winds blows chilly and cold

September, I remember
A love once new has now grown old

--------
Thank you for indulging me. And thanks to Paul Simon. And Art, of course, for singing.

Overheard in Flahrida

2006-07-17T16:07:00.000-04:00

“Toucan? That’s in the Swan. We're in the Dolphin.”

--Hotel security guy to confused conference attendee at Exhibit Hall entrance.

“Do they have a Wal-Mart in DisneyWorld?”

--Giant tourist dad in leisure wear in the Screen Door General Store checkout line.

“If you like crowds, they have the biggest Mickey Mouse store in the world right down the street.”

--Well-meaning high school teacher to me, at the booth. [Ed: who likes crowds?]

Anatomy of an Expensed Martini

2006-07-14T20:31:00.000-04:00

I’m drinking the most delicious dirty Bombay martini at this very moment. My computer is on a backgammon table. The hotel bar is itself delicious--it has that old New York bar feel, with dark wood and a hodgepodge of leather armchairs, rattan sofas, old sewing machines, and floor-to-ceiling windows allowing the aggresive sunset to pierce through the low-lit room. My table is too high for typing, ergonomically designed for drinkers, not writers. I always thought they were one in the same.

I’m a new woman after spending 2 hours by the pool. I went from an overly-air-conditioned, fluorescent-lit, windowless exhibit hall to a blindingly sunny patio with geckos running about, a few nonscreaming kids in the moderately-sized pool, and flowers, flowers. I hottubbed. I talked on the phone to my mom and to a friend, both in mid-crisis—they were lucky to have caught me at the only time on this trip when I was psychologically able to calm them down and respond earnestly, sympathetically, to their problems.

There is a woman sitting near me, part of two couples. She is elegant. Her arms are simple bones with flesh draped over them. Her shoulders are sunburned, her watch glints when she stirs her Diet Coke. An acceptably funky wooden costume necklace hangs from her roped neck. She knows her arms are her best feature, and in the mornings as she dresses she furrows her brow and bites her lips but then sees those long, thin arms.

I move outside to the porch. Much better. Sunset, pink flowers, cigarettes. And, as if it couldn’t get any better, the bartender brings me an ashtray. It’s glass, and old-fashioned. Perfection. Sunsets are so dramatic. In Egypt, the ancient people believed that each day was born to the goddess Nut, and died each night. So poor Nut would have to give birth every 24 hours. When I think about that, my life doesn’t seem so bad.

The olives taste like they’ve been surrounded by blue cheese for several weeks. Scrumptious. A storm cloud is passing overhead. Thunder. Weather changes so quickly in Florida, she’s a moody girl, like me.

I’m not seeing cross-eyed yet, but I’m close. It’s delightful. I’ll keep you posted.

Reporting Live from Flahrida

2006-07-12T15:30:00.000-04:00

I'm now the proud owner of a Mickey Mouse umbrella. It’s raining in Florida, and I hate my life.

Where shall I begin? The 5:30 AM confirmation call from the car service? The driver not knowing how to get to LaGuardia from Williamsburg? The woman next to me on the plane elbowing me for 3 hours as she played touch-screen video games and ignored her son? Charming. Speaking of charms, she sported a lovely bangle on her right wrist featuring the character Spike from the popular, yet now cancelled, television show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Allrighty then!

After a significant amount of turbulence (50 kids, screaming) and a ride on the “Magic Express” bus (packed with families of four wearing matching T-shirts), I finally arrive at the Walt Disney Boardwalk Inn, where I am to stay for 4 days for a conference.

There are no smoking rooms left. But Hermie, my magical check-in agent, says I can smoke on the balcony because it's “near” the smoking rooms. Ok...? As I unlock the door of the soon-to-be-smoking room 2335, the phone is ringing. Hermie! She asks how I like the room. “Well, it’s all right, but I would prefer a smoking room.” “Ok!” she replies, extremely cheerfully. “I’m calling because the AMEX card that was on file was declined.” I guess my upgrade to a king bed smoking palace wasn’t going to happen.

The corporate card for the hotel room and additional charges (of which I plan to make many) did not go through and at this very minute I have no idea if I’m paying for the room out-of-pocket—a concept that is quite hilarious given that I have $288 in my bank account and I think that’s less than the nightly rate at the Boardwalk. The excitement never ends!

I do have a room key/”Magic Pass” that lets me eat, drink, and buy stuff on the room. However, the Exhibit Hall is in another hotel that doesn’t take the card. Of course not! Speaking of the two-hotel dynamic, they are in fact a 30-minute walk from each other, which might be nice if one was on one’s honeymoon and not lugging a laptop in the rain whilst wearing work shoes that a girl that works on Seventh Avenue in New York City wears.

Exhibit Hall setup is supposed to start at 12:30; I get there at 2:15 and they are not even checking people in yet. Blond high school boys whose summer job it is to lug and assemble portable kiosks scurry by, carrying metal boxes that will soon house a conference administrator that will check my name off of a ridiculously long alphabetized list of presenters. I leave the hall and forage for lunch.

My treat to myself is that I’m having a Sam Adams before I set up the booth. Tonight’s after-booth plans? Room service, Internet browsing ($9.95 for 24 hours of access), cable TV, and God-willing, a bottle of hooch. I wonder what kind of liquor selection they have at the Screen Door General Store. According to the Boardwalk Bugle, it offers “a selection of grocery items, snack items, sodas, beer, wine…” EUREKA! I will drink whatever expensive swill they have in that joint. I just hope Mickey isn’t on the bottle.

Note: There is no free WiFi – anywhere in Disney. Oh, and I think the pool is closed for maintenance.

More to come!

Entourage

2006-06-29T10:43:00.000-04:00

I've decided that for a last-summer-before-grad school treat, I'm buying a mediocre iced coffee from the cart guy on 56th & 7th every morning before work. It's only been about a week that I've been purchasing coffees from the cart guy, and already he knows me (a little milk, one sugar, no bag, no donuts). I love New York cart guys.

Anyway, this morning, coffee in hand, iPod in ears, sunglasses on, I trudge up the steps toward the revolving door that leads into my building. Standing in front of said door are about ten suited men, hogging the entryway. Get the fuck out of my way, suits. As I get closer to the mob, I notice that several of the men's left ears are sporting curly white wires. I slow a bit, but basically prance myself into the middle of the mob and sashay through the revolving door. The wire men check me out. Apparently I was cleared.

I turn back to see who is causing this glut, and notice that the entire crew is moving through the door, right behind me. Popping up in the middle of the entourage is the governor of New York, George Pataki, in all of his 6 foot 5 and camera-ready coiffed glory. Next to him is a man that, in heels, would be about 5 foot 8, head tilted all the way back, chattering away at George's upper arm. I speed up. As I pass the building security guys (who look stiff and scared shitless), the refrain "here he comes," "here he comes," follows me, cascading dominos. A youngish woman in a mosaic-patterned wrap dress and peep-toe stilettos stands in front of me, hands clasped and arms stretched long. She is doing an excellent job of waiting. She looks through me, parts her lips slightly and strides forward to receive the governor. I continue on, clutching my coffee, and flash my badge to guards with bigger fish to fry.

I kind of wish it had been Donald Trump. Now that's an entourage I'd like to see.

Oh Egypt, My Egypt

2006-06-21T11:54:00.000-04:00

Last Tuesday, a large aircraft rudely deposited me back onto the streets of Brooklyn from the land of fire ants and flame trees. Thud.

My trip seems otherworldly, like I was shooed into a waiting spaceship hidden behind giant curtains and strategically placed foliage to fly up and out of the atmosphere. Like everyone else on board was an astronaut and I the teacher from New Hampshire. I got the coveted point-of-view, won the lottery without even picking five.

The goats on the shores of the Nile were placed there for my enjoyment. The little ones, especially. The word galabaya? Invented for my pleasure. Nubian culture exists only to create the chest scoop and stomach drop I experience when I just think the word "Nubian." Sakkara beer, the goddess Mut, heiroglyphics -- I bet you didn't know this, but they arranged their atoms for me and me alone.

