Arriving back in Lebanon yet again is less exciting and more deja vu each time I am on break. This time, the dullness of my hometown is compounded by the total awesomeness (and lack of a close-by replacement) of New York.
I'm afraid that I'm destined to be THAT girl who's like: "Oh my God! Well you think THAT sandwich is good?? AT SIXTH AND TWELFTH IN MANHATTAN I ONCE HAD THIS SANDWICH THAT RIVALED GOD." yackyackyackyack.... It's like when I came back from studying abroad in the south of France and everything was about the Mediterranean and apricots, except this time it's all about the East River and pizza. And oh-mi-god-lemme-tellya-bout-the-pizza-!!-pepperoni-like-you-wouldn't-believe-sister-!!.
And let's face it: I really hated New York for the first month or so I was there. HATED IT.
The crowds. The smells. The subway stabbings. The drug dealing elderly women on my stoop. The cooped-up feeling of a boyfriend-shared, one-bedroom apartment. The yelling on your corner at 2 am. The elbowing for room on Sixth Avenue. The Staten Island accent. Did I mention the crowds?
I once spent the entirety of forty blocks underground on an express train that was crawling more slowly than the local tracks with my nose pressed into one man's armpit and my ass pressed into another man's palm.
I hated New York.
But like every other sucker who moves to the city, I fell for it.
After the sun goes down and the sidewalks radiate heat from the day, a breeze blows in from the Atlantic and it's hard not to love it. By dusk, the city rushes quietly home--by bus, by car--and the din of clinking flatware against white porcelain plates plays like distant hands on ivory keys in Carnegie. Walking along 82nd, the squeaking friction between a wine glass and the terry cloth drying it is louder than your footsteps while the old man holding both these items stares at you through his thick glasses from his fourth floor apartment and you think that it's nice he doesn't live any higher than the fourth floor if he absolutely must live in a ritzy apartment on the Upper West Side and that you have maybe seen him on the subway with a camel-colored briefcase and you know there's only the one wine glass and that he has dined alone.
When the weather cools down, the leaves change color--setting the city afire in oranges and golds. And you love that even after months of becoming a jaded New Yorker, the sight of the Chrysler Building's triangulated, impossible tip first buzzing and then bursting into light like an inverted firecracker against a dark canvas sky still takes your breath away.
There's a lot wrong with New York, but the real problem is that there's too many things right with it. You can't always love it, but you can't leave it either. If you do, you can hear the chk-chk, chk-chk of the subway, the clacking of stilettos against pavement, the honking of taxis and the fizzing, crackling electricity of the city as it turns on its lights. It's too much to bear and you know you'll be back.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Another Homecoming
Thursday, December 7, 2006
A Christmas Struggle
The copy I had seemed old to me, which made it special. Its cover was hard and big--I couldn't cover it with both my hands spread on its surface. Like most kids, the idea of this man who lived forever and just made presents all year consumed me. It made sense that he existed. Who wouldn't love just giving gifts for a living and having an army of elves and cavalary of reindeer at your disposal?
But how was Santa the one who got the gig? Had nobody been giving gifts before then? Did Santa start Christmas? No, the baby Jesus did. I had that book, too. Even at this young of an age, the basic commercial and spiritual clash of Christmas was baffling me.
'That's tacky,' my mom said when the apartment across the street from our house put up a 'Happy X-Mas' light-up sign. I asked why and she explained that the 'X' took all the nice things out of Christmas--that it made Christmas all about buying stuff and not about being with family and friends. 'Why bother putting up the sign if it doesn't even spell the whole word out? It's missing the real message.'
So I would return to my studies, poring over the famous Christmas Eve text, looking for clues. After my mom shut the door, I'd pick the book back up from its spot on my bookshelf and, unable to read the majority of the words, I would stare at the pictures. There had to be something I was missing, and once I found it, the whole Santa-Jesus-Christmas thing would become clear to me. Instead, the pictures--out of the context of the story itself--became more confusing.
Most confusing was the last picture in the book. Santa had finished his big night--the gifts delivered, the cookies eaten, the milk drank. But here on the last page, without any words to explain, was Santa--lying out in the sun, stretched onto a beach chair with sunscreen slathered thick and white on his nose. He was holding a drink with a little umbrella in it like the ones that I could get at TGIFriday's with my soda if I asked the waiter nicely. He was on vacation.
