Accismus

Two weekends ago, my friend and I were on our way into the city, when we saw lights in the distance from Bedfort Avenue (where we’d been eating Thai food).  We walked down to the lights, and found a fairly large fair!  I’d stumbled on this fair the year before, as well, but hadn’t known what it was.  Apparently, it is the Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel and San Paolino, a 12-day festival that happens every July.  That would explain all the Italians.

Entering the fair...

Crowds at the fair.

A pretty big fair, too - it spread off in all directions.

There was everything you look for in a fair…rides:

This ride spins everyone around very quickly.

…guys grilling meat…

Meat!

…women frying zeppole…

This lady was upset at me for taking her photo.

…patriotic frozen drinks…

Red, white and blotto!

…souvenirs…

Not sure what any of these are.

…tasteful novelty Ts for i bambini….

Pity the poor child.

…games, where you can win a half-dead goldfish in a Ziplock baggie…

Chuck's Live Fish

…firefighters, lest things get out of hand…

In addition to these firefighters, there were many groups of funny cops standing around, but they told me that if I took their picture, they would confiscate my camera.

…and garbage, without great piles of which no street fair in July in NYC would be complete…

Smells better than the zeppole!

…and finally, bizarre religious iconography!!

Giant, garish, totem-pole-like thing.

Man in a boat. (Don't be immature.)

Now, according to this video that my roommate found on Gothamist, these two religious icons are stars in a ceremony, in which they are lifted by gangs of fellows and danced toward each other, to the tunes of the Rocky soundtrack.  Please watch the video – it is something else.  Unfortunately, we did not witness this spectacle.

After exploring the street fair, we went out a-drinking in the East Village, after which we thought it would be good to get Pommes Frites.  Apparently, everyone else thought so, too.

Mmmm...Belgian fries up ahead.

We couldn’t find a handy stoop to eat them on, but luckily the nearby Max Brenner’s was closed, and someone had left some of the tables out!  We spread out our fare and felt very clever.

Sidewalk dining at 3:00a.m.! No wait.

The next night, I went to see Jigsaw Soul, a local band that always provides a giant, multi-media performance experience.

Jigsaw Soul

The audience.

The Jigsaw Soul dancers.

Shadow visuals.

Choreographed keg cup stacking.

One of several giant papier-mache bird heads.

More visuals.

After the show, we were famished.  Time for shawarma and falafel!

Mmmm, gyro-loaf!

After that, it began pouring, so we went over to Washington Square Park to watch the band and friends play dodgeball in the fountain.

Rainy Washington Square Park.

Hipster swimming pool.

It's all fun and games till someone loses a contact.

The next day, I was pretty tired.  I went for a long, lazy Sunday walk, over the nearly deserted Williamsburg bridge.

Bike and pedestrian lane.

After that, I ate a massive cup of ice cream, but I did not choose to document that with photographic evidence.  A pretty good weekend, overall.

Today in the park, I saw a pigeon spot a Ritz cracker lying in the middle of the path. This was a big, fat glossy pigeon, and he began pecking at the cracker. Presently, a smaller, darker pigeon ran up and tried to get a peck in. Pigeon A attacked Pigeon B with a flurry of feathers and they went beak-to-beak. Pigeon A won, and went back to pecking at the cracker. Another small black pigeon ran up, and there was another fight, with Pigeon A winning. After that, Pigeons B and C lurked around the cracker waiting for an opening while Pigeon A strutted in tight, little circles around the cracker’s perimeter, puffing out his chest and making proclamations. Eventually, he went back to pecking at the cracker, and before long, his beak speared it. He shook his head from side to side to dislodge the cracker, and it flew off some distance. The pigeon looked for it anxiously, as did Pigeons B and C.

At this point, a baby ran down the sidewalk, scattering the pigeons. The baby found some object wrapped in foil and put it in his mouth. I looked around for someone to intervene, and saw the baby’s mother running over. She chased the baby off down the sidewalk, yelling something in Polish that was probably, ‘Spit it out right now!’ Meanwhile, the fat pigeon found the cracker again, and was fighting over it with the two smaller pigeons. He sunk his beak into one of the smaller pigeon’s wingpit, and the bitten pigeon squawked and shimmied sideways, flapping its wing wildly against the fat pigeon’s head. Right that this moment, a tiny brown sparrow swooped between the fighting pigeons and the third pigeon who was hunkering to make another break at the cracker, snatched up the cracker in its beak and attempted to fly off. You could just tell how smart it thought it was by the set of its tailfeathers in flight. Unfortunately, the cracker was too big for it to fly with in a balanced way, and it was forced to land several times to rearrange its grip – the three outraged pigeons giving full, waddling chase. Finally, the sparrow managed to get the cracker to the grass, where it nestled down and became camouflaged. The pigeons went all over the place looking for it, and it worked at the cracker as quickly as it could.

I wish that was the end of it, but at some point when I wasn’t looking, the fat pigeon got the cracker back. The sparrow flew off like a shot, and there was the fat pigeon, puffing and proclaiming and strutting in tight little circles in the grass, while all manner of other pigeons made runs at the cracker. The pigeon kept battering everyone who got near, then took hasty pecks at the cracker, leaving off in time to attack each new intruder – he would even take on three adversaries at once.

I hate that Pigeon A won in the end. He was one fat, shiny, self-congratulatory, greedy, entitled jerkface, and as I sat watching him guard his meal, I wished harm upon him.

In New York, personal space is always at a premium. Until very recently, Greenpoint was an oasis for those who need their breathing room: conveniently adjacent to the non-stop party that is Williamsburg, Greenpoint was a less crowded, less expensive hood for those who prefer to have their fun and then go home. Unfortunately, it seems the hipsters have gotten hip, and with each passing year, there’s a little less room in Greenpoint.

If you’re willing to go a bit out of your way, however, there are a few places that seem to have escaped the influx.

It’s brunch on a Sunday, and Brooklyn Label and the Park Luncheonette have lines out the door. But there’s another option that always has seating. Head North on Manhattan Ave. all the way to Huron St. and have juevos rancheros or a breakfast burrito at chef-to-stalk Cody Utzman’s Mexican street food restaurant, Papacitos. Delicious brunch for under $10 (and great veg options), friendly service, and – now that it’s summer – the long picnic tables in the breezy garden can accommodate all your friends at once.

After brunch, it’s time to do some shopping. Don’t feel like strolling Franklin Ave’s boutiques with the Vans-shod masses? Just steps from Papacitos, check out The Thing, an old school thrift store that’s as packed with stuff as Bburg’s Junk, but not packed with patrons – possibly because the place is a dusty mess and the owners are cranky. But the basement is a sight to behold, crammed with thousands upon thousands of used LPs. If you’ve got money left, head South on Manhattan Ave. Weirdly, Fred Flare chose to open their first ever brick-and-mortar store at the random out-of-the-way corner of Meserole and Leonard. The store’s adorable, and the merch is cuter. But best of all, you and your pals will likely have the run of the place.

Shopping not enough cardio to work off your brunch, but don’t want to crowd into the Sunday afternoon Greenpoint YMCA sweat-fest? Try Otom Gym, a block away on Calyer. Cheaper than the Y (a recent summer special is around $40/month) and less crowded, but you will have to ignore the exaggerated grunts of the weightlifting, musclebound men who make up the majority of the clientele. For a peaceful (and free) workout, you can always go for a run in the park. If it’s nice out, McCarren Park is sure to be carpeted in sunbathers, but shady, smaller Monsignor McGolrick Park, East of McGuinness between Huron and Driggs is always quiet. There are more trees in McGolrick, a small dog run and a playground, as well as a sheltered pavilion and several interesting sculptures — check out the weird squirrel statutes on either side of the West gate, that appear ready to pounce.