Re-entry is a bitch. Change in pressure from none to constant. The food's different. My fellow astronauts are gone, back to California and Pennsylvania. We'll next see each other at a mission reunion in Ft. Lauderdale, sipping whiskey sours awkwardly from plastic stemware.

I'm a disjointed mess, mourning my trip. But I promise, there are stories to tell.

It's Been a Month and This is All I Can Muster

2006-06-21T11:34:00.000-04:00

Which fucked-up genius composer are you?

Nick Cave... dark and creepy. You're a bi-polar genius, with equal passion for the most degrading aspects of humanity, as well as the beauty & wonder of God and Heaven.
Take this quiz!

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I am? Awesome!

2006-05-22T11:22:00.000-04:00

You Are Marge Simpson

You're a devoted family member who loves unconditionally.

Sometimes, though, you dream about living a wild secret life!

You will be remembered for: your good cooking and evading the police

Your life philosophy: "You should listen to your heart, and not the voices in your head."

The Simpsons Personality Test

Thanks, spillah! A perfect Monday morning pastime.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Writer's Block

2006-05-10T10:37:00.000-04:00

I
Among twenty episodes of American Idol,
The only moving thing
Was my thumb on the remote.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a popular Internet browser
In which three tabs are open to celebrity gossip.

III
The wine key twirled in the pliant cork.
It was a small part of the evening.

IV
A woman and a keyboard
Are one.
A woman and a keyboard and a wine key
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The spiciness of Mexican
Or the savory of Thai,
The order-placing
Or just after.

VI
Cigarettes filled the long ashtray
With barbaric ashes.
The shadow of my wine glass
Crossed it, up and down.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An unbelievably trippy aspect.

VII
O fat men of Brooklyn,
Why do you imagine olden times?
Do you not see how the hipsters
Walk around the blocks
Of the neighborhood you live in?

VIII
I know noble shops
And affordable, discounted clothing;
But I know, too,
That the sale rack at Scoop is full
Of what I need.

IX
When the waiter flew out of sight,
He marked my iced coffee
On one of many order tabs.

X
At the sight of my Sudoku puzzle
Full of purple numbers,
Even the editor of the Times' Sunday Crossword
Would cry out sharply.

XI
She rode over the Williamsburg Bridge
In a metal carriage.
Once, a fear pierced her,
In that she mistook
The direction of her train
For Queens.

XII
The TV is flickering.
The writer must be napping.

XIII
It was sunny all afternoon.
It was sunny
And it was going to be sunny.
The writer sat
In her back-yard.

*Inspired, of course, by Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". Read it, please . Let me add another thank you to this world: Mr. Stevens, thank you for a beautiful poem.

I Heart Clyde

2006-04-10T12:02:00.000-04:00

He is smiling at me! I feel special.

A Most Complicated Month

2006-04-05T11:44:00.000-04:00

Just yesterday, on my way home from work, I thought, I should grab my camera and take pictures of the blossoming trees on Via Vespucci, knowing that their white petals would soon be lifted from their stems by the forecasted high winds of early April. But I got home, ate dinner, and never went back outside.

Today, the air is filled with white. But not with blossoms.

I guess nature had other ideas.

Mates of Awesome, or, Prenostalgia

2006-03-24T12:21:00.000-05:00

The one thing that is getting me through these first bleak days of spring is the new Mates of State record, Bring It Back. Most of you know that I'm a huge fan. If I had written a year-end Top 10 Best Things Ever 2005, Mates would be number 2, behind Clyde.

Although I've now claimed the band as my own (as I imagine lots of other indie kids have, which is cute and nice and the way it should be), I have Massey to thank for introducing them to me. He is one to thank, as he also inspired me to start this lovely little weblog. Massey is a ball of creative energy wrapped in smarty pants and silliness, and I will miss him when he goes to Vegas then Jersey to become the full-on superstar that he is destined to be. Anyway, that said, Mates will always remind me of him, and of Askur & Embla. See, last year, a dovetail effect occurred, where the music and the people I was hanging out with all made sense in this perfectly prenostalgic way. You know when you are experiencing something, and as it happens, you know that you will think of it always and miss it forever? Well, that's what I mean. (Embla, is there a better word for this? If not, please add to OED. Thanks.)

When Massey, Askur, and I started hanging out at work, we recognized each other as members of the same karass. We got each other through the day-to-day, discussing our frustrations and dreams at lunch amongst the pleated pants in Bryant Park. We did prat falls in the office, danced through the aisles at Staples, threw stuff at each other--acts of insanity to keep sane. We made plans to get out. New jobs, school, whatever, just out. We all ran home after work and did more work, our own work. We wrote and designed and built and recorded.

One Wednesday, we decided to take a break and see the Mates of State at Bowery Ballroom. Embla joined us. We drank beer and bitched about work until they started playing. Lights down, then spotlights up, illuminating blond girl hair and boy drum kit chrome--and WHOOOAH OH OH WOOOOAH OAH OAH there they fucking went. We leapt in the air, closed our eyes, and sang out. We smiled so much our teeth were dry. Beer was spilled, we embraced, we acted like teenagers and bounced off the walls. We were victorious! For that hour, we had won. Incredible.

The next day, and for the next several months, it was back to work, of course. But things were about to kick in to high gear with applications, interviews, sick days, trips on trains, letters of intent, words of encouragement, the soundtrack for which was the Mates' back catalogue: Team Boo, All Day, My Solo Project, and Our Constant Concern. Songs with lyrics like "it's all in your head" and "I color the sky with you./I let you choose the blue." Smile.

Bring It Back is another rapturous, thoughtful, ass-shake. And it couldn't have come at a better time. The boys are gone (Askur to new fabulous job and Massey to school) and I am left. I think of their bright futures and I am so proud of them and happy for them and all good things for them. But I'm prenostalgic at heart, I think, and just want to bring it all back.

This Just In

2006-03-24T10:35:00.000-05:00

I haven't been posting much, or doing much of anything, because I've been watching too much American Idol. Evidence.

Just A Spell

2006-03-13T14:53:00.000-05:00

Whether you live here and commute every day, or have visited your crazy sister in Brooklyn for a weekend, I'm sure you've seen some strange shit somewhere along the 660 miles of New York City's subway system. Hell, if you've ever seen Seinfeld you know what I'm talking about. Examples: 10-year-old breakdancers freestyling during rush hour, rainbow-paletted ads for Dr. Z's skin peels, a guy on a makeshift burro in full-on vaquero gear singing "La Cucaracha" at top volume, fistfights. These everyday occurrences may elicit delight and/or terror in the average straphanger, depending on whether or not said straphanger is seated or is forced to actually grip some type of strap.

I thought I had seen it all. Well, if not it all, than most of it. Not the case. This morning, on the uptown Q train, the following note was Scotch-taped to one of the doors:

ARE YOU
A PROMISCUOUS FEMALE?
OR A FEMALE JUST HAVING A (PROMISCUOUS) SPELL

PHONE
A PROMISCUOUS MALE

(718) [phone number omitted]

Brown skin, light skin and yellow
skin females are the most promiscuous
people.

This 4 x 6 missive was posted at eye-level, if you happen to be about 5' 5''. Although the handwriting (all caps, black ink) was a bit crude, the paper itself was cut straight along each edge, revealing premeditation. And promiscuous was spelled correctly each time, which made the whole thing even more intensely bizarre. Was this a painfully shy Internet connection-less single looking for love in the big city? A bizarre social experiment? A cruel joke? Performance art?

In each case, a visual of the other end of the 718 phone number materializes: the 50-year old living with his mother in Queens, sitting by the wall-mounted rotary phone. Eggshell white. Shag carpeting. A group of long-haired Ph.D. candidates amalgamating then analyzing responses to the note based on Caller Anger Level. PowerPoint CAL index charts. The 15-year-old kids, jeans low, Starter caps bright, cackling every time their buddy's phone rings. The frustrated actress/artist with a shaved head and a bag full of mildly offensive notes that she surreptitiously tapes to train car doors and scaffolding. Stirring the melting pot.