A slew of questions arose: Did he stop at home or did he leave the reindeer on their own to get back to the Pole? Where's his suit and does he always wear yellow swim trunks when not in his suit? Where's Mrs. Claus? Does she get a vacation, or do she and the elves slave over the next year's toys beginning on December 26th without any help from Santa? When does his vacation end, does it last a week or until December 23rd of the next year?
After a year, I got tired of trying to figure it out. I had learned to read almost all of the words in the book, I had stared at the pictures for hours on end, and nothing was becoming more clear. Santa, I guessed, would remain a mystery.
Perhaps driving this Christmas quest was my personal relationship with Jesus. I don't, however, mean 'personal relationship' in the way that a Catholic grandmother might mean it.
I really mean 'relationship,' to the point where at age four, I had a crush on the Biblical figure and wanted him to be my boyfriend. (Note: Jesus not always this air-blown.) Of all my imaginary playmates ("Charlaines" my five-dollar pink bear bought at KB Toys, Barbie, Grover from Sesame Street, and Elmo too--until I found out he was a 'he' and not a 'she' and I felt terribly cheated), Jesus was my favorite. He was the most real and the nicest.My friendship with Jesus came crashing down around me my last year in preschool. On a sticky August afternoon, Jesus and I were playing outside under my favorite tree in my backyard. My dad had made the swing--a totally, utterly rough tree swing with rope that would give even the toughest sailors callouses and a flat, hard, butt-numbing board for a seat. I loved it. So on this afternoon, I--willing to be a good friend and share--was pushing Jesus on the swing since it was His turn. Then, something happened. It might have been because I hadn't been spending much time lately looking at the illustrations in my Mom's childhood Bible, or maybe because I had waited so long before I did share the swing with Him, or maybe I was just pushing too hard... But suddenly, unexpected, Jesus flew back much farther than expected and I was hit in the face.
I fell onto my back, knocking my head on the ground. Worst of all was my chin--scraped by either His foot or the butt-numbing swing itself. I ran inside, crying and confused. While I sat in her lap, my mom put Neosporin, gauze and medical tape on my chin and I explained to her what had happened. Through my tears, I made a vow. I was done playing with Jesus.
It wasn't that I didn't believe in Jesus, I concluded, I just wasn't friends with Him anymore. I went back to studying my 'Twas the Night text. Sadly, Santa still wasn't providing explanations or answers as he smiled over his tropical drink. Even more devastating was when, clued in by context about a month after my break-up with Jesus, I found out that Santa was not real.
The details of this horrible revelation I do not remember. According to my mom, I asked for the truth in the car while on an errand drive with her. I asked timidly and in a way that my Mom took to mean that I had figured it all out, and even if she couldn't pull over on Ohio Route 42 to talk about it, she should be honest with me then and there. After she said that I was right, Santa didn't exist, she tried to explain that the spirit of Santa Claus was a real thing while I cried over my second loss. I've done a pretty great job totally repressing this memory. I do remember, however, that afterward I put the 'Twas book on the shelf indefinitely, deciding I was too old for Santa, and feeling more confused than ever about what Christmas really meant.
Things have changed in the last eighteen years. I no longer resent Santa for not being real and I'm not grudging on Jesus for that scrape he gave me on the swing. I don't keep a copy of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas nor of The Holy Bible bedside. I don't believe in Santa, and I'm pretty sure Jesus was an okay guy, but not the son of God or anything.
Some children in France are taught that Santa
was I'm not sure at which point Nicholas went from being Saint to being Santa and moved from France to the North Pole, but I'm okay with this story. Granted, it's bloody and dated (from the 1500s actually), but in it, Santa and God coexist and fight together in an epic battle of good versus evil. So I may not be sure how commercially and/or spiritually I want to spend my Christmas this year--the ratio of my time spent mall shopping and knelt praying now escapes me--but either way, they both beat the third alternative--spending seven years salty and in pieces at the bottom of a barrel. And I suppose that's a good reason to celebrate.
Tuesday, December 5, 2006
Exhausted reflection
I'm not feeling particularly creative or witty in the last few days. This could be for a number of reasons:
1.) I took the LSAT on Saturday and am still slowly returning to the state of a normally-functioning human being. More on that later.
2.) This is my last week at work, and I'm depleted. Yoga is just wearing me down right now, and we all know that's not what is supposed to happen.
3.) It's cold.
4.) I don't have any sweet-looking outfits that put sass in my... well... writing.
In case you're just joining us, I've been in New York for six months now. Correction: Six months as of Saturday. I arrived to Harlem, New York on Saturday, June 10, 2006 where I spent the next three months working at TOH at T. I then moved at the end of August to Brooklyn where I have lived for the next three months and worked at YL at R. I will leave very close to exactly six months later, on Tuesday, December 12th--two days after my 22nd birthday.
