May 29, 2006

Two On the Subject of Distance

Over spicy tuna rolls at Sake Haven on 79th and 2nd last night my friend told me that sometimes you have to leave a place in order to escape the memories tied to it.

I said that sometimes no matter where you go your past always has a way of catching up with you.

May 25, 2006

The Way #71 Sees My Life

I think the Starbucks near my office is cursed. And I say the Starbucks because if it's not the place then it's just got to be me because every time I go there (and it's not often anymore) something strange happens. I have, yes, out of my current financial problems and need for the extra ten minutes of sleep in the morning rendering it impossible to make it from the subway to the Starbucks and then to my office in order to be on time, stopped frequenting my old haunt. I'm now friends with Ralph, the guy at the coffee stand on the sidewalk right outside of my office where I can, every morning, have my coffee ready for me for just one dollar. He asks me about my weekends and tells me to have a good day and his coffee is hot, which is about as picky as I can be these days when it comes to getting anything I can get for a dollar.

An entire two weeks ago when I went to Starbucks in a free ten minutes I had during the day on Friday, my grande non-fat latte setting me back a whopping $3.75 which is like, enough to almost buy me dinner for an entire week (read: a box of cereal). They forgot my order and after re-ordering it on the fly I got a half full cup of whole milk that was barely steaming (whatever happened to, careful, the beverage you’re about to enjoy is extremely hot?) and suddenly my world was falling apart. Holding the white and green cup with # 71 on the side by the inarticulate man-hating Maureen Dowd, I realized that perhaps our relationship (Starbucks and mine) is hitting a rough patch. Perhaps it’s time to sever the cord of this love-hate (usually mostly love) union and look for someone who treats me with more respect and appreciates my feelings, can understand the kind of girl I am.

This morning (back again, some of us never learn) I was harassed by the man standing in front of me in line. He wouldn’t stop asking me if I had a quarter. No, I said (which was true) I don’t, but he just wouldn’t let it go. He asked about five other people, all of whom didn’t even bother to acknowledge his existence (that’s New York for you). The man (Irwin) then proceeded to ask me about my weekend plans, what I was going to get, if I had ever tried the bagels, if I was going to be late for work. He, apparently, loves their muffins and isn’t, “damn it,” going to get a paycheck tomorrow. The whole scene was just so awkward for me that it was all I could do from turning around and running away, my only typical response to awkward situations.

When the British guy behind me jokingly asked me if I had a dime, I started to laugh and then Irwin shot us both a hateful look and asked pointedly: “are you laughing at me?”

Well, I guess sometimes life (and Starbucks) is like what #71 says: the minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.

May 21, 2006

I'm Not Easy

There was a girl in front of me drunk and dancing to the music, which was loud and obnoxious and she was the only one doing it and it made me embarrassed for her.

The guy who was talking to me was talking about what guys at bars talk about, and I wasn’t so much listening as I was looking at his hair and how it bounced when he opened and closed his mouth with each word.

As he talked I couldn’t hear over the music all that he was saying, and I just nodded my head and smiled thinking, here he is talking when it all just comes down to whether or not I’m going to go home with him.

I pictured the morning and how it would be after the vodka wore off and how it’s just as easy to be nobody to somebody, so why go out of my way to be nobody to nobody.

Outside a sad scene: the drunk girl falling onto the ground and the guy trying like hell to pick her up.

May 18, 2006

elbow wrench : directions ::

You want to think you're better at things than you really are. You want to think that you can handle anything life throws at you and when the time comes to really to step up to the plate you'll be able to follow through. And, unlike Alex Rodriguez up at bat two runs down at the bottom of the eighth, you won't cave under the pressure.

