May 03

++++++++++++

phone home

5/30/03
Spaghetti and fishcakes. I’ve seen this advertised out front of Brooklyn diners for what seems like a million Fridays. I’ve never heard of such a combo, it sounds totally unappealing to me, but that could be because I don’t care for either spaghetti or fishcakes (I’m assuming they mean like fish sticks? Not like Thai fish cakes). I’m guessing it’s some Catholic thing, which is a religion I know nearly nothing about. I’ve only semi-recently discovered that Lent is where you’re supposed to give things up (because last year Jessica was getting it on with some guy and he said he couldn’t have sex because of Lent and I thought that was about the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. Even dumber was that same week that lame Josh Hartnett movie “40 Days and 40 Nights” about the guy who vows to remain celibate for Lent came out. Taking cues from forgettable teen movies is pretty sad for all involved.) and I didn’t realize Ash Wednesday meant you actually put ashes on your face. Crazy New Yorkers. I did hear somewhere that Oregon has the lowest church attendance of all 50 states (and the slowest response time to green lights) so forgive my ignorance, I went to some freaky non-denominational type church and briefly went to a scary bible school in the woods, off a highway. So, spaghetti and fishcakes sounds grotesque yet strangely alluring. I just want to see what a plate looks like one of these days.

5/27/03
I haven’t really been doing a single productive thing lately, and yet I feel busy. Maybe that’s just scatterbrained distraction. I only work three days a week, school’s out (at least until July), I have almost no responsibilities…so I really have no excuse for lazing around they way I have been (heck, it was a holiday weekend). I’ve just been doing typical mundane things like seeing movies (“Matrix Reloaded”: so-so, but I wasn’t a fanatic in the first place. Love that multi-cutural rave scene inter-spliced with Keanu getting it on, right. Sunday night I saw “The Apple,” a 1980 musical set in the future of 1994, which has got to be one of the craziest, baffling, over-the-top movies of all time. The only thing possibly weirder and funnier was the trailer for “Casa de los Babys,” which had me almost pissing my pants. Thank God, 90% of the audience was laughing too or else I would think it was some cruel hallucination.) and going out to eat (tried Otto, Mario Batali’s newish pizza place, which I’d expected to be annoyingly one-hour wait, crowded and with lame food based upon reviews. But it was totally empty on a Sunday afternoon and the food was perfectly fine, especially the melt-in-your-mouth lardo (yes, that’s lard) pizza with rosemary, nutmeg, olive oil and little else. I’d go back.). I really wonder about my neighborhood sometimes. It’s not great, but it’s not bad either. It’s totally neutral. However, James hates coming out here, he’s down on Brooklyn in general because he insists something bad always happens (primarily, to his car)…and I’m starting to believe him. We’ve been hit twice, his car has been towed twice, we were threatened (by one of the car-hitters) and had him jump full-force on the hood of the car, but yesterday’s incident may have taken the cake. James always gets jumpy about leaving his car parked out front for more than like an hour, which I think is stupid, I just don’t get that protective thing with people having to keep a constant eye on their property. But we were hanging out here for maybe three-four hours, putting up IKEA shelves (of which one was totally broken and busted, which is irritating. The thing only cost $12.95, but it’s a pain in the ass to go back out to Long Island just to exchange it, plus I naively didn’t keep the receipt) and configuring my new broadband phone service (oh, that’s something productive I did recently—paint one of my walls. It’s totally an unintentional ‘80s teal, but what can you do?). When we go outside to leave, there’s this young couple scrutinizing his car across the street, and I get this sinking feeling. From my vantage point I can’t seen anything wrong, but the guy starts apologizing and the mood goes tense so I head over tentatively. The right side of the car has been keyed, and they guy has some garbled, Judge Judy, white trash (well, they weren’t white, but you know) story about a family feud and his cousin being mad at him and the fight spilling into the street and how he has a black car and she thought James’ car was this guy’s and scratched it all up. The stupidity of New Yorkers never ceases to amaze me. The chronic, undeserved annoyances of every day life continue to surprise me, even after five years. Is it too much to expect a sliver of thoughtfulness from time to time? We called the police and there wasn’t much to be done, the police officers joked, “at least she didn’t have a baseball bat.” I guess that’s humor around here? When all was said and done, it was agreed that the guy would contact his crazy cousin and try to get her to do right, i.e. cough up a couple hundred dollars (like that’s going to happen) and in the mean time James is supposed to go and get an estimate and file a police report within ten days if she doesn’t fork over. Having her arrested was an option and I was totally for it (I was the only one). The cops were all that’s an option, but you’re the one who has to be neighbors (basically, you’re asking for retribution and trouble) and I’m like fuck off, James doesn’t live on this block, the guy doesn’t live on my block, the crazy cousin doesn’t live on my block. It’s my stupid-ass neighborhood, and I have to be all worried like oh will someone come after me for pressing charges because they are fucked up and don’t know better than to vandalize strangers’ property? In the scheme of things it’s not a big deal at all, but it totally irks me the way people carelessly screw other and pay no consequences. Don’t be surprised when I start turning all violent, it’s just a matter of time.

