Now, let’s all hurry up and lose our damn minds!!!
November 22, 2009
MS 11/21/09: Williamsburg Bridge
Ran over the Williamsburg Bridge and back today. Saw seven (7) ironic mustaches, two (2) non-ironic pairs of legwarmers and one (1) Scottie dog.
November 13, 2009
MS 11/12/09: Annoyances
One of the many annoyances of living in NYC is that a production shoot will frequently interrupt your daily routine. Today was a freezing cold, windy and rainy day, but for some reason, everybody was shooting in Greenpoint. Some project had trailers parked all up and down Driggs Ave., but I didn’t see anyone out in the weather, other than a few workers taping down wires. Then, there was a commercial shooting at the track. A little tent had been erected next to the track, and about ten people and all their equipment huddled under it. A guy dressed like a referee stood out on the track opposite four muscular dudes in summer running gear, who posed squatted down as if about to race. They must have been freezing. An aide with a showy sense of urgency stopped me and requested I run around behind the tent, so as not to mess up their shot, so I had to squelch through the mud, dodging trees and benches, every time I did a lap.
Exiting the food court adjacent to the Lex & 53rd subway station, an Indian guy in some sort of food industry uniform chased two Hispanic guys who both wore a different restaurant’s uniform. ‘Mexico, Mexico, everybody from Mexico!’ the Indian guy was saying, while the two other guys rolled their eyes at each other, and clearly tried to out-walk him. ‘I love tacos! But I am just not [unintelligible]. Seriously, Mexico is a beautiful country, a gorgeous country.’
On Park Avenue, a car failed to go promptly at a green light, causing several cars to lay on their horns for a good long while, which in turn interrupted the phone conversation of a thin blond woman whose tweed pencil skirt met her black leather boots in a perfect horizontal line across her kneecaps. ‘It’s just so loud here,’ she screamed into the phone. ‘It is just too loud, I mean. This whole city, I don’t – this city is so…loud, and I really, I feel sorry for people who have to…’
November 10, 2009
MS 11/9/09: Wall Street
I had to go all the way down to the Financial District today, which hasn’t happened since…ever. Now that I think about it, it was the first time I’d been down in that particular area, and I was sad I didn’t have time to linger. I saw the Stock Exchange, with a massive security cordon out front and tons of tourists snapping shots, and Trinity Church, and Federal Hall, with the big bronze statue of George Washington out front. He had a little cardboard sign in his hand, which read ‘Free Bonuses!’ Several of the streets (which are narrow and cobbled, in an oddly quaint way) were shut down as pedestrian walkways, which was nice. The tourists were all in tight clumps, so they were easy to circumnavigate. I didn’t pass the Wall Street bull statue, but I did see a vendor selling mini Wall Street bulls decorated in different patterns for “only” $10, which I thought was stupidly high. Although I only walked around down there for about ten minutes total, during that time, not one, but two older men came up to me, despite my headphones and lack of eye contact, to ask hopefully if I might need some directions, miss. (New Yorkers really love to give directions, particularly to young women.) And there was a man wearing a sandwich board, which said something about corporate greed and American capitalist repression, but what I really noticed was the young man interviewing the sandwich-board wearer and taking notes on a little pad. Undoubtedly sourcing local color in hopes of selling a freelance article somewhere. Everything down there looked as overall gray as Dorothy’s Kansas, but that might have just been the weather, or possibly my psychological response to anywhere money is actually made.
October 10, 2009
I’ve Been Reading: Netherland
Shortly after 9/11, Hans van den Broek’s wife leaves him alone in New York City – in the Chelsea Hotel, no less – and returns to England with their young son. For the next two years, Hans commutes to London every other weekend, and spends the rest of his time aimlessly distracting himself in post-disaster New York. He becomes involved with a cricket league composed of various immigrants and enjoys thinking back to his youthful days of playing cricket in The Hague, where he was born. One player is Chuck Ramkissoon, a charismatic and eccentric Trinidadian mover-and-shaker, who has his fingers in all sorts of pies. Hans finds himself more and more involved with Chuck, drawn into his mysterious world.
Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland is largely about cricket, which is something I can’t get a mental picture of at all. Hans himself admits that:
The uninitiated onlooker at a cricket game is . . . puzzled by the alternation of two batsmen and two bowlers and two sets of stumps. . . . It can take a while before the puzzle is sufficiently solved, particularly for the American viewer. I can’t count the number of times I, in New York, fruitlessly tried to explain to a baffled passerby the basics of the game taking place in front of him, a failure of explanation and comprehension that soon irritated me and led me to give up.
As elusive as the cricket descriptions, however, the various illustrations of New York City neighborhoods, landmarks and institutions are lovely, from the Herald’s Square DMV to the Greenwood Cemetery. O’Neill has a knack for setting, and his brief descriptions cut right to the essence of a place. And in Netherland, O’Neill is expansive on the subject of New York. Critics have compared this book to Gatsby, and indeed the mapping is unavoidable: Chuck Ramkissoon is found floating in the Gowanus Canal at the beginning of the novel, and the comparisons only start there. The book spends time on the American dream, the idea that any hard-working dreamer can go rags-to-riches, and Chuck is the ultimate schemer. When Rachel asks Hans about Chuck’s politics, Hans realizes he has no idea:
The decisive item, if I’m going to be honest about this, was that Chuck was making a go of things. The sushi, the mistress, the marriage, the real estate dealings, and, almost inconceivably, Bald Eagle Field: it was all happening in front of my eyes. While the country floundered in Iraq, Chuck was running. That was political enough for me, a man having trouble putting one foot in front of the other.
