I bet there would be brie with almonds

On the weekend, all the trains are diverted away from Lower Manhattan, I know not why. Of course, taking the diverted train over the Manhattan bridge at sunset is not a bad thing. Neither is walking home from Canal, on account of which you will run into a crowd of black cowboys from New Jersey (I know this because there were several horse trailers with Garden State plates and the guys had printed shirts that read: "Cowboy"). But my fave was the 50-something couple from Staten Island who had come into the city to shop and were trying to figure out how to get back to the ferry terminal (recall: no trains). Because Staten Island is this great, great irony - a NY borough but totally parochial. They were both so New York and suburban, middle class, boring. I really want to go to their house for dinner.

Went and saw a musical

I've been a tourist my own city for the past few days since some out-of-towners are here. I went and saw my first Broadway musical. It was at the Eugene O'Neill theatre. It was called Spring Awakening. It was not so good, but I like to leave the house, and... tick.

I also have to say I liked walking through Times Square, because in my overly urbanized and sardonic life I forget that things like TGIFriday's and fat midwestern suburban families exist and it's nice to be reminded.

The triangle above and to the left of me

In a city this dense, moving (eventually) just a few blocks west of where I used to live actually significantly changes my neighbourhood and day-to-day. Jubilee is farther away, so I go to Gristedes in Battery Park City, which I think is supposed to be kind of yuppie and upscale, but is dirty and annoyingly overpriced. Sometimes I take advantage of Jubilee's free delivery, but usually I feel too guilty making some guy ride over here on his bike to bring me cigarettes and a carton of organic milk.

Also, I now live just a few steps from Tribeca. I guess I did before, but I didn't really explore it much, because it was west of my path uptown, and whenever I did happen to stumble through it, it seemed kind of deserted. Now I've realized that it's cunningly that way - the streets are very quiet, but around every corner there is a fantastic dimly-lit bistro or wine bar or cucina with, nowadays, a spill of tables outside. No wonder the celebs hang out there.

Last night I went to one of those unassuming places and hung out with some lawyers - by coincidence the only non-grad student type I ever associate with here. Probably everybody around us was somebody, but what do I know. We drank wine and tequila until they put all the chairs up and turned the lights on and swept us out the door.

Mermaid Parade

Once a year at Coney Island. I was too busy sitting on a kerb eating a soft-shell crab sandwich and garlic fries to muscle my way to a good view - you know how my version of tourism is to eat my way through something - but I did see the porn star mermaid float and the Mayor of Brooklyn float and the goth mermaids and the Uncle Sam and I won't even mention how wonderfully queer it all was. Travelling in a big group meant spending a lot of time trying to hook up with each other after someone would go to get a hot dog and go missing for an hour, until eventually Suz and I decided to hit the boardwalk and the beach. I didn't have my suit but I put my feet in the water and my feet on the sand - you know how that's 80% of the beach experience for an urbanite anyway - and some guy came by selling cheap Coronas and I basked in the company of some of the people whose invitations I had been turning down for a month in favour of moving. Then I took a sunned-out, head-lolling, open-mouthed nap home on the F train. There is a fab, fab, hot, sandy beach a subway ride away. Shit.

Dead zone to the world's largest urban oil spill, return

Temporary crash pad neighbour-hood was the site of the largest urban oil spill - six million gallons more oil than the Exxon Valdez. Now moving back to the Financial District, this time even closer to Ground Zero. Because I would rather breathe my environmental toxins than drink them. Well, if it's on the 2/3 and the 4/5!

Craigslist, you are mean to me.

I don't know if I've mentioned this part yet, but I did spend $200 on a couch and futon and then $150 moving them (and my boxes) only to give the furniture away on Craigslist. Met the people outside the bug apartment today and watched them haul the futons off. I had no place to put them, of course, and just needed to be rid of them asap, so as to bear as little responsibility as possible for that place, get out sooner rather than later, justify not paying any of that rent. Also had pulled my stuff out of storage two already-paid weeks early. Which will be ironic if I end up living in the Financial Distict again - where they were stored - since that is where rents seem to be cheapest.

Sitting outside near the projects (which I did, for two hours, waiting for these furniture pirates to show up) is kind of nice. All the middle-aged Spanish women say hi because they don't know who you are yet. Cutest, though, was a four-year-old girl walking with her dad, who asked him "Do you like that girl, daddy?" To which he said, "No, I like your mama. I ain't allowed to like any other girls." "What's her name?" "I don't know her name! I don't want to know her name. You want mama to beat daddy up?"