While I very much hated this city for the first month or so, I've learned that I love it. My time in New York has been less of just a job stint in the city and more of a study abroad experience. This may be a little saccharine and expected, but I really do think I've matured a lot in my time here. I've discovered a lot about what I love about writing, what I hate about magazines, and who I am in general. I've also become something of a New Yorker--albeit, a New Yorker who loves Chicago more...maybe.
Strangely enough, as much about New York still remains a mystery to me (Alphabet City, Williamsburg, Queens...), I still feel like I know more about NYC than I do about Chicago. And I also hate to admit it, but I have grown to love the interconnected incestuousness of New York, complemented by all of its social circle websites that list where the latest art gallery openings and open bars are. I'm still on newsletter mailings for Chicago stuff, but when I receive the Trib's Metromix in my inbox, I roll my eyes because it's yet another week of "Best Bartender" or "Your Pics," and not the everchanging social scene of New York.
Now, I'm not complaining about my social life in Chicago versus my social life in New York (okay, maybe a little), but the vastness of New York eventually got to me. Granted, it took moving to the baby-infested borough of Brooklyn to do that. (Goddamn, I just love their rosy little faces.)
However, I've just come to realize that maybe I won't just be a Chicago bum all my life, moving from the Andersonville/Southport to Near North/Lincoln Park to the 'burbs, as I've always thought would happen. Maybe other things lie before me. And I guess that's pretty cool.
Monday, December 4, 2006
From Brian Doyle's The Hummingbird, to be published next year
Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladores, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.
Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant's fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.
Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles -- anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures more than any other living creature. It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.
The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It's as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest mammal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.
Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.
So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Intolerable Pretense, or How I Learned to Love the Soybean
My favorite thing about working at a company like R. is the absolutely-positively-necessary pretense of being one of those healthily-anorexic (I eat a meal a day!), caffeine-free, vegan-only, marathon-running do-gooders. For the first two weeks I worked here, I skipped lunch because no one left their desks between noon and two o'clock to eat anything. Were the Sunchips in the kitchen really enough? I wondered. It turns out they were (if you had like four bags a day), but then at week 3, I retaliated and started frequenting my beloved 39th Street Au Bon Pain again. God love those chocolate-covered macaroons.
As if the bare-bones organic kitchen were not a fun place already, it only gets better when visiting advertisers meet with the publishing staff. Platters of lunches briefly grace the soy-laden fridge--delicious cheese and (red!) meat-filled lunches, succulent chocolate-covered strawberry lunches, mouth-watering cookie and fudge-toffee lunches. When the leftovers hit the kitchen counter (and let's face it, nobody's eating at these meetings anyway, so these platters are usually still stacked with mountains cheddar), word spreads quietly and quickly, like mono in high school. Within moments, the goods are gone. Disappointed, emaciated women in skinny, fair-trade jeans wander the halls, knowing that if their cubicles were only a couple yards closer to the kitchen, they too would have had a square of cheese or almond cookie.
I once walked into the R. kitchen to find two women standing awkwardly, looking confused and as if their kitchen had somehow changed in ways incomprehensible to them. That's when I saw it--two twenty-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola. They weren't even Diet! There they were, two veritably, sugarily, 180-calorie proof bottles of the pure stuff, black and bubbly. The women stared.
'Where do you think it came from?' the first one asked.
'I've never seen something like that here before,' responded the second.
The first woman picked one of the bottles up and turned it around, making sure it really was what she thought. Apparently she figured it out because she put it down quickly and stepped away as if it were a caffeinated bomb, ready to go off if you held it for too long.
'Well, that's strange,' she concluded.
I grabbed a cookie and trotted back to my cubicle, realizing half-way back that I had forgotten to grab a fresh bottle of Poland Spring. When I returned to the kitchen, the Cokes were gone, and so were the women.
More embarassing still is when the ad and pub execs don't have the decency to stash the leftovers in a discrete place and instead leave them sitting in an open conference room. (Let me quickly add that these conference rooms are without walls and tout big glass windows on all sides in some bizarre Brady-Bunch's-vision-of-the-future design that I'm sure looked good fifteen years ago.) So, all of us on the outside can clearly see that mound of macademia nuts and fudge on display, just beyond the museum-like glass walls.
