Saturday night in NYC

Going out on a Saturday night feels like punishment - surrounded by NYU students, the bridge and tunnel crew, fratboy traders and other nine-to-fivers, bad dates, etc. Who wants to share the bar/restaurant/sidewalk with that? Plus, the subway only runs once an hour (and it's skipping your stop).

On the other hand, staying in on a Saturday night feels like punishment. Like you're the last human on earth without friends, like you're under house arrest, like you're fifteen and grounded. Four hours of watching bad tv and reading failblog (cuz god knows you're not going to get any work done - it's Saturday, ffs!).

The only solution is to go to someone else's house and drink their booze and eat their food. And perhaps settle the Kant vs. Hegel debate with finger puppets.

Why is there a tupperware container full of homemade meatballs on 13th street?

You mean you don't know?

I hate that chick

That chick on her iPhone, blithely unaware of her surroundings. The one with the heavy bangs, wearing rubber boots and a kaffiya (nailed it, congratulations, that is exactly what you are supposed to wear "this season"*). She's at most twenty years old, but I'm sure she has some fabulous connected internship somewhere, which she either gets paid obscenely well for, or not at all (whatever, at any rate she lives off her parents' dole). That chick doesn't even need to have disdain for you - whence would anything of the sort arise in her financially lubricated glide through the city and through life. There are WAY too many of that chick in New York. Ugh, and why is she always in line at Starbucks in front of me?

*I think I got that right. Did I get that right?

SMS Highlight Reel, vol. 24: Interrupted text messages saved to drafts folder

Something about the crying and the a

Lol. Seriously are you just sitting

Cuz I'm not there. If I were there, they'd be about someone else.

Well I'd let you but you've gotta

And even though you said that I will meet you for a glass of wine somewhere in the proximity of Union Square

A bathtub and a fireplace

A bathtub and a fireplace are the holy grails of New York apartment living. Ironically, my apartment used to have both, which I found out when I went to the Tenement Museum, since it gives tours of an old, derelict tenement on the Lower East Side, which happens to be identical in blueprint to mine. The apartments used to be railroad style (one room is reached through the other, without a hallway), with a fireplace in the front bedroom, a bathtub and a fireplace in the kitchen, followed by a back bedroom with no window. There were two shared toilets per floor. That my apartment used to be set up in this way was confirmed for me by a neighbour on the first floor who has lived here for ages; she knew the "nice old Polish lady" who used to live in my place when it was rent-controlled at $95.86 a month, and still had the bathtub in the kitchen. "I remember when your apartment was being renovated," she says. I can still see the remnants for myself - the two drywalled outcroppings on my wall hiding fireplaces, the window onto nothing where the hall toilet used to be.