june 04

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phone home

6/28/04
Just so you can be in the know regarding trendy NYC crime, hit-and-runs are HOT and fires are NOT. Burning buildings are so early '00s. Running people over is totally in for 2004. Subway shootings are gaining a close second, but mowing people down beats a stray bullet any day. It might also seem like beheadings are big, but don't confuse Baghdad with the Big Apple. I used to be inordinately concerned with the sheer volume of random house fires in the city. It seemed like everyone and their granny was being charred in their sleep, and there was that match-playing tot who displaced eight families when he set their apt. aflame on Father's Day, but that sort of thing is on the wane. Now, every time I turn on the TV or open a paper someone new has been squished, dragged or flung by a speeding vehicle, and more often than not the diver flees the scene. Friday, an old lady was hit in the Bronx, and a toddler was killed just a few blocks from my apt. NYC drivers are frighteningly bad and oblivious to other cars and pedestrians, so this isn't surprising. (If you notice, the worst of the worst have Pennsylvania plates. And there's no logical reason why so many obvious Brooklynites would have Pennsylvania plates instead of New York ones. They are such flagrantly scary drivers that James looked into why, and as it tuns out Pennsylvania has a mail in driving test [at least that's what he's been told by former residents, but I find it hard to believe there isn't a road test], and people who couldn't get a license in NYC are totally scamming the system. Same goes with car insurance, Brooklyn has one of the highest rates in the country, as James discovered when changing from a Manhattan to a Brooklyn zip code, and bad drivers with illegal out-of-state registrations are hip to this fact also. It's so irksome to me, like I don't have anything better to worry about, but heck why should retards get all the breaks?) Since the first day I moved here, I've had a phobia of being hit by a car. I'd been in NYC less than twelve hours, and found myself under the subway tracks, bombarded by salsa music and shaved ice vendors at the Ridgewood/Bushwick border. God knows why, and like a good Portlander I was waiting for the light to change before crossing the street, and some loud, pushy Puerto Rican guy was all "don't be afraid of the cars" and walking along side, encouraging me to just step out in front of traffic. And this is the norm, I discovered. People do not fear cars, and this doesn't make them streetwise or ballsy in my book, but infinitely stupid. (Sometimes just to feel vindicated, I secretly want someone to get hit when I see them blatantly meandering in front of oncoming traffic, but that's asking for the worst kind of karma imaginable. You know I'm going to get mangled in the grille of a car now.) It's not as noticeable until you are the one behind the wheel, or even in the passenger seat. But there's nothing more annoying than people standing like five feet from the curb, waiting to get a head start on the light, in all intersections. It makes it impossible to turn without making them step back, which they're loathe to do. The worst is when your light turns green, and the corner pedestrian just walks out, slow as shit, anyway like they're daring you to hit them. In Manhattan it's more of a case of clueless white people yapping on cell phones or safely in a gaggle of similarly minded folks who simply walk into the street, then panic and scramble when they realize they're inches from oncoming traffic. In the boroughs, they pay no mind to WALK/DON'T WALK either, but the difference is that they're doing it on purpose. It's totally antagonistic, and while I used to think it terribly uncouth to honk at someone on foot, I will now lean over and hit the horn when James is driving and an asshole saunters in front us, which really pisses him off (James, not the walker), but it makes me feel better. I felt kind of bad when I first heard about the kid getting hit by our apt. but the details of the crime indicate that he and his sister were in the crosswalk and the truck had a green light. A crosswalk isn't a safe haven, I mean if a car is moving fast, it's not like they're expecting people to be waltzing around inside it when they have the right of way. So, my point is I'm a little disturbed and bothered by all these runovers because I hate jerky drivers (the jerkiest are the totally unbrave DWI FDNY fucks, and that's a trend within a trend. What are they up to--27 arrests so far this year? Lest you think I'm a firefighter hater, here is the sweetest story I've seen in a long time) but I'll have to take it on a case-by-case basis because the pedestrian could've totally been asking for it.

