On the subway, the law of supply and demand is fully in effect: the fewer seats available, the more desirable they are.
I get on the 4/5 after work at Bowling Green, which is the first uptown stop in Manhattan. There are always a few stragglers from lower Brooklyn on it, but most of the seats are empty. Some people still rush into the train, of course, but the majority of us take our time. I usually nonchalantly nab a seat if I’m planning to read, but if I’m going to play my Nintendo DS and don’t want anyone looking over my shoulder to see how terrible I am at Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, I stay standing.
Plenty of other people stay standing at that stop, too, but at Wall Street, the train fills up a little more, and you start to see riders get a little anxious about their lack of choices. They want to sit, but they don’t want to try to squeeze in between the oversize lady with her five bags and the guy with his legs unnecessarily spread three feet apart. People try to look casual, but they’re secretly sneaking looks up and down the entire train to see if there’s anything worth making a move on.
At Fulton Street, there’s no time for pretending. Women rush into the train and plunk down with no regard for how huge their assets are and how small the seat space is. Men who would normally open doors for little old ladies practically push them out of the way. Pregnant women are left clutching their stomachs and fanning themselves with their hands as everyone looks at each other, hoping someone else will volunteer to give up his or her seat first.
I feel very smug about getting to choose whether or not I’ll sit, and I’ll admit that I like to mess with the people who have to stand. I’ve found that if I take off my headphones and turn off my iPod right as we enter Grand Central, the woman standing in front of me will breathe a sigh of relief and grab my seat as soon as I stand. I hate that. So when I want to have a little fun, I’ll take my headphones off as we enter the station before Grand Central, which is Union Square. And Union Square is a full 28 blocks away from Grand Central. Which means that after I take my headphones off and the woman in front of me prepares herself mentally for the joy of sitting down on the crowded train, I’ll make her stand waiting for another five minutes until I actually get off. And if there’s a lot of train traffic or a track fire or anything to slow us down, that five minutes can turn into ten or fifteen. You can imagine how this delights me.
I went to see (500) Days of Summer with Kamran and my friend Beth last weekend. It was beautiful. And really, really depressing.
I knew that I was going to see the movie when the preview included a scene where Zooey Deschanel makes Joseph Gordon-Levitt take off his headphones in an elevator to tell him that she loves The Smiths. On one hand, I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, who doesn’t love The Smiths?” Please try not to base your entire relationship on one song, folks.
It’s just like in Garden State when that bitch Natalie Portman is like, “You have to listen to this Shins song. It’ll change your life, I swear.” And I was like, “Sucka, I was listening to The Shins before you were born.” But Zach Braff is all taken by her, because guys like chicks with mental illness.
But on the other hand, I also understand it, because I based my entire love of Kamran on the fact that while I was working at a science museum in college, he and his dad visited on their way to move him into Princeton, and I’m entirely sure we spoke to each other that day and somehow found each other six years later.
So, I knew it was going to be overly-indie, but you know I’m into that. I just didn’t know it was going to be so sad. I thought about it for days afterward, and I can’t even figure out why. I mean, for god’s sake, the director’s other credits include a Jesse McCartney documentary and a 3 Doors Down music video!
Maybe it’s that I secretly think of Kamran and myself as the Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel of Manhattan. Except even more adorable when in IKEA.
In conclusion: the costumes were awesome, the chalkboard wall was awesome, and the soundtrack was awesome. Summer was a bitch, although I’m sure I’d see it differently if the movie was told from her point of view. The girl at the end sucked. Please see it so we can discuss.
After a rooftop barbeque in Brooklyn on Saturday night, our friend Jeff offered to drop us off at Kamran’s apartment on his way home. As Kamran and I buckled ourselves in, we realized that in nearly three years of dating, it was the first time we’d ever been in a car together.
I came up near to you
My arm around your waist
I was wanting to get to know you
Lean in and get a taste
I could hear your heart beating
And I found I wanted to eat your heart up
Chew it up and swallow
Get your blood to flow through my head
Oh no . . .
If I were to eat your heart up
And get your blood to flow in my wake
I’d be on to make the same mistake again
With someone else
You would be so easy to eat
You would be so easy to eat
You would be so easy to eat
Isn’t it ridiculous how something as simple as a reference to a seriously old TV show on a dinner reservation can totally make my day?
