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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Hyperopia

I think I saw New York for the first time tonight. 70+ degrees in Manhattan today and I didn’t make it outside at all. Living within the confines of a 5 x 10 cube doesn’t really sound like living at all, but we all have to work to live and live to work and it all becomes a hazy mess between Monday’s and Friday’s and the tainted Sundays because of the sinking feeling that work is looming just beyond it.

I walked through Central Park after work where people are walking and running and running pushing strollers with sleeping children and walking holding someone’s hand or the leash of a dog.

The park on Saturdays is full of people who are happy on that one good day of the week where they’re actually living. But at 6:30 on a Thursday night as the afternoon is falling into evening and the sun is slipping behind the Essex Hotel, the park feels different.

You know how it is when you walk and walk and you don’t know where you’re going but you know that walking is the only thing that feels right. Maybe it’s because all day we don’t really feel like we’re walking towards anything. We’re getting up and going to work and going home and it’s all static, it’s all the same. Maybe sometimes we’re being pulled forward when we don’t even realize. Maybe sometimes we’re being pulled towards something when we don’t even know what it is.

In the end, though, we always end up walking home. I’ve decided that my favorite part of the city is 5th Ave along the park because walking down that sidewalk you’re caught in between two worlds, like being in two places at the same time. The fast-paced-passion of the city with its speeding cars and honking horns and gray pavement, and on the other side the calming feeling of nature where you can hear the birds and trees and feel the feeling of grass beneath your feet and you’re being pulled by both but you don’t have to choose.

I may not have seen a lot of the world, a lot of exotic cities or foreign cultures, but I’ve just seen New York for the first time. Maybe sometimes we’re all too concerned with wanting to see what’s just beyond that we fail to see what’s already there, in front of us.

Gina and Todd

I couldn’t sleep on the couch of my old apartment last night as Gina and Todd were fighting in the hallway just outside the door. She said, Todd, I can’t believe you chose Kay over me. He said, Gina, you need to get over this. She yelled, you chose your friends and beer over me and he yelled back asking her what she wanted him to do.

So she cried and cried and yelled and cried and he didn’t say much of anything. His friends were out on the sidewalk and they laughed and smoked and the smoke drifted through the living room window and I could smell their Marlborough lights.

Gina screamed, you have no idea how much you’ve hurt me. You don’t know how it feels, you don’t know how it feels, she yelled and he didn’t say much of anything.

So she cried and cried and yelled and cried and then threw a brick at the wall outside the front door that made the windows shake and left a gash three inches deep.

After a long time it stopped but I still couldn’t fall asleep because I was thinking about how Gina and Todd probably used to be happy before he starting choosing his friends and Kay and beer over her and before she started screaming and crying and being irrational.

Every time you turn around it’s always another Gina and Todd getting together. They’re kissing on the subway and holding hands in the street until one starts choosing his friends and beer and Kay over the kissing on the subway and the holding hands in the street and she starts screaming and crying and becoming irrational.

Every time you turn around it’s always another Gina and Todd breaking up.

Boston v. New York

I got off the train at Back Bay Thursday night and made the walk down Huntington Ave towards my old home of Symphony Road. The city looked different and the same all at once but I guess that happens when you see something that you haven't seen in a long time.

The streets were almost empty, a far cry from the New York I'm still getting used to where the cars are always moving and the sidewalks are always full. It felt like, and still does, as though my life is taking place in two cities. Friends and a past life in one, a job and a new life I’ve yet to really find in another.

Maybe Boston and New York are always meant to be at odds with each other, and once you live in one it’s difficult to make the transition. Each have their own good and bad sides, like a guy you meet at bar: Boston the adorable sports fan who says hello to you over a pint and lives in a house in Cambridge. New York the financial big shot you meet at a club who buys you a dirty martini and lives in a high rise facing the park.