Just West of McGorlick on Nassau is Brooklyn Standard Deli, Cody Utzman’s brand new organic mini-mart. In an area saturated with Polish delis, Utzman’s store is a Godsend for foodies, with locally sourced and organic goods at corner store prices, and sandwiches and prepared meals, plus Stumptown coffee, homebaked goods and a juicebar. The focus here is on vegan and vegetarian fare (though meat options are also available). All this, and more elbow room than The Garden.

But if you’re craving Polish (and in Greenpoint, who wouldn’t be?), but Old Poland and Lomzynianka are packed, check out Antek Restaurant on Norman, across from the library. This bare bones Polish cafeteria has no English postings alongside the Polish menu, but here’s a hint: there are English take-out menus on the counter. The dishes are huge, tasty and dirt cheap – like a hearty white borscht with a mound of mashed potatoes for $2.50 – and there’s plenty of seating where you can chill and watch Polish TV.

For dessert, skip the perennially packed Peter Pan donuts, and head North on Manhattan to the charming Cafe Riviera, where mammoth, flaky croissants and fruit-and-cheese-filled danish the size of hubcaps are on offer for only $1.50, and cafe au lait in a pretty glass mug is $.50. The seating is limited, the line is often long, but most people get their treats to go. If you do snag one of the marble-topped cafe tables, it’s a pleasant place to watch the foot traffic down Manhattan.

When it comes time to hit the Greenpoint night life, stay well clear of the drunken scenesters at Enid’s and Matchless. Rather, head up North on Manhattan to The Hideaway, a hunting-lodge-inspired bar with yummy cocktails and bar food, nightly specials and episodes of Planet Earth on the overhead TVs. The Hideaway is cozy, but there’s always an open table, and the patrons are more into conversing with each other than striking poses at the bar.

Don’t stay out too late, though – if you’re like everyone else in Brooklyn, you’ve got a long day of freelance work ahead of you! When it comes time to pay the bills, there are a number of places to squat in Greenpoint. Cafe Grumpy and Greenpoint Coffee House are well-known haunts for laptop-toters, but try Eat on Meserole at Leonard. This tiny coffeeshop-slash-record store has great ambiance and no customers. Be forewarned:  they’ve recently gotten rid of the wireless and ask that you not bring laptops – but hey, going offline can really increase your productivity!  Plus, unlike Grumpy, Eat has a delicious full menu. By your third visit, you’ll be besties with the staff.

To get to Greenpoint, take the G to Greenpoint or Nassau. (Or skip the crowded platform and lengthy wait at Courthouse Square, and stroll over the Pulaski Bridge instead!)

Listen up, New Yorkers who live in high-rise apartment buildings: just because you cannot see into the windows of surrounding buildings does not mean that you are not lit up like Christmas to people across the way. If you do exercise videos in the buff toward the back of your apartment…oh, man, can I still see you. Without even trying. In fact, it’s very hard not to see you. And I’m sure other people can see you, too, and are probably not as polite about looking away as I am.

Seriously, last night, as I was looking at this woman (and trying to stop looking at her), a naked old man totally ran back and forth in the apartment under hers. I am not even joking, I swear. What is with these people? Being filthy rich and having an enormous apartment in Soho must make you want to turn on all the lights and pace nakedly back and forth before the windows. How can they not realize they’re visible? I’m never leaving any curtains open ever again.

My last year in Chicago, I lived in a fourth-floor studio with big windows facing out over a parking lot, which was ringed by distant apartment buildings. I couldn’t directly see any other people in their apartments, and so I breezily concluded that no one could see me, and lived for a year without curtains. I now wonder how many of my activities ended up photographed and posted on the internet.

I have become more conscious of curtains lately, as there is currently a giant gang of men working construction in my backyard, and continually bringing buckets of rubble up from under the house, right in front of my street-level windows. From what I can tell, the crew consists of a pair of Hispanic men, exactly the same height, one with facial hair and one without, who both wear hoodies and are involved in a continual fireman’s ladder of excavating rubble buckets from whatever is going on in the backyard, and one gangly, furious-looking Polish man who stands around smoking and glaring at the other two. Plus, my landlord, who shows up from time to time to conduct an endless lecture in deafening, emphatic Polish. I’m frankly at a loss to imagine what he could find to discuss at such length. I’ve never talked so much at a stretch in my life, and he ,shows up to orate at least twice a day. So, that’s the entire cast of characters as I’ve spotted them, but it sounds like there must be at least fifteen additional people working back there. I can’t tell for sure, because shortly after all this work began, the back door into our garden apartment (and our main source of natural light) was nailed shut from the outside and then covered over in thick black plastic, momentarily confusing me one morning into thinking I’d slept straight through the day. So whatever’s going on back there is a mystery to me.

Every time I enter or exit my apartment, the workers stop whatever they are doing (emerging with a bucket from just under my bedroom, or standing atop the enormous economy-size dumpster that’s been permanently installed in the street outside my window) and stare at me until I’ve passed. It’s really uncomfortable, and my initial impulse was to ignore them steadily, but that was uncomfortable as well, because I was forced to do so multiple times a day. And I felt like a bitch, since they are working on my apartment. So, at one point, as I passed one of the twins (the one with the facial hair), I said hello.

‘Heeeyyy, babyyy,’ he replied. Fine. Bitchface and steady refusal of eye contact it is, then.

Given this environment, I’m newly interested in the opacity of my curtains. When I lived in the back of the apartment, I had no curtains at all for the better part of a year. Then, summer came, and there were boys in the next yard. I bought a $.99 shower curtain, and then realized it was transparent, so I bought another one, and between the two of them, I felt fairly private. Then, I moved to the front of the apartment, with windows right on the busy sidewalk. I bought some nice curtains this time, and spent a good bit of time with a friend, taking turns with one of us standing on the sidewalk and the other positioning herself directly in front and behind my various lamps, dancing around and removing clothing, and I came away from these experiments fairly confident that my activities weren’t particularly observable from the street.

The other windows in the apartment, however, were not crash-tested. Until the back door was papered over, the guys in the back yard used to watch us as we made coffee in the mornings, as if we were some sort of mildly interesting zoo animals. I don’t miss the company, although I’m sorry for the loss of light. Additionally, there’s a little window in our shower that gives onto the backyard, but it’s frosted and marbled. Still, it’s a little disconcerting to bathe with several men carrying on a conversation just on the other side of the glass. And one of my roommates hung a scrim of washrags over the frosted glass, which immediately made me paranoid that perhaps the window was transparent after all, and I’d given everyone a show with that first morning’s shower.

During the day, I work in a cubicle with giant windows, and the immediate view is of the skyscraper opposite. It is close enough for me to see everyone across working, and even to tell if there is text or pictures on their computer screens. I sit with my back to the windows, though, and occasionally I forget that I don’t really have any privacy, especially after dark. I have yet to catch the eye of someone in the building opposite, but I’m conscious of them there behind me, and I’ll often wonder if I’m being watched and turn around to see.

This afternoon, for example, I realized I had a little boogie, and dealt with it in the usual way. But then, I wheeled around guiltily to see if anyone in the building opposite had witnessed this. And directly opposite was a man standing right up in the window, wearing a yarmulke and bowing repeatedly over his little book (the Torah? I don’t know from Judaism). To either side of him, his coworkers worked on, unawares. Now, that’s not particularly embarrassing, but…it’s private, yeah? Later, I turned around again, and he was plastered against the window, staring at me, or someone or something in my building. What do you do if you make eye contact with someone in an opposite building? Do you wave? Or does that puncture the polite fiction that, as we all go on about our private businesses in bright and framing windows, we are unseen?