6/25/04
Working Friday summers is starting to look pretty good. My original plan was to spend the day working diligently undisturbed on my final, but I got to work an hour late, I have to leave an hour and a half early to go to this make-up class, then since everyone in charge was absent today, the rest of the library staff decided to get pizza and beer delivered. So much for that final. I guess staff was bored enough earlier before I showed up that they were hanging around trying to decide which celebrities would play each other in a movie. Bizarrely, I was given Helena Bonham Carter. Maybe as a talking ape. The last time a group of people decided to cast each other (this is not something I've made a habit out of, though now that I think about it there were two other occurrences. In high school we were trying to figure out who would be who on Cheers, and I was unanimously voted Cliff Clavin. Oh, and I was Bea Arthur on and Golden Girls. For fuck's sake.) I was given Christina Ricci. I don't know why I'm always hypothetically played by these tiny actresses, but then it's not like they have anyone my actual build to choose from. It goes all extreme, you're either "normal" actress size like 98% of the size 0 and 2s you see on the screen or you're big big a la Star Jones (not that I'm any fan of Star Jones--don't let her wedding website make you barf too hard) or Camryn Manheim. Like there's not a single person on TV or in the movies that's between a size 10 and 18, which I would probably guess the majority of women fall between (and no, a "fat" 125-130 pound Renee Zellwegger doesn't count). Off the top of my head, I can only think of Sara Rue and Mia Tyler, who isn't even an actress. Alright, I'll now spend my final 45 minutes at work, well…working.

6/19/04
Have you ever procrastinated so much that you worry you might have brain damage or are actually incapable of completing the put off task? I have a take home final exam, and I’ve had it for over a week. It’s due in two Mondays. I have to write a business plan for a public library digitization project. I don’t really want to do it, but I’m starting to think I don’t even know how to do it. I have Tuesdays and Thursdays off and didn’t get to it. I called in sick Friday and didn’t do it. James spontaneously went out of town this weekend for Father’s Day, so I figured that’d give me Sat. and Sun. to get it done. But today I still didn’t do it. All I did all day was watch TV, go to the gym, then spend hours toasting ingredients, and pounding pastes to make a Thai-Burmese dinner that surly undid any good I’d done at the gym. And the thing is, that as soon as I finish this exam I’ll be totally free, nothing to worry about until my next and final library science class at the end of July. There are just so many other things I’d rather concern myself. I really want to blame it on my stupid anti-depressants that I think I’ll be made to stop taking next week when I go to the dr. because I know they’re messing with my blood pressure, and well, people with high blood pressure probably shouldn’t be taking drugs that make them all speedy, serotonin-boosting or not. Plus, I’m tired of sweating profusely, especially now that it’s getting into the 90s. Though I might miss the insane dreams the drugs induce. Other people’s