Well yesterday, for me, the time came, and it came in the form of a box from ikea. My New York apartment, albeit on the Upper East Side, is still somewhat small. The two-seater couch I acquired from back home makes just enough room for me and The Texan (my roommate from Austin) to sit snugly next to each other while watching Grey's Anatomy. But New York is the kind of city where you're constantly surrounded by people, pushed up against them in the subway, walking around them on the sidewalk, trying to avoid them (your boss) at the office. People here are everywhere. So in going home you long for a little space, a little time alone, the chance to feel like your life has more breathing room than it really does.


That's where the chair comes in. I bought a chair from Ikea, the only place to buy furniture when you're living in Manhattan and are so low on money you fully believe that two tablespoons of peanut butter out of the jar really constitutes as breakfast. When I hauled the box into the apartment I realized the test was upon me: assembly.


Looking at the one large picture covered with circled numbers and letters that correspond with the key in the lower right hand corner, I started feeling the way I did the morning of my SAT's, that feeling that perhaps I'm not as smart as I thought, that perhaps something that should be so simple, is in fact, very difficult. Thirty-five laborious minutes later all I had managed to do was piece together the two arms and connect them with a beam. That little elbow wrench only letting me turn the screw half a centimeter made me want to kill someone, and, as my hand started to cramp I yelled with frustration to the empty apartment "I can't do this is!"

There it was. I admitted it. I can't assemble chairs that come in boxes from Sweden. So I sat down with a cheap glass of pinot noir and looked more calmly at that one page of directions and accepted the fact that I'm not as handy around the house as I thought.

At least I know that until I work up the patience and brainpower to have another go, I can just put one of the cushions on the floor between the two arms, and have some personal space – because in this city, that’s priceless.

May 12, 2006

Help, I'm a bookish underachiever

I have to say that im insulted, not only as a woman but as a writer. Okay well I'm not a writer because everyone who is a writer by defintion has to have had something published. If not, then we're all writers and I hate be the person who goes around at cocktail parties eating canapes cooing "oh yes, i'm a writer."

It doesn't, however, stop me from having what i have deemed "bitter writer syndrome." When reading about kavvaya a long time ago I remember automatically hating her. a sophomore harvard student with a book deal. Right. I've been slaving over a book for the past three years and haven't even gotten an agent, but Kaavya was able to get a hefty book deal for what is after all, chick lit, and not just any chick lit, plagarized chick lit. This, by definition means you're not a writer.

This NYT article by Whitney Otto struck a chord with me because it seems as though she dislikes Kavaaya as well - and what self-respecting writer wouldnt. There are a lot of things I have written and looking back on them later I squint my eyes in overall disgust saying, what was I thinking? It's what any writer goes through, you work on it, and it takes time, it takes age (Otto is 68) to really get a grasp on life and what you're writing. Kaavya decided to bypass that difficult stage, the endless rounds of editing, the writer's block, the time it takes to really write something worthwhile and just opt to take it away from someone else and pass it off as her own.

I work on doing what Otto says, drinking heavily (yes) and lazily listening in on other people's lives. If there's one thing I took away from my creative writing classes in college (aside from other peoples seriously freakish stories) is that listening is the key to any writer's success, add non-stop vodka sodas to the mix and I'm pretty sure I've found my calling.

And anyway, according to Kavaaya's school of writing I can just plagarize The Sun Also Rises because yes, I feel like that is a book I could have written - if only I had the chance to write it before Hemingway

May 8, 2006

How to save a life.

Losing it fast I scream “help!” waving my arms leaning over that scary dark abyss that is in between me and the other side of the station where an express subway is flying past and the sound is deafening.

I want to reach up and cover my ears but I don’t because I’m waving my arms and screaming “stop!” even though I know that the man driving the oncoming subway can’t hear me. It’s like the way you yell at a fly ball as it’s cruising high over center field “go! go!” even though you know it’s not going to help it stay just above the outstretched mit below it.