Sorry for the lack of posts, but I’ve been distracted by my show, followed closely by a sinus cold, followed closely by a 30-day Notice to Vacate from my landlord, followed by an (ongoing) apartment search, and all the while working on my latest screenplay (entitled Dr. Prozac, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love NYC).

I’ll get back to updating soon.  Meanwhile, Happy Halloween, and remember to vote!!

I have mentioned on this blog before that I am a compulsive eater.  One easy way I have found to manage my weight is never to buy and bring home more than I plan to eat at any one sitting.  While this is a more expensive way to eat, it didn’t used to be that unreasonable.  You could generally eat for $5, and there were any number of $.99 snack food items in any drugstore or minimart you happened to pass.

Now, I understand that everything is more expensive now.  I don’t like it, but I am beginning to accept it.  What I don’t understand, however, is why there don’t seem to be single-serve portions of anything anymore anywhere.  I regularly find myself with five minutes to spare before work running into every damn drugstore all up and down the snack aisles, and there are just giant bags of chips, huge cans of nuts, jumbo pouches of trail mix.  What is this?  I don’t want seven servings of a snack.  If I take seven servings of a snack into the office, I will be eating seven servings of a snack.

The only single-serve portions available anywhere now, however, are those 100-calorie pack things, which are just totally worthless.  One hundred calories on an empty stomach just prods it enough to make it furious – you’re better off not eating.  I operate from a continuous base of low-level hunger, and when that hunger kicks from low- into high-level, I want to have just enough food in my purse to knock it back a little.  If I have more than that, I’m going to eat until I’m actually really full, and then I’m going to eat whatever small amount is left after that, because there’s not that much left and I may as well finish it.  And then I’m also still going to eat dinner three hours later anyway, even though I’m totally full, because I was so looking forward to dinner that I can’t bear the disappointment of just going straight from the office to whatever I’m working on that evening without my dinner break.  And there you have it – the Duane Read has just ruined my whole day just because it’s no longer stocking single-serving bags of nuts.

I have this dream that there would be a wonderful grocery store that caters to people like me.  This grocery store would have nothing but inexpensive, single-serving portions of all different kinds of food, and for an added bonus, maybe it could even be healthy food.  And a wide variety.

Well, actually, there is such a place.  It’s called Trader Joe’s, and there’s only one, and if you want to go there, you have to fight your way through a crowd of thousands and wait online for upwards of 45 minutes.  Wouldn’t you think, every other retailer in Manhattan, that, given the immense popularity of TJ’s, there might just be a market there that could stand to be capitalized on???

Single-servings of portable, precooked food items for $5-$6.50 a pop!!  And single-serve snacks for under $2!!!  Available at a great number of convenient locations throughout the five boroughs!!!!

Somebody cater to my specific need, damn it!

–

Oh, and also, if you don’t already read Fafblog, this Sarah Palin post is a great time to start:

As a Jesus-fearing moose-hunting hockey-mom mother of five who hunts moose for Jesus, Sarah Palin is kin to the wild outdoors and appreciates its bountiful splendor as she is gunning it down from her airplane. Sarah Palin understands that America is dangerously addicted to oil, and that the only cure is more oil. . . . Sarah Palin may not know if global warming is man-made. She may not know if global warming is real. She may not know what global warming is. But if global warming is caused by abortions, Sarah Palin will fight it – by banning abortion, just in case the first couple times didn’t take.

Go, read all of it, and then read the entire rest of Fafblog, because it never fails to kick ass.

Most of the time, the way people behave is not particularly mysterious. We might say that it’s mysterious, but what we really mean is that it’s unbelievably inappropriate, self-centered, rude or self-indulgent.

“It’s unbelievable that he would say that to you!”  Such a comment means that we can’t believe an adult would not exercise the appropriate self-restraint not to vent his or her emotions in an inappropriate way, but that doesn’t mean that we completely don’t understand the urge to do so, or how the person arrived at their inappropriate level of rage or indignation, or why they would really want to display it.

I’ve been thinking about which particular human behaviors seem to me to be not just inappropriate or childish, but really entirely inexplicable – that is, where I cannot for the life of me project myself into the frame of mind that causes a person to behave or be such a way.

One behavior I really can’t fathom is walking around with a boombox. This blows my mind. I truly can’t imagine what possible combination of thoughts can lead somebody to carry a battery-operated boombox out of their apartment and onto the sidewalk, select some sort of music that they want to play, and turn it on, crank it up, and point it carefully outward at passers-by. Why is this enjoyable to anybody? Maybe headphones get sweaty or hurt your ears…I can kind of see that. But a boombox is so cumbersome. It seems obvious that these people really are doing this at everyone around them – they want everybody else in addition to them to have to listen to this music. But why? Is it that they think some people might come up and start a conversation with them about it – that they might make a friend? Do they think some women might come over and start to dance? That seems unlikely – surely, no one would really think this, and even if they did, presumably they’ve done this before, and I’m sure that it never inspires any sort of relationship with anyone, so after trying and failing to use the boombox as a conversation starter three or four times, you’d imagine they’d give it up…yet we still see this behavior. Maybe these men are hoping that somebody will start a fight with them about it? That seems a little more likely. But it’s such an odd way to cruise for a fight – in the middle of the day, out in the heat, with a cumbersome piece of equipment.

The only thing that I can think is that it’s a small display of power – you know that nobody else has chosen to listen to music right at that moment, or they would have headphones on. So, you are choosing for them that they will listen to music – loud music, your music – right then, whether they want to or not. You are forcing them to participate with you in music-listening, and in that way, you have made a power grab. You own this part of the street now, because everybody on it is forced into an activity with you, and for whatever reason of social passivity and politeness, it’s hugely unlikely that anybody will bother to confront you about this, so you can assume that they are being obedient to your demands. They will listen to your music now, and they will probably not enjoy it, but they will listen to it anyway. I guess that’s sort of a motive that makes sense…for those with swagger and gold chains. But those are not always the people who carry boomboxes around. Sometimes, but not always.

I started thinking this, for example, because the other day as I was getting on the subway, I saw a guy across the street tune his boombox and carefully position it out. He looked around at everyone in a defiant, yet kind of self-conscious way. He wasn’t really selling it. This was the weirdest thing I’d ever seen. Usually, a sort of crazy, militant guy positively charges along with a boombox on his shoulder and the boombox seems a natural outgrowth of his general aggressiveness. But this guy – this guy was making careful decisions. He looked intimidated by his huge decision to carry a boombox around. So, given that, what on Earth in his mind ever inspired him to take on this challenge? What was the thought process?

“Okay, Ron, you have this boombox and you’re going to take a fifteen-minute walk and play it. Just go out there and play it! Nobody’s judging you. You’ll feel better once you’ve done it. It’s now or never.”

Why? Why ever? What ever for? Why would anyone ever want to walk carefully around a neighborhood with a boombox? What incentive could Ron possibly have had?

I can’t imagine.

__
Incidentally, I know that I’ve been curiously silent lately.  I realize that there’s a convention going on, that there’s a hurricane, that before that there was another convention, and there have been some Olympics, and an invasion of Georgia, and now it’s Labor Day, and through it all, I’ve not been blogging.  You might think I’ve been very busy.  Yep.  You might think that.