Although Matthew Fox is alive and well in my heart thanks to “Lost” marathons at Tracey’s apartment when I’m visiting Ohio and should be, you know, spending time with my family and changing out of my pajamas at some point in the day.
I saw Harold and Maude in Bryant Park on Monday night. And when I say I “saw” it, I mean it, because I heard exactly three lines in the movie:
1) “Sagging breasts and flabby buttocks.”
2) “Do you enjoy knives?”
3) “I love you.”
And actually, I didn’t even really hear the second line; Beth had to tell me what it said. See, I arrived at Bryant Park for this week’s installment of the Summer Film Festival a full hour and a half before the movie started, but when I met up with my co-worker Steve, he said the place had already been packed for a while. There was absolutely nowhere to sit in the grass, so Steve, Beth, Emily, Jeff, our new German intern Niko, and I ended up on the concrete stairs, miiiiiiiiiiiles away from the screen with our view partially blocked by the motorhome that the movie was being projected from.
I’ve never seen Harold and Maude, but even without being able to make out any of the dialogue, I thought I’d pieced the story together pretty well until I got back to Kamran’s apartment. It was then that he said, “Yeah, wasn’t it totally crazy how [that really important thing] happened?”, and I said, “Oh, I had no idea [that really important thing] happened.” And now the movie’s ruined for me. But not for you, because I save spoilers for the comments section. Love you!
From what I gathered, though, it’s a really lovely movie. Both because Harold is uber-hot in a pasty white boy way, and because Cat Stevens does the soundtrack. The audience was swooning all over the opening credits:
It felt sort of magical, I’ll admit, listening to Cat and watching Harold reject all of the college ladies who want him, surrounded by these giant buildings with the lights from Times Square reflecting off of them. The only problem I had was that there were homeless people there. I felt sort of weird for hating them, because I generally try pretty hard to keep my feelings toward the less fortunate in the neutral to hopeful range. And, like, the outdoors belong to these people, you know?, so it’s almost like I was watching my movie in their living room. But I pay my taxes and patronize summer film series sponsors, and therefore I deserve things like a decent seat away from the less hygienic, am I right?
I know you’re supposed to be all happy for other couples when you’re in love, but yesterday, I found myself watching this commercial and thinking, “My greatest hope is that their relationship will end in a bitter, drag-out divorce”:
It’s the “I didn’t need the Internet back when I was into scoring random hos/hoes at bars, but my mom told me I need to keep it in my pants now” line that really makes me want to see him unhappy, I think.
Of course, I’ve always wanted to see these two fail miserably, but only because their painting o’ love is so sad. It includes a handprint, for God’s sake:
Last week, I walked into the ladies restroom at work and saw a black cardigan sweater draped across the back of one of the toilets and spilling on to the floor. Just looking at it sort of made me sick to my stomach, and in order to keep from vomiting, I had to stop myself from picturing some woman coming in, realizing it’s hers, picking it up off the back of the toilet, and putting it back on.
I swear, I’m about ten seconds away from putting a hazmat suit on every time I go in there, and someone’s taking her clothes off to pee?
I may be biased toward my own misery, but I always think it’s ridiculous when people in other cities complain about the weather. Vermont can get 12 inches of snow, and I’m going to think that the 2 inches in NYC is 100 times worse. Texas can be 115 degrees, and I’m still going to think NYC at 85 is more unbearable.
Yesterday was the first really hot day we’ve had here, with a disgusting humidity to boot. Kamran was working late, so I asked myself what I truly, truly wanted for dinner without him there to judge me. I chose pizza, of course, and stopped at the Two Boots in Grand Central, because they’re the only ones in the entire city making pizza with any flavor, as far as I’m concerned. As I waited in line for my two slices of Sicilian, all four people in front of me asked the cashier for napkins, and he apologized to each one and explained that they unexpectedly ran out. When I got to him to pay, I of course said, “I have two slices of Sicilian. And can I have that with a lot of napkins, please?” He made a gun with his fingers and said, “Good one.”
