Patron saint of riding the subway drunk, midafternoon

Facebook strikes again - this time a 12-year reunion with a friend from high school in Brussels. She's a solicitor now (faithful readers will recognize that this perpetuates my inadvertent trend of only ever hanging out with lawyers), so I made her buy me drinks at the St. Regis hotel. When I arrived she was being hit on by some businessman hotel lothbario, and it occurred to me that I could probably drink $20 cocktails for free every day if I put on some mascara and hiked up to midtown and sat alone at the wood. But then every day I would have to go home and have a four-hour nap. Gawd damn!

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.

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.

131 Rivington

K: This place sort of reminds me of a prison.

M: Yeah, I can see that: white tile, iron bars...

K: ..fluorescent lighting. It's really nice. I can see how a lot of prison romances get started.

Lunch

Katherine and chips and Grace and Marianne and cookies and wine

Katherine is here!

And we are too busy yakking and drinking vinho verde for me to stop and describe it all to you so here is a hobo story:

Today I saw a guy in Union Square station lighting a cigarette, kind of in that surreptitious "I know this is verboten" but "Fuck it, I'm a hobo - the rules don't apply to me" kind of way. But the funny part was, he had this exact folding grocery cart, and in it all he had, way down there at the bottom, was a slice of pizza.

Feng Shui

My daily routine for an interminably long time has been:

Wake up to roommates making oatmeal, sleep, wake up to roommates doing dishes, sleep, wake up again, drag laptop onto bed, read email and celebrity gossip, shower, scrounge for food, watch a few minutes of y&r, train it to school, drink coffee, chat with friends, cig, read philosophy (repeat), train it home, scrounge for dinner, read email, go out, get back, watch movie, sleep.

And every day a fresh layer of philosophy readings, borrowed CDs, coffee napkins, dirty laundry, and metrocards settles on my living space.

But today was different, because Katherine is coming tomorrow. I tidied and dusted and swept and bought groceries, and now it's actually really nice and homey in here. Katherine is going to *love* eating pizza pops and sleeping on my exercize mat under a pile of jackets.

OMG, I am so excited.

Happy Thanksgiving

Well, then. Andrew leaves early early tomorrow a.m. Today we went for Dim Sum again, then wandered deep into Chinatown, into the parts that smell like fish poo, where there are really no round-eyes, to find a candy store that sells sour cherry blasters as well as candied tilapia and preserved Thai lemons, and a grocery store under the Manhattan Bridge – literally built right into its supports so that you can hear the subway go by overhead.

Tonight we had a Canadian Thanksgiving dinner – chicken thighs and Stove Top stuffing and mashed potatoes and packaged gravy and yellow beans. You can do a lot with an electric skillet and a small convection oven. We also had great meals the rest of the weekend. I had so start cooking again after all those restaurant visits when we were camped in the hotel (including a visit to the guacamole truck). Also, it was incredibly nice to come home again. I’m glad we stayed in the hotel for that very reason – to come home again and feel so cosy in this place. My stuff, my bathroom, my kitchen.

I am totally over the fashion thing. I think New York has a way of making you become what you already are. The flipside of the fact that this city is so crowded, and that you never, ever find yourself alone and in private, is that you can do whatever the frickety-frack you want, wherever and whenever you want. It’s fantastic.

Fish poo, then dumplings, then fish poo

Hasn't been much to report over the past few days since Andrew and I were holed up in a hotel and a Starbucks in Grammercy and nothing was happening in my life outside of the pages of the First Critique.



But I simply must post this HI-larious story from Grace:

"Twice in two days I've been stopped on my bike while trying to get to/from school by some random looking people with no apparent authority. They are the film crew for some movie/commercial being shot at 10th and Lafayette. They step right in front of you and start saying, "ma'am, stop, ma'am, this will just take two minutes, you cannot ride through until we're finished the shot ma'am." The first time I ignored the guy, he grabbed my handle bars and insisted that I stop, and the cops came over to ask the same thing (hmm, NYPD working for Hollywood??). Okay, so I waited impatiently, cause I thought it was lame and I was late for class. So, tonight after class, I was riding home and the exact same thing happened, only this time, there were more of us being held up. More complaints, delivery guys trying to get through, women on their cell phones with important places to be; we were all being contained by these two production assistants who were literally pleading with us to stop. So we all did (about 9 of us). Then this homeless guy wanders up, wearing a dirty old "I heart NY" t-shirt and tries to walk right past the assistants, who try to stop him by explaining that it would only be a minute. The homeless guy--and this is the punch line, finally-- said, "I don't have time for this," and marched right past the two, into the street where they were filming, and all we heard was the director guy yell, "CUT!" as he threw up his hands and everyone moved into the street. It
was great. The homeless guy led us all to freedom.

Then I rode through China town which smelled like rotten fish poo and then really good steamed dumplings. And then poo again."

