Went out tonight with some friends, Lower East Side, drunk drunk drunk, etc. Friend with the drugs tells us about the trouble he almost got into in getting them. He's from out of town - living in L.A. - and so had to call an unfamiliar pager number, and knew he wasn't going to recognize the deliverer. Apparently it's not a good idea, even in broad daylight, to stand on a streetcorner in the Bronx and say "You looking for me? You looking for me?"
Three weeks of chain smoking and chain coffee drinking and shitty sleep and foregone trips and now, the tide has turned, friends. Yesterday was presentation day, and I really rocked it. Compliments left and right. Then I got a latté and wandered around Central Park in the late afternoon sun. I could never get tired of the perspective offered by the high-rise art deco buildings backdropping the green landscape. Plus, it smells good.
Before I moved to New York, I asked anyone I ran into who had lived here - because this was my main concern about housing - whether they thought I would have to deal with rats where I lived. Rats or cockroaches. I figured there weren't any in those pre-war apartments on the Upper 
East Side, but in a student dorm downtown, you know, I thought it might be an issue. So I would ask this, and they would always laugh and condescend and say, "You're so cute." And I would say, "No really, I'm honestly asking, because I don't know." And they would laugh again and smile and pat me on the head. And I would say "So will I?" And they would say "I dunno."
Well, the other day I watched a gaggle of my male neighbours in the dorm try to catch a rat (probably just a mouse, actually), with, let's see, there was a broom, a tupperware container, some books, a bottle of whiskey... They eventually got a sheet of that mousetrap sticky paper, and the next morning found the ratmouse on it. The sticky paper doesn't kill it, of course, just traps it. None of them wanted to kill it, so eventually one of them just threw it out the window.
I remember working this hard. Well, not so much that, but working this hard and feeling shitty about it. That was last summer, when I was teaching formal logic every morning at 9 am. I hated waking up to the alarm, I hated finding new things to wear, I hated that I never had the discipline to leave the house early enough to walk, I hated the fact that the hour and ten minute lecture on a subject I felt insecure about at the time was only the very beginning of a long work day devoted to it - grading and website maintenance and constructing assignments and responding to emails and most of all, writing more lectures. Also kind of a shitty, stressful time in my life anyway.
And what made it bearable was a geniune partner in crime - one who worked even harder than I did at a much more stressful job. Almost every day at 4:30 we'd meet in the river valley, drink a few beers, smoke a joint, and take our hacks on the par 3.
Sigh.
P.S. I hope I don't get you fired.
Tonight I gave a hobo in the ATM vestibule some change and he threw it back at me, yelling "What will this get me? Fucking candy?" So I picked it up again and went and bought myself a latté and some tomato bocconcini salad.
Friend nannies for some screwy rich people in the West Village. Both parents are home all day, mind you, but they'd rather pay someone else $15 an hour to raise their kids.
Last week the mom's parents were coming over to see their grandkids, so the mom preemptively cleared out of the house. Yup. While the grandparents were visiting, they chatted my friend up, like you do, about where she's from and such, as the kids played happily in the back yard and the house gleamed from my friend having cleaned it top to bottom earlier that day, until the dad pulled my friend aside and told her she was not paid to socialize. And then, because he can't stand the grandparents anymore than his wife can, he sent my friend out to have dinner with them and the kids.
When the grandparents left, they cordially shook their son-in-law's hand and gave my friend a big hug goodbye. Aw.