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the possibility (distant and remote) of making Manhattan a pedestrian-only borough.  I agree that this should absolutely happen, and that it makes no sense for people to be driving here (spare me the thing about trucks making deliveries – donkeys work well enough for many pedestrian-only villages atop mountains, and anyway, it’s too expensive to buy things in Manhattan and everyone ought to brown-bag from Brooklyn and Jersey and leave the city itself as one big sort of park, with all last-minute food needs being satisfied by cart vendors; not to mention that if the retail stores couldn’t get their shipments in, tourism would decline by half, and it’s not like anything currently for sale in NYC can’t just be bought on Amazon).  And I know a brilliant way to bring this desired goal about immediately, without petitions or government action or any real process at all:

All the people of New York should just start walking in the streets en masse, so that they become utterly untraversable for vehicles.  Bam!  Pedestrian-only borough.   And we’d all have an inch more elbow-room . . . at least until the next yearly influx of 20,000 generic white kids with new BFAs who all just know in their hearts that God intended for them to be a **STAR** arrive, and everybody goes back to stepping on each other’s heels all day.

Last week, I was having lunch in Bryant Park. For those of you who don’t live here, Bryant Park is the large park in the middle of the working week part of town, at the back of the research library. There are several terraces all around the perimeter of a large lawn, and these terraces have a lot of little green, metal tables and folding chairs, and during lunchtime (or just after work) during the week, every single inch of space is occupied with businesspeople eating street meat and soba and pizza slices and overpriced panini, and with tourists licking ice cream cones and pointing their cameras everywhere.

At any rate, I was sitting at a table I’d managed to grab, and I heard a giant, crashing sound. I looked up just in time to see a giant tree branch crashing down from above. A man, woman and young boy scattered as it broke across a garbage can. The boy immediately grabbed his shoulder and opened his mouth in shock, then closed it again. None of this was funny. But what happened next was hilarious.

Immediately, a park security guard came over with a walkie-talkie and three men in plain clothes. They rushed up, faces full of concern, and began to interview everyone at the scene. They examined the pieces of the branch, where they’d broken into bits and fallen to either side of the trashcan. They interviewed everyone at the scene, except for the boy, who was still holding his shoulder and silently opening and closing his mouth like a goldfish. I assume he was trying not to cry (he was about 13). A guy came along with a giant dolly to wheel away the wreckage. Many people who’d been witnesses came up to offer their testimony. The boy’s mother retold the tale over and over, with large, explanatory gestures, and she and the security guard spent much time determining at exactly what point the branch had collided with the trashcan, and scrutinizing the trashcan at the spot in question. A tourist with a digital camera was enlisted to take numerous photographs of the scene. Everybody got on cell phones, and began to explain what had happened to various people who hadn’t been there, but might need to know. Apparently, if a tree falls in Bryant Park, the situation will be handled.

Speaking of interesting things I’ve observed recently, on Saturday, I was walking around Prospect Park, and I found myself behind two women who were swinging a little girl between them. The little girl told one of the women that it was her turn now, and she took the place of the little girl, and leapt into the air, to feign being swinged.

‘Whooo!’ she said. ‘I almost got off the ground there.’

The next day, Sunday, I was walking in the Village, and I passed a little boy and a man, with another man between them, all holding hands. The man leapt into the air, as if being swung by the other man and the boy.

‘Whooo!’ he said. ‘I got a little height there.’

It was weird.

Not too long ago, Slate posted an article on the Anne of Green Gables books. I read all the Anne books when I was a kid, but I don’t remember a whole lot about them. I remember the first one (although I do get it mixed up with the movie, Pollyanna. Wasn’t there also a movie version of Anne? Which one was the one where the girl takes pieces of a chandelier into the room of a bedridden old man? And was there also another movie very similar to Pollyanna that came out around the same time, also possibly with Haley Mills? Was it Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms? And if not, what was Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms? And why is the spellchecker telling me that’s not how you spell Rebecca? Its suggestions for replacements look far weirder. I am SO CONFUSED).

Anyway, the other main thing that I remember from the books is the episode in one of the later ones when Anne is wandering around her college town looking for housing, and she stumbles across this darling, little Victorian gingerbread house in a beautiful area, and she goes up, knocks on the door, utterly charms the two old maids who live there, and some deal is promptly worked out whereby Anne and her roommate can live in this story-book house (which is full furnished and has matching porcelain dogs on either side of the fireplace, which I guess is a…plus?) for little money, and at great satisfaction to everyone involved.

Even as a child, this made an impression on me. “That must be how one finds apartments!” I thought. And you know what’s nuts? That is how I’ve found most of my apartments! I usually go to a nice area, wander around, find a shady street, look for a sign advertising a studio in my price range and buzz the super. Generally, it only takes an afternoon. Until I moved to this freaking city. That’s not how it works here.

I’ve been spending a good bit of time lately wandering around Brooklyn Heights. It’s really nice there, and they have the Promenade, and it’s one of the least crowded areas in New York that I’ve found. And I thought the other day, as I walked through its freaking gorgeous streets – those kind of streets where the buildings all have big sweeping red brick stairs that give broadly onto the sidewalks, and all the trees are huge and green and meet in the middle of the street, and there seems to always be a gentle wind funneling billows of snow-white petals down the blocks, and you feel like you ought to put your arms out to the side and spin, until you realize everyone who lives there is watching to make sure you’re leaving soon – I thought to myself that the future solution to artists and colorful eccentrics being priced out of NYC (a subject that everyone says they’re oh so upset about, although I doubt they’d put their money where their mouths are) is for a family living in one of those homes to provide a room to somebody they find unobjectionable and delightful for a very reasonable rent.

I would be a very good tenant for a nice family. I’m quiet, and clean, and I never have anyone over. The only thing is, I wouldn’t want to get involved on any level with the family. They would have to be willing to maintain a certain degree of impersonal detachment that most people really can’t maintain over a long period. And they’d absolutely have to leave me entirely alone at all times, and not make comments about my peculiar eating habits. And more than that, I have absolutely no idea what the advantage of the arrangement would be to them. They surely wouldn’t need the small rent I would pay. While I could pitch in with housework, and occasionally baby-, pet- and/or house-sit, people that rich could easily hire somebody to do that.

I need to figure out something I can bring to the table.

Last Saturday night, my roommate and I (at our usual level of Saturday-night hedonism) decided to try out the ‘instant watch’ option I’d recently discovered on Netflix. At first, my roommate thought she could hook her laptop up to the television, but the cord turned out to be for her camera only. Then, we thought we could at least watch on her laptop (which is faster than mine). But she has a Mac, and this Netflix option is not available on Macs. Then, we finally decided to just use my laptop, propped up on a stack of old TimeOut New Yorks on the coffee table. After perusing the selection (which is hit-or-miss), we finally decided on Ordinary People. My roommate’s friend really loves this movie, and neither of us had ever seen it. So, we clicked on it!

. . . Only to be told we needed to download some software. Slowly. We went for cake. We came back. The software finally loaded, we shut down, we booted up, we installed, we shut down again, we booted up again…and we pressed play!

. . . And got a message that, due to our internet connection, the movie would take nearly two hours to load.

“You know,” I said at this point. “I’ve never seen Say Anything.”

“Really?” said my roommate. “I have Say Anything!”

“I know!”

So, now I can knock that one off the list.

My mother once said to me that she didn’t understand why all movies and books and plays had to be about terrible things happening to people. I replied that I couldn’t think of a way to tell a story about everything going swimmingly.