dreams are boring as hell, so I’ll spare you, but the story lines are ridiculously complex and the dialogue surprisingly clever. I think it’s actually a little dangerous, I thought anti-depressants might help me get my sorry ass out of bed in the morning, but they’re having the opposite effect. If I half wake up at a reasonable hour in the middle of an entertaining, story-like dream I’ll opt to fall back asleep and see what happens in my hazily invented plot instead of facing the day and doing something responsible. And there’s nothing more depressing than wasting a perfectly good day sleeping. But I swear after I started taking anti-depressants, I got completely fixated on ebay, like nothing I’d ever felt before. Whenever I had something important to do, or when I was supposed to be working, all I could do was search pointlessly on ebay. It was a total compulsion. Then I weaned myself and for the month of May I got all OCD with recipes. I know I’d have homework or jobs to apply to and all I could do was look through cookbooks trying to come up with insanely detailed meal plans for the entire week, making crazy long lists, organizing inter-borough shopping excursions to track down needlessly obscure ingredients (do those tiny pea-sized Thai eggplants even exist in NYC?). My latest time-waster is vacation planning. I don’t have the time or money to get away, but it’s consuming my anyway. The seed was planted a few weeks ago when my supervisor off-handedly mentioned a deal in her Travel Zoo email newsletter (which I received minutes later). $599 RT to Bali with a stopover in Hong Kong. Those are two places I’ve totally wanted to visit, and sure there would still be lodging and food to contend with, but that’s a really good deal. The tickets had to be purchased by the end of June, which was ok, but the catch was travel had to be Sept-Nov. and that’s too iffy. I’d like to believe I’d have a nice new full time job by the fall, and there’s no easy way to take of two weeks as a new employee. So that sucked. Then the middle of last week I hit upon the brilliance of the all-American road trip. It would have to happen soon because like I said, I have school at the end of July, and I will start temping for a few weeks at BBDO where I was interning in mid-July. During all my down time at work and free time at home that should’ve been reserved for school work, I scoured maps and searched travel sites looking for the most interesting drives. New England? Blah. Sideways, west through Pennsylvania and Ohio? Nah. I got a little excited about driving along the east coast to the Carolinas, Low Country, and all that. But it only then occurred to me that wherever you drove, you’d have to come back, and that return drive didn’t seem as fun. Gas isn’t cheap anyway. So, after some serious time wasting, I finally came up with my plan, lame-ass and out of the blue as it may sound. I will fly into Nashville July 6, stay two nights, rent a car and drive through Alabama and Mississippi to New Orleans where I will stay until July 13, then I will fly back to NYC. It’s practically a done deal. I basically told James this is what we’d be doing in a couple weeks, and he was like “fine.” Now that that’s all wrapped up, I have absolutely no excuse to not start working on (and finish) my final.