Whatever the scenario, I think the note-writer's/poster's main purpose was achieved. Because as with all signs, notes, missives, advertisements, instructions, and villanelles, their point is to be read.

Waiting

2006-03-03T20:26:00.000-05:00

Two minutes late isn't a crime. The crime is how comfortable I feel sitting here, alone, a vodka tonic burning on this small wooden table, my pen out, its tip meeting its own reflection on the semi-glossy pages of my daily planner. I already went through the errands, crossed some things off my list. There's nothing left to do but write.

It's just before 9 PM on Saturday night in the Lower East Side. I'm meeting four girls. Four lovely, funny, hot bitches. Our plan is to get together and drink. Maybe discuss our menstrual cycles. You know, the usual.

It's just before March. March could be quite a month. It could either break my heart or open doors to what I've always thought was my future: me, hunched at a desk, pencil in mouth, hair up, typing fast, a cigarette burning in a tiny ashtray on my desk. And that's all I do. That's it.

The DJs show up, carrying bins full of vinyl and rectangular metal cases. One is a true LES-dweller with shaggy hair and a gaze fixed on a point just out of his focal range. The other is a Japanese kid wearing a winter white crocheted beanie and a matching bomber jacket. Goggles of some sort. He's the one who does the flyers, catalogs the records, and worries about surge protectors. His buddy is just for show. They plop their gear on the floor near me and ask the hot French bartendress if she needs anything. I gather they are foraging for dinner. You know it's a party when the DJs show up.

OK, 16 minutes is criminal. When you're waiting for four people and they're all late, it kind of feels like a conspiracy. I picture my girls, two doors down, heads back in laughter, earrings glittering in the candlelight. They're saying things like "I'd never made out with anyone with a tongue stud before" and "Who wants a shot?" and they're giggling and flickering and beautiful and alive.

Maybe I'm in the right place after all.

A Little Poem from the Vault

2006-02-27T23:37:00.000-05:00

Ex-boyfriend

A full lunar eclipse
a girl in a classroom
a list of novels
snowfall

How nice that these things remind you of me.

Oldest Girls

2006-02-27T15:04:00.000-05:00

When my sister and I were young, my parents sent us to day camp every summer. Not a fancy overnight camp--day camp. Camp Massasoit was affiliated with Springfield College, where my dad was the Assistant Athletic Director, and was situated on what was known as the college's "East Campus," nestled between the Monsanto plant where half of my old relatives worked, and an on-ramp to the Mass Pike. Despite it's urban location, we campers enjoyed several varieties of trees, the requisite lake, a ball field, even a pueblo (in which we sat on rainy days, making God's Eyes and chucking empty chocolate milk cartons at each other). My mom drove us to camp in the morning, and Dad would pick us up after work.

Camp Massasoit was a repository for sons and daughters of Springfield College employees and Pioneer Valley's population of borderline juvenile delinquents. Most of us had parents that worked blue-collar or low-paying professional jobs. Even as a young girl I knew where my camp landed in the pecking order of New England's many camps. I imagined that the overnight camps, situated deep in the Vermont woods or on a sprawling farm in northern Connecticut, offered their campers miniature log cabins with gingham curtains sewn by woodland creatures, breakdancing instructors, acting lessons from Michael J. Fox, and a selection of gentle, fawn-colored horses.

The summer I turned 11, it was my fifth year at camp. Campers were divided into age groups, the most envied of which were known as "Oldest Boys" and "Oldest Girls." You didn't know what group you were in until the first day of camp, so I was taken by surprise when they called my name for Oldest Girls--technically, I was on the border between Oldest and Second Oldest. I left my pack of 10-year old friends, turned bright red, and walked my bright red shorts and basketball T-shirt across Council Ring toward a mob of long-haired 13-year olds wearing fluorescent short shorts and spatter-paint sunglasses on lanyards. Holy shit.

The first day or so, I did my best to never speak. I hoped the triumvirate of power, Vicki, Cathy, and Michelle, would skim their eyes over my head, never to rest on my pale and petrified face. (I figured this would happen naturally, as they were all about a foot taller than I was.) These three teenage girls represented the most powerful regime I had ever encountered; fueled by hormones and boredom, they ran Oldest Girls with an iron fist wearing a lacy fingerless glove. Vicki, the leader of the pack, sported a Woonsocket, Rhode Island teased blond mullet, a scowl, and a penchant for doing whatever the fuck she liked. Her sidekick, Cathy, looked not unlike the then-hugely-popular cartoon character after which she was named. With her huge glasses, brown curly hair, and mouth full of metal, she seemed destined to be unlucky in love, dotting her i's with plump hearts until she died surrounded by a few dozen tabbies. Rounding out the group was Michelle, an exquisite, six-foot-tall black girl, who I think was recruited mostly for her looks but also to balance the power structure with a bit of sweetness.

And then there was me. On day three, as I silently sat on a picnic bench, waiting for our group to go to archery, a shadow passed over my outstretched legs. "You need to shave your legs." My heart froze. I might have peed a little. Standing above me, were the Big Three, Vicki in front, arms crossed. I squinted up at them, partially blinded by the sun that seemed trained on their every movement. "Um, yeah," I managed. Until that moment, I had honestly never considered the subject of shaving. "Yeah, and why are you wearing those baby clothes?" I think this came from Cathy, her head sprouting from Vicki's left shoulder. "Uh...I..." As I searched for an explanation to another phenomenon I had never thought about, the deafening bullhorn that signaled a change in activity period sounded. I stood up, eye-level with Vicki's training bra, stepped around their formation into the throng of campers headed to boating or riflery. I had been recruited. And if I was to get the job of Number Four, I knew had to make some serious changes.

Through a series of feigned illnesses, I managed to avoid the girls for the rest of the day. When I got home that night I ran a bath, stealing my mother's disposable razor from the medicine cabinet. I examined each downy hair on my shins, and began soaping them with Camay until the bar crumbled in my hands. Terrified, I held the razor over my right leg, eyes tearing up and hands shaking (the best way to start your shaving life, I know), and practiced the motions I imagined I was supposed to do in order to free my Neanderthalish limbs of their matted outer covering. "What are you doing in there? Dinner's ready!" My mother's voice thundered through the bathroom door. "Nothing! I'm almost done!" I screamed, dropping the razor into the sudsy water. I knew she was coming in. My mother was always coming in.

"What are you doing?" she yelled. I burst into tears. "I'm shaving my legs these girls at camp told me I had to and they are so ugly I can't go to camp tomorrow with hairy legs all the other girls at camp are shaving" I blathered. My mom came over to me, helped me out of the tub, wrapped me in a towel. I blathered on. I dried off, got changed, and sat down to dinner with a promise from my mother that she would teach me to shave my legs after we ate the hot dog casserole that was getting cold. My father and sister chomped away, oblivious of the mother-daughter ritual that was soon to take place. After our lesson, I rummaged though my dresser drawers, looking for the most grown-up campwear I could find, including the shortest shorts I owned. I settled on a pink and purple ensemble, pink shorts with a stripey shirt. Collar up. No socks with my Keds, hair sprayed up into a kind of souffle. Sunglasses. I was SO Number Four.

Later that summer, I was the proud owner of my first "boyfriend," Jamie--he of the painter's cap with a mudflap at the back. When he took it off, his hair was the exact same shape. We were devastatingly cute together, which was why Vicki picked him out for me. I shared my first dance with him at the Picnic Grove to Berlin's "Take My Breath Away." All that and we had exchanged about 13 words. We broke up the day camp was over via Cathy communique. She decided I didn't like him, and told him so. And she was right, so it all worked out for the best.