Then got home to find a fly infestation in the crash pad. Infestation. Lord of the flies. Eventually, 100 of them dancing in the see-thru dustbuster, since, pace the honey/vinegar apothegm, apparently there is no better way to catch a fly. Had to unpack and repack each one of my boxes, terrified that a sticky little sac of maggots had crept in there during their four-day sojourn at the bug apartment.

It's been a great ride, folks.

P.S. NY real estate continues to kick my ass. You can't even live on top of three other people for less than $1000 a month. Not even in Brooklyn. You wouldn't believe the shitholes. You wouldn't believe the prices. The terms and conditions. The asshole brokers. "$1295 Studio in the East Village. [And by that we mean $1900 studio in the East 90s.] 28 square feet. Gut renovated. ***A REAL GEM!!! TONS OF SUNLIGHT*** through the sole window in the bathroom. Fee: 86%. Bring fourteen paystubs and proof of a diversified investment portfolio. ***WON'T LAST!!!***" The jackass roommates. "Show up between 3:55 and 4:00 pm on Friday for the open house. Vie with 50 others for a chance to live on our ugly furniture and share our idea of hygiene. Also, bring first, last, second last, and fifth months' rent. And a security deposit. 123 4th Street, just sixteen blocks off the L in East East East Williamsburg."

Krolewskie Jadlo

The other day in the Polish restaurant, I got a Polish menu instead of an English one (btw, you have to go to this place - two mediaeval knights' armour suits standing guard outside the door and $8.00 for plate with pierogies, kielbassa, cabbage rolls and potato pancakes, with beet salad, cabbage salad and two cold water pickles). And today in the grocery store a woman started trying to ask me about the price of garlic in Polish. Oh, and when I went to the bakery the woman tried to serve me in Polish.

I mean, sure I *am* Polish - in that Western Ukraine sort of way - but come on now. Am I that moon-faced? Am I that cankled?

P.S. If that seems evil, I just found their website for this pic, and the front page includes the line "I have always dreamt about opening a real polish restaurant, a restaurant that Polish people would not be ashamed of..."

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.

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.

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.

SMS highlight reel, vol. 2

Whoa, wait a minute. What is becoming of that pie?

This place is the bomb bomb bomb Holy shitness

Yo, that sucks. Btw, G train is running screwy

I just got out of jail.

Ew. I think I just finished my Gadamer paper...

Oddly mesmerizing, sleep inducing

Omg im drunk in long island.

Wanna do easter?!

Well, it's a very hip hipster queer bar in wilsbrg.

Drop that deuce yet?!

Hey babe. Drunk. Miss u. How u doin? Prob asleep.

I don't have any memory of like the last hour of the party AND i threw up IN BED (also dont remember that).

Shit girl lets ride.

Look left

I think i'm straight-up gay. Blink 3 times if you can hear me.

Give me 5 mins to finish this cereal

[]

Today like yesterday, like many days, I confine myself to bed to get reading done. And the combination of Levinas, Spinoza, Gadamer, and the greasy internet machine makes every hour identical, and makes them tick past like minutes. What happens with a total lack of structure, I think.

My neighbourhood, like all neighbourhoods, has a soundtrack. And there is a high degree of temporal organization to it. Trinity Church sounds out the quarter turns; the guts of the building being renovated next door are hauled away at both 6 am and pm; the 2/3 passes underground every couple of minutes. You'd think that the subway noise especially would have become invisible to my consciousness by now, but the opposite is happening. Because I can picture what it's like to stand on the local platform and recoil to an express train screeching and shuddering by, every time I hear the train below me now my brain magnifies the sound to that level. I stop reading. I stop typing. I wait for it to pass.

my future ex-husbands The Slackers

There aren't really any words for this past Saturday night in Red Hook, as friend and I discovered while we were there. We barely even know each other, but a coincidence of hometowns and teenage years spent at ska shows allowed for a moment - nostalgia but not repetition, happiness but non self-aware. We exited the cab, waltzed past the line up with our pre-paid tickets, bought a draft, commandeered the men's restroom with two other gals when we realized the line for the women's wasn't moving, then sidled up to stage left just in time for a clear view of the perfect two-hour set. We communicated only in raised eyebrows, every half hour or so, the in-betweens spent dancing? drinking? watching? Must have been, but all I remember is Glen Pine having his way with that trombone, and Marcus Geard beaming because he loves what he does, and Vic Ruggiero talking in that unapologetic Brooklyn accent about the scene "in heah", and about spending the last ten years angry over what we're doing to each other and the planet... then accepting that we'll go out in some kind of blaze of glory, but here is this. He'll be playing. And hopefully, Glen Pine will be smashing my headboard.