And that's how R. reduces grown men and women to children with their noses pressed against the window, mouths watering and hearts breaking. Red-faced, editors young and old quickly shuffle into the empty conference room, grab a cookie and run out with their heads down. Yes, I did see you, and no, I won't tell anyone.
Perhaps R. is just trying to compensate for the unhealthy habits of other publishing companies where the caffeinated dregs of coffee are happily slurped and extra-buttery popcorn happily jumps about in a running microwave while an editor munches on Doritos. After all, these were the companies of men who ordered their 3 o'clock scotch and sodas on Fridays from the beverage cart as it tooled around the cubes and whose ordered lunches were Salisbury steaks and not edamame. Then again, R. isn't the company selling off chunks of their properties so maybe they've got a good thing going. Either way, I'll be the intern hawking the kitchen until the next meeting is done.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Another Angry New Yorker
New York anger has surpassed all bounds which I once previously thought existed. Granted, I've become quite the angry New Yorker, but I would have never expected what happened to me on Sunday to happen.
After a stress-riddled weekend, I--believe it or not--looked forward to taking yet another practice LSAT on Sunday evening to cap off my weekend. Unfortunately, because Kaplan is a bunch of half-asses, their Brooklyn center is in The Middle of Nowhere, Coney Island. This meant finding a convenient way of getting there with time to spare. Too bad this is New York.
I called my car service--Arecibo in Brooklyn--at 3:45 PM to get to my 4:30 PM test. "Ten minutes tops," they told me. I waited.
4 o'clock rolled around, then 4:05. I started to anxiously watch my one-block street, jumping every time I heard a car coming down the road and then sadly plopping back down in front of the window to wait more. I tried to call Arecibo to make sure I wasn't forgotten, but no surprise--their line was busy.
This is always a bad sign as it means that not only is there someone already ordering a car and on the line, but at least a dozen other people are listening to the same bad Spanish elevator music as you. Finally, at 4:20 PM, I got someone on the line and griped, 'THERE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A CAR HERE 25 MINUTES AGO.' 'Yes, one minute,' the same monotone dude who always answers the phone said.
Yeah, about five minutes later, a beige van pulls up. At this point, I have five minutes to get to the godforsaken tip of Brooklyn (a 15 minute car ride at its shortest). I've neglected to mention why this test was so important. Let me tangentially tirade on another topic, Kaplan.
I signed up for this LSAT course, knowing I'd be on my TM, knowing I wouldn't necessarily have a big social life (I was wrong about that), and knowing (maybe) that I want to, at some point in the next five years, apply for law school. Why NOT do it now that I'm working a day job that's only an internship, right?
Unfortunately for me, the problems with Kaplan started right away. I signed up for an eight-week course that was cancelled and had to switch into a six-week class instead. My next big disappointment came when I realized that my teacher--Marion--didn't know how to teach. Aside from her poor communication skills (something I thought you needed as a lawyer), she cancelled classes, randomly, and rescheduled them for inconvenient times like Sundays at 9 am.
Then, after ten of our thirteen sessions, Marion decided to quit and didn't offer up an explanation for her sudden departure.
Nick, my new teacher, introduced himself and realized quite quickly that our class had become remedial thanks Marion's efforts. We did some crash-course catch-up when Nick taught us, and many of us realized we hadn't even received all of the benefits of Kaplan we're supposed to.
For example, practice test scores have yet to be posted. Our finished homework doesn't show online. Marion wouldn't bring back explanations of tests. Then, after one class with Nick--our "new teacher", another new kid who looks like he may or may not be seventeen showed up to teach us and introduced himself as our "new teacher."
My Kaplan experience has been so terrible that I've decided to take their "Higher Score Guarantee" and take the course again in the winter in Evanston and then take the LSAT again after that. I'm pretty much convinced I suck at the LSAT and that my mediocre instruction had something to do with it. In the meantime, I'm doing all I can to catch up to where I should be AND doing all of my homework required to cash in on my "Higher Score Guarantee."
Which takes me back to this Sunday afternoon, where I absolutely needed to attend this test in order to get my guarantee and if I did not get there in time for it to be proctored, I would not get to take it, would not get a score for it, and thus, would not be allowed to either get a refund or more classes.
So there I am on Sunday afternoon, oscillating between cursing the driver, his company and the traffic under my breath and practicing yoga-meditation techniques to calm myself down. This, I can assure you, is counterproductive. As I begin to feel less worried (I had called Kaplan and they said I'd have until 4:45 to get there to take the test), my driver misses the turn and plunges bumper first into worse traffic. I'm irate and quietly keeping it to myself. I will not, I vow, pay this guy. And I will never, ever, ever take Arecibo fucking Car Service again.