It was a summer of firsts, a summer of transformation. Being part of the Oldest Girls gave me a taste of arbitrary power and coolness that was easily recognized in many social situations to come. I never saw or talked to Vicki, Cathy, or Michelle after that summer. Come to think of it, I don't really remember talking to them much at all.

Really

2006-02-17T18:05:00.000-05:00

This past Valentine's Day, my date was not with some charming, attentive boyfriend or even a mildly interesting single acquaintance--it was with the television set. (No, I don't own any cats.) I had a plan, demonstrated by the following equation:

Red Wine + Olympic Speedskating =
A relatively-happy-and-somewhat-distracted-from-loneliness Mega.

An attainable goal...or so I thought. Little did I know I was about to have a Reality TV Meltdown.

I'm pretty much a reality TV whore, and will watch anything involving fat people trying to resist pyramids of glazed doughnuts, drunken college kids making out with each other in hot tubs, teenagers trying to marry off their parents, or starving yuppies battling for a coconut. But my favorite reality shows are those that pluck the fabulously talented from obscurity: Project Runway, America's Next Top Model (yeah, talented may not be the word here), and the mother of all reality shows: American Idol. So every Tuesday and Wednesday nights, I'm glued to the TV to hear every cracked note and every powerhouse rendition of "Chain of Fools". I've been known to weep when underdog-type contestants get through to the next round. I said I don't own any cats!

This year, my roommate Saint Peg and I have what's commonly known as Olympic Fever. We've been watching as much lugeing, curling, snowboarding, and skating as we can stand. Feverish as I was, on Tuesday, while purchasing my Sauvignon Blanc, I was contemplating the American snowboarding team's curious choice of pinstriped uniforms and the mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a vest that is Johnny Weir. The night before, as Saint Peg and I watched the women snowboarders rip up the halfpipe, we became hungry for more competition during the commercial breaks. After a brief trip though Time Warner Cable's offerings, we decided to counterprogram with 2-minute glimpses of Pomeranians and Shiba Inus at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Yes! We had it down: the second Bob Costas started to speak, we'd leap for the remote and press "Last Channel" and a millisecond later we were studying Rocky Balboa's Uncle Tipsy the Rottweiler's textbook gait. Counterprogramming: a thing of beauty.

Anyway, Tuesday, the plan was more of the same. Peg and I ordered pizza, and endured the final moments of women's curling, settling in to behold another night of our new reality habit, Olympic sporting events. I called my sister to remind her about the Dog Show. She had already missed the first night--tonight was the crowning of Best In Show. After my spiel, she asked, "What, no American Idol for you tonight?" Lightheaded...mouth open...wine glass very nearly dropped. I had forgotten about Idol. Everything started to go dark. I hung up and leapt to the small TV set in the other room, frantically switching channels to FOX 5. My head spun. I think I screamed. Peg laughed and started eating the pizza, while I ran from room to room in my fuzzy slippers, a whirling dervish.

After a minute or so, I caught my breath. I planted my ass in front of Idol, poured another glass of wine during the commercial break, and cried when the little skinny kid with the bad haircut sung Josh Groban's "You Raise Me Up," well, just like Josh Groban. I felt warm and fuzzy. Valentine's Day had surpassed my expectations.

I'll wrap up this whole box of chocolates with this, a paraphrase of my AM New York Horoscope dated 2/15/06: If you don't have a sweetheart, get a dog or a cat or a bird. Or a fish or even a plant.

A plant.

Craigslist Poetry #5...more from Val Day*

2006-02-16T17:10:00.000-05:00

Crappy Valentine

wow..you hung up on me.
I just don't get it

A year later and my heart still cries
thanks for breaking my mirror shithead

beautiful boy, its Valentine's Day
you always said we could never be more than friends

I'm Not
Thinking of you today, too bad really.

oh i almost forgot
who cares if a soldier dies

*constructed exclusively from message subject lines on the New York City missed connections board dated February 14, 2006

Craigslist Poetry #4...Valentine's Day Edition*

2006-02-16T12:06:00.000-05:00

A Valentine to Myself

Today, more than ever
I think I am the luckiest girl
we crossed paths twice today
A Valentine treat
Don't know what your plans are tomorrow

This is the Last Worthless Evening
my dirty, filthy, matted, troubled Valentine
you used to say
style is the answer to everything

*constructed exclusively from message subject lines on the New York City missed connections board dated February 14, 2006

Massey Is a Genius

2006-02-10T10:33:00.000-05:00

It just needs to be said.

Please read this.

Money Doesn't Grow on Trees

2006-02-08T21:33:00.000-05:00

In warm months, the branches of the yellow-leaved tree outside my bedroom window are heavy with shitting birds. Last September, my sister parked her car under it overnight and in the morning we had to break out the bucket and my pink dishwashing gloves and scrub about 100 significant piles of birdshit off of her Jetta. That fall, each night at dusk, the shitters screeched their warm-weather guts out, comparing notes (I got the sideview mirror! I got the driver's-side door handle! Right on, brah!). Self-congratulatory bastards.

Any way you slice it, it's nice having a tree outside my window. Even though I suppose it's more common in Brooklyn than in Manhattan, being able to see foliage directly from my New York Metro Area window is especially pleasurable. Yet another reason why I love living in Brooklyn. When I first moved to New York, I landed in the West Village. For the first six weeks, I stayed with my friend in her studio on Mulberry Street and only knew how to walk to get 1) pizza, 2) cash, and 3) to the bar. Little did I know that those three destinations (the order of importance of which could be debated forever) were pretty much evergreen in terms of their absolute necessity for survival in the big city. In that respect, not much has changed since I made the move across the East River. Tony's Pizza, the AutoCash2000 at Khim's Millennium Market, and Daddy's (happy hour! fireplace!) see their fair share of my face and my dollars.

Brooklyn became my home because I was sick of living in a West Village apartment in which I could scramble eggs while sitting on the toilet. My roommate and I bought copious amounts of Ikea shelving and a miniature dish rack, attempting fruitlessly to maximize the 600 square feet that was 26 Leroy Street Apartment 6. In this "two bedroom," there were no closets, a stand-up shower, and plaster walls with mouse tunnels dating from 1865. Charming, indeed. We happily paid close to $2,000/month for this apartment--being 25, we didn't know any better. To make ends meet, we put our silver dollar pancakes and bacon from the Waverly Diner on our Visas and sold CDs at Bleecker Street Records. Somehow we avoided debtors' prison and survived as semi-starving recent college graduates in a neighborhood that now, five years later, welcomes only B-list actors and couples with a combined annual income of over $500,000. No wonder my roommate moved to Sunnyside and I to Williamsburg, where one can easily walk to the Pay-O-Matic and, on the way, grab a slice of pizza for $1.65.

I don't recall ever seeing birds in the trees outside my apartment in Manhattan. When I moved to the West Village, I didn't give much thought to trees, or lack thereof. I didn't think much about money, or lack thereof, either. I suppose the tradeoff for paying a bit less in rent is that I get to have a tree full of birds outside my window. But of course, being Brooklyn birds, they gleefully, mercilessly, shit on your car.

Craigslist Poetry #2 and #3*

2006-01-31T10:46:00.000-05:00

Mad

We shared a cab out of convenience
en route to home
you stupid stupid boy
I am so mad
it's weird to miss you
damn me and my timidness

Not Mad

A sign from the Universe
my lunchtime crash
Beth you were right
I am not mad
(insert swear word)
I'm still here I still think of you
It's going to be my hardest year ever

*constructed from message subject lines on the New York City missed connections board

Quitting: A Timeline

2006-01-28T09:41:00.001-05:00

Then:
We waited for a table. It was warm in there. The bar was full of people talking about their days, their plans. We said nothing. I sat on a barstool, you stood close. My fingers wrapped around your belt, pulling you a millimeter closer to me than you already were. You were nervous, but looked at me straight and steady. Trust, that confident snake, wedged itself into the crack in my heart. We ordered red wine. You kissed me. We ate arugula salads with sliced pears.