I stand corrected. Say Anything is a story about everything going swimmingly. Two hot, nice, well-liked young people meet, go nuts for each other, and everything goes well for them about it. Oh, sure, the girl has the momentary “I’m going to London, we should break up preemptively,” panic, but then she’s all, “Or, why don’t you come with me?!” And there’s the whole thing with the dad, but seriously, what movie watcher is really all that upset about a dad going to jail for white-collar crime when there is hot teen sex to be had? Nobody cares about John Mahoney’s hypocrisy when John Cusack is standing in the rain with a boombox over his head. Especially since the fall-out with dad has no hugely negative effects in the heroine’s life – sure, she’s disillusioned with him (although I must say here that the thin reasoning behind how he rationalized his crime is super belabored – you can practically hear the writers’ gears grinding as they try to find a way to inject some sort of plot-necessary conflict into this movie that won’t put even a slight shadow over all the good-feelingness), but he still loves her and is there ready to resume their relationship whenever she can reconcile herself to his shortcomings, and too – she has a full, merit-based scholarship! So, conveniently, she need not even sweat over whether or not to use Daddy’s ill-gotten gains to fund her already planned-for dreams. She’s her own woman now, with a bonus Cusack along for the ride.

Which is not to say that I didn’t like Say Anything. I did like it – how could you not like it, is my point?

At some point during our Say Anything viewing, Ordinary People finally downloaded, so we started to watch that on my laptop. Ordinary People . . . was very brown. Everything in it was brown, which is typical for movies made during the time period – it was a very brown country around 1980. There was a lot of snow. There was swimming, and a suicidal boy, and Robin Williams was a kind, but no-nonsense therapist, and everything was pretty much Sally Field’s fault, because she was such a cold, self-absorbed bitch for no real reason. And Christina Ricci’s boyfriend got electrocuted, and there was a giant robot bunny that issued proclamations having something to do with string theory, and everybody got new sneakers.

Or something like that. I don’t know. The main thing I know about Ordinary People is that it took us about seven hours to watch it, due to the Netflix “instant” watch feature being (a) a piece of crap and (b) about as “instant” as osso bucco (you like that one? I worked hard on it). Every fifteen minutes, the movie informed us that it would need to spend 30-45 minutes re-downloading itself, to avoid viewing difficulties (by which I can only assume it meant cause viewing difficulties). But we watched it all the way through anyway, because we are ladies who finish what we start. It was the most gruelling Saturday night I’ve had in months.

This past week, I went with some friends to the free showing of Wet Hot American Summer at the McCarren Park Pool. The Pool is a couple blocks from my apartment – it used to be an actual pool, but now it’s a drained pool that’s used for summer concerts and movies, at which times it gets terrifyingly packed with hipsters. This movie was the first one this summer, and I unintentionally went in costume. I had never seen the movie and didn’t know anything about it, but I have in my wardrobe two pairs of shorts: one is a knee-lenth pair of cutoffs, and the other is a pair of red cotton short-shorts with white trim, which I now know are the exact same pair that the gay guy in WHAS wears throughout the movie. It turns out coming in costume to these outdoor movies is encouraged, so I ended up displaying far more enthusiasm than I’m normally comfortable with, completely by accident.

At any rate, movies at McCarren Park Pool are really fun, especially if you get there early enough to put down a blanket and enforce a small zone of personal space around it (which we did). You’re not supposed to bring your own food and beer, but everybody does, so next time, I’m bringing a 40. The other thing I will do differently next time (other than not dress up like a character) is wait afterward until the crowd bottlenecking through the narrow entry gates has disbursed. The crowd inside is not too bothersome, what with the open sky and all, but the rush through the gates was terrifying, and required bodily contact with many strangers dressed for (and all asweat with) the hot summer night. It was a wet hot American stampede (you like that one? I worked hard on it).

At some point in the past week, I also watched Indochine. For the first 2/3 of this movie, all I had to say about it was: ‘a bunch of French people act like assholes in Vietnam. The especially good-looking French people show some small compunction about their bad behavior.’ But then (around the time the daughter shot the guy) the movie got much, much better, and by the end, I’d decided it was a great movie. This had something to do with the perspective of the movie broadening out from being entirely through the perspective of the French, and becoming more objectively about Vietnam itself and the colonization conflict overall.

But, boy, if I’d been the daughter, I’d have totally gone for the revolutionary, enlightened childhood sweetheart who’s all “you and I don’t matter – join the resistance” over the “I’m sort of useless and intermittently cruel and racist, plus I slept with your mother, but man, look at these eyes” French soldier.

On a sidenote, I always take note when theatre people are portrayed as the political underground in movies or plays. This happens a lot, because people who write and do theatre and films really want to write their ilk as hugely politically significant, and while I know that in some situations playwrights are quite influential and active (Prague Spring, early-19th c. Russia), I think that, especially during the red scare, playwrights got way too much credit for their influence on public opinion. Was anybody really ever inclined toward Communism just because Brecht’s plays were oh so thrillingly entertaining? Please. Charlie Chaplin, maybe. Brecht, no. And as for more active forms of subversion, theater people are the most feckless, inactive, self-absorbed people on Earth (I can say it – I kind of am one, albeit in a reluctant, half-assed sort of way). Performers might kick up a stink if they’re censored, but they’re highly unlikely to go around assassinating officials and circulating broadsheets. Because those activities require discretion, and the only thing that theater people want out of life is to be widely and constantly observed. “Underground” is the last place a performer wants to go.

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow:

We are witnessing a globalized political whitewash job, with artists and assorted collectors, dealers, and sycophants pouring a thick layer of avant-garde double-talk over the infernal decade of suffering, destruction, and death that Mao unleashed on his country in 1966. And as we are also dealing with the house of mirrors that is the art world, I have no doubt that somebody is ready to explain that I am confusing appropriation with approbation or that fascism is just another way of spelling freedom.

(via 3QD)

–

Better, a roundup of art reflecting desolation, worlds without people and post-apocalyptic cityscapes:

This new ruin romanticism is especially evident in the Flooded London imagery, rendered up by Squint/Opera (the firm behind the visualisations for the 2012 Olympic Stadium, via Archinect – what could be the emotional motivation behind their fascination with rendered ruins?). The imagined ruin has always existed – they have been a staple artistic subject for centuries. Only the focus used to be on abandoned civilizations, the perceived hubris of the ancients. In contrast, the virtual ruination of the modern era is self-imposed schadenfreude, with all the damage and joy turned inwards. It is a feeling made universal by the internet, where planning catastrophes and architectural missteps are all lovingly chronicled and catalogued.

When I Am Legend came out, New York was briefly plastered with posters of Will Smith and his dog, walking briskly down a completely empty city street.  Commuters gazed upon the posters with wistful sighs.

Last night, the boy next door who’s been learning guitar, held a little concert just outside my window.  He went through the entire White Album, and his group of friends was very encouraging of his efforts.  If I woke up tomorrow and found myself the last human on Earth, I think I’d be alright with it.  (And I wear contact lenses, so.)

I’m already bored of Wall-E. I haven’t seen it. I haven’t really heard all that much about it. I’ve seen, I think, one preview. I’ve listened to everybody I’ve talked to in the last couple of weeks assert that it’s really very good, and that I ought to see it right away. And I’ve seen headlines of articles and blog posts about it on every site I visit – I haven’t even read the articles; I’ve just seen the headlines.