6/15/04
Ok, I really should be really nervous right now. “Mama,” that would be James’s scary-ass mother is going to be here at the apt. in a couple hours. It’ll be the first time she’s shown up here since I moved in. The woman is a total nut, so any sort of mayhem could arise. James went all nuts yesterday, scrubbing every square millimeter of the place, and got all crazy with rules about how I shouldn’t wear my pajamas in front of her (like I would) and not say I’m unemployed (I’m not, I don’t get why he’d think I’d even say that) and not let my cat jump on the couch (I guess she has fits when her cats jump up on things and that if given the chance she’ll try and snoop through my things, check out my underwear and finger my furniture for dust (I think he was joking about the underwear). She starts yelling about them “acting like animals.” Funny that, considering, you know, that cats are animals and all). The whole thing is ridiculous to me. I mean, if someone has issues, they have issues, it doesn’t really seem like walking on eggshells solves anything. But heck, I’m no problem solver. I plan in staying in my room and doing the homework that I was supposed to be doing all day and didn’t.

6/13/04
Is it true that everyone in NYC goes out of town during summer? Or at least does long weekends? I have no sense of these things. Maybe the same people who attend ten weddings a summer also do Hamptons timeshares or whatever it is people do these days. Every local magazine, newspaper and website make it sound like only losers get stuck in the city, and that everyone has jobs with summer Friday hours. And didn't you know? Helicopters are the way to the Hamptons now? Who needs that outmoded Jitney anymore? (Oh god, the Jitney. I'm so amazingly wise and urbane now, but it wasn't always that way, oh no. My first heinous temp job summer '98 I was personal slave to a nasty, nasty, landscape architect to the stars. I seriously thought the little mentally ill woman [she wore the same exact dress four days in a row in the middle of 90 degree heat, and this occurred over the span of two weeks, like wearing it Thurs, Fri, Mon, Tues.] was going to snap my neck when I lost David Geffen's number. What can you do? I'm a horrible, poor excuse for a secretary, and for $10/hour I couldn't really give a shit. But she was all wound up one day about how I had to find out when the earliest Hampton Jitney was leaving from somewhere on the Upper West Side and to make a reservation, and I had absolutely no fucking idea what a jitney was. Totally clueless. I didn't even know what the Hamptons were, really I still don't, I mean it's just a bunch of beaches on Long Island, right? I don't get it. But I knew the Hamptons involved water, so I figured the jitney must be a boat, maybe like a fancy dinghy. I didn't have internet access at any of these temp jobs, I mean it was only like the height of the internet boom, so it wasn't as if I could look it up. I finally found the number in her rolodex and somehow eventually deduced that the jitney was simply a coach bus. And somehow I'm a rube because I don't know what some made up sounding word like jitney means.) Summer hours is a concept I’d never heard of before moving here, and I’m not sure who even does that, it’s an old tradition, right? If I’m correct, it’s only publishing companies, which could explain why writers of these articles seem to think it’s standard. Actually, the slide library where I work is closed Fridays in summers, but it’s not a perk, staff has to use vacation time or compensate by working extra Mon.-Thur. I’ve been coming in anyway, and since we’re closed to faculty and my coworkers don’t want to come in, it’s my day to listen to whatever I want to (no “Urban Divas” channel on Netscape Radio) and do homework and mess with this website and get drunk. It seems like every Friday there’s some sort of celebration in the main library (they do have to work Fridays), either an art opening or birthday (this time it was a group party because they’ve become too cheap to do individual birthdays. They said that this party wasn’t just for June staff, but would cover my birthday too, I was like fuck that, mine’s not even until almost August. So, I made sure to drink extra). Anyway, I didn’t actually get any school work done (which is pretty sad and stupid since I have a take home final due very, very soon), but I did spruce up my restaurant page a bit.

6/7/04
A couple days ago I had made it out of the gym, and almost to the end of the corner when I heard a loud "hey." I hate it when I hear hey because you never know if it's intended for you or not, and even if you are the correct target, you don't always want to stick around for what's about to come your way. Hey is so Brooklyn, it's loud, obtrusive and rude. James gets irked by drivers who yell hey when they want directions, and if you help them they just drive off, never saying thanks, or if you don't know where they want to go they get pissy and nasty with you like it was your idea for them to stop and harass you while minding your business. So, I decided this hey might be meant for me. I turned around and this hefty Hispanic woman barked out the passenger window "where's the curves over here?" It took a split second, but I deduced she wanted to know where Curves gym was, and I politely told her (I'm always inexplicably helpful with directions). Of course, they immediately drove off without saying thank you. But that wasn't the issue. The rub was why she picked me out off the street. It was a sunny day, there were like a million couples and mommies with strollers and dogs to choose from. But she knew better than to ask any of them about Curves. "Where's the curves?" would've elicited blank stares from the bulk of them. No, she shrewdly deduced that the sweaty, pink-faced, chunky girl in workout clothes would have to know where Curves was. Curves, my ass. The thought of lifting weights in a room filled with female Brooklyn hey-ers makes my skin more than crawl. And after all the recent hoopla about their male CEO being a rabid pro-lifer, I feel even stronger in my anti-Curves stance.