Subsequently:
Every time you drove away, leaving me wrapped in covers, writhing, the crack widened. Eventually, after so much leaving, it spread to my whole chest and brain and imploded me. A person can only take so much leaving, you know.

Now:
I've quit you. I've never quit anything before, besides piano lessons when I was nine. Never thought I'd feel so good about quitting something. The snake is back in its hole, waiting for permission.

Prediction:
It's going to be a long wait.

Craigslist Poetry #1*

2006-01-19T09:35:00.000-05:00

get over it K8
it was two times
it wasnt right from the start and you wanted it too much
sorry if you have bitter feelings
i was honest from the start
it all got so blurred
so let it go
im tired of feeling your weirdness

*constructed from message subject lines on the New York City missed connections board

U.G.L.Y. You Ain't Got No Alibi

2006-01-18T15:26:00.000-05:00

I'm not a vain person. I mean, I like to look good, and take the appropriate girly measures to do so: I moisturize, get my hair did, paint my nails, even apply eyeliner for special occasions. I wear lipstick every day. I own lots of pairs of heeled shoes. I'm pretty secure with how I look, and can usually laugh off a silly or unflattering photograph of myself--it happens. I'm not a super-insecure diva-like chick. But I totally pulled a diva move the other day.

Newsflash: I take lots of pictures. A significant number of said pictures could be (are?) deemed unflattering by their subjects. Aware of this fact, I sometimes edit out terrible pictures of my friends from my silly flickr account, figuring my best friend wouldn't appreciate a picture of her nasal canal or one where her eyes are Gary Busey-closed. But most of my stuff on flickr is not of terrible importance, so it's not the end of the world if one or two less-than-flattering images make it up. None of the albums up there are my wedding album. Wedding albums are a whole other deal--they represent the most important people on the most important day in a couple's life together.

I usually don't love pictures of me at weddings, mostly because I'm drunken and nowhere near as luminous and beautiful as the bride (which is the way it's supposed to be--all girls pale in comparison to a bride, even when dolled up for a wedding). And I'm totally fine with that--it's their day, who cares what I look like? But usually there's one or two of me and everyone else that are tolerable enough to include in the wedding album. Or so I thought. On Monday, a close friend of mine shared his online wedding album with the whole world. On it, there are 176 photos of a gorgeous and beaming couple and happy, well-dressed, fabulous-looking wedding guests. And then there's the one of me.

It is a photo inappropriate for viewing for any and all grandmothers, potential mates, babies, dogs, model scouts, boy scouts, Mounties, ex-boyfriends, future ex-boyfriends, and/or employers. And yet it lives and breathes and is currently being clicked on (to expand!) by most of my close friends and anyone else who was at the wedding.

Let's examine the evidence:

My dress is falling down. After a series of evaluations I concluded that no, that's not a nipslip. But it's damn close.
A mighty wind has blown my hair into a power mullet. Like Charles Bronson on top and Vanilla Ice's unbraided rattail in the back.
An unlit cigarette is clenched between my frowning lips. True class.
From the way my finger is positioned, it looks like I am flipping off the photographer and whoever else happened to be in a 20-mile radius.

The first time I saw the picture, I shuddered, but knew, because of its hideousness, that it would never be included in any album, so I forgot it existed. Until Monday. The second time I saw it, bookended by a photo of the bride's mom and sister sharing a tender moment (both looking fetching, I might add), and two of my chain-smoking friends (sans cigarettes and smiling widely, of course), my body temperature alert level rose to "mortified" and I immediately begged my friend to take it down. Surprised by my vehemence, he said that everyone loved it but that he would add another one of me to offset the terrible one. O...k...?

I know, I know, I know: it's their wedding, their pictures, their friends, their album. I should just keep my mouth shut. My one small point is: I'm single. I don't want a picture of myself that elicits laughter (not to mention ridicule, revulsion, or moral outrage) representing my presence at a lovely wedding between close friends. But I guess I'm stuck with it and have to own the fact that I did, for that split second, look like a haggard boozehound with a palsied face. Could be worse. I suppose I could look like that all of the time.

And no, I'm not linking to the picture. Those of you who've seen it know what I'm talking about.

Signed,
Vain in New York

Hang Up Your Fucking Coat

2006-01-13T17:55:00.000-05:00

So last night B, C, and I went for a post-work drink in midtown. For Brooklynites like us, going to a bar in midtown is a daunting proposition. There are so many great bars in NYC. Settling for a sports bar filled with 100 screaming bankers with their khakis in a bunch about how long it's taking for the girl to bring them their goddamn potato skins goes against everything I stand for. But, in the interest of time or temperature, it is sometimes necessary to ignore all standards of taste and just go wherever the beer flows. Last night we hesitated in the doorways of a few places like the one I just described, but, sick-faced, we pivoted our way back outside, depressed, confused, and bereft of alcohol.

Across the street from one of these cruel places, we spotted a dark storefront with a single red light and a sign reading "Lounge." From what we could see, it was a bar, and it wasn't crowded. Score! We swung the door open. Emerging from the semi-darkness to greet us was a long-haired (long as in "to-the-butt-long") woman wearing a half shirt and spangly waist jewlery. She softly asked us to hang our coats, and told us that after we did so, she would "get us situated." Hmm. Above the coatrack, a sign echoed her sentiment, albeit in a more direct manner: HANG UP YOUR FUCKING COAT. We hung up our fucking coats.

We had stepped into what looked like a hookah lounge/manual relase parlor/cocktail lounge. It contained a bed bedecked with pink feather boas and a curious staircase that lead to an even more curious second floor. A few patrons scattered themselves on floor pillows, low armchairs, banquettes covered in red fabric, cowhide pillows. We were seated at a glassbox table that encased various papers and artifacts that we couldn't read for the darkness. Candles strained to light the tabletops and red Christmas lights illuminated the underside of the bar. Shoulders were shrugged, beer was ordered, and we proceeded to chat away about work and Midtown and whatever, happy to have found a semi-empty haven where we could drink in peace. We gathered this place hadn't ever seen a platter of potato skins.

People started coming in. Some suits, some girls that clearly worked together in the marketing department, some old guys. At the height of our conversation, a screech that was a cross between a Cherokee war whoop and a high-pitched yodel exploded from above. All conversation stopped, all heads snapped to the top of the staircase, where all that was visible was a pair of light brown arms snaking in the glow from a streetlight. Low, rhythmic music was suddenly playing, and an exquisite, fifty-percent-clothed woman began descending the staircase. She slunk, she writhed, she did things with her ribs I had no idea could be done. Her fingertips picked imaginary petals out of the air. We sipped our Stellas, mesmerized, breaking our stares every few minutes to exchange goofy smiles.

Another pair of arms made their entrance from the top of the staircase. Then another. Eventually, all three women were downstairs, dancing amongst the suits and the marketing chicks. C and I faced the action on the banquette, while B, the boy, faced the wall. He sat in his low chair looking at us, bellies and spangles gyrating behind him. We laughed. The women whirled, hair flying in sheets. We had gone from trudging around midtown, weighing this frat bar versus this sports bar, to sitting in the middle of an authentic belly dance show. I'll use an overused phrase: only in New York, kids, only in New York.

Bullets Below Houston

2006-01-04T14:47:00.000-05:00

I recently saw Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway again. Besides the John Cusack character reminding me of an ex-boyfriend (idealistic, stubborn, sweet), the scenes of the young playwright and a grande dame of Broadway sloshing gin martinis in Theater District speakeasies made me long for my first few years in New York -- the years when I acted out my version of these scenes with my screenwriter and barcrawler friends. The major differences were that drinking was legal and that none of us had written anything yet.