And I’m already sick of it. This is what happens to me all the time with whatever culture thing everybody goes nuts for. It’s not that I don’t want to see it, or that I wouldn’t like it on its merits. I’m sure it’s great, and I’m sure I’d love it. But I probably won’t see it, just like I never ended up seeing Juno or, well, really any movie, honestly. I think in the last year, I saw The Orphanage and Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day (both with other people, after all the movies on offer went through the rigorous screening process that is everybody else’s tastes and what they’ve already seen, so you end up left with something random, but by and large unobjectionable like The Orphanage or Miss Pettigrew), and that’s it.

It’s just that, within five minutes of a film being released, it’s freaking everywhere, and I feel like I’ve seen it, not just once, but over and over and over again.

And furthermore, I guess that some people are glad for the next cool thing, but personally (and I know I’m not the only one), I’m always drowning under a cultural backlog of things that I must absolutely see, read, experience, be up on, and whenever someone tells me that I simply must drop everything and see this thing RIGHT NOW, it feels downright rude. I have enough culture to be wading through! I don’t need somebody barging into my little culture-absorber’s library carrel and screaming, “Drop everything! We’re all seeing a movie about a robot RIGHT THIS MINUTE!” What the crap? I’m still working on seeing Juno! Are we done with that already? I still haven’t seen The Godfather. Or Say Anything. Or the first Batman – the one with Christian Bale, not the twelve Batmans before that. And I never saw Brokeback Mountain, either. Not to mention there are oodles of You-Tube videos people simply won’t speak to me until I watch now right now. So, you know what, Wall-E might not get watched right this damn minute, and he’ll just have to wait his turn, won’t he?

I’m feeling stressed just thinking about it. I realize that some people think that films and books and web bits and stand-up comics are things to be enjoyed recreationally, as they come, and need not be amassed like plunder in the various stockpiles of one’s brain. I realize that for some people, word of a new cultural sensation they’d not heard of before is a treat, not a sign of personal failure. But I think these people are of a different species from me entirely.

These are the type of people who say things like, “I’m looking for a good book to read.” A statement which I cannot believe anyone could ever utter in all sincerity. Who are these people?

Here, odd, disinterested space-people: here is my 58-page single-spaced insane book list I’ve been adding to since I was twelve years old, with titles scribbled all up and down the margins and extra Post-It notes covered in chicken scratch stuck on all over. Close your eyes and point to one. You’re welcome.

Meanwhile, I’m off to see Wall-E. I mean, The Dark Knight. I mean, STOP MAKING MUST-SEE MOVIES FOR A LITTLE WHILE, WON’T YOU?

–

Speaking of glut, the 4th of July is the day for one of America’s greatest annual events: Nathan’s Famous 4th of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest, the competitive eating event of the year. I’ve mentioned my obsession with competitive eating several times on this blog, and all the heavies will be at Nathan’s this year: Kobayashi, Joey Chestnut, and my personal favorite, Sonya ‘The Black Widow’ Thomas. Thomas is a 100-lb., 5′5″ Korean woman who has consistently demonstrated an astounding ability to put away large amounts of food:

She swallowed the egg. Then she swallowed 64 more in six minutes and 40 seconds. She could have eaten more but the organizers ran out of eggs. . . . “Eggs are easy to eat,” Thomas explains. “I could eat 80 or 90.”

(My obsession with all this, however, is not so unreasonable that I would actually go down to Coney Island this morning and experience first-hand the crush of humanity crowding around the Nathan’s Famous stand there.)

Speaking of impressive athletes, click here to marvel at the mind-blowing physique of Dara Torres, 41-year-old swimmer who’s attempting to qualify for the 50-meter freestyle in the Olympics this year. If I were to pick a role-model between the two, I think eating 64 eggs in 6 minutes is a slightly more reachable goal for me than looking like Ms. Torres when I’m 40.

It’s probably a good thing all of my goals are in culture consumption.

Okay, so I would like to retract my earlier statement about the crowded Greenpoint running track.  Today was…an inspiration.  I think I ran about 10 miles.  I don’t know where you fellows have been all winter (presumably, you can all afford gym memberships, because if this is your condition after six months of neglect, I cannot wait to see you in September), but damn. Feel free to lob your golden apples my way, boys – I find myself growing less competitive with every passing torso.

Two yards over from us, right outside my window, there’s a family with 24 children. Now that the weather’s nice, the children are let out of the house at about 9:00 a.m. and they remain outside until midnight…or even later. Now, I’m pretty outspoken about the fact that I don’t much care for children, but even if you think the little darlings are presh, you would probably agree with me that these particular children blow. I mean, they are just the worst freaking children ever. Imagine 24 little banshees setting up an inarticulate, piercing scream, and then maintaining that scream for fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, and you will begin to have some idea of the constant soundtrack that has accompanied my waking and would-be sleeping hours for the past several weeks.

And on top of that, the guys who live next door (in between us and the children) have also ventured out into their back yard. Which is fine. Except that they (and their friends) are of that breed of partiers who think the only way to enjoy socializing is to get drunk and scream. Back when I had a social life, I was in the ‘get drunk and lay around’ or ‘get drunk and vehemently discuss politics’ or ‘get drunk and laugh hysterically at everything everybody says’ social circles, and I have never understood the ‘get drunk and scream’ set. I mean, what are they even doing? What are they talking about? You know who I mean, right? Those who go “wooooooooooooooooooo!” over and over? What is that? If any wooers are reading this, seriously, explain to me why this happens, and why it is fun, and how it is even remotely tolerable for the people you are with. Why do woooooers have friends at all? They’re always surrounded by crowds. To me, the whole point of getting drunk in a backyard is to let it all go, to relax, to chill, to stare at each other and laugh at nothing, and let the wind blow through the chimes. I usually feel like screaming “wooooooooooooooooooooooo” when I’m at my most sober and parachuting from a plane. Not at 3 a.m., when I’ve had enough alcohol to knock out a horse.

Memorial Day eve, the guys next door at about 10 or so got out a guitar, and started screaming the lyrics to some songs. You’d expect drunk people to have a relatively short attention span for this kind of thing, right? No. They did the entire songs, and they kept it up, in unison and just screaming, for a full hour. And of course, since the kids were still outdoors, they started trying to scream over the drunk guys, and the drunk guys wouldn’t be upstaged by a bunch of children. Escalate, escalate. And the women attending the dude party crowed with forced laughter, trying to convince themselves they were included.

This is a bit of a tangent, but frankly, I just don’t comprehend the general jubilance that most people seem to be brimming over with at all times. It seems to take so little to make other people happy. One more damn, stupid Friday night with the same people drinking the same beer and talking about the same nonsense, and people go “woooooooo!!!!!” for sheer joy. I’ve never gotten that much joy out of a mere party, even if it was one of the (few) parties that actually turned out to be really fun. A party can be pleasant or it can be dull, but it’s rarely a portal to ecstasy (unless you’re on it). But most people are positively stoked all the time about nothing. These are the people who are so thrilled to be drinking and going “wooooooooooooo” that they will keep it up until the sun rises, and do it all over again the very next night. Even in my most hard-partying period, I either had to stir up some interesting shit (read: make out with somebody), or I was pretty much over it by 2:00.  The only times in my actual life that I’ve felt such joy I could have screamed “woooooooo” for hours were the times when someone had just given me an award.

Which explains a lot about me, and now that I write that, I guess it’s not that it takes so little to make other people happy, but rather, that it takes so much to make me happy. Perhaps I should examine that.