Both are very different, and while there are all sorts of things that fall in between the obvious distinctions of each wonderful city, I’ve yet to find where I fit in with either of them, but I suppose that will just take time. And I know Boston might be criticized for being small, but sometimes I can't help but think that it’s like what Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei Lee says, “It’s a terrible thing to be lonesome, especially in the middle of a crowd.”

Tomorrow Is My Birthday

Time is passing and I think of how I haven’t done nearly half the things I’ve always wanted to do. Haven’t taken enough chances or vacations, haven’t seen the Pacific, or caught a fly ball at Yankee Stadium, haven’t kissed anyone on a sidewalk or have been published in a major magazine.

If I were to look back (and I have a lot recently because birthdays make you do that), to a year ago, I would think about how time has moved so quickly between then and now that I hardly know where my life is going.

I was noticing the other day a small scar on my left knee. I don’t remember how old I was or how it happened or what kind of day it was. I don’t remember how much it hurt or if I cried.

There are times in our lives that for one reason or another, become lost. Days weeks months pass, and as birthdays tick by like the flash of a blown out candle, it’s though those times never existed at all.

Occasionally we come across a picture or a postcard or see a familiar face that makes us wonder. A severe case of acne or love or a fall from a bike, these leave scars. I think about all the close calls that didn’t.

So birthdays and years come and go and the past starts to melt away. I guess those of us that bruise easily, must learn to heal the same way.

Good Friday

Every Friday morning when I'm leaving my building, hair a mess because I snagged a few extra minutes of sleep for opting not to shower, brain still non-functioning, fumbling to get out my subway card, sunglasses on in order to hide an exhausted face (especially this week, never making it home before 10PM) my doorman smiles at me and cheerfully says, "Happy Friday."

I do what I always do which is smile back and say thank you. But what I want to say is, why never Happy Monday or Happy Wednesday? You know, when I really need it.

Today has been okay.

“This city is really testing me today,” I shouted to International Girl (pls. refer to Dirty Water) over the phone tonight as I was standing on the sidewalk on Central Park West.

After not having left the office until after 11:30 PM last night, I took the subway up to 72nd to catch the cross town bus. I was there with three other people as the clock rounded midnight, half asleep thumbing through my latest issue of the New Yorker as the man across from me stared at my legs. The other man was talking on the far end of the subway car, at first to himself, and then to us, and then to the people who got on at 18th street, and they didn’t pay much attention to him either.

He was talking about how he was homeless and needed money and food and “whatever we could spare.” I did what I always do, which is pretend like I can’t hear even though I can and I know they know I can and I feel mixed feeling of guilt and sadness and guilt and confusion about how the world is so strange and how sometimes I don’t know how to deal with it.

At 72nd and Amsterdam I waited for the bus to take me to the east side and to home and to bed and it never came. A cab ride and $10 plus tip later I was home and out the money to afford my morning coffee for the rest of the week.

Today was the same late night, followed by having to walk around the upper west side in hurting feet trying to find various apartment buildings to personally hand-deliver them tomorrow’s touring itinerary. The last and final building was on West 61st and impossibly tucked behind Lincoln Center where the numbers don’t go in any sort of order and after walking in circles I vowed to hate west 61st forever. Upon seeing me the doorman said, “Have a hard time finding it? Happens to everyone,” to which I gave him a fair rendition of a withering look and simply said, “yeah.”

I finally made it back over to Central Park West just in time to see the cross town bus pull away from the curb despite my running with arms-flailing attempt to stop it. My heart sank and as a few expletives left my mouth, the proper CPW Burberry-clad woman with her jack russell terrier probably named Forbes gave me a look of semi-disgust.

That’s when, in my defeat, I called International Girl. “This city is really testing me today,” I shouted over the phone as I was standing on the sidewalk on Central Park West. She of course told me not to worry and said that if anyone can overcome the hardships of the city, it was me.