And yet, for all its Gatsbyish notes, Netherland is not really about America, precisely because it is such a love song to New York City, and any American who spends upwards of a minute in NYC knows that it’s not remotely representative of the 50 states proper (not that any one location really is). But then, in another sense, the quintessential American dream is realistically centered in NYC, because so many immigrants arrive here, join communities of immigrants from their own countries, and live and work here for generations. I’ve met people who’ve lived here for years and have never been anywhere else in the country. This city is more of an international crossroads than a fixed location; it is the most international place I have ever been, which is one big reason why I love it.* In this respect (the gathering of the teeming masses), New York is the ultimate representation of an American ideal – albeit America as it never really was, and most emphatically is not now. But somewhere back there, in between the Puritans and the ’50s, there was a time when New York was thought to be representative of the country itself. Later, after relocating to London, Hans observes:
Although it’s not a secret that I lived for some time in [New York], I’m not accorded any unusual atuhority. This isn’t because I’ve been back for awhile but, rather, because I’m precluded by nationality from commenting on any place other than Holland – one of those parochialisms, I am pissed off to rediscover, that remind me that as a foreign person I’m essentially of some mildly buffoonish interest to the English and deprived, certainly, of the nativity New York encourages even its most fleeting visitor to imagine for himself. And it’s true: my secret, almost shameful feeling is that I am out of New York – that New York interposed itself, once nad for all, between me and all other places of origin.
But commenting on the American dream is not the main thrust of Netherland – this is primarily a book about Hans, and Hans is intrigued by Chuck, but in a removed, and not overly involved way. Whereas Carraway’s raison d’etre as narrator was to observe and describe Gatsby, Hans’s relationship with Chuck is a take-it-or-leave-it sort of friendship, as is everything in Hans’s life at that time. In fact, the motivations of all of the characters in Netherland are fuzzy at best. We don’t really know why Rachel leaves Hans – mostly because Hans, a rather unreliable narrator, will not admit to having any idea himself. We don’t really know why Hans stays obediently behind in New York for as long as he does (again, he doesn’t spend much mental time on it himself), or why everyone in the novel seems to suffer from a confusing and painful ennui (“I wasn’t especially troubled by the hours spent flat on my face,” says Hans, of his habit of lying for hours with his head under the armchair in his hotel room). Perhaps it has something to do with 9/11 itself, which, while mercifully not focused on in much outrageous detail, bookends the story of these people, looms slightly behind them without their ever looking straight at it, just as the actual event framed New York itself and everything that happened here for some time. Hans: “We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington, and, for that matter, Moscow.” But Hans’s mourning has far less to do with 9/11, and more with the fracturing of his family, and his lack of ability to shake off his own inertia:
The difficulty was not merely that I couldn’t think of an alternative to the program of traveling to London once or twice a month. No, my difficulty was that I could not disarrange the boundless, freezing dismay that undermined every personal motion I attempted. It was as if, in my inability to produce a movement in my life, I had fallen victim to the paralysis that confounds actors in dreams as they vainly try to run or talk or make love.
Perhaps Netherland is more about the time it takes to shake off a tragedy – something unreasonable and inexplicable happens, and people totter away from its epicenter, where, stunned and confused, they distractedly go on with their lives.
At any rate, I didn’t care. Nobody could call this a bad book – it won the PEN/Faulkner, after all – and I paged through it readily enough, but it left no deep impression on me, and I wouldn’t ever urge it on someone.
__
*Oh, yes, by the by – I love NY now, for those of you I haven’t spoken to in awhile. I had my reservations for the first couple years, but now I’m like a googly-eyed newlywed, and am currently entirely convinced this is the only place to be (in the US, anyway).
July 26, 2009
Two Weekends Ago
Two weekends ago, my friend and I were on our way into the city, when we saw lights in the distance from Bedfort Avenue (where we’d been eating Thai food). We walked down to the lights, and found a fairly large fair! I’d stumbled on this fair the year before, as well, but hadn’t known what it was. Apparently, it is the Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel and San Paolino, a 12-day festival that happens every July. That would explain all the Italians.
Entering the fair...
Crowds at the fair.
A pretty big fair, too - it spread off in all directions.
There was everything you look for in a fair…rides:
This ride spins everyone around very quickly.
…guys grilling meat…
Meat!
…women frying zeppole…
This lady was upset at me for taking her photo.
…patriotic frozen drinks…
Red, white and blotto!
…souvenirs…
Not sure what any of these are.
…tasteful novelty Ts for i bambini….
Pity the poor child.
…games, where you can win a half-dead goldfish in a Ziplock baggie…
Chuck's Live Fish
…firefighters, lest things get out of hand…
In addition to these firefighters, there were many groups of funny cops standing around, but they told me that if I took their picture, they would confiscate my camera.
…and garbage, without great piles of which no street fair in July in NYC would be complete…
Smells better than the zeppole!
…and finally, bizarre religious iconography!!
Giant, garish, totem-pole-like thing.
Man in a boat. (Don't be immature.)
Now, according to this video that my roommate found on Gothamist, these two religious icons are stars in a ceremony, in which they are lifted by gangs of fellows and danced toward each other, to the tunes of the Rocky soundtrack. Please watch the video – it is something else. Unfortunately, we did not witness this spectacle.
After exploring the street fair, we went out a-drinking in the East Village, after which we thought it would be good to get Pommes Frites. Apparently, everyone else thought so, too.
Mmmm...Belgian fries up ahead.
We couldn’t find a handy stoop to eat them on, but luckily the nearby Max Brenner’s was closed, and someone had left some of the tables out! We spread out our fare and felt very clever.
Sidewalk dining at 3:00a.m.! No wait.
The next night, I went to see Jigsaw Soul, a local band that always provides a giant, multi-media performance experience.
Jigsaw Soul
The audience.
The Jigsaw Soul dancers.
Shadow visuals.
Choreographed keg cup stacking.
One of several giant papier-mache bird heads.
More visuals.
After the show, we were famished. Time for shawarma and falafel!
Mmmm, gyro-loaf!
After that, it began pouring, so we went over to Washington Square Park to watch the band and friends play dodgeball in the fountain.
Rainy Washington Square Park.
Hipster swimming pool.
It's all fun and games till someone loses a contact.
The next day, I was pretty tired. I went for a long, lazy Sunday walk, over the nearly deserted Williamsburg bridge.
Bike and pedestrian lane.
After that, I ate a massive cup of ice cream, but I did not choose to document that with photographic evidence. A pretty good weekend, overall.
July 20, 2009
I’ve Been Reading: Area Code 212
Tama Janowitz, if you haven’t heard of her, is a novelist who, as far as I can surmise, accidentally achieved it-girl status for awhile back in the 80s, because she happened to make friends with Andy Warhol and the two of them, plus another woman, had weekly ‘blind date’ dinners where each of them had to bring a likely date for the others (none of these dates ever worked out). After Warhol’s death, Janowitz faded from view, and it seems that whenever she opens her mouth nowadays, she pisses everyone off. She’s kind of Sarah Silverman-ish with the un-P.C. comments, although I don’t think Janowitz does it to provoke; it just doesn’t occur to her that anyone would bother to be offended.