Easter

I ate Easter twice yesterday, first brunch at Ulysses in the Financial District, where your $20 includes a bloody mary or mimosa, coffee, and as many trips to the bacon, french toast, custom omelette, croissants, cakes, fresh fruit and cream, smoked salmon and raw oysters as you can fit in.

Then we kicked it in Bushwick, which I have mentioned many times before is the hispanic neighbourhood where they hate you white people, and with good reason because your presence means their rent is about to triple, and had ham and scalloped potatoes and salad and hard boiled eggs. Now, when a pulsing blast of Spanish music goes driving by on the street outside, guess what kind of car that is. Nova? Souped-up Civic? No, fool it's an Astro minivan. You know, cuz you can fit your whole crew in there. And you can get them at auction for like, $800.

Then we sat around and used Google Maps to show each other where we lost our respective virginities. New party game!

Dobry

Yesterday I was in Greenpoint, which is a neighbourhood that is 75% Polish and 60% Hispanic, so it makes sense that I got cat-called in Polish by a Hispanic guy.

And by "drugs" I mean extra-strength Gravol

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?"

Two New York things I did this weekend

And it's still the weekend, cuz it's President's Day. (Buy a mattress.)

1) Went to PS1, which is a branch of the MoMA out in Long Island City, Queens. It's in an old public school, obviously, and a bit edgier than the MoMA, a bit less ikea. My faves were an installation piece where you and another person climbed up tall ladders and poked your head through a just-big-enough hole in the ceiling (I won't tell you what you saw), and a blurry, foggy b&w photograph of a house that seemed to come in and out of focus as you looked at it.

2) Finally had an egg cream. It was seltzer and chocolate and something dairy. This was at Eisenberg's, which is a very old, long and narrow Noo Yawk diner. Food was great. Stools and bar were great. Cheeky Mexican cooks were great.

PoMo in SoHo

Last night I went to a reading of a play - Jean Anouilh's verson of the Greek tragedy Antigone - by a small group of young actors in the very early stages of putting together a production. It took place after hours at a place called Manhattan Bistro in SoHo, what neighbourhood I rarely venture to since I'm more of an Anarchist Forum Meeting on the Lower East Side New Yorker than a shoe-shopping between cocktails one.

The reading was green, enjoyable, overwrought, endearing, uncomfortable, all of the above.

Add:
a) Antigone being paged on the intercom/phone from the kitchen mid-scene.*
b) A young woman in the audience periodically leaving her barstool to sob loudly outside the restroom.*
c) Creon competing to be heard over the owner and a manager, who are arguing heatedly about unexplained suppliers' bills.
d) Another woman in the audience snickering, heckling, guffawing, suggesting throughout much of the second act.*

So here's the question. Which one was the real play, people? Oooooooo....

*Note: everyone in New York is an actor.

Le weekend

Friday was a dinner party with real grown-ups, Saturday was a couple of houseparties, Sunday was a potluck on the Upper West Side - first time I've been to that particular part of town. It was in a fabulous apartment: high ceilings with curved mouldings, hardwood floors, big dining room, doorman, rooftop view of the midtown skyline across the park (the picture is of another view from the roof)... How do you get an apartment like that? Someone dies. No really - this was inherited. Har har. The crowd was slightly more diverse than I usually hang around with: a chef, a few DJs, a clothing designer. I am moving up.

P.S. You know how when you grow up in Calgary you know, like, one Jew? It's the reverse here. And it's me.

Staten Island

Friend and I went to Staten Island on Saturday, since that is a borough we hadn't yet seen, and because we both appreciate the need for random adventuring, and because we heard you can get $2 beers on the (free) ferry. It was windy and cold and hilly and very suburban but scummy at the same time. We stopped locals on the street to ask them where we should go if we wanted to see or eat something, and they all said, "Back to Manhattan." Friend says that we should give Staten Island to New Jersey, in exchange for the Nets.

We did find a great thrift store - the kind with items that you will clutch as you fall to the floor, laughing so hard you're trying not to pee. For example, friend found a tie-dyed, zodiac-themed Long Beach shirt - wider than it was long - to wear to the two houseparties in Brooklyn that night.