I guess it’s the way any good relationship is, with the bad things and the awkward things and the homeless men (okay maybe not all relationships), and the missed buses and missed chances and the late nights and getting lost and being too proud to ask for directions.

And anyway, it is, after all, only Tuesday.

opening day

I remember them clearly, the days when the sun would start to stay out later and my father would be watching the game. Windows open (I grew up without air conditioning), we would sit and watch (I grew up without cable) until even the light summer nights would turn to dark. On TV, though, it never looked like night as the bright lights of the stadium fell on everyone, illuminating the field.

He would talk about baseball when he was younger, the 1962 Yankees with Joe Pepitone, Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, 1977 with Thurman Munson, Bucky Dent and Reggie Jackson. He would talk about the way it used to be, the way they used to wear their socks, the way they never used to get into fights the way they do now. And we would sit, windows open in the summer heat from opening day on, and watch.

And I then went to college in Boston, which he didn’t like. People picked fights and made jabs and wore shirts that declared their hatred for the team I had grown to love. So in 2001 New York lost in a year I wanted them to win the most and in 2003 I watched from a bar next to Fenway Park as Aaron Boone made grown men cry.

Whenever he would see me my father would always ask the same question, “So is this gonna be the year kid?” And I’d smile and laugh and say “they always say this is the year.”
Until one time, it was.

Opening day always makes me miss being a kid. This will be my first season in a while watching the games on safe ground. However I will miss the man who would always scream and cheer from the apartment above me every time the Sox would make a base hit. I will miss the drunken fans in their Jeter Drinks Wine Cooler’s t-shirts. And I know it will take me a while to realize I don’t have to hide being happy when Sheffield hits a home run. But a part of me will miss that certain hum that starts on opening day in Boston and doesn’t die until long after the last pitch leaves the mound.

But things change, people move on, say goodbye, take bigger paychecks or more steriods or retire and then come back. So you can’t tell too much from opening day, and it won’t be until they’re home in the Bronx that will I really feel like the season has started. Because it’s like the great Yogi Berra once said, “in baseball, you don’t know nothing.”

Recession

Well, it’s that time of year again when writing deadlines are upon me. I spent much of early spring last year working on one short story, slaving over each round of edits, meetings with a writing professor, more revisions, changing the end, then keeping the end, take away this scene and re-shaping the sentence structure in that one.

But that’s what writing is, editing. What started off as an idea about a neurotic girl who can’t help but mentally pair everything she sees into groups of two, suddenly turned into an almost 20 page story about the loss of a parent, a professor crush, mild obsessive compulsion and economics.

By the end of the summer the rejection letters were piling up. In addition, the essay I spent over a week writing for Vanity Fair ended up a total bust and now, with the onset of the Glamour writing contest telling me to, (by May 14) write up to 3,500 words detailing something that has happened to me, a “great real-life story.”

Truth is, I’ve hit a recession. After a stack of rejection letters and hours of wasted time, money spent on reading fees and postage and copies, endless pages of text that still remain saved safely on my key drive (yes, no more disks, my poor old friends), I’m feeling less than inspired. Yes, I could win $5,000, but it’s not about the money, it never is. As a writer (and I’m not being so lofty as to call myself a writer) you have a day job, and when you want to write you do it because you have something to say, and the reward is the simple opportunity to share that story with others.

I’m bankrupt of ideas, inspiration and motivation with no Greenspan of my own to turn to. But this is how life is. It comes in waves, surges of an up-cycle followed by the inevitable crash that follows (remember 1929?). So, like the economy, I'm hoping this feeling is cyclical. Pretty soon I’ll be back on top, riding the wave. And true, the wave will most likely bring me back to the sandy rejection letter shores of yesteryear, but who knows. That’s the thing about life, you just never can tell.

Because really, a bomb could drop tomorrow and result in a city’s economic ruin, but, just as a city is demolished, it is rebuilt, and the cycle begins all over again.