I recently read a fat book of short, humorous essays by Janowitz, Area Code 212. The essays focus mainly on life in New York as a semi-famous but not particularly fashionable person, tiny dogs, ferrets, Janowitz’s adopted Chinese daughter, Prospect Park, Andy Warhol, unmanageable hair, and food. I thought most of them were great fun, although I think the entire book could be condensed into five long developed essays – a lot of these are repetitious and many of them blurbs that don’t seem to be at all thought out. I’m pretty sure Janowitz would be a lot of fun to hang out with – though she was in the in-crowd at a hot time in NYC history, she mainly just exclaims about all the free fancy food she got to eat.
Area Code 212 is aptly named; Janowitz seems to be one of those people who came straight to NYC as soon as possible, and then never left it. The above list of topics could also serve as her bio. Still, if you have to narrow your entire scope to a single topic, New York – sprawling, ever-evolving – is a good one. New York is also one of those places that was always way more fun right before you got there. I am forever jealous of the many phases of its past, and wishing I had arrived in any earlier decade. Although, no matter when I came to NYC, I’d likely shy as far away from the scene as I do now, so it would probably make no difference.
November 11, 2008
Public Displays Of Private Affairs
Listen up, New Yorkers who live in high-rise apartment buildings: just because you cannot see into the windows of surrounding buildings does not mean that you are not lit up like Christmas to people across the way. If you do exercise videos in the buff toward the back of your apartment…oh, man, can I still see you. Without even trying. In fact, it’s very hard not to see you. And I’m sure other people can see you, too, and are probably not as polite about looking away as I am.
Seriously, last night, as I was looking at this woman (and trying to stop looking at her), a naked old man totally ran back and forth in the apartment under hers. I am not even joking, I swear. What is with these people? Being filthy rich and having an enormous apartment in Soho must make you want to turn on all the lights and pace nakedly back and forth before the windows. How can they not realize they’re visible? I’m never leaving any curtains open ever again.
My last year in Chicago, I lived in a fourth-floor studio with big windows facing out over a parking lot, which was ringed by distant apartment buildings. I couldn’t directly see any other people in their apartments, and so I breezily concluded that no one could see me, and lived for a year without curtains. I now wonder how many of my activities ended up photographed and posted on the internet.
I have become more conscious of curtains lately, as there is currently a giant gang of men working construction in my backyard, and continually bringing buckets of rubble up from under the house, right in front of my street-level windows. From what I can tell, the crew consists of a pair of Hispanic men, exactly the same height, one with facial hair and one without, who both wear hoodies and are involved in a continual fireman’s ladder of excavating rubble buckets from whatever is going on in the backyard, and one gangly, furious-looking Polish man who stands around smoking and glaring at the other two. Plus, my landlord, who shows up from time to time to conduct an endless lecture in deafening, emphatic Polish. I’m frankly at a loss to imagine what he could find to discuss at such length. I’ve never talked so much at a stretch in my life, and he ,shows up to orate at least twice a day. So, that’s the entire cast of characters as I’ve spotted them, but it sounds like there must be at least fifteen additional people working back there. I can’t tell for sure, because shortly after all this work began, the back door into our garden apartment (and our main source of natural light) was nailed shut from the outside and then covered over in thick black plastic, momentarily confusing me one morning into thinking I’d slept straight through the day. So whatever’s going on back there is a mystery to me.
Every time I enter or exit my apartment, the workers stop whatever they are doing (emerging with a bucket from just under my bedroom, or standing atop the enormous economy-size dumpster that’s been permanently installed in the street outside my window) and stare at me until I’ve passed. It’s really uncomfortable, and my initial impulse was to ignore them steadily, but that was uncomfortable as well, because I was forced to do so multiple times a day. And I felt like a bitch, since they are working on my apartment. So, at one point, as I passed one of the twins (the one with the facial hair), I said hello.
‘Heeeyyy, babyyy,’ he replied. Fine. Bitchface and steady refusal of eye contact it is, then.
Given this environment, I’m newly interested in the opacity of my curtains. When I lived in the back of the apartment, I had no curtains at all for the better part of a year. Then, summer came, and there were boys in the next yard. I bought a $.99 shower curtain, and then realized it was transparent, so I bought another one, and between the two of them, I felt fairly private. Then, I moved to the front of the apartment, with windows right on the busy sidewalk. I bought some nice curtains this time, and spent a good bit of time with a friend, taking turns with one of us standing on the sidewalk and the other positioning herself directly in front and behind my various lamps, dancing around and removing clothing, and I came away from these experiments fairly confident that my activities weren’t particularly observable from the street.
The other windows in the apartment, however, were not crash-tested. Until the back door was papered over, the guys in the back yard used to watch us as we made coffee in the mornings, as if we were some sort of mildly interesting zoo animals. I don’t miss the company, although I’m sorry for the loss of light. Additionally, there’s a little window in our shower that gives onto the backyard, but it’s frosted and marbled. Still, it’s a little disconcerting to bathe with several men carrying on a conversation just on the other side of the glass. And one of my roommates hung a scrim of washrags over the frosted glass, which immediately made me paranoid that perhaps the window was transparent after all, and I’d given everyone a show with that first morning’s shower.
During the day, I work in a cubicle with giant windows, and the immediate view is of the skyscraper opposite. It is close enough for me to see everyone across working, and even to tell if there is text or pictures on their computer screens. I sit with my back to the windows, though, and occasionally I forget that I don’t really have any privacy, especially after dark. I have yet to catch the eye of someone in the building opposite, but I’m conscious of them there behind me, and I’ll often wonder if I’m being watched and turn around to see.
This afternoon, for example, I realized I had a little boogie, and dealt with it in the usual way. But then, I wheeled around guiltily to see if anyone in the building opposite had witnessed this. And directly opposite was a man standing right up in the window, wearing a yarmulke and bowing repeatedly over his little book (the Torah? I don’t know from Judaism). To either side of him, his coworkers worked on, unawares. Now, that’s not particularly embarrassing, but…it’s private, yeah? Later, I turned around again, and he was plastered against the window, staring at me, or someone or something in my building. What do you do if you make eye contact with someone in an opposite building? Do you wave? Or does that puncture the polite fiction that, as we all go on about our private businesses in bright and framing windows, we are unseen?