Timing in life, I’ve come to find, is everything. Two minutes before everything was normal and I was heading home from work and thinking about how I hadn’t eaten anything since this morning and how work is exhausting and how its been too long since I’ve been on a proper date, all while reading my newest edition of the New Yorker like the good little New Yorker that I am. And just like any good New Yorker, I know that a train never comes when you want it to. You run and you miss it and you curse yourself for stopping in the bathroom on the way out of the office, for letting that woman push through the revolving door before you, for not running across Varick Street when you saw the light was just turning yellow.

Timing has led me to where I am now, watching the man at the end of the station sway back and forth. I think that he’s just had a few too many Pilsner’s after having had a bad day at the office, (haven’t we all). But when I see him fall onto the tracks I blink and then think that this isn’t my life and then blink again. Frozen in time nothing knocks me out of my stupor but the low rustling sound of the oncoming train.

The New Yorker now on the ground my arms are waving and, losing it fast, I scream “help!” Two other men have joined me now, all three of us leaning, waving, screaming, trying to save a life.

At the last minute the subway car screeches to a halt just like in the movies, two inches from its victim. I see it because it’s right in front of me, and wanting to look away I can’t because my brain isn’t working fast enough to catch up with my reflexes to let me.

Men in uniforms come running in from out of nowhere and push me aside, hopping down onto the tracks. In a daze I watch as they haul him out, his bottle of Maker’s Mark still in his hand. They prop him up against the wall and a pool of red forms behind it. As I stare, slowly reaching down to pick up my dropped New Yorker, I see the man drunkenly take a sip out of the bottle and utter one simple line to the medics who are desperately trying to help him:

“That was a close one, huh?”

As I leave the subway station, deciding to walk off the nerves that are still built up in my body, I start to think about how life’s just one big game of chance. How if you’re lucky you get out of the way in time, or are fortunate enough to have someone there save you. I guess sometimes we all need saving, even if we have a hard time admitting it.

May 6, 2006

restaurant du jour

Last night over Coronas (leaving the over priced vodka soda on hold for another night) at the Baggott Inn near Washington Square Park, I got to talking with some people and realized that everyone, in their own way or another, is getting over that one bad experience that has yet to fully leave their subconscious. It’s like going to a Restaurant-of-the-Moment in Soho and having a really bad experience with their steak au poivre. Just because you get food poisoning once doesn’t mean you’ll get it the next time you order it, however, it’s difficult not to associate the taste without that memory of having spent the entire night on that bathroom floor come rushing back.

The problem however, is when you can’t stop yourself from subconsciously letting that one night ruin your life, uh I mean, rather, your love of steak, forever.

As I walked home from the subway, the construction workers on Lexington and 3rd asking me how it was possible that I was going home alone, I started to think about how life’s just like one long endless street of restaurants. You move from one to another, feeling betrayed when they close down, and walking back home, your hands in your pockets, the overwhelming feeling of disappointment hits you the way their Chianti did after the third glass.

But in the end you can’t stop life, or restaurants, from happening or closing down. I guess the only thing you can do is take comfort in the knowledge that new places will eventually open up, that menu choices will change and in the end, you can always just go vegan.

May 3, 2006

The Last 48 Hours

Have been sick for the last 48 hours and have consumed so many liters of Gatorade and so many Nyquil caplets that I don’t even feel like a functioning human being anymore.

Awake yesterday after having had to leave work early the day before due to high fever and exploding headache, I was trying to watch some tv before the massive amounts of over the counter medication kicked in. I don’t know how people don’t work. There’s nothing even good on tv during the day, and, too comatose to read I was forced to sit in front of it for a good portion of the afternoon hours yesterday.

Even sick, I was getting stir crazy, wanting to get back to my real life and away from the world of daytime talk shows and soap operas. I actually watched (regrettably) an entire episode of Date My Mom, which, I have to say, is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever seen.

I am in no way looking forward to going back to work tomorrow (fever subsiding or not) to the stacks of work that will inevitably have piled up in my absence. Even if I am feeling better, getting back there and frantically plowing through missed work in a struggle to catch up, will bring me right back to where I started two days ago, feverish with a headache.