In 2000, my friends and I were what you could call professional bargoers (a direct result of most of us working in bars). We loved to drink, but the point of our almost-nightly outings wasn't to sample the trendiest cocktail in the sleekest new club or put on tube tops and do 11 shots of Jäeger -- the point was to sip on a cocktail or two (or five), smoke a bunch of cigarettes, and talk. Talk about films, about writing, about love and sex, about how Yeats and Welles and Cobain were geniuses before the age of 27 and about why the fuck weren't we? We weren't seeking a buzz, although we welcomed it when it came (hello sweet friend); we were seeking inspiration. Enamored with ourselves and everything we said, we carried notebooks filled with direct quotes "for our screenplays." On bevnaps we doodled diagrams of the universe, poem fragments, and crude renderings of that pair of boots on 8th Street, slipping them into purses and jacket pockets only to throw them away the next time we had colds. When I think of this time in my life, J, of course, is in every scene.

J isn't a grande dame of Broadway or my ex. She's one of my best friends. J made it OK for me to move to New York -- she was already here, knew the ropes, and let me stay with her. She got me a job and practically got me an apartment. She lent me her clothes, her friends, $20, whatever. I paid her back in nights. On these nights, J and I would try on jeans for an hour, have a pre-cocktail cocktail, then walk half a block to Botanica, where the music was loud, the drinks were cheap, and the ashtrays were gigantic cut glass monstrosities that we would slowly fill to capacity. Boys in ring-necked T-shirts and shaggy hair would trip by us on their way to the back room to see how their belt buckles looked in under red light bulbs. Girls in newsboy caps and dangly earrings sat on couches, whispering to each other (about us? Bring it, bitches), eyes pasted on boys. J and I would order vodka tonics and light up, hunched on thrift-store armchairs, breathlessly telling one another about the book we'd just read the movie we'd just seen the couple that had come into the bar the conversation we'd had the poem we'd started. We'd pick books to adapt, come up with ideas for TV shows and song cycles. This would go on for hours. Bevnaps flew. Eventually, we'd get drunk and either go home or take a cab 6 blocks to Eldridge Street and dance with teenagers from Staten Island.

I'm not talking breathlessly in bars as much as I once was. J lives in LA now, has a baby; I work 9-6 in New York. We talk on the phone, but it's not the same as when we're actually sitting together. I only know two bartenders. People I once barcrawled with have quit smoking, moved away, gotten married, all three. The perfection and possibility of those nights seems far off, at least as far away as the World Trade Center was tall from where I sit, being a bad employee, typing romance and potential on a keyboard that should be used strictly for catalog copy and permissions letters. A lot can change in 6 years, but nothing can erase the time I spent downtown before everything changed. I'm just glad I got to play for a while before it did.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

2005-12-31T13:03:00.000-05:00

Christmas morning at my parents' place is a time that my family and I look forward to each year. We get up early, make a pot of coffee, crank up the old school Christmas tunes (The Salsoul Orchestra's Christmas Jollies is a fave), and start winding our way through our stocking gifts, which takes us about 2 hours. We, being a tad masochistic, open each present one by one, starting usually with my sister, who selects a gift at random, opens it, then tries to guess which of the other four of us bought it for her. The guilty party raises their hand and thank yous are thrown around. So, for us, opening a case of peppermints is a major event than can take up to 5 minutes. We each buy the others 5 stocking gifts, so we each have 20 gifts in our stockings. So that's how we get to 2 hours. It's bliss. Except this year.

My parents have two dogs. The elder (Princess) was adopted a couple of years ago (hence the silly name), and her nickname is "Boca Grande" because she is a bit of a barker. I have an unnatural love for this little fluffball, to the point that she can do no wrong in my eyes. So she barks--so what? The younger dog is named after a morning television personality (fine, it's Regis), is super cute (nickname "Poco Cabeza"--the Spanish isn't quite right, but you get the idea), but, for a little dog, is quite aggressive with anyone that is not in our immediate family. He could be perched in your arms licking your fingers one second and snarling the next. Usually on Christmas, these pups chill out and play with their new toys, beg for crumbs from our danishes, and sleep. They might bark a little here and there, perhaps at a squirrel scurrying atop the neighbors' fence. But this year, the squirrel went unnoticed. This year, we had a special guest: my sister and brother-in-law's dog.

Don't get me wrong, Tori is a sweetheart. She is an American Bull Terrier who loves people and gigantic bones. She was invited to Christmas morning because she was going to my sister's in-laws' place, and they didn't want to have to drive back to get the dog after the Christmas morning festivites. Which, in theory, was a practical idea. It's important to note here that both Tori and Regis were diagnosed by a dog trainer to be aggressive toward other dogs. So, it was decided that Tori would spend Christmas downstairs while the humans and two small dogs would open gifts upstairs. Let the fun begin!

A dog's bark is never a soothing sound. But most bigger dogs' barks have a lower timbre and don't pierce through brainmatter like those of small dogs. So when Tori started barking downstairs (after being snuck in through the porch while we distracted the two fluffs with treats), it wasn't so bad. When Boca and Poco went batshit crazy, however, it was. They charged the basement door. They shook. And they started shrieking at a volume I had never experienced from anything other than a screeching 6 train or guitar amp feedback in a 250-square-foot practice space. This cacophony propelled Tori to howl and bark right back. In a flurry of wrapping paper and glittery ribbons, my parents leapt from their easy chairs and grabbed the now-rabid dogs away from the door, avoiding bared teeth as they scooped them up and brought them to the kitchen. The barking continued. Leashes were affixed to collars, Tori was given a calming peanut butter treat, and my parents each took a small dog, returned to their chairs, and we tried to resume our normal routine.

For 2 hours, the dogs barked. My eyes watered, they barked so loudly. For 2 hours, Boca and Poco sat quivering in my parents' laps, trying everything they could think of to escape and charge the basement door again. I sat on the couch, fingers in ears, waiting for my brother-in-law to open the socks I gave him. When he did, I raised my elbow so he would know they were from me. I couldn't even hear him say thank you.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Notes From Aboveground

2005-12-20T17:05:00.000-05:00

Greetings from the NYC Transit Strike 2005! About 30 minutes ago, I almost ran over a dude on roller skates in my mother's VW Bug.

I, like an ass, decided that, after a full day of working from home (complete with the requisite 2 pm Bloody Mary), I would get in the car at 4:15 to try to drive into the city to see my best friend in the delivery recovery room at St. Vincent's (congratulations, U!). Bad idea jeans. After snaking my way through residential Williamsburg, assaulted on all sides by speeding minivans, darting Hasidic children wearing all black, and the aforementioned (and intriguing) roller skating populace of East Williamsburg, I got in line for the bridge entrance, happily listening to my iPod and smoking Parliaments with the heat blasting. 20 minutes later, I resignedly swung my car to the exit lane of the BQE, glancing forlornly at the barricaded bridge entrance on my left, and began my winding journey back to the parking spot I had abandoned only 40 minutes before. Sigh.

But that's just my minor saga. I feel much worse for those that did one or more of the following today:

walked over a bridge or bridges in 27 degree weather
hitched rides with malodorous individuals in vehicles of questionable safety
paid $20 to share a cab from 44th Street to 21st
stressed to get to a place of business that depended on clients making it in (hair salons, doctor's offices, etc.), only to find all clients had cancelled
weren't able or allowed to work from home

Sometimes, English Majors that live in Brooklyn get a break. Strike on, suckers!

Brokeass Mountain

2005-12-15T11:14:00.000-05:00

Here's the deal: I like movies. Also the deal: I hate going to the movies.

Listening to other people eat popcorn makes me want to commit homicide. But most of my disdain for moviegoing stems from a particular experience in San Francisco. My ex-boyfriend was a film guy, and was friends with other film guys. Said guys took me along to the SF Film Festival, where we crowded into a darkened theater in Japantown to watch an Eastern-European film that featured, from my spotty recollection, drunk people on a houseboat and a large white horse.