November 5, 2008
What Was All That, Then?
Was there some sort of unofficial holiday last night, or something? NYC was freaking insane – there were fireworks, and people screaming and dancing in the streets, and all sorts of hoopla.
Help me out here – I can’t find anything about it on the internets.
November 1, 2008
I Have Not Died (Yet)
Sorry for the lack of posts, but I’ve been distracted by my show, followed closely by a sinus cold, followed closely by a 30-day Notice to Vacate from my landlord, followed by an (ongoing) apartment search, and all the while working on my latest screenplay (entitled Dr. Prozac, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love NYC).
I’ll get back to updating soon. Meanwhile, Happy Halloween, and remember to vote!!
October 10, 2008
In Which I Attempt a Date
Well, dear readers, it was bound to happen eventually: I actually went on a date last week. And you’ll be happy to hear that it was on every level an absolutely insane and embarrassing failure…not because you’re rooting for my continued loneliness (though you may be, I don’t know), but because it makes for a really entertaining story.
I met this fellow (let’s call him “Patrick”) while waiting for the G-train late one night. I was too tired to read anything and didn’t have my headphones with me. He made eye contact and I cut him dead with a glare, as is my habit. But he came over and started talking to me anyway, and well, he was really, really good-looking. So I gave him my card.
After the usual three-to-four day waiting period, Patrick called, and we agreed to meet up in the Village for dinner. He explained that he had to pick something up at 7:15p.m. around Washington Square Park?
I said that was fine, and then he said (and I thought this was really odd at the time), ‘Hey, wear pants, alright? Not, like, a skirt or anything.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Are we going bowling or something?’
‘Uh, did you want to?’ he asked. ‘I mean, I thought we’d just grab a bite and maybe-’
‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘No, I just thought, because you said to wear pants that-’
‘That we were going bowling! That’s hilarious – do you always bowl when you wear pants?’ he laughed (a lot). ‘You’re so funny!’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Why did you-’
‘So, I’ll see you then, then, in your bowling pants!’ he said, and rung off.
So, okay, whatever. People are strange.
Anyway, the big date night arrived, and I went down to the park (wearing my usual jeans), and soon Patrick arrived. He was still really good-looking. And he was carrying a small cage with a guinea pig in it.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘What’s with the guinea pig?’
‘Well, this is what I had to pick up,’ he explained. ‘I did some work for this friend of mine, I, uh, I built this really piece of furniture for him, you know, and so then – get this – I get done, and he’s like, oh, I don’t have any money to pay you. But he just got this guinea pig? And I don’t know, I was just like, well, I’ll take the guinea pig. Because I’ve been wanting a pet, but I don’t have a lot of space. I’ll have to get a bigger cage for him, though. I sort of wonder…do you think they kill mice?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He’s cute. What are you going to name him?’
‘I’m thinking Palin,’ he said.
‘Topical,’ I said. I then told Patrick about how I knew this guy in Tennessee who raised guinea pigs and had cage after cage of them in his garage, and took them to guinea pig shows and so forth. And that there’s a guinea pig transport system, where if you live in South Carolina and you buy a purebred guinea pig from Seattle, there are people signed up in every state that will drive the guinea pig along to you, like a sort of pony express for guinea pigs.
‘I don’t believe you,’ said Patrick.
‘It’s true,’ I said.
‘I think you’re making up stories, and honestly, if you are, you should just stop it, because I’m about just being real.’
This was sort of funny, because I really do make up stories sometimes when I’m talking to strangers I don’t think I’ll see again (say, at a party…although sometimes I do end up seeing them again, often, and then it’s awkward because the lie has to be kept up forever), but this was actually true – I do know a bit about guinea pigs. I sort of apologized and changed the subject, and then we went back and forth on where to eat, and Patrick suggested Red Bamboo, which is this vegetarian place that I’d been to before and was agreeable to. When we got there, we had some issues with the guinea pig at the door. The hostess wasn’t sure we could bring Palin in, since Palin is basically a rodent, but after Patrick promised to keep the cage discreetly under his chair with his jacket over it, she said it was probably fine.
‘So,’ I said, as we looked at the menus. ‘Are you a vegetarian?’
‘No,’ said Patrick. ‘But I tend to…what I do is, I’ll like pick a color? And then for a week, I have to only eat things that are that color. So, this week, I’m only eating black things. So, I’m thinking I’ll get this black bean ginger stir-fry, but I have to check and make sure it really looks mostly black.’
Now, a lot of you may be thinking, ‘Freak!’ But I actually have really weird eating habits myself (Clif bars, anyone?), so I’m sort of understanding about this type of compulsive behavior. And additionally, I had once flipped through this book at Barnes & Noble about challenging your brain every day a little bit to keep sharp and stave off Alzheimer’s, and it basically said that you had to always be looking for ways to break your routine in non-routine ways so your brain doesn’t just go into habitual autopilot, and one of the specific suggestions it gave for doing this was to make a new eating rule every week, like maybe just pick a certain color and only eat things that were that color for a week. So, I figured Patrick had read this book.
‘Did you get that idea from a book about keeping your brain entertained?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘Um, eating all things of one color,’ I said. ‘Did you read to do that in a book about how to keep surprising your brain, so that-’
‘-It’s got nothing to do with my brain,’ said Patrick. ‘It’s about my body. I figure you should only ask your body to break down a certain kind of compound at one time, you know?’
This was a really bad sign, as I have no patience whatsoever when people start spouting this kind of bullshit, so I quickly changed the subject, and the conversation was more or less okay until the server came to take our order.
‘Is the black bean stir fry black?’ asked Patrick.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘It’s black beans, yes.’
‘But is it black-colored? Like, if I looked at the plate, does everything look black?’
‘Um,’ she said. ‘It’s in a black-bean glaze, but it’s all vegetables, but it’s…’
‘Is it mostly dark?’
‘I guess.’