I am a Doughnut

I was sitting across from two men on the subway today. It was early, I had overslept and dragged myself to the bus just in time to watch it speed away. I thought about chasing after it and then, looking to the flask of coffee in my hand (I’m bringing now since money is tight, pls. refer to 3/22 posts for more info.) and opted against it.

When I finally did make the bus and then the subway, I found myself, (sunglasses on so that no one would see that my eyes were closed), sitting across from two men. They got on at 66 and immediately rushed up in front of me to eye the map behind me. They were talking quickly in a language I couldn’t quite catch being as it was still too early for my brain to properly function. One of them was tall and skinny with glasses and a face like Christian Slater (remember him?). He had a sport coat on with light blue pants that looked as though they were to be worn only when painting a house or something large that needs painting. From the looks of them, it appeared as though that’s what he had already done.

The other one was shorter and stockier, with an angry looking rough face with jagged teeth and a scar that ran from the middle of his cheek along the jaw line, down to the bottom of his chin, probably from an encounter at a bar after too many pints of dark amber wheat. He was gesticulating wildly and was angry, or least it sounded like he was angry, but then I realized he was speaking German, and people speaking German always sound as though they’re put out about one thing or another. I caught more than a few shizer’s in there, and when he noticed me looking up at him, his face hardened and I looked away quickly.
He tied his shoes on the inner corners in double knots, he wore a thick wool coat even though it was 70 in the city, he was German, he was yelling, he was scary.

Now I’m not saying that all German people are scary. I’ve never been to Germany and know someone (International Girl, pls. refer back to Dirty Water) who spent quite a lot of time there and came back boasting of great people, great sausages and great beer. I personally don’t really know any German people, but it seems to me like they’re doing pretty well after that whole incident that that mass-murdering psychopath and that little problem with that wall in Berlin. But we helped out a little bit though.

It was, after all, the great John F. Kennedy who stood on that wall and proudly said, “ich bin ein Berliner!” Which, of course means, I am a jelly doughnut.

Well. Just goes to show you can’t win ‘em all.

Kissing in Manhattan

I’ve been asked to post. So here I am, making a post because apparently waiting from Sunday to Thursday, “and it is literally almost Thursday,” is “no good.” Thanks for the tip. And for caring. Really.

Okay so let’s talk about a few things. Firstly, and most importantly it’s that time of year again. Purchased my first iced coffee of the year as it’s in the sixties here in Manhattan and I can already feel a shift in the city. Of course there was still the same pushing on the subway, the same woman with the oversized Vuitton bag always asking which stop it is because she can’t see through the thickness of her equally oversized Gucci sunglasses.

On another note, they’re filming a movie over near West 72nd which I noticed as I was waiting for the bus yesterday. Probably some romantic comedy about how some quirky girl who aspired to be more (and they always do) wins the heart of the guy whose heart no one thinks can ever be won (and it always can, but not until the very end). Throw in a gay best friend and a colossal misunderstanding that gets corrected in the last ten minutes and you’ve got yourself a winner.

Do you ever notice how people in soap operas (come on, admit you’ve seen at least one episode) and romantic movies are always kissing on street corners, especially in New York? Loretta Castroini and Ronny Cammereri, Harry (did he have a last name?) and Sally Albright, Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak (with a cat no less). I know I haven’t been here all that long, but I have yet to see anyone kissing anywhere let alone on 72nd and Amsterdam. That sort of thing must just be frowned upon above the park.

Someone told me recently that when she was living in New York she “made out on street corners all the time. It’s fabulous, you should try it.” Maybe she’s seen too many movies or I just haven’t been here long enough, but I guess the next time some guy asks to kiss me on the street (it happens all the time, naturally, and is typically a man in five faded shirts sitting on the sidewalk swigging Marker’s Mark out of the bottle with a cat eating his face) I’ll let him, instead of asking him to get back to me after he’s checked the temperature in the general vicinity of hell.

Only, of course, if I can keep the cat.

"That's just like, so abstract..."