6/3/04
Houseguests beat you up for different reasons. Sightseeing, Broadway shows and slow walking are the usual annoyances from out-of-towners. But with my sister and boyfriend it’s unhealthy influences. I still can’t figure out how the carton of cigarettes she brought us from duty free a week ago only has one pack left (she doesn’t even smoke, and her boyfriend is hand-roller). It was near shocking how many bars (all in Carroll Gardens and Red Hook, for the record) blatantly ignored the smoking ban. It’s hard to abstain when presented with the opportunity to be illegal. Thankfully, at the last minute I was able to rescind my original request for candy (I asked her to bring goodies before our house became a sweet treat stockpile post fried candy party). I forget how the British drink like fish (or maybe it’s just the English I know) and when faced with 4am closings instead of their usual 11pm pub times, they really go like gangbusters. And despite their being vegetarians, we still managed to eat out daily, and with serious gusto. I feel like I need to detox for about a month. Not that we didn’t have fun, of course. Now it’s back to buckling down, drinking water instead of wine, getting back on that elliptical trainer, school, part-time work and looking for a fancy job. Whenever I’m around Europeans (though English hardly qualify as European) I get so jealous by their (lack of) work ethic and massive amounts of vacation time. Certainly, NYC is an anomaly, and warping. Sometimes I feel I’m the only one who works less than 50 hours a week. It’s the NW in me. Slackness and lack of ambition are in my DNA (not to mention a propensity for heart disease, diabetes, obesity and cancer). My sister is a social worker (who never did more than daycare and nanny work in the USA, but finagled a faux work history nannying needy adults), the boyfriend is a potter. She owns a home, they have cars, constantly are on holiday (they were just in Egypt in March) and she’s now in the process of reducing her hours from a five-day week to four. It’s just not right. Well, this is the time of year where I always wax nostalgic about having moved to NYC. Yes, I made the miserable trek six freaking years ago last week. It scares me to ponder it too much because every subsequent year I re-visit my one-year older life it’s distressingly similar. I mean, in six years people have married, had children, divorced and remarried. Not that I know any such examples, but it happens. And when it comes down to it, my problem is just that I will always be a complainer. Objectively, I suppose I am totally in a different place than I was in 1998. Instead of a rat hole (technically, a mouse hole) in the hinterlands of Queens, I live in a pretty damn nice apartment in desirable Brooklyn. My commute has shrunk from an hour to 20-25 minutes (though I still love to complain about it). I have access to a car (a serious luxury in NYC) and have a goddamn washer and dryer inside the apartment, a serious improvement over hauling laundry ten blocks up a hill. My gym is only eight blocks away instead of 15, and yet I still feel like it’s too far (I’ve been suited up and meaning to go for the last hour, but can’t motivate to walk up the street). What does seem chronic is that I’m still penniless and in even more severe debt than last year. I suppose that’s a major factor in life satisfaction. But if I actually was financially sound and had spending money, I’m sure I would find something else to bitch about. I’d probably bemoan the lack of “real” Asian and Mexican restaurants in the neighborhood and get sickened by all the lovey dovey baby-making couples on the F(fectionate) train (wait, I already do that). So, general malaise and crappy jobs still prevail, but I will have my master’s degree next month, and sporadically get paid to write. That doesn’t sound so bad on paper. Hmm, and I have been in a decent relationship for nearly five years with someone that I actually like and originally stalked with a vengeance. It seems so normal now that it’s almost embarrassing to dwell on. It’s hard to believe I haven’t sabotaged it yet. Those are sort of the two biggies, at least in my world. Gross and dull as it sounds: financial and romantic stability. If I were to achieve both at once, I have no idea what I would do. Is that why people have children? There’s no more striving and struggling left. I could certainly think of better ways to create stress uncertainty and hardship. Maybe a bad gambling or drug habit. So, I can deal with the six years passing on an intellectual level. But what struck me was while unpacking I found a photo of myself from when I first moved here. I had taken it at one of those sticker booths, the one at Astor Place Kmart, which was the only one in the city at the time, a novelty. I look like a little kid. It’s nearly unfathomable that I was 25 (though to be fair, weeks from 26). For comparison, I scrutinized a sweaty, ruddy photo from Monday night (at Sparky’s Ale House where I saw this guy “The Finch” that was dating and dumped a friend of mine. The friend who was previously dating Ken Ober, which still cracks me up. But this guy was pretty darn dorky [um, he’s in a band called Geek Farm, for dorking out loud] so it was nuts how cocky and confident he was. We called him The Finch because he was tiny and had uber blonde [you know, the types with white eyelashes] tufty hair, like a little bird. Anyway, he was celebrating his birthday at the bar. Our group and his closed the place down, though the two certainly never mingled.) The photo's not wholly ghastly, it’s just different. I'm exactly to the number, the same weight as when I moved here, yet I look slighter and cowering on the left and round and hulking on the right. I don't know why I'm so surprised that I would age in six years, really it's the difference between a fifth grader and a high school junior (though I suppose there's a little puberty involved in that analogy). Give me another six years, and I might have a spazz out for real.

sticker booth youth

bar booth goof