He sighed heavily. ‘But is it- you know what, forget it, I’ll just get a double order of the black rice, and black beans, and a chocolate milkshake.’
Seriously.
So, fine, you know what? I got a gigantic dessert for my meal. Because I am always wanting to get dessert for dinner, but I always figure people will give me shit about it. But at this point, Patrick sure couldn’t say anything about it, so I got a slice of peanut butter tandy heaven cake with a scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream.
‘That’s disgusting,’ said Patrick.
‘I’m only eating desserts this week,’ I replied, and stared him down.
At this point, I’ll admit, I was actually kind of thinking Patrick and I might be perfect for each other. I began to think it might be quite freeing to be with someone so much more eccentric than I am that I could just give total free reign to my own eccentricities. I imagined how being weird in a pair in public would be far more comfortable than being weird alone, and you know, actually, I could probably kick it up a notch and be even weirder if I had a partner who could act as a buffer. It might be really fun. And the conversation was going along just fine, the food came, all was well. And then…
We got to talking about our favorite authors, and I mentioned how upset I had been that David Foster Wallace just died.
‘Oh, me too!’ agreed Patrick.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘In fact, I have to say, I kind of cried when I read that-’
‘Me too!‘ screamed Patrick, and he burst into tears. I shit you not. Right there at the table, out of nowhere – and we’re talking giant, chest-heaving, gape-mouthed, wrenching sobs. I mean, he was screaming. Everybody in the entire restaurant went dead silent and turned and stared at us. I was mortified. I didn’t know what to do. It seemed like that moment went on and on for hours, for days. Patrick just bawled his head off – he didn’t even put his hands over his face, he just stared straight ahead with his mouth wide open and howled – and everybody stared at us, and I was so humiliated I wanted to drop through the floor…and then I started to laugh. I kept picturing the scene from the outside, as if it were in a story, the way it looks now as I’m blogging it, and it was just so damn hilarious that I went into a sort of hysterical, giggling anxiety fit and couldn’t stop. Patrick sobbed, and I brayed with laughter, and we sat there over our insane dinners with the guinea pig scrabbling around under Patrick’s chair, and I feared we’d be frozen there in that demented tableau for all eternity.
What eventually happened was the manger came over to ask if we were okay, and we both said that we were fine, and he suggested that we might be happier the hell out of his restaurant, so we paid (well, I paid – Patrick apparently had forgotten to go by an ATM), and got out of there as quickly as possible.
‘Do you want to come with me to shop for guinea pig stuff?’ asked Patrick, who had more or less gotten himself together, but had not apologized for his mad behavior.
‘I should probably head home,’ I said. ‘I have to be up early tomorrow.’
And then, even though I knew I should leave it alone, I just had to ask: ‘Patrick,’ I said. ‘Why did you tell me to wear pants?’
‘What?’ he said.
‘On the phone, you said I should wear pants. Why?’
‘Look,’ he said, looking pissed off. ‘I move slowly, okay? I’m a slow-moving guy. And I’m honest about myself. And I don’t make any apologies. So, just, you know, I take my time! And I won’t apologize for that.’
I didn’t want to press him further. I went home, and I haven’t heard from him since, about which I’m extremely relieved.
I rarely take a chance on going out with a complete stranger, and sure enough, every time I actually throw caution to the wind, the guy invariably turns out to be a complete psychopath. My intuition is either hopelessly broken or missing entirely, so perhaps I’m wise to be standoffish.
September 25, 2008
About How Many Words In This Post?
To follow up on my Trader Joe’s story, apparently, there’s an instinctive element to how easily you deal with math:
There is intrinsic interest in what Angier reports: evidence that how good you are at subitization, the instinctive quantity-assessing ability you share with many animal species, is correlated with, and perhaps even determinative of, the extent to which you will readily develop abilities at linguistically formalized manipulation of mathematical concepts.
This makes sense to me – in addition (ha) to being very poor at doing even simple math in my head, I’m also entirely unable to come up with answers to questions like, ‘About how big is the room, like, how many feet?’ or ‘About how many inches thick is the manuscript?’ or ‘About how many people work at your office?’ I just have no freaking clue. There is no corresponding visual in my head. If you were to ask me about how many inches the laptop I’m currently typing on is, I would say that it’s squarish, and about the size of a phone book, but thinner than a phone book.
The Manhattan equivalent of a wardrobe to Narnia is being posted all over the blogs this week: it turns out that 190 Bowery is not, after all, an abandoned building, but rather is a big, fat, jealousy-inducing single-family home. Now, I think that no matter where you live, this apartment looks pretty cool, but to people living here, it’s absolute personal space porn. And these people are certainly the last living people to ever have such quality of life in Manhattan. Between the economy, my very un-earnings-focused life, and my general mental block when it comes to contemplating finances, I very much doubt that I will ever own any sort of home, much less the giant, empty expanse of space I crave.
In addition to an intense longing for unpopulated spaces, NYC has also bred in me the intense desire to have the ability to kick a lot of ass. So I’m glad to hear a 5-foot tall grandmother is currently training the Italian military in hand-to-hand combat.
I also love this: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People I Know.
And finally, for the Bottle Rocket fans out there (incidentally, a DVD of Bottle Rocket was another thing that the Alaskan boy bestowed upon me – I’m not saying he didn’t have good taste), here’s a transcription of Dignan’s entire 75-year plan (via Kottke). Sadly, I have very similar lists, composed in all earnestness.
September 11, 2008
Whither the Single-Serve Portions?
I have mentioned on this blog before that I am a compulsive eater. One easy way I have found to manage my weight is never to buy and bring home more than I plan to eat at any one sitting. While this is a more expensive way to eat, it didn’t used to be that unreasonable. You could generally eat for $5, and there were any number of $.99 snack food items in any drugstore or minimart you happened to pass.
Now, I understand that everything is more expensive now. I don’t like it, but I am beginning to accept it. What I don’t understand, however, is why there don’t seem to be single-serve portions of anything anymore anywhere. I regularly find myself with five minutes to spare before work running into every damn drugstore all up and down the snack aisles, and there are just giant bags of chips, huge cans of nuts, jumbo pouches of trail mix. What is this? I don’t want seven servings of a snack. If I take seven servings of a snack into the office, I will be eating seven servings of a snack.