New York is for lovers

Having a wonderful, wonderful time with Andrew here. He arrived after much organi- zational debacle at 2:00 am, so our first date was at a 24 hour Ukrainian diner (I know). The next day we lay low at the dorm, dying my hair and finally leaving the house at sevenish for risotto at my already favourite New York restaurant (fill up on the incredible breadsticks and pinot grigio, pack home the risotto). We followed that up with a few beers in Tribeca, then home.

Saturday we visited the farmer’s market and had brunch with another couple in Brooklyn, on a street that was very reminiscent of 4th avenue in Kitsilano. Then we subwayed back to Manhattan so that I could get my gym membership at the Y (as a student, I get to take advantage of the rock-bottom price of $50 a month) before their no-sign-up-fee promotion ended at 5:00. After that we went to the top of the Empire State Building, which is sort of the worst way of enjoying that particular site, since you are funneled through a lot of ugly, dry-walled, souvenir-laden corridors, masking the art deco sublimity that is the building itself. I know – you go for the view. I actually like the neck-craning view from the ground better. The 86th floor vantage just puts it all in perspective and proportion again, and the city loses its grandiosity.

That evening we wandered into Little Italy and found spaghetti bolognese, and today – having done the requisite East Village/Lower East Side drinking binge and noon sleep-in – we wandered into Chinatown and found dim sum. It’s great being able to do that. Of course, you can’t tell anyone about the fantastic places you find when you didn’t bother to take note of the sign on the door, or even what street you were on at the time.

We also spent a good chunk of the day in Central Park, me reading Kierkegaard, Andrew on my cell phone making hotel reservations, then the two of us wandering for hours on the picturesque walkways, under and over bridges, around ponds. We finally emerged at 78th Street (about 20 blocks north of where we started), and took Madison Avenue towards home. That is where all the obscenely rich people buy obscenely expensive clothing and jewelry and custom made fragrances. We bought two obscenely expensive cappuccinos. It feels like a different city compared to the grunge of downtown. There’s certainly nothing for me to do up there. I’m sure we saw some famous people (we saw enough body guards and limousines), but I was too busy powerwalking to my next meal to take note of who they were.

Post 3: I like the hyphen

Yes, it’s a scandal. I haven’t posted in ages. Most of that has to do with Mom being here, and spending a lot of time haggling for my cargo shipment, which I have finally got a hold of. Apparently it was at Laguardia all along. Hmm.

So last weekend I went to the “Bodies” exhibition at the South Street Seaport (http://www.bodiestheexhibition.com/intro.html). Even more interesting than the genuine human bits was peoples’ reactions to them. Teenaged boys were fascinated by how small a two-month-old fetus is. Women crowded in silent reverence around the cross-section of the female pelvis. Kids started out wide-eyed and grossed out and ended up as bored after half an hour as they are with anything else.

Sunday the gals on our floor of the dorm all went for Dim Sum. We had invited the boys too, but they had assumed that “meet in the lobby at 9:50” meant 9:50 pm – since who in their right mind gets up before noon on a Sunday?

Mom’s visit was great – I got to eat in real restaurants and shop at Bed Bath & Beyond! (And, in a real Manhattan first, got my stuff delivered!) She may or may not be back, since she had to do the entire trip sans luggage (toiletries, change of clothes, pills) – the entire time she was here, her bag was in L.A., presumably having a GREAT time – and I think that may have soured her a bit on the experience.

I finally have a cell phone. I shopped all over town – way more providers here than up North, of course – and couldn’t seem to get around paying an enormous security deposit, seeing as I don’t have a US social security number. I eventually avoided all that by buying a phone and doing the pay-as-you-go thing, which everybody thinks is really weird, seeing as, like, I’m totally going to run out of minutes – NOBODY uses a land line anymore, that is so 90s. Sometimes, especially around quitting time, you find yourself walking through a forest of people talking loudly into the air while wandering down the avenue, each figuring out exactly where their interlocutor is, and what restaurant or watering hole they will be meeting at post-work.

I also now have all of my philosophy books – prices are pretty reasonable when you’re paying the publisher’s set price and not some exhorbitant Canadian markup. It feels good to read grown-up philosophy after a year of teaching 100-level material.

Tomorrow is the big day – the five-year anniversary of 9/11, which happened very nearby to where I now live. Bush was even rumoured to be there at noon today, so I went down to see. Besides the usual crowd of tourists/gawkers/rememberers, there was one lone protester – a guy with a huge banner, screaming about how Bush *planned* the WTC attacks. With a dozen news cameras trained on him, of course. (No sign of Bush - he was inside somewhere.)

The rest of the past week has been filled with bureaucratic misadventures, attending my first classes, visiting Brooklyn (on purpose) and Queens (not) for the first time and getting very, very drunk in the East Village once again – this time with a bunch of lawyers willing to compensate for mine and Grace’s inability to afford drinks. And the drinks – they’re a little pricey, but I tell you, you get your money’s worth. Every one is made with a very long free-pour of premium (and decidedly not watered down) spirits. I had to change my drink from gin & soda because I can’t stomach the taste of several ounces of gin with a thin slice of lime.

And on that note, I will talk to you all later.