5/20/03
I got inexplicably tired last night and didn't finish my thought yesterday about not having any sense of appropriateness. I don't think it's that odd to hightail it out of a doctors office without paying and giving a urine sample (they'll send me a bill). But is it weird to have a near-stranger cut your hair? I don't really think so, I mean that's what hairstylists are, people you pay to cut your hair, you don't necessarily know them, at least not a first. Perhaps the difference is where the cut is being done. About a month ago, people from work went out for drinks and a friend (girlfriend? I'm not sure) of a coworker (that I've never said more than a handful of sentences to) said she a haircutting license (or whatever it's called) in Pennsylvania, though not here, and I asked if she still cut hair and she said yes and for $15. I'm totally cheap and desperate when it comes to hair. People may remember my last haircut was in Sept. and came from that freaky guy who only gives girls under 25 really short haircuts, but for free. I didn't take her up on the haircut until last week and was wary because we were drinking a lot and who knows if she remembered saying she'd do it, or what price she'd said or any of that stuff, but I've grown a total moptop in the past eight months since my last scary cut. Anyway, I went to her apt. and it wasn't that big of a deal, I don't think, but people seem to think it's strange that I'd go to someone's house I'd only met for like half an hour and get my hair cut. Maybe it's the laid back, West Coaster in me, but it doesn't bother me much to sit in someone's living room in a fold out IKEA chair, wet-headed, draped in plastic, chitchatting with roommates and roommates' boyfriends who have stopped by. What does weird me out, and makes me feel socially inept is the whole concept of roommates. It's a relationship that's awkward to me. I just can't deal with living with other people. I did live with my sister for about a year when I was 20. That was ok, we had a 3-bedroom place, then she let these annoying vegan punks from Alaska move in and I had to get the hell out of there. I also lived with two boyfriends in my late teens-early 20s, and that didn't go so well. It's enough sharing space with people you do know, but what are you supposed to do and say with these roommates. Maybe it's not a problem for on-the-go types, which most New Yorkers seem to be. But I'm a sitter-around-er, I'm on the computer, watching TV, cooking, reading, concocting craft projects and I like doing these things alone. I could be dooming myself to spinsterhood, but that's fine. James has been looking for a new apt. and those plans don't involve my moving with him, he's more adamant about the whole personal space thing than I am, and that's ok too. But people think that's weird that we don't live together. I don't think it's so horrible, I only get freaked out when I hear about yet another couple who's been dating less time than we have who are getting married. I'm not sure at what point it becomes glaringly strange to keep separate residences. Like my friend Jessica has a crush on this guy, and it turns out he not only has a girlfriend, but has been dating her for nine years. Nine years is a long time in my book, they're not married, but they are living together. I would be weirded out to date the same guy for nine years and still live apart, but what about five years? Where do you draw the line? I'm slowly coming up on four, and don't know if I should be alarmed or not. Like I've said I don't have any sense for these things. I run out of waiting rooms and get haircuts from strangers in bars. Speaking of, I just ran into the coworker (he only works on the other side of the room from me) with the (girl?)friend who cut my hair and thought I should mention it because not saying she'd cut my hair seemed even odder because it's shorter and you'd think he'd know that I'd had her cut it. He was all squirrelly and then said that they'd broken up (cleared that issue up) a while ago. I don't know, that just made it seem even more weird that I'd call her up and show up at her apt. when the tenuous connection I had to her in the first place was missing. And the pressing question is what I'm supposed to do when my hair starts growing back out?