The only single-serve portions available anywhere now, however, are those 100-calorie pack things, which are just totally worthless. One hundred calories on an empty stomach just prods it enough to make it furious – you’re better off not eating. I operate from a continuous base of low-level hunger, and when that hunger kicks from low- into high-level, I want to have just enough food in my purse to knock it back a little. If I have more than that, I’m going to eat until I’m actually really full, and then I’m going to eat whatever small amount is left after that, because there’s not that much left and I may as well finish it. And then I’m also still going to eat dinner three hours later anyway, even though I’m totally full, because I was so looking forward to dinner that I can’t bear the disappointment of just going straight from the office to whatever I’m working on that evening without my dinner break. And there you have it – the Duane Read has just ruined my whole day just because it’s no longer stocking single-serving bags of nuts.
I have this dream that there would be a wonderful grocery store that caters to people like me. This grocery store would have nothing but inexpensive, single-serving portions of all different kinds of food, and for an added bonus, maybe it could even be healthy food. And a wide variety.
Well, actually, there is such a place. It’s called Trader Joe’s, and there’s only one, and if you want to go there, you have to fight your way through a crowd of thousands and wait online for upwards of 45 minutes. Wouldn’t you think, every other retailer in Manhattan, that, given the immense popularity of TJ’s, there might just be a market there that could stand to be capitalized on???
Single-servings of portable, precooked food items for $5-$6.50 a pop!! And single-serve snacks for under $2!!! Available at a great number of convenient locations throughout the five boroughs!!!!
Somebody cater to my specific need, damn it!
–
Oh, and also, if you don’t already read Fafblog, this Sarah Palin post is a great time to start:
As a Jesus-fearing moose-hunting hockey-mom mother of five who hunts moose for Jesus, Sarah Palin is kin to the wild outdoors and appreciates its bountiful splendor as she is gunning it down from her airplane. Sarah Palin understands that America is dangerously addicted to oil, and that the only cure is more oil. . . . Sarah Palin may not know if global warming is man-made. She may not know if global warming is real. She may not know what global warming is. But if global warming is caused by abortions, Sarah Palin will fight it – by banning abortion, just in case the first couple times didn’t take.
Go, read all of it, and then read the entire rest of Fafblog, because it never fails to kick ass.
September 1, 2008
Truly Inexplicable Behaviors
Most of the time, the way people behave is not particularly mysterious. We might say that it’s mysterious, but what we really mean is that it’s unbelievably inappropriate, self-centered, rude or self-indulgent.
“It’s unbelievable that he would say that to you!” Such a comment means that we can’t believe an adult would not exercise the appropriate self-restraint not to vent his or her emotions in an inappropriate way, but that doesn’t mean that we completely don’t understand the urge to do so, or how the person arrived at their inappropriate level of rage or indignation, or why they would really want to display it.
I’ve been thinking about which particular human behaviors seem to me to be not just inappropriate or childish, but really entirely inexplicable – that is, where I cannot for the life of me project myself into the frame of mind that causes a person to behave or be such a way.
One behavior I really can’t fathom is walking around with a boombox. This blows my mind. I truly can’t imagine what possible combination of thoughts can lead somebody to carry a battery-operated boombox out of their apartment and onto the sidewalk, select some sort of music that they want to play, and turn it on, crank it up, and point it carefully outward at passers-by. Why is this enjoyable to anybody? Maybe headphones get sweaty or hurt your ears…I can kind of see that. But a boombox is so cumbersome. It seems obvious that these people really are doing this at everyone around them – they want everybody else in addition to them to have to listen to this music. But why? Is it that they think some people might come up and start a conversation with them about it – that they might make a friend? Do they think some women might come over and start to dance? That seems unlikely – surely, no one would really think this, and even if they did, presumably they’ve done this before, and I’m sure that it never inspires any sort of relationship with anyone, so after trying and failing to use the boombox as a conversation starter three or four times, you’d imagine they’d give it up…yet we still see this behavior. Maybe these men are hoping that somebody will start a fight with them about it? That seems a little more likely. But it’s such an odd way to cruise for a fight – in the middle of the day, out in the heat, with a cumbersome piece of equipment.
The only thing that I can think is that it’s a small display of power – you know that nobody else has chosen to listen to music right at that moment, or they would have headphones on. So, you are choosing for them that they will listen to music – loud music, your music – right then, whether they want to or not. You are forcing them to participate with you in music-listening, and in that way, you have made a power grab. You own this part of the street now, because everybody on it is forced into an activity with you, and for whatever reason of social passivity and politeness, it’s hugely unlikely that anybody will bother to confront you about this, so you can assume that they are being obedient to your demands. They will listen to your music now, and they will probably not enjoy it, but they will listen to it anyway. I guess that’s sort of a motive that makes sense…for those with swagger and gold chains. But those are not always the people who carry boomboxes around. Sometimes, but not always.
I started thinking this, for example, because the other day as I was getting on the subway, I saw a guy across the street tune his boombox and carefully position it out. He looked around at everyone in a defiant, yet kind of self-conscious way. He wasn’t really selling it. This was the weirdest thing I’d ever seen. Usually, a sort of crazy, militant guy positively charges along with a boombox on his shoulder and the boombox seems a natural outgrowth of his general aggressiveness. But this guy – this guy was making careful decisions. He looked intimidated by his huge decision to carry a boombox around. So, given that, what on Earth in his mind ever inspired him to take on this challenge? What was the thought process?
“Okay, Ron, you have this boombox and you’re going to take a fifteen-minute walk and play it. Just go out there and play it! Nobody’s judging you. You’ll feel better once you’ve done it. It’s now or never.”
Why? Why ever? What ever for? Why would anyone ever want to walk carefully around a neighborhood with a boombox? What incentive could Ron possibly have had?
I can’t imagine.
__
Incidentally, I know that I’ve been curiously silent lately. I realize that there’s a convention going on, that there’s a hurricane, that before that there was another convention, and there have been some Olympics, and an invasion of Georgia, and now it’s Labor Day, and through it all, I’ve not been blogging. You might think I’ve been very busy. Yep. You might think that.
