"Get your free Daily News!"

Or today: "Get your free goddam daily news!" Yeah, that's got to be one of the worst jobs, handing stuff out on the street.

Being poor

I've eaten for free every day this week. Leftovers from meetings and student events, vegan activists dishing out fake meat entrees, a disgruntled cashier who refuses to charge customers at the end of his shift. I've scoped it all out.

Bitches, look at what I am having for lunch today.

Lobster sandwich, crab bisque, prime rib on foccacia, waffle chips with chipotle mayonnaise, eggplant couscous, berry tartlets, chocolate truffles.

I know, shut up

My furniture arrived, and some of it was wrong, and I signed the waybill and tipped the bitchy delivery anyway because I am a suck. And my friend came over and helped me put it together and she laughed continuously at how ugly it is. Haha, okay that's kind of funny. Fuck.

Let's see... I'll call this one The unfamiliar familiarity of the quotidian

Every morning I buy coffee from this coffee truck near work, and the guy who runs it pretends to remember me. I figure it's an overenthusiasm he thinks is good for business, but he always gets my order wrong, and we have the same conversation every day (he's from Egypt; he got here only 7 months ago; he doesn't work weekends; he's looking for a girlfriend). Today he was away from his truck, talking to hotdog man across the street. He saw me from across 5th avenue, and yelled in recognition, "You want coffee?" And then he dodged through four lanes of cabs to make it back to his truck to pour me some, and got it right. Danger. Aw.

q w e r t and sometimes y

My friend Eric and I have discussed this: the only way to write a blog, one other people can read, and not die of exposure is to never say anything in it. And this is a guy who gets naked in public regularly.

Hence why I don't blog when things happen, because I have to find something else to talk about. Which begs the question why I blog at all, I guess, and the answer, besides the redoubled voyeurism, the narcissistic attention-seeking (no one has a blog and doesn't track visits to it), etc., is because it provides a little trail of breadcrumbs for my life. All those little evasions are great mnemonics.

That's a picture of my filthy keyboard at work.

Giuliani

People here hate Giuliani. I cannot overstate this. I didn't know that before I moved here, so I'm filling you Canadians in.

Take today. Sitting in the ER at St. Vincent's hospital, filling out someone else's forms I brought in but barely know because she's near-unconscious (it occurs to me that I have done this exact thing before with three different people), chatting with the little old lady ER docent, who a propos of nothing (well, the election) gets onto this tirade about him. She even repeatedly called him "evil". "Huh. Can I put a work address for this? So what was so evil about
him?" "Well you know he refused to meet with Virginia Fields, the borough president, because she was black, but even before it came out that he was a racist just the audacity that he would run for president..."

Food, flora, etc.

So the poverty. Yeah. Always looking to score free food. Jk - I did that when I wasn't poor. Anyway, Union Square is a good place to try. Always granola bars and cans of iced tea and random calories like that. But the other day, it was flowers. While friend and I sat on the steps and cried about boys, this kid came up and asked us if we wanted a flower. I accepted; friend declined but asked why they were handing them out. "Because it's cool."

And I carried that gerbera all over town and then home in a plastic bag, crushed between my new frying pan and air mattress, then abandoned it all Thursday night while partying at a friend's, then finally placed it in a cup of water on Friday. Five days later it's still looking good.

Apartment: decorated.