(On even more of a tangent, I have a theory that this is how potheads get started: they’re formerly active people who one day realized that if they just deadened enough brain cells, they’d actually become able to tolerate the crushing boredom of sitting around living rooms with their friends, watching a movie that everyone has already seen three times. Woooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Anyway, back to the subject at hand, I don’t actually mind the next-door guys as much as the children, because the guys next door so far (knock on wood) have gotten quiet once it hits 11:30 or so (also, a couple of them are attractive). But the kids are out there screaming all hours. Children are officially more obnoxious than drunk twenty-something hipsters.

Speaking of children ruining things for everybody else, I believe I’ve mentioned before that I find the increasingly crowded running track to be another drawback of summer. I usually run about 11:00 a.m. on weekdays, and it’s a pretty good time to go. Yesterday, however, there was a nursery school on the track. Some childcare workers had taken a whole gaggle of kindergarten-aged children onto the track, where of course, the kids were all over. I was running past, and a little girl waddled right into my path; I swerved to avoid her, and she somehow managed to leap over a whole lane and get in my way again, at which point, I pretty much knocked her over. “Hey! Hey!” I barked, trying to warn her, but she was in her own world. The childcare worker, to her credit, yelled at the little girl instead of me – what I don’t understand is, this track is right in between a giant, grassy park, and a big playground. Given those other, clearly more appropriate and desirable options, why the hell would they bring the kids onto the crowded running track?

The city’s got me feeling so hassled this week that I’m even feeling crowded in my own bedroom, what with all the backyard hoopla. I feel overrun – wherever I am standing, someone will undoubtedly suddenly need to be standing right there. If I find a deserted area, five minutes after I get there, four people will come sit on my damn lap. Hey, New York: why don’t you all let me know wherever it is that you’re not going to need to be, and I will go there?

And yes, I realize that the answer to this question is “anywhere else on the planet other than NYC.” Sigh.

Last summer, I saw nothing of New York. This summer I’m trying to go on at least a brief walkabout every nice weekend. I bring my camera with me and make strangers uncomfortable by pointing it around with the flash off. When I was backpacking, all I did was wander around and look at things and take photos. I should really explore New York City the same as I did Phnom Penh, or Luang Prabang. Because who knows how long I’ll be here.

The weekend before last, I took some pictures just around my neighborhood here, Greenpoint. I live near McCarren Park, which is a shitty little park, really, but in the summer it (like all parks) becomes a festival of happiness, as everybody sacks out on the grass to soak up sun while they can, and wonder why they don’t just move to a nicer city. (Do I sound a little down on NYC lately?)

Greenpoint is the second largest Polish community in the States (after Chicago), and a lot of the signage and stuff around here is in Polish, which is sometimes fun. For example, this sign is on my block…

Wedel to urok, wedel to smak!

I don’t know what Wedel to urok, wedel to smak! means, and I don’t want to, because what I’ve decided it means is much more fun.

Every weekend in McCarren Park, there is a farmer’s market:

A farmer’s market.

Where you can buy honey, among other things:

Many honey.

Younger people lie on the grass, and look chill and fashionable:

You know you want to lie with us.

And older people sit on the benches, and look pissed and disapproving:

We think you should sit up and put more clothes on.

Some people are very happy to be in the park:

We are so happy!

While other people think the park’s happy to see them:

We are so cool.

The park can be peaceful:

Or there might be a parade:

Let’s not react to the parade.

This particular day, there was a kite festival:

Kites! And families!

There were many kites:

Kites! And some dude!

And clowns performing:

The clowns were not as funny as this little girl is making them seem:

You SLAY me!

And of course, there are children in the park:

Horrid little children. See? Even their moms look sick of them.

Look at them, trying to be all wide-eyed and endearing. Posers.

Well, that’s all for the park, but I did want to mention that later that night, as I was waiting for the L to come home, I saw this couple indulging in shameless subway PDA:

The romance of the subway!

As you can see, most people ignored them, but I was disgusted, as was this random guy standing behind me:

Gross!

…Hey…wait a second. Isn’t that…the same guy?!?!

But how…? But what…?

My mind is officially blown.

(Prelude: On Tuesday, an envelope arrives under the door of apartment 1, heralding a rent increase of $300 and a year-lease to begin June 1st, and generously permitting four days for decision-making purposes.)

Saturday:

7:30 am: Roommate 1 awakes.

9:00 am: Roommate 2 awakes. Rs 1 and 2 discuss the situation.

10:30 am: Roommate 3 awakes, takes last of coffee, goes back into room and shuts door.

10:35 am: Rs 1 and 2 knock on R3’s door and request that R3 join them in discussing the crisis.

10:36-11:30 am: Wailing and gnashing of teeth.

11:30 am: Decision reached to negotiate with landlord, ask for three month extension at current rent, or at least before having to commit to lease.

11:35 am -12:35 pm: R1 showers, dresses and makes and consumes fry-up breakfast. Rs 2 and 3 watch.

12:36 pm: R2 asks R1 if we’re about ready to make a move on this. R1 consents. Landlord is phoned, says he’s coming right over.

1:48 pm: Landlord arrives, is seated, negotiations begin. Rs 1 and 3 stare pleasantly at the ceiling, and R2 is consequently forced to do all the talking.

1:49 pm: Delay on rent increase flatly denied.

1:50 – 2:10 pm: Delay on lease mulled over favorably. Inquiry posed as to what happens if no extension granted. Will Rs 1, 2 and 3 be out by June 1st?

2:11 pm: Somebody says ‘eviction proceedings.’ Much screaming. Landlord exits.

2:12 pm: Awkward pause, followed by nervous laughter.

2:30 pm: Landlord phones. There will be no compromise.

2:31 pm – 4:45 pm: Laptops circled. Craigslist is alternately praised and condemned. R1 emails possible listings to R3, who leaves many voicemails. R2 researches tenants’ rights, and consults with friend who is a landlord.

4:45 pm: R3 excuses self, goes in room, calls Mom, cries. She hates New York, wants to move somewhere pretty and warm, by the beach possibly, or to Paris.

5:00 pm: R1 and friend watch Kentucky Derby. A filly breaks its ankles and is euthanized on the spot. R3 goes for long, aggressive run – she will miss the adjacent park. R2 lies on bed and stares at ceiling – she is SO over this bullshit.

6:00 – 9:00 pm: On advice of R1’s friend, rentdirect joined and paid for. More laptop work, and phone calls. R3 buys and consumes large slice of chocolate cake. R1 asks for bite, and is grudgingly given a small piece.

9:30 pm: Rs too depressed to go out, retire to rooms. R1 goes to bed. R3 drinks, tinkers with personal budget and account balance over and over. Surely, must be mistake somewhere?

11:45 pm: R3 falls asleep in chair.

Sunday

7:30 am: R1 awakes, showers, makes and eats eggs.

8:15 am: Rs 2 and 3 awake, dress in same clothes as yesterday.

9:00 am: Rs walk to L train. L train is on weekend service. Rs are swallowed by pressing mob.

9:30 am: Rs emerge at Union Square, walk to 6th to catch F to Park Slope. Rs are blocked by bike marathon. Rs wait impatiently. Bikers swarm past endlessly, hollering and cheering each other on.

9:35 am – 10:15 am: Rs ride F train to Park Slope. Wonder if they will be riding F train frequently in future.

10:15 am: Rs walk to open house through beautiful Park Slope area. Rs love Park Slope!! Rs are thrilled to pieces to live in Park Slope! Rs hate stupid current apartment anyway.

10:17 am: No one answers bell at open house, no sign or way into the apartment. Rs stand on sidewalk. R1 apologizes.

10:18 – 10:45 am: Rs make their way up to Bed-Stuy area, split up.