August 27, 2008
Towards a Pedestrian-Only Manhattan
There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the possibility (distant and remote) of making Manhattan a pedestrian-only borough. I agree that this should absolutely happen, and that it makes no sense for people to be driving here (spare me the thing about trucks making deliveries – donkeys work well enough for many pedestrian-only villages atop mountains, and anyway, it’s too expensive to buy things in Manhattan and everyone ought to brown-bag from Brooklyn and Jersey and leave the city itself as one big sort of park, with all last-minute food needs being satisfied by cart vendors; not to mention that if the retail stores couldn’t get their shipments in, tourism would decline by half, and it’s not like anything currently for sale in NYC can’t just be bought on Amazon). And I know a brilliant way to bring this desired goal about immediately, without petitions or government action or any real process at all:
All the people of New York should just start walking in the streets en masse, so that they become utterly untraversable for vehicles. Bam! Pedestrian-only borough. And we’d all have an inch more elbow-room . . . at least until the next yearly influx of 20,000 generic white kids with new BFAs who all just know in their hearts that God intended for them to be a **STAR** arrive, and everybody goes back to stepping on each other’s heels all day.
August 19, 2008
Elizabeth Bennet’s Missed Connections
To the Foreign Gentleman
(in the newsstand who complimented my bustle this morning):
You and I are similarly of low fortune. While in rare circumstances, a certain charm and affection can make up for a deficiency in income (for a time), in our case, no such affinity exists, and we would surely be as miserable as ever two people could be. I dread the despair into which this missive will surely cast you, but I implore you: bend your thoughts to your daily task, to living virtuously, and to God’s grace, and in time I am certain that you will forget your disappointment, and find some measure of peace and happiness in a life well lived.
Gently,
Elizabeth Bennet
–
To the Dear Sirs In the Helmets
(at work upon the scaffolding near my residence):
For some months now, you have been engaged in making some renovations to an estate adjoining my own property, and so I have had occasion to pass by you several times daily. Thus frequently tossed together, we have developed a familiarity with each other that perhaps we would not have done, had circumstances not caused it to be so. I cannot say that I regret this turn of events, as your cheery greetings of a morning never fail to bring a smile to my face. However, of late, I have noticed that all of you, dear sirs, do seem to be somewhat competing for my affections. I would not trifle with honest working fellows, so let me be plain: I do so value the friendship of each of you that I could never forsake the dear, genial esteem of all for a closer intimacy with one. I hope that we can carry on as before, feeling for each other the true, deep love of brothers and sister.
Your Neighbor,
Elizabeth Bennet
–
To the Young Laborer Upon the 6 Train:
I did not mean to appear, all windswept and partially undressed, on the threshold of your subway train. It was the storm, you see. And rude it was indeed of you to heighten a lady’s shame by exposing her to ridicule and unseemly remarks, especially in front of a train car’s worth of strangers. I am no woman of easy virtue. I merely could not afford to secure myself a taxicab. Am I to be subject to such abuse merely because I have not wealth enough to hold myself remote from it? Does it make you high to bring me so low? Would you make sport of a richer woman in this way? Am I not, though poor and undefended, a woman, after all, with a woman’s heart, a woman’s shame? What have I done, sir, to deserve such ill-treatment at your hands? Is my offense merely to be of little fortune, alone and beautiful and subject to the whims of public transportation? I may not be wealthy of purse, but I am proud, sir – proud and honest. I pray that this letter may work some remorse in you, and teach you not to use another woman thusly. However, for myself, I merely hope that our paths never again cross.
Firmly,
Elizabeth Bennet
–
To the Fellow in the Tavern Friday Last,
Having had some little time to reflect upon our brief tête-à-tête and the unfortunate way in which we parted, I have decided at last that perhaps I was to some extent to blame. I will admit that I had gone into a bawdy place and imbibed too much wine. I was low of spirits and convinced to enter the tavern by a dear friend who, while possessing of a good heart, does not, I am sad to say, always conduct herself with the utmost prudence. I am in charge of my own affairs, however, and ought not to have behaved myself thusly. I had lately been disappointed in a marriage proposal, and perhaps I sought to cure my wounded vanity by attracting admiration from another. A dreadful, wanton way to behave, true, but if you but knew how I had been wounded!
However, it was still my hope, in any event, to attract the attentions of an upstanding and genteel young man of suitable birth and proper comportment. Little did I expect, even in such surroundings, to be so accosted by one who I now cannot but regard as a most debauched and sorry fellow. Furthermore, just because a lady consents to speak privately with a strange gentleman in an alleyway, it does not follow that she is likewise prepared to enter a taxicab with the gentleman and proceed unchapheroned to his private residence! If your black eye did not teach you the truth of this, allow this letter to remove any remaining doubt. And so, while it may indeed have been true, as you so unkindly and repeatedly asserted, that I was in some respect ‘begging for it’ . . . not from you, good sir! Never from you! I would bed an hundred hipsters before I ever stooped so low!
(I do sincerely apologize, however, for becoming ill upon your oxfords. That part of the business was indeed my own fault.)
Scathingly,
Elizabeth Bennet
–
To the Stockbroker Who Took Me to Dinner
(and bragged about his ventures all night, then stiffed the waiter):
I guess money can’t buy class, you dick.
Decidedly,
Elizabeth Bennet
August 18, 2008
Peculiar Behavior In and Around Parks
Last week, I was having lunch in Bryant Park. For those of you who don’t live here, Bryant Park is the large park in the middle of the working week part of town, at the back of the research library. There are several terraces all around the perimeter of a large lawn, and these terraces have a lot of little green, metal tables and folding chairs, and during lunchtime (or just after work) during the week, every single inch of space is occupied with businesspeople eating street meat and soba and pizza slices and overpriced panini, and with tourists licking ice cream cones and pointing their cameras everywhere.
At any rate, I was sitting at a table I’d managed to grab, and I heard a giant, crashing sound. I looked up just in time to see a giant tree branch crashing down from above. A man, woman and young boy scattered as it broke across a garbage can. The boy immediately grabbed his shoulder and opened his mouth in shock, then closed it again. None of this was funny. But what happened next was hilarious.