5/19/03
I'm afraid there comes a time where it becomes hard to tell between right and wrong. Or more like what's appropriate or not. I'm not sure that I really have a grasp on these concepts. I haven't committed any major gaffes, but I do wonder. Like this morning I had to call the dr. first thing and try to get an appt. early as possible today because I'm having my millionth urinary tract infection and I'd already suffered through the weekend and can't afford to miss work so the earlier I could schedule it the better. I'm supposed to be at work at 10am, they could only fit me in at 10:30 or 3:00, and used the term "urgency resident" which threw me off, I guess that's what I wanted. I took the 10:30, and it wasn't a big deal because I was at James' and he only lives one block from the dr. office and that's only about four blocks from my job. Anyway, the waiting room was all full and you could tell people had been waiting a long time and old people with canes were sighing and complaining and muttering in Spanish, not good signs. I'd hoped to be in and out fairly rapidly, I mean I only wanted my antibiotics and to get the hell out of there. But I sat for maybe 45 min. before I was called back. The residents always end up being gross, jock-ish guys, which is whatever, it's not like I have to date them, but I'm always wary of them. Residents are all rule-driven, and I can’t stand rules. This guy seemed a little nerve wracked and was pretty quick to agree with my symptoms (then told me some story about a study where those who’d self-diagnosed UTIs compared with those who saw doctors had about the same rate of accuracy. This morning before heading to the dr. I was reading a story on NYTimes.com about how the fourth state had just made it so morning after pills could be obtained without a prescription. People probably have more issues with those pills than antibiotics, so why can’t they just give them without a formal appointment, already? What’s weird is that according to the article only 51 percent of women in 2000 had heard of them [morning after pills, not antibiotics], and in 1997 only 1% had used them. I recall getting them six years ago and I don’t remember it being a new, radical thing, there were subway ads at least two years ago. Who are all these in-the-dark women who get knocked-up and just take it?) and give me a Cipro prescription like he just wanted to move things along. Then he took my temperature and it was high, which seemed to change his course of action and he started doing that annoying stomach and back prodding and then had to consult with his supervisor. He gave me the prescription but was being all by the book and wanted a urine sample. This is really pointless because they give you the antibiotics anyway, the lab always seems to charge me instead of my insurance and I never get the results, they just go into some black hole. Maybe they go onto my record, but I doubt it because these residents never have my chart. It's a total waste to do the urine test, and I was in a hurry, and to make it more annoying he told me to go back to the waiting room till a nurse called me. They also make you wait out there after your visit is done to schedule another appt. or for you to pay. It's a lot of waiting. So, I get out to the waiting room and I'm like fuck this, I'm not waiting around to pee in a cup and pay my $35 urgency care fee (it's normally $15, but they jack it up when you do the short notice thing) for a dr. who's barely a dr. yet. I had what I'd came for, my prescription, so I skipped out of there before anyone noticed or started calling my name. I felt better once I got out to the elevators, but then it struck me that maybe that was weird behavior. The resident did ask, "I'm going have them do a urinalysis, is that alright?" Maybe I was supposed to be all New York and say no, and that I was in a hurry, then yell out at the receptionist to just bill me, as I breeze past while pulling out my cell phone, flagrantly violating the no cell phone signs taped up on every inch of available wall. Nah, I'd rather just be agreeable, then sneak out like I have emotional defects. Urgh, it's now after 5pm and I still don't have my damn Cipro because Walgreen's said it'd be an hour and who has an hour to sit around like that? Such time-wasters in this city. I’d give them a piece of my mind if I wasn’t so damn passive.

