Yesterday I went here

It's a factory in the neighbourhood that makes all the lox you see in the grocery stores. Acme. On Friday mornings (that seems right in the Polish neighbourhood, huh?), they sell direct off the line to walk-in customers. The woman who helped us kept generously slicing off and handing us samples with her wet, fishy rubber gloves. You actually can tell the difference between the wild and the farmed. When it came time to buy, she cut us off a half-pound sized chunk like we asked, then threw the other half in for us as well.

Look, the NYTimes made a video about the place.

NY things you thought only existed as story devices in movies, vol. 1

Fleet Week!



Also: thought those uniforms only existed in gay 1940s Broadway musicals.

The conversation going on outside my window right now

[All shouted, between a guy on a cherry picker, and his buddy working at the base of the street light]

"You don’t even know how to read the fucking meter, bra!"

"I know how to read the fucking meter, moron! It’s the leads that are the problem!"

"The meter’s not the problem! You don’t know what you’re fucking doing down there!"

"I said the leads are the fucking problem!"

Yeah, don't

Don't go for beers with your ex-roommate in the East Village, even if it is sunny out and you can sit on a patio, before going to pallots, because all you'll want to do is lay back on that mat and exhale, and not do the part where you inhale and do the hundred.

Ever more subway stories

So the other day, I'm waiting on the platform for the L train, and it isn't even that late at night (10ish), and there aren't a lot of people around cuz a train just went by, and this woman my age is drinking a big bottle of Yoohoo. On my other side, this other young woman my age suddenly takes two steps towards the platform and projectile vomits some brown liquid that looks exactly like Yoohoo. Straight outta the Exorcist, my friends. A solid stream five foot arc onto the tracks. I turn away and look back at the first woman, who kind of smirks and then takes another huge sip of her drink.

The other other day, I'm sitting on the G train, and this woman turns on her 8-year-old daughter and SMACKS SMACKS SMACKS SMACKS her square in the face. Then buries her own face in her hands and cries. Her daughter is totally cowed, looks around embarrassed, shifts over a seat. The mom glares at her as though her daughter has hurt her feelings, and poutily moves over a seat towards her.

Sto*rage*ies

Living out of a suitcase is its own kind of pleasure, but even funner (read: more fun) is when all of your other belongings are neither ready-to-hand nor present-to-hand, because they are in a storage locker in Lower Manhattan. So yesterday when I secured a job interview 4:30pm, for a 10:30am time slot the following morning, and the apocalypse was going down outside (blackened skies, ripping wind, pouring rain), all I had to do was buy a new umbrella, take the subway to City Hall, walk eight blocks, swipe my card at Manhattan Mini Storage, take the elevator to the fourth floor, find the movable staircase, manoeuvre it over to my aisle, climb up there, unlock my locker, drag the ironing board and clothes rack and other odds and ends off my big tupperware bin with all the clothes in it, unseal the bin, root through it for my suit jacket and nice pants, close it up again, re-shift everything again and unseal my shoes & coats box, dig through it for some black dress shoes, close it back up again, repack my storage locker, then carry my dress clothes around in a duffel bag on the subway for the rest of the evening as I went to meet a friend.

By the way, those guys that sell knock-off stuff on Fulton from off a queen-sized bedsheet? They keep their stuff at Manhattan Mini Storage.

Moving

See, I meant to blog this story, but I ended up telling it to a couple of people already, and now I feel redundant blogging it. Even though I only told it to two people, and a good 7 read this blog. I keep this blog so I don't have to talk to anyone. Individually, like. But then it kind of undermines me when I get home and people say "SO TELL ME A NEW YORK STORY" and I don't know whether they are one of the 7 people who read my blog, where anything remotely interesting that happens to me is reposited, and I would feel like an ass telling the same mediocre (non)story twice, and so I just stare at them.

Yesterday I moved out of the dorm. Yep, I am no longer a Financial Districtite, which is really weird, since I lost my bed and roommates and living space and grocery store and neighbours and street and subway stop and zip code all at once. I moved my stuff into the storage space a ten-minute walk away. I had a hell of a time getting a cab to take it all there. After being turned down a few times, one guy spelled it out for me:

[thick NY accent] "Look lady, it's a $2 fare, and I have to do all the heavy lifting. Forget it."

I wasn't letting this guy go - he had a minivan. So I bribed him with a $20 tip. Isn't that cool and spontaneous of me to make a side deal with the cabbie like that? I am proud of myself.

So that was a long effing day. I had to lug my giant suitase and a couple of bags across the East River on the subway. People kept offering to help, but I turned them all down. And now I am squatting someplace temporarily, before going someplace temporarily-permanently. By some confluence of parental aid and being in the right place at the right time, I actually am getting MY VERY OWN APARTMENT, four subway stops from school. This is a New York miracle. Oh man. Sometimes it all works out.