In a few days, I will have an entirely different life

I miss my blog too, when I don't post. It's my very own internet diary.

Thursday or Friday: Drunken end-of-semester farewells in the dorm include an impromptu turn naming as many African countries as you can in three minutes (on pen and paper, each to his own). Oddly enough, all three of us came up with 24. I thought I had 25, but I named the same country twice, once under the colonial name.

Saturday: Brunch at a South African place in Fort Greene. I read James Michener's The Covenant in grade 9 in Belgium. I finally know how to pronounce bobotie.

Sunday: The nearly yearly ritual of sorting through everything I own - that is, my life - determining what is significant, what is worth remembering, what I will look at again, what heuristic ornaments I do and do not need. Programs from the Rockettes: out. Ticket stub from the ESB: in.

Linguistic irony strikes again

Busboy: ¿Es terminado?
Me: Yeah, you can take that.
Busboy: Gracias.
Me: Thank you.
Busboy: ¿Fue bueno?
Me: Yes, it was.
Busboy: [taking glass] Una mas?
Me: No, I'm done thanks.
Busboy: ¿Habla usted español?
Me: Me? No...

Get out your, um, calculators...

And sort this puzzle out for me, before I get kicked out of residence in five days.

I need an apartment, but I have to avoid:
a) brokerage fees (which are somewhere in the order of 10% of your rent for a year, that is, thousands of dollars)
b) the kind of place that wants first and last months' rent and a damage deposit up front (that is, thousands of dollars)
c) a scary neighbourhood
d) living with a pervert or an actor
e) paying more than, say, $1000 for a room [note: incompatible with mandate (c)]
f) living in Coney Island, or Queens, or Jersey City, or anywhere else that none of my friends will ever want to take four trains to come and see me (also: where I will have to take four trains home from the LES when I am drunk) [note: incompatible with mandate (e)]
g) paying to subscribe to a listing service (and so instead having to use craigslist to find the place) [note: incompatible with mandate (d)]
h) nah, fuck it - I'm not even going to list cockroaches.

Forecast: descriptive language

Yesterday I kept picturing that wonderful sensory overload of being on a tropical beach at night, pitch black, ears filled with the crashing waves, contact humidity on every inch of your skin, breathing in that soup. It's like you expect the ocean to be switched off and put away at night and someone left it on, in the dark - isn't that dangerous? - and you expect the air to have a chill but every molecule of it is still densely warm. And by "you" I obviously at this point mean a girl raised on the prairies/mountains.

So today New York was that kind of hot and humid. Well, close. It was nice.

Exeunt

Um, hi. Blog's gone dark, I know. Times are not good; everyone's stressed, everyone's sick, everyone's swimming in the whorls of mental instability that we academics like to masochistically impose upon ourselves every four months. It radiates out from work to time to people to life to health to self. I keep busy staring at the various aporias that every aspect of my life has resolved into: I need to be both here and there. I need to be both with and without him/her/them/that. I need to keep my schedule clear for academic work, which I won't be able to sustain without instead filling it with paid work.

And so, I present to you this commemorative shot I grabbed of the Empire State Building decapitated...



And a decapitated shot of my own, since I look good on Taz coffee and American Spirits.

A trio of star-crossed tourists take their seats

Went to the ballet with some friends from elementary school (I know, right!). With a few glitches: I barely made it uptown by our agreed-upon time, then waited 30 mins with no sign of them, until the ushers stopped letting people through the doors. By the time I got off the subway back at home, there was a frustrated message on my cell: they were lost, about 90 blocks off target in fact, having been misdirected by the concierge of their hotel. 65th and Broadway, not 65 Broadway. WhoTF doesn't know where the ballet is, anyway? (I'm looking at the concierge.) Same place where the Met opera and the Philharmonic and Juliard are. Lincoln Center.

Anyway, they were actually only about 4 blocks from my house, oddly enough. I quickly got us on the train and to the theatre just in time for the start of the second act of Romeo and Juliet. We were way up high, but I loved the 6-storey interior drop to the orchestra pit. I also really enjoyed the show even though the Times had panned it; I don't go to the ballet often enough to not just enjoy it when I'm there. There seemed to be a lot of sympathetic sniffling in the audience, too - but that could have been because of the outrageous pollen levels in the air right now. Even I feel like I have allergies.

(By the way, apparently it's a good thing we went on Wednesday 'cuz on Tuesday Bill Clinton was there along with the rest of the NY leet, and I would have felt even more out of place with my nap breath and wrinkled cords. LA DE DAH.)

Then I took the gals 50 more blocks uptown to Le Monde because god help me if I was gonna set foot in Times Square, where their hotel was, for that post-performance drink. We gossiped and ate, it was good. Turns out everyone we went to school with can now be exhaustively summed up as some concatenation of: doctor/lawyer/married/gay.