Another tanget--if you're not familiar with car services in the greater New York metropolitan area, there are two kinds of car service--the good kind and the bad kind. The good kind usually is a little bit expensive and will get you places on time. The bad kind doesn't always get you places on time, but it is cheaper and I always call the shots with how much I pay them. I do not, for example, ask, 'How much will that be?' I learned this after my first experience where I got charged twice the price for a ride. Since then, I've made Arecibo pay for their erring ways and give the drivers what they get. I tip really well when drivers are 1) Nice, 2) Don't swerve at other cars and/or pedestrians, 3) Don't play Hispa-rap super-fucking loud, 4) Don't drive patched-together ghetto vans with stickers all over the windshield to the point where you can't see out of it.
So as we pull up to the KAPLAN Center at 4:50, I ask my driver (who had been listening to Ricky Martin the WHOLE DAMN ride) if he has a ten.
'Why?' he asks.
I only have a twenty, I tell him.
'THIS,' he says, 'is a FIFTEEN dollar ride, MISS.'
Yeah, I say, and I am MORE than TWENTY minutes late because you and your company didn't get me here on time.
'I,' he says, 'am ONLY a driver.' (Here, I see his point, but all these drivers have two things in common: 1) They suck, 2) They work for the same company. So, no deal.)
And? I ask him, You are the driver and you also got lost and you're making me more late for something I don't have time to miss.
'It's fifteen dollars and I'm just a driver, MISS,' he repeats snottily.
Well, I can give you ten or I can get out of the car and never use your service again, I say. (Now, in the moment, I knew haggling for five dollars is not a huge deal, but was more concerned about getting to my test than anything and was not willing to give up even a buck to someone who had made me more than a half hour late.)
'NO,' he said, picking up his little radio as if he's going to tattle on me to HQ.
Well, I'm never calling your service again, I say and move to open the sliding van door.
As I start to step out of the van, Mr. Crazy-Ricky-Martin-Lovin'-Motherfucker starts TO DRIVE THE VAN!!
Here I am--half-out the van and it's moving! Cars honk and he swerves me toward the next parked car. I throw myself out and as the momentum of the stopping van thrusts forward, the van door SLIDES SHUT ON MY ARM.
'Are you crazy, MISS?' he yells at me.
Am I crazy!? I half-gasp back. YOU just drove with me OUT OF THE CAR.
At this point, I settled on the idea of either reporting him or suing his ass and threw him the twenty and yelled, GIVE ME FIVE AND EXPECT TO BE REPORTED. I HOPE THAT'S WORTH FIVE DOLLARS TO YOU!
I ran into the Kaplan test, where I took my test, totally frazzled, and shook out of anger the entire three and a half hours.
---
When I related this story to my mom, she said it's not worth haggling and "engaging with strangers." Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that's just how New York works. I love my mom, but Duluth, Minnesota and hell, even Chicago, pales in comparison to the seething, dirty anger of New Yorkers.
I saw a middle-aged woman claw a teenager in the face just the other day in Grand Central as the teenager pulled the woman's hair. Somehow, as I passed the two women, I figured the middle-aged woman was justified in her anger even if not her actions. The teenager looked like a touristy yip-yap type that says 'crunchy' and likes Ricky Martin. She maybe even drives a beige van for Arecibo Car Service.
Friday, November 17, 2006
New York = New Angry
Hey Dude With the Cellphone Camera!
Do you think I didn't see you take that picture of me, you creepy motherfucker? Aside from the fact that you weren't even slick about your dirty-perv ways, you also bumped into someone after taking it. At least watch where you're going, smut-face. We don't want your fucking perv germs rubbing off on us. The subway is bad enough.
Here's a tip, you fucking novice. Next time, don't stare back and forth from the screen of the camera to me while you try to frame the shot right. This is perversion, not art. Don't waste your time on aesthetics. Also, turn the sound effect off your cameraphone. The chk-chkahh! of your fancy ass phone's "shutter" is something of a giveaway. Get a clue, cleverless cockface.
Oh, and if it looks like I'm reaching for my bag in your picture, it's only because you barely escaped a macing followed by a middle finger through your eye. Take that and get off on it. Twat.
Saturday, October 14, 2006
That time I broke my back in half dancing and slamming into people harder than ever before
Here are the first five fist-pumping minutes of the Basement Jaxx show I saw at Webster Hall on Wednesday. Simply put, my life will never be the same. (Also, at 3 minutes and 40 seconds, she is so pointing at me.)