5/13/03
I think I have serious ADD. I called in sick today because I’m sick, but also because I need to finish a research paper, that was technically due yesterday, but had a deadline extension until tomorrow morning. So, I’ve had all day to wrap it up, but I keep getting sidetracked printing out pictures for potential craft projects, looking up low-fat lasagna recipes that don’t use tomato sauce (not that tomatoes are related to fat in any way, I just don’t like tomato sauce much), and searching rents and jobs in other cities. I got on this bender this morning because I saw a job ad for a newspaper indexer in Memphis and the pay wasn’t amazing or anything (high 30s) and I don’t particularly want to be a newspaper indexer (a distraction’s a distraction) but the depressing thing I’ve discovered (well, not discovered because I already knew it, but hadn’t dwelled on it much) lately is that library jobs in NYC pay really, really poorly, not just in relation to the cost of living, but insanely bad in general. I have absolutely no plans to work in a public or academic library so hopefully it won’t affect me too terribly, but if for some reason I were to go the traditional library job route, I would have to move, no way around it. I really can’t continue to live here, underpaid like that/this. So, it seems like lots of these so-so library jobs in the rest of the country pay just about the same as they do here, if not more. The only problem being that you’d have to live in these towns I’ve never heard of in Arizona or Iowa or Ohio. But Memphis, at least I’ve heard of, and from the apt. ads I was looking at it seems you can do pretty well for under $500/month. The idea of practically doubling my income and halving my living expenses sounds really, really nice, I must admit. Uh, until you try and look up restaurants in these towns and under Thai they have one. One Thai restaurant. I mean, Mexican and Chinese is about as wild as it gets. And I don’t even know about nightlife. I don’t like blues, I don’t care much about Elvis. Actually, I think there is some sort of nebulous “scene” down there. I don’t know, the south has never appealed much to me. I don’t have any major desire to live anywhere in particular and that’s my problem. I only know Portland, where I would probably never live again, and New York City, which makes me insane, but is all I’ve known for almost five years to the day. Those are the only two places I’ve ever lived, so what do I know about the ways of the world? I definitely have more of an affinity for the west coast than the east, but Los Angeles seems sort of yucky, Seattle isn’t much better than Portland, though it thinks it is. San Francisco is actually appealing, but about as stupid as I can get in terms of income/rent ratio traumas. Northern California is probably the only region I’d want to live in on the west coast, though. I was born in the Bay Area so maybe there’s some creepy, primal draw. I’d live in the suburbs where they have In-N-Out Burger and Filipino fast food chains, and wouldn’t complain. Oh jeez, I only have a paragraph or two needed to conclude my paper (then proof the damn thing), and I’m irreparably distracted now. And to compound matters, James managed to splice my cable so I can get free, random cable channels again (and "24" is on in 30 min. I haven’t been able to watch it at its proper time for months because I don’t get home from work till 9:40pm on Tuesdays). TV’s a distraction. I’ve been fine without it for the last two weeks (though I binge on weekends). The weird thing is that I lost IFC and the Travel Channel (but gained TLC—is that a fair trade?). I can still hear them (and semi-see them), though. Same with HBO and Animal Planet. I guess I could just pretend I’m blind and absorb what I can. I’m sure there are visually-impaired folks who still enjoy Taxicab Confessions and Pet Psychic.

5/9/03
I swear to God, I made light of SARS and now I have it. For the past two days I haven’t been able to breathe or swallow, my head hurts and I can’t stop sweating. I wouldn’t care so much if I didn’t have so much crap to do. I have two final projects down, only one to go. I created this really basic website with scans of menus from Roosevelt Ave. It’s no big shakes, the bulk of the project was writing this 13 page hypothetically organizing your knowledge because the class is called Knowledge Organization (which is a fancy term for old fashioned cataloging and classification). And it really sucks because it’s duh stuff like people like searching by cuisine and neighborhood and they like keyword searching on full text and prefer graphics over text, but you have to tie everything in with all the readings from the semester that I don’t remember reading. Anyway, I chose Roosevelt Ave. because it has the largest variety in the smallest space. I grabbed menus from 61st to 81st streets (and some side streets) and one day hope to get them all, and more, scanned, and up. My point was to supplement all the lame Manhattan-centric services like Menu Pages and Amazon.com Restaurants. The only public library I’m aware of that’s doing a menu digitizing project is Los Angeles Public Library. Cornell has a small selection of their rare menus online, too. I don’t know why I’m so obsessed with menus. Apparently I’m not the only one because there are all sorts of annoying folks jacking up the minimum bids on ebay. I don’t get the benefits of ebay from a financial standpoint. It’s great to be able to browse all these items from a home computer that you’d never find a few years ago. But people are totally out of control with their bidding. It’s like some crazy mob mentality or something. There’s a totally false sense of worth with many of these mediocre items. Anyway, I’m determined to find all the places in NYC that serve Hawaiian versions of things. During my project I discovered Hawaiian empanadas, and something freaky as heck called perro caliente con salchicha. Now I don’t speak Spanish, but I’m pretty sure perro caliente means hot dog, which they describe as “bread with sausage, potatoes, parmesan cheese and Hawaiian cream” Nutty, but for $3 it couldn’t hurt to try, right?