Immediately, a park security guard came over with a walkie-talkie and three men in plain clothes. They rushed up, faces full of concern, and began to interview everyone at the scene. They examined the pieces of the branch, where they’d broken into bits and fallen to either side of the trashcan. They interviewed everyone at the scene, except for the boy, who was still holding his shoulder and silently opening and closing his mouth like a goldfish. I assume he was trying not to cry (he was about 13). A guy came along with a giant dolly to wheel away the wreckage. Many people who’d been witnesses came up to offer their testimony. The boy’s mother retold the tale over and over, with large, explanatory gestures, and she and the security guard spent much time determining at exactly what point the branch had collided with the trashcan, and scrutinizing the trashcan at the spot in question. A tourist with a digital camera was enlisted to take numerous photographs of the scene. Everybody got on cell phones, and began to explain what had happened to various people who hadn’t been there, but might need to know. Apparently, if a tree falls in Bryant Park, the situation will be handled.
Speaking of interesting things I’ve observed recently, on Saturday, I was walking around Prospect Park, and I found myself behind two women who were swinging a little girl between them. The little girl told one of the women that it was her turn now, and she took the place of the little girl, and leapt into the air, to feign being swinged.
‘Whooo!’ she said. ‘I almost got off the ground there.’
The next day, Sunday, I was walking in the Village, and I passed a little boy and a man, with another man between them, all holding hands. The man leapt into the air, as if being swung by the other man and the boy.
‘Whooo!’ he said. ‘I got a little height there.’
It was weird.
August 11, 2008
We Seldom Murder
So, this weekend, a guy in Beijing stabbed a tourist to death, in public, in the middle of the day.
Also recently, a guy riding a Greyhound bus in Canada stabbed his seatmate to death, hacked his head off, and displayed it to the 37 other passengers who’d run screaming out of the bus. Which…wow. As if riding a Greyhound isn’t horror enough in itself.
And, while we’re talking murders, there’s a new book out on the 1924 Leopold & Loeb affair, which, if you’ll remember, involved two smart, young men carefully murdering a stranger for absolutely no reason:
Neither killer showed any remorse after being captured and indicted for murder. Kidnapping had been involved; they had sent a ransom note to their victim’s family. But money wasn’t their true motive. Perfection was. Leopold and Loeb dreamed of committing the perfect crime, and they found philosophical backing for their desire in Nietzsche’s notion of the Übermensch. Leopold wrote to Loeb: “A superman . . . is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from the ordinary laws which govern men. He is not liable for anything he may do.”
You know, I ride the subway every day, and it is a constant source of wonder to me that very rarely does anybody shove anybody else out in front of an oncoming train. Frankly, the rarity of this reaffirms my belief that, no matter what else you might be able to say for human beings, we’re at least far more likely to be passively harmless than actively malicious. I have an overactive imagination, especially concerning possible physical pain and harm to my body, and as I wait for the train, I am forever anticipating a good firm shove in between my shoulder blades. I imagine myself plummeting forward onto the tracks, surprised and remorseful, as the train barrels down upon me, and, like Anna Karenina, all my Earthly concerns are finally resolved. I can imagine this vividly, with conviction, as if it had actually happened to me at some point in the past. You might think, given these daily grim imaginings, that I would be forever looking back cagily over my shoulder, or hugging the wall far from the yawning chasm. But I don’t. And neither does anybody else. We all teeter precariously near the brink of the train platform, peering impatiently into the black, yawning tunnel, and when the headlights of an oncoming train come charging up at us, preceded by a whoosh of stale air that blows our hair back on our heads, and followed quickly by a screaming, hurtling death machine shooting past not one foot from where we stand, we barely shift our weight ever so slightly back. Nobody ever suspects the throngs of people pushing and jostling up against them on all sides.
Even if New Yorkers were not constantly possessed with a murderous rage towards anyone and everyone around them, and even if a good number of them weren’t stark mad and/or under the influence of everything under the sun, and even if the platforms weren’t dangerously overcrowded so that the slightest slip of a high-heeled power-walker could easily send everyone toppling over like dominoes…even if, in short, the Manhattan subway tunnels were filled with good-hearted, cheery, conscientious folk whistling happily on their way to work, following orderly and careful pedestrian traffic patterns, and granting each other a good margin of personal space to navigate in, it would still be a freaking miracle that everybody wasn’t forever being shoved in front of an oncoming train. So, being that New Yorkers are indeed furious, crowded, impatient and insane, it is a ringing endorsement of the general non-murderousness of human beings that we all for the most part repeatedly survive our daily commute.
Of course, in addition to imagining someone might push me out in front of an oncoming train, I am also forever imagining that, in a moment of caprice, I might suddenly leap out in front of one on my own volition. I’m pretty sure everybody thinks about this, just as whenever you are somewhere high, you fear you might decide to leap over whatever banister you’re peering down from. Again, for the most part, we all resist such impulses, or rather, we manage not to ever forget to mind very carefully that we not accidentally leap to our deaths without giving the matter due consideration first. If we do jump, we really mean it.
So, every day, I imagine being murdered, and I imagine murdering myself. The third possibility, of course, is whether I might push somebody else in front of a train. Lord knows, I’m not without cause. However, oddly enough, I rarely vividly imagine pushing other people in front of a train. When I was a kid, I used to have nightmares that I was driven by a sort of frenzied compulsion to murder dozens of strangers and bury them in our backyard. At some point in the dream, one of my parents would discover this, and suddenly, my dreaming self would fully realize what sort of awful business I had been up to, and the full onslaught of this realization – of what a monstrous person I was, and of how much destruction I’d wrought, and of the guilt I would now have to bear – would come crashing down on me all at once, and my real-life self would wake up in a cold sweat, and it would be awhile before I could reassure myself I’d only dreamed it, and furthermore, that I wasn’t still guilty of any sort of latent murderous intent for even having merely dreamed it.
So, I used to worry a lot that I would at some point become a serial killer. But that was when I was a kid. As an adult, while I do constantly worry that others might suddenly be the death of me (whether by accident or intent), or that I might slip up and kill myself, I don’t have any real apprehension that I might suddenly start killing other people. And I think I can count this as a personal virtue, because apparently, some people really do find themselves – suddenly, of an afternoon – hacking a stranger to death with a knife. But this is a rare event, and if it makes you frightened about what might befall you out there amongst others, reassure yourself the way I do: think about how seldom we nudge each other off train platforms (and this is certainly not because we like the people around us), despite how incredibly easy it would be to do so.