Just a few thoughts:
I hate Stephen King's self-promoting, pretentious writing. Shoot me in the face before you tell me what a fucking metaphor is, freaky bastard.
Friday nights in cleaning an apartment really are not so bad. They're kind of gratifying.
I strangely am not broken up over being on TM and not in EV-IL. What does this mean? Why am I becoming seduced by New York? That bitch.
Today I saw this crazy dude walking the tunnel between the BDFV and 7 stations at 42nd St./Bryant Park. He was playing with those Rennaissance juggling sticks as he walked, taking up too much space. From a distance I spied two other crazy people--an old guy in a 65-year-old ladies' running jacket and his super-plump wife who was wearing reflective sunglasses, tight-ass black leggings and a huge fanny pack. Much to my delight, the crazy couple knew the crazy dude and exclaimed, "Hey, Sticks!" And my day was made by Sticks and his friends.
I like reading again. Thank God.
I have gotten thrifty in New York. Minus the drinking and going out. That's never thrifty. But today I bought probably $70 worth of beauty products for $13. I bought almost a dozen books and two records for $7 two weeks ago. And tomorrow I may or may not attend a set-up-a-booth-and-trade-stuff-for-free-that-you-don't-want-anymore fest. Awesome.
Oh, and Amy's visiting this weekend. I may or may not rub shoulders with the bridal fashion industry. Sweet?
Saturday, October 7, 2006
Crispy MTA Monkey Faces
LL Cool J was in my office this morning. Although I did not speak with him, I did get to listen in on his meeting with about 25 R employees as he confirmed that he not only still exists, but apparently is writing books for R.
Also: Does the fact that I heard LL Cool J say "crispy" as an adjective when the only other time I've heard that phrase was from some 16-year-old girls in La Guardia legitimize the girls' saying it, or demonstrate how lame LL really is? Thoughts?
Finally, meditations on New York subway twats:
How is it that if I harrass an MTA employee, I could spend up to seven years in jail, but it's okay for MTA employees to make monkey-jerk faces at me?
Granted, this mocking doesn't happen all the time, but it's happened enough for me to be pissed.
It started this summer on one occassion when I ran for the B train at 116th. I swiped my card as the doors began to close and hurled myself toward the first car. I met the eyes of the conductor who stared me down as I went face-first into the closed doors. I stepped back and he continued to stare at me, dead-eyed and unforgiving. Like that, he started the B back up and took off toward 110th, making me ten minutes late for work.
Then there was the time at 15th Street/Prospect Park while I waited for a Manhattan-bound F. While I leaned against a pole toward the middle of the platform, a Coney Island-bound F pulled into the station. Already feeling irked and personally affronted by the arrival of this beach-bound fun train, I glanced over at the conductor in the sixth car to direct my anger toward the individual driving this enemy train. To my horror, he gave me the overly-exaggerated Up-And-Down and then grinned toothlessly at me. I cursed myself for having spent time on my make-up that morning and skulked behind the pole to avoid his gaze. Unfortunately, I couldn't hide my whole self behind the pole and as the conductor from Oogling Hell set his train in motion once more, he leered at me the whole way out of the station, head hanging out of the window and tongue lolling out of his mouth like some rabid dog.
So that's why this morning I was wholly prepared to flick off the next MTA employee who crossed the line. This time, it was at Broadway/Lafayette--again on the F train, which is apparently a haven for sex offenders and lunatics. I had put down my book once the train had crossed into Manhattan, having had my morning's fill of contrived John Grisham drivel. Staring out the window and preparing myself for the upcoming eight hours of cubicle-bound boredom, I tried to think positively about my morning. I wasn't running late today; My mom's blazer from the 80s looks great with these red patent leather mary-janes; my benchmate was not holding a Smirnoff this morning nor was he passing out on me. Things were generally going well. Until I looked up into the face of an MTA employee who, quite literally, pressed his face up against the window, crossed his eyes and made a monkey-face at me. A veritable, ugly-ass monkey-face--one I had not seen the likes of since second grade when the facial expression fell out of fashion. I was torn out of my blissful, half-awake morning state. I should say something! Get up and give the MTA Monkey a piece of my mind. Dammit, I will not take it anymore!
As usual, I spent the duration of the "Doors Open" plotting so desperately that by the time I had resolved on placing a choicely-worded complaint (the civil-minded New Yorker thing to do), the doors were closing and we were on our way to West 4th. That's fine. When I see a Monkey Face next time, I will remember it, and justice will be mine.