All was fine until the movie hit the, oh, I don't know, 2 hour and 45 minute mark, when I started to panic. I needed nicotine and relief from bladder pressure immediately. On either side of me, 25 rapt film devtoees were smugly nestled in their seats, faces upturned and illuminated by the white horse. Not blinking. Not moving. I began to experience the precursors to a panic attack, squirming in my seat, kicking my legs out straight then snapping them back and up into a tucked position, rearranging my coat, making grunty noises, rolling my eyes. (Picture Elaine watching "The English Patient.") I think I finally got up and left, annoying at least 50 people as I made my way out of the aisle. That cigarette tasted like nectar from the gods.

An experience like that is one I want to avoid at all costs. When I tended bar a few years ago, I saw lots of movies. I could go to the Tuesday 1:15 showing of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," splay out like a cat in the sunshine, and make it out of there before the high schoolers showed up for "X-Men" at 3:05. Aaaah. But now that I'm a 9-6er, my only opportunity to go to the movies is after work and on weekends. Like the 7 million other 9-6ers in the New York Metro Area. No thanks. Plus, my piddly disposable income goes toward drinks, dinners, travel, gifts. Not $11 movies starring Ryan Reynolds in a fat suit. So, for the most part, movies that I want to see go unseen. (Exception: Harry Potter movies. Leave me alone!)

As you may guess, I haven't seen "Brokeback Mountain," and probably won't, even though, in theory, I'd like to see it. It looks like it would be good. My roommate, the lovely Saint Peg, gave me a copy of the story on which the movie is based and I read it last night before bed. Beautifully, painstakingly written by Annie Proulx, but while reading, I felt personally sad. Not sad for the characters, but sad for myself. Because I had a relationship like that, electric and right but doomed to regret and loneliness and pain in old age. Ah well, we all move on. Someday I'll be able to watch it, I'm sure. On cable.

Pop Culture Haiku #2*

2005-12-07T17:20:00.000-05:00

Nicole, Nik, Bre, Kim
Jayla, Lisa, Kyle: Which
is the skinniest?

*inspired by the UPN hit America's Next Top Model: Cycle 5.

Disco Casual

2005-12-07T15:15:00.000-05:00

It's that time of year again: holiday party time. To kick off the season, I must head to some anonymous, oversized club (uptown! help!) after work tomorrow for the corporate boozefest. If it's anything like last year's, I will have had 2 gin martinis and 5 cigarettes by 6:45. I'm dragging Massey and B with me; we hope to claim a booth and drink our faces off whilst making fun of guys in Dockers. My main concern about the whole thing is typical girl: what I am wearing.

The email invite for this event contains the following: "appropriate professional attire requested." I guess that means no glittery half shirts. (Note to self: resist temptation to wear fishnets and fuck-me heels to work.) Professional party attire? I'm sorry, but that's an oxymoron. What's most stressing me is that our office is casual, meaning we can wear (nice, pressed) jeans and (clean, fashion) sneakers whenever we want (the Employee Handbook states, "If you would wear it to move, don't wear it to the office." Uh, okay. Thanks.). So "professional attire" here is, well, not suits and stuff. Am I supposed to bust out a twinset and some nude hose for this party?

When I think "holiday party," I think unexpected sparkle, higher-than-normal heels, extra eye makeup. But all of this is out of the question as per management. The rest of the women in my department will probably kick it up a notch and wear their mauve ill-fitting Old Navy sweaters instead of their off-white ill-fitting Old Navy sweaters. Gasp! I think for me it will be a skirt, boots, a demurely-festive top, maybe a cute blazer. Disco casual. I'll save the fuck-me heels for the next baby shower.

A Princess Never Cooks

2005-12-02T17:25:00.000-05:00

BAM! Yes, believe your eyes, this was my Thanksgiving dinner table (pre-food, of course). Take that, Marty.

Not since I read Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret, have I felt so, well, womanly--like I graduated to the next level or something. I can now say that I have experienced, albeit briefly, the sweet nectar of the once-bewildering world of filigreed slotted spoons, monogrammed pewter napkin rings, and multi-colored hand-blown cordial glasses. Would you like an absorbent sandstone coaster for your snifter?

Breathe in. Breathe out. Imagine, if you will, the sumptuous tendrils of scent that drifted in from my kitchen last Thursday: thyme-and-butter-rubbed turkey breast stuffed with garlic cloves and bread dressing, glowy sweet potato bisque with cinnamon, flaky, top-split dinner buns. Until a week ago, I could never have written that sentence. The smells more commonly emitting from my kitchen include the plasticky Eau du Microwavable Burrito or perhaps the sweet aroma of a freshly punctured can of tunafish.

For a long time, I told myself that I didn't like to cook. I even resorted to purchasing a silly magnet proclaiming "A Princess Never Cooks." Yeah, I know, buying a silly magnet to rationalize an aspect of one's personality is a desperate act usually committed by lonely and bored housewives with a surplus of cash. I have one, OK?? I bought it in college. Anyway, my recent brush with the culinary arts has a lot to do with my recent lack of cash. Eating out 3 meals a day in New York City is a killer. ($10 salad, anyone? With avocado? $14! And that's lunch.) So this summer, after several threatening phone calls from my credit card company, I decided to budget and scrimp and save and cook more. So, I've been cooking more. Ahem.

This Thanksgiving, when my parents and grandmother decided to come to Brooklyn, I stressed, but was excited. It would be a new tradition, a new adventure, an opportunity to either (A) entertain my family by tending to their every gastronomic need and desire, or (B) burn down the kitchen. Either way, I figured it'd be memorable.

OK, I'm off to buy a bundt pan.

The Axis of Cleanliness

2005-11-23T14:00:00.000-05:00

Well, it's almost here.

It is my debut as a totally-grown-up-Martha-Stewartesque- domestic-goddess-Thanksgiving-dinner-host. The kitchen has been scrubbed, the vegetables purchased and stored in appropriate locations (potatoes: cool, dark cabinet; carrots: crisper), the clutter of everyday life has been craftily hidden in closets, drawers, and under furniture. The unopened bills are in the hall closet under a pile of scarves.

The best way to get me to clean is to invite people over. The longer they stay and the cleaner their home is, the more I clean. It's actually pretty scientific. For example, if I were to invite a bunch of friends over for, say, an "August 20 Party For No Reason" where the primary host-like activities would involve cleaning up spilled drinks, emptying ashtrays, and dancing in the kitchen, the cleaning would be light--perhaps pick up a bit, wipe down the counters, and break out a Toilet Duck. A hostess for this type of affair should instead focus on deciding how much beer to buy and locating the flashing disco ice cubes. On the other end of the spectrum, you have, say, your parents and grandmother staying at your place for two nights over Thanksgiving. A whole other ballgame--the opposite plot on the Axis of Cleanliness.

As we all know, Thanksgiving is the Holy Grail of hosting. The Olympiad of domestic talent. Although I've been cooking a bit more lately (!), I am nowhere near my mother and grandmother's level of organization and raw talent in the kitchen. So, the least I can do is scrub the shit out of my house, break out the fancy butter dish, buy a bunch of wine, and pray for the best.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Pop Culture Haiku #1

2005-11-21T11:32:00.000-05:00

My name is Jewel.
I used to live in a van.
Now all must suffer.

Eh?

2005-11-18T12:08:00.000-05:00

How can a 9 AM corporate quarterly meeting with no food be made worse than it already inherently is? Two words: overenthusiastic clapping.

Now I understand, as a corporate drone, that I must do my part to politely support whatever results, announcements, and other managerial hijinks (e.g., wacky PowerPoint presentations, digital videos of beaming employees, the playing of Outkast's Hey Ya!) are presented. So yesterday, when our bar graph towered over that of the competition's, and even when the new org chart was revealed, I contributed to the requisite applause with a clap that could be categorized as somewhere between the one used after a drained 3-foot putt on the 8th hole and the one used for my ex-boss's sister's band's performance at 7 PM on a Sunday night. A clap that can be summed up in one word: obligatory. Let's say a 2.5 on a scale of 1 to 10.