5/6/03
I’ve been getting a good dose of suburbia lately. Last weekend (two Saturdays ago) I feigned it by checking out the Applebee’s and multiplex in Battery Park City. I know that’s not the suburbs, it’s just weird, but it’s in this isolated complex across the street from the World Trade Center hole and there’s also a Chevy’s. I’m not sure who goes there, but it’s definitely uncrowded. I was able to eat myself sick on an obscenely large appetizer sampler (riblets, quesadillas, mozzerella sticks, nachos) and Caesar salad with popcorn shrimp (I could only eat three bites of the salad after that snacky barrage) without the typical 45-60 min. wait common at chain restaurants (hmm, maybe it’s true that Manhattanites shun this crap because we did Olive Garden in Chelsea about a month ago and the wait was only about 10 min. Though while passing by the new Red Lobster at the Target mall in Queens two Sundays ago, there were people sitting on the ground out front and I heard a quote of an hour wait. Gotta love the boroughs). We also were able to show up exactly at the show time 10:50pm for Laurel Canyon and have our pick of seats. I didn’t mind Laurel Canyon, but this weekend I had the urge to see a movie and I didn’t want it to involve a subway trek, which was fine since James lives walking distance to four multiplexes and a handful of smaller theatres, and there was absolutely nothing I wanted to see. I swear a couple weeks ago there were tons of things that sounded good (though my mind is blank on what they were). Now it’s all Daddy Day Care, X Men, Lizzie McGuire, Holes, urgh. I settled on Identity (I didn’t know it was the #1 movie in America), “the scariest movie since The Ring” (is that saying much?) and it was mediocre and had some lame psychologically twisted surprise ending. I think it was supposed to be a surprise ending. I hate surprise endings. Just make an entertaining movie, please. Then Sat. we headed to New Jersey for a rubulad party and I’m so glad they’ve taken to hosting these things outside of Williamsburg. There were the usual bands and art and stuff, but I was taken by the table set up to sell waffles for $1. They had a little waffle iron and were whipping up batter, syrup and butter were on the side. Everyone else got one, I was waiting till later, sitting on the floor hanging out when all of a sudden the table crashed. Feet were sticking out, a body had smashed through the middle of it and people started yelling to call 911. That’s when I noticed the passer-outer was Jane’s nerve.com date. Oh my, it certainly added excitement to the evening. I’m not sure if that’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to get alarmed about (he seemed ok later). Unfortunately, the waffle table was out of commission after that incident. Later I saw two separate groups of people reenacting the table-crash. I guess he made quite an impression. Sunday I headed out to Long Island for some grand reopening sale at Ikea (speaking of, they’re sending out postcards eliciting comments/support for the one to be built in Brooklyn in 2005. That weirded me out, I mean I would like a nearby Red Hook Ikea, but it’s scary to think I could still be in this craphole in two years. Will I still be in Brooklyn, or even in NYC when I’m 32?). It was a big deal, the place was packed and they were crews filming commercials. I kind of just wanted to explore Long Island because I know nothing about it. Whenever we want to do the suburban shopping/dining experience we head to N.J. Now that I think about it, Westchester is another option, but it just doesn’t have the same appeal as N.J. or L.I. What I didn’t realize is that you can get to L.I. toll-free. With N.J. there’s the $6 Holland Tunnel (or $7 Verrazano Bridge, depending on how you go) and once you get into the state, all the highways, or turnpikes or parkways, or whatever the hell they call them out here, cost money to drive on, which I’ve always found to be irritating. Anyway, the highlight of the excursion was a trip to Minado an spacious all-you-can-eat Japanese seafood buffet in a strip mall. It wasn’t bad at all, they had sushi (duh) and lots of seaweedy salads and hot dishes served with thousand island dressing/mayo (what is the deal with the Japanese and their mayonnaise fetish anyway? Maybe it’s just Americans (or me) who has the aversion to mayonnaise (and believe me, it’s not a calorie-counting issue. I know Pret a Manger is failing in NYC because their sandwiches are too British, i.e. oozing with mayonnaise). I suppose NYC has its charms (can eight million people be wrong?), but the real action is outside the city limits, I swear.