I’m trying to experience Manhattan on a budget since money is currently considerably tight. So yesterday I ran outside (free), made coffee at home (free) and went to the MET (again, free).

The couple standing next to me in front of Cezanne's “Still Life with Cherries and Peaches,” are talking as they gaze intently at the painting: “...and it’s just like him too, I mean that’s how he was, Cezanne, just like totally into the whole abstraction thing, like as a way of creation, like with multiple meanings and like you never knew what he meant, it’s just so, wow, like so abstract.”

I look to them and then back at the painting and make a face of "what?" Abstract? I might not know much about art but I know it’s a painting with fruit. Isn’t that all it’s supposed to be? According to this couple it isn’t about fruit at all, it’s about the male and female, the female cherry and the male peach living together in harmony on a table, I mean in a relationship, which I guess is what the table signifies, the base on which their relationship sits on. Right.

I think I shake my head and move on because they’re cramping my style, which was trying to be very cultured by spending three hours walking through the MET with no one to say profound things to like, “yeah I mean it’s so textured, the depth here, the meaning is just, I can feel what he was feeling when he painted this” (girl speaking of Monet’s Haystacks). That’s the one thing I hate about museums, it’s all of the people who, upon entering, think they’re art experts.

For a while I followed around a High School Art History class visiting from Ohio or Illinois or something, I didn't really catch it, and melded into their walking tour because their teacher had a lot of great things to say. At one point one of the boys who didn’t seem to care about art at all and was hanging in the back of the pack (as I was) looked at me and asked me as we stared up at Washington Crossing the Delaware, “are you even in this class?”

I promptly left the American Wing and went to Frank Lloyd Wright’s living room to hide.

When the exhaustion and pangs of hunger hit it was time to leave. I didn’t seen half of what I wanted to and will have to return at some point to see the rest. I walked outside into the warm night and bought a hotdog from the street vendor on 81st and walked down 5th Ave alongside the park while I ate.

That’s the great thing about New York, you can have a great day, and all it will cost you is 75 cents.

Low Budget Lifestyle

For those of you who don’t know, I’m currently holding down two homes. Yes two. I’m a fabulous multi-homeowner in my early twenties. One place here in the city naturally, and when I’m not too busy working all hours in Manhattan, I try to jet set up to Boston where I am currently paying rent on yet another apartment.

Of course side note is, that I haven’t been up to Boston to enjoy the greatness of this other apartment, and I’m still paying for and the sad fact that the sub-letter who moved in the morning I moved out, has since decided to move out.

So right now, funds are tight, and living on a shoe-string budget is something I’ve started to really adapt to since I got here. However this is a bit of an extreme and as I currently have roughly $20 in my checking account (because of the two rents, naturally) I barely have enough to split between my addictions. Coffee (you guessed it) window shopping (which in Manhattan means buying something) and vodka sodas.

Friday night, with money tight I went to Merchant near 14th St with a fellow co-worker to indulge in addiction no. 3. Headed then up up uptown to 125th street for a party hosted by an old Boston co-worker, where the drinks were free, and right now as a two-apartment-holding-classy girl, free is the word d’ jour. Made it there and back successfully without any muggings, stabbings, etc. I’ve realized that anything above 85th St. is a whole other world, and even on the express train it seems to take forever.

The rest of the weekend was spent doing things that didn’t cost me anything, like sleeping. I did however find out two interesting things by the end of the weekend. One, that I’ll only be a two-apartment-holding classy girl until the end of the month, which is wonderful news as I will be able to indulge more in addiction no. 2.

Also, wandered around the city for the day on Sunday (really making that grande bold last) and ended up around 46th and 5th and found that, upon looking twice and feeling a sort of heart wrenching loss, that my favorite restaurant in the city from years ago, has gone out of business.

I guess not having a lot of money in Manhattan is only okay for some of us.

Thankfully that will all change for me soon…well, somewhat.