11:00 – 11:20 am: Rs 1 and 3 wait on stoop in war zone, next to construction site. R3 eats Clif bar. Building owner’s son appears, and shows small apartment with no closets, and back window overlooking small rubble-strewn lot and graffiti-covered wall. Car alarm begins to blare.

11:20 am – 12:00 pm: Rs 1 and 3 walk to nearby apartment. Realize front door is impassible due to construction, men on ladders with power tools. R3 phones landlord and cancels.

12:15 pm: Rs meet again. Rs do not love Bed-Stuy.

12:15 pm – 1:00 pm: Rs walk to next appointment for many miles, because R3, who planned the route, swears is quicker to just walk than deal with Sunday train service in Brooklyn. Rs 1 and 2 are very quiet for duration of walk.

1:15 pm: Next appointment reached. Shit hole. Landlord is called and appointment is canceled.

1:30 pm: R2 goes into city. Rs 1 and 3 walk home, because is easier to just walk than try to take freaking awful trains through Brooklyn. R3 mentions how nice current neighborhood is, what a good area for going on runs. The park. Young people. Good bakeries. R1 is ready to be alone for awhile.

2:00 pm – on: Rs go about their business. They can’t think about this any more today.

10:30 pm: Landlord visits apartment. R1 is home. Landlord agrees to 3-month hold on lease, provided Rs pay rent increase.

11:00 pm: Rs phone each other, and wearily accept landlord’s offer. Crisis delayed for three months. At which point, R3 figures she’ll surely have enough saved to move to Paris.

Summer is just around the corner. Normally at this time of year, my seasonal anger (which starts to build in late September and reaches its peak in the dead month of February) melts as the sun rises. This year is different, however, because this year is the first year I’ve managed to run outdoors throughout the entire winter. New York is mild enough; in Chicago, I could never make it much past mid-October. Anyway, because of this, for the first time the warming weather has actually had some negative effects in my life: there are people about now. When I go running in the park of a morning (or afternoon), there are people all over the paths. People meandering back and forth, people with dogs, people with babies, people with yoga mats and ice cream cones and no sense of purpose or direction. People, in short, who are In The Way.

They are even in the way on the running track, which blows my mind. While I may hate it, I understand how some people arrive at the conclusion that sidewalks are an appropriate place to list vaguely back and forth while staring at the sky with your thumb up your ass, but surely an actual running track is the one place in New York where even the most placid and directionless fool would realize people are meant to move about in an orderly, brisk, purposeful fashion. But yet, the track in Greenpoint is clogged with people (and their freaking children) wandering all over the place, completely oblivious to the lanes and the many runners moving with a momentum that makes it difficult to swerve and stop at a moment’s notice. There are people who appear as though this one half-hearted lollop around a track is the first time they’ve gotten off a couch since they hit puberty. There are old people who wheel around and stop in the lane and gawk at you when you run up behind them, as though they’re horribly offended you would do something so blatant and aggressive as run on a running track, when they are out for their morning waddle. There are even (I swear to God) hulking teenage boys riding little girls’ bikes the wrong way around the track. And incidentally, every single time I’ve observed any soccer player from the field in the middle of the track crossing after some errant ball, I’ve never once seen one of them look both ways and wait for runners to pass. Nope, they just stroll right on across without looking up and let the joggers either stop short, jerk to the sides or plow straight into them.

So much for the running track. There are also two parks where I run every day, and both of them have been lately ruined by the Brooklyn Park Service’s yearly spring maintenance. In Park No. 1, they are busily cutting the branches off all the trees; to avoid killing people with the falling limbs, they helpfully tape off the portion of the walk that they’ll be working on that day, except that they usually only remember to tape off one side of it, so that you’ll be running along and suddenly you’re clotheslined by a length of police tape appearing seemingly out of nowhere, just before a giant tree comes crashing down behind you. And the air is thick with sawdust. In Park No. 2, they have repaved the running track with an insanely thick, pillowy bed of uneven wood shavings, which is about as easy to run through as a Chuck E. Cheese ball pit.

I can’t wait till fall.

I noticed a number of St. Patrick’s Day revelers out yesterday sporting green carnations. Is it just me, or are green carnations inextricably linked with Oscar Wilde? Not, I imagine, the image these (mostly frat boy) drinkers were intending to project.

Speaking of whimsical accessories, I think I saw my soulmate on the G-train yesterday. A friend of mine gave me a little stuffed dog she got in a Happy Meal awhile ago, and I carried it in my pocket and played with it on the train (for something to fidget with, or squeeze when I got stressed) until I got sick of it. Yesterday as I was getting on at Court Square, a fellow was passing me, and I noticed him surreptitiously zipping the exact same stuffed dog up in his jacket. !

Speaking of the G-train, the MTA fare hike has gone into effect, which &*(^T*R&^#*R^QW!!!!!!!!!!! Honestly, I really do feel that if you can prove residence off one of the shittier train lines (like, for example, the G: shittiest of all possible lines), you ought to get a lower monthly fare. It only makes sense that if your train experience is consistently agonizing, endless and unpredictable, and is undoubtedly hastening your premature death due to frustration and anxiety over its unbelievable suckitude, you really ought not to have to pay the same price as someone who lives off an efficient and timely train that doesn’t just shut down entirely any time that’s not rush hour.

Aright, aright, you people listen up. Me and my partner are about to do some acrobatics on this mothafuckin’ L-train, arrright? You ready? We gonna bust out some crazy shit, and if y’all like what you see, throw us a couple bucks; if you don’t like it, just ignore us, aright?

Aright, aright! This first move we gonna do is called the wheelbarrow! Me and my buddy been doing this since we was in second grade field day, yeah, it’s called the wheelbarrow, because I am going to get on my hands, and my buddy Paul is gonna grab my ankles and it will be as if I were a wheelbarrow! Aright, y’all ready? ARE Y’ALL FUCKIN’ READY?? I’m letting you know how it’s going to go, because it is insane! So cover y’all’s kids’ eyes, aright? Here we go! Yes! I am now a wheelbarrow! Clear a path, as I wheel by you all up and down this train. Oh, shit.

That was awesome.

Aright, y’all like that? Y’all want some more? We’ve got all kinds of crazy tricks for you today! This next trick is called the sloth, because what’s gonna happen here is I am gonna hang from this bar by my ankles. Y’all believe that’s gonna happen? Believe it! Can y’all two ladies get up for a second, because I will be occupying this part of the bench with my dangling head. Thank y’all very much. Aright, aright! Here we go with the sloth! At this point, I will be letting go my hands and supporting myself by my ankles only! My buddy Paul is here to spot me, so don’t nobody have no fear. Woot! I am now a sloth! Y’all ever seen a sloth like this up on this train? I do not think that you have!

That was sweet.

Okay. At this point in the performance, Paul will be doing his spe-ci-ala-TEE!. What Paul do is called the top, because he spins around and around like a top. He spins so fast, you will not believe your own eyes. Aright? There he goes. Now, while Paul spins, I will be explaining to you why this trick is significant. You might not think that spinning is a very impressive trick to do, but what y’all don’t realize is that Paul just drank a fifth a henny, and ate near ‘bout three hundred sauceless hot wings, aright? Paul is a master of the…aw, shit, y’all. Well, ain’t nobody perfect. The possibility of failure is what makes live performance so thrilling, do you not agree? Okay, peace, y’all, this is our stop. Uh, if you enjoyed this performance, feel free to put a dollar or whatever you got in this here hat.

Oh, now that is just immature. Aright, aright, we will say our goodbyes (come on, Paul, quick).