As I started drawing my hands back and forth, I expected a certain amount of noise (300 people, auditorium), but nothing could have prepared me for the woman next to me's clap. Besides being ear-splitting, it was wholly inappropriate. I'm talking a clap usually employed to try to get Pavorotti to come back for a third encore at the Met. I'm talking an 11.

Her hands seemed to hate each other. They smashed together with the determination of a caged bull raging against its pen, each crash of hands louder and more furious than the last. After the initial shock to my left eardrum, I looked over at her surprisingly small and delicate hands (white and veiny, held out and up, framed by the cuffs of a billowy polka-dotted blouse), trying to discover the secret to THE. LOUDEST. CLAPPING. EVER.

All I could make out was that her hands were slightly cupped (which improves decibel output--a fact even an amateur clapper would know). But I believe that it wasn't this cupping technique alone that created the jackhammering beside me. It was much more than that. I believe that this woman was experiencing rapture. I believe she so genuinely wanted to share her visceral responses to the corporate announcements (throughout the 2 hours, she emitted reactionary gasps, twitters of laughter, sympathetic ohs), that, when faced with the fact that she was one of many people in an auditorium, she chose the only way she knew she'd be heard in a blur of 600 hands: by clapping as loud as humanly possible.

I can categorically say, that nothing ever presented at a corporate quarterly meeting will illicit my overenthusiastic clap. I'm saving that for Stevie Wonder's third encore. That is, if I can still hear.

Midtown West

2005-11-16T16:26:00.000-05:00

So this drunk with a hook for a right hand told me a story this afternoon. It stopped me in my tracks. Really.

B and I were downstairs, me smoking, him playing on the scaffolding, when this guy (ruddy, wiry, tattooed) came up to me asking, I thought, for a cigarette. Instead, he told me that he had smoked for 29 years and had quit. Good for him, etc. (Coincidentally, I had been at a company-sponsored Health Fair earlier and was asked if I knew anyone who needed to quit smoking. Nope! I was just there for the free magnets.) Really, good for him.

Then he asked me for 50 cents, and after I politely (weird, I know) said that I couldn't spare it, I was sorry, etc., he said "Don't be sorry...once I was in Penn Station sitting across from this girl. She was writing a letter or something, I don't know, and I asked her 'Hey, why don't you write me something? Write down what you really think of me and then give it to me.' So she did. And you know what it said? You ain't nothing but a drunk and a piece of shit. You're a perfect example of a drunk.'" And B and I stared. And I said, "Well, they're just words..."

Agog. Would you ever ask a stranger to write what they thought of you and give it to you? If asked, what would you write?

Dangerous territory, breached only by drunks and masochists. But once you lose a hand in a rusty machine, tendons stretching then snapping apart and back, or sliced cleanly perhaps, like a log of pastrami, maybe hearing the truth doesn't hurt so much.

Invoking a Subroutine

2005-11-15T15:05:00.000-05:00

It was a working lunch for me and the boys today, Massey with his beautifully printed orchestral score (amazing), marking away with a red pen, and B with his nerdy computer book, dog-eared and nearly incomprehensible to non-computer nerds. Although I have to admit, the table of contents sounded quite soothing when read aloud by B in his radio voice (the until control structure...the memory parentheses...). The book has a llama on the front.

It was the Personal Improvement Lunch Hour (PILH?), I guess, which is something new to me--most (read: all) of our other lunches have involved traipsing around Times Square trying to decide what to eat, scoping out a table in Bryant Park, unwrapping sandwiches, and talking shit for an hour. We also kick at pigeons (too close!) and stare at people. But today was different.

I must say, I like the idea of PILH quite a bit, but today of all days was not a good one for me to be (or even appear) disciplined. I'm not even sure what my personal improvement would have been, but that's beside the point. Last night, my sleep was interrupted by a nightmare (an injured dog, a crisis, a rescue, a green field), which then caused me to lie awake for 90 minutes, from 4 to 6:30 AM. Grrrrrrrrr. I think I watched an episode of Antiques Roadshow, a bit of Taxi, I swear I saw a little Oscar and Felix action, and I remember finally drifting off to the theme song from M*A*S*H 30 minutes before my alarm was to go off. So, today, I'm tired, headachey, unfocused, and cranky. And it has nothing to do with the two martinis I drank after work last night.

Morals:
1. Orchestral scores are beautiful.
2. Computer books are weird.
3. Always know what your personal improvement project is.
4. Don't drink two martinis on a Monday.

The Da of Pan

2005-11-14T15:55:00.000-05:00

Obsession, thy name is Su Lin.

Su Lin. Translation from the Chinese: "a little bit of something very cute." It just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? I think so. (Although the name does--every time--remind me of Sue Ellen from Dallas, who, as we all know, is quite the opposite of "a little bit of something very cute." More like "a lot of something very drunk and full of shoulderpads." Anyway.)

For the last few weeks, a few friends and I have been combating boredom at work by watching a sleeping panda cub via the San Diego Zoo's Panda Cam (see link at right). The recently named, 104-day old Su Lin sometimes crawls around the birthing den, or plays with Mom, or eats--but she mostly sleeps. It's weirdly mesmerizing to watch her curled in a ball, one paw twitching in reverie as she reaches for dream bamboo shoots. I once got an email from my sister imploring me to "Look at the baby immediately! It's an upclose shot of her sleeping in a ball!" I love the internet almost as much as I love my sister.

For whatever reason, the floppy and deep sleep of the young and innocent is pretty damn compelling. Sometimes I think it's a kind of sleep I'll never have again. Although right now, in this overheated office, after a starch-heavy lunch of butternut squash risotto with pancetta, it seems somehow within my grasp. Night.

Pen Island

2005-11-11T16:28:00.000-05:00

East Village, Hi-Fi, Thursday, 10pm: Girls with cool hair, wrecked and too blonde. I want it. A shaggy dude in coveralls air guitaring to Van Halen's "Unchained" while waiting for his turn at 2-player Ms. Pacman. A busboy of small stature (ok fine, a midget), wearing the same color as the walls, stealthily removing empty pint glasses from the copper countertops. A blingy doorman checking IDs, asking if I've been on "what's that new show...with Tyra Banks?" Smile. One of those good-hair girls resting her chin on the shoulder of her boy's (ironic) tweed jacket. Hate them.

Then, the red pleather booth, long enough to house me, P, J and all our stuff. Nice. Last night was the first day this year that everyone has to drag their piles of coats and bags, hats, etc., into the bar. These (usually puffy) items are unceremoniously stuffed between barstools, smooshed into backpacks, thrown over speakers or barstools to be semi-forgotten and spilled upon as the night (drink, dance) wears on. Then, late, scrounging on the trashed floor, feeling your way to that mini umbrella or favorite hoodie, only to grab someone's sheepswool-lined denim jacket that (sweet!) happens to be your size. I don't condone theft, just karma. Everyone's drunk anyhow.

Last night wasn't a drunk night, but it was a drink night. There's a difference. Drunk nights can be intentional or accidental, but they're always expensive and exhausting and they're never as fun as you'd imagined they'd be. Drink nights are, well, excellent. I'll get into them more later. But don't get me wrong, I love 'em both.

Cool and Breezy

2005-11-10T09:58:00.000-05:00

What does it mean when Neil Young's "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" comes on my iPod (it's on shuffle) every morning as I ascend the subway steps at 40th Street to go to work? I'm sure you can venture a guess.

Also regarding the shocking entry into my office building every morning: Massey and I were saying that the turnstiles in the lobby of our building should greet us with a "Good Morning" in a soothing, vaguely sensual voice as we swipe our IDs, instead of greeting us with the usual mechanized whirrs and whizzes and frequent high-pitched BZZZZZZZZing for those of us who dare to step into a turnstile's realm too soon after the drone in front of us. The voice could also say stuff like, "You look handsome today," or "Excellent choice of footwear." Just an idea.

first post alert

2005-11-09T11:55:00.000-05:00

watch out, kids, I mean, Massey--here we go.