I stood back and waited for my slices to come out of the oven, and when the other counter person handed them to me, they were on two plates. I didn’t think anything of it at first, but after I’d taken a few steps, I realized that it was going to be kind of awkward carrying them allllll the way back to Kamran’s like that. It would’ve been so easy to turn around and ask for a takeout box, but the place was so busy, and I didn’t want to be a bother, and every step carried me closer to the sidewalk. (Kamran says this makes me very pathetic.)
So I just held my pizza in front of me, out in the open air for all of the dust and cab exhaust to settle on. People kept looking at it jealously as I passed, and a couple of deliverymen even asked if I’d share. “It’s too good to give up!”, I said. I’d unfortunately started out on the far end of Grand Central, so three avenue blocks later, I was finally at Kamran’s apartment on the waterfront, and I was hot.
I thought about how if I talked to Tracey for a third time that day, I’d complain to her about the heat, but then I realized that it’s probably been hot in Ohio for two days now with the way the weather travels so slowly to NYC. But then I realized that she’d say, “But the weather always feel worse in New York because you have to walk around in it instead of driving through it in your air-conditioned car.”
The other day, Dr. Boyfriend innocently informed me that he’d been listening to Electric Six’s Switzerland album on his iPod, not realizing that I’d go crazy reminiscing about how much it meant to me three short years ago. See, I met my ex-boyfriend Todd during our senior year of college at THE Ohio State University in a German film class, and after we’d dated for six months, he moved here for grad school at NYU. I took an extra year to write an undergraduate thesis and then moved to NYC myself, thinking that we’d both loved karaoke and strawberry shortcake from Whole Foods and riding the subway equally.
It turned out that Todd only liked to sing one song at karaoke, that they built a Whole Foods in Ohio, and that the subway made his claustrophobia act up. So he planned to move back home, and I planned to move with him, because it’s hard here, you know? And it’s even harder when you don’t know anyone but five of your boyfriend’s friends. I started looking at apartments in Columbus, picked out my future dining room table one day while I was shopping on High Street with my best friend, Tracey, and even bought some candles to match the exposed brick wall I imagined my new place would have.
And then I just didn’t go. Todd still went, and my friends must have thought I was the biggest asshole for teasing them with my plans to go with him, but I stayed, and I left our beautiful 350-square-foot studio with its black and white checked bathroom tile in Chelsea and found a sublet in Brooklyn. The sublet was the ground level of a brownstone in Park Slope where the kitchen, living room, bathroom, and one bedroom were on the first floor, and the entire basement was a second bedroom with its own bathroom.
I was rather lonely during that time. I hadn’t really considered NYC my home and hadn’t bothered to accept any invitations to hang out with friendly co-workers, so the only person I had to rely on was a guy from my very first job in the city. He lived in Park Slope and had been the one to convince me to take a sublet there, so I naturally assumed he’d be my tour guide and makeshift boyfriend. We did super-romantic things like meet at midnight for walks in the park (because he didn’t go into work until 11 a.m. and didn’t care that I had to be up at 7), listen to hours and hours of Radiohead (because it’s the only band we had in common) in his one-bedroom apartment (I didn’t know anyone else who was able to afford to live alone in NYC, so it impressed me), and watch the sun set from the roof of the Met (and then go straight to our respective homes instead of continuing an actual date). He’d call me only once a week, and I’d call Tracey eight times a day to complain about it.
The lease was up for the girl I was subletting from at the end of August, and I just assumed that my friend Wen (who I met while working Barnes & Noble, which was my second job for the first year I lived here) and I could just slide right in to a new lease. But on August 29th, the landlord called to tell me he was raising the rent from $2100 to $2800 and that I could get the hell out if I wasn’t happy with it. I begged him for a month to find a new apartment, and Wen helped me move my stuff into the basement bedroom so I could enjoy four glorious weeks of sleeping in a room the size of other people’s entire apartments.
I’d met Kamran (who is, of course, the current Dr. Boyfriend) on September 14th, but I wasn’t spending every waking moment at his apartment in front of a reality TV show yet. Every morning, I’d take a shower in the first-floor bathroom (because the downstairs one had seemed too scary to me after the flooding) and then try to find a corner of my room where I wasn’t visible to Wen on the first floor. The staircase was an open one with wooden bars where a wall should have been, so anyone standing in the kitchen could look down into the bedroom through the bars and see whatever wild thing I might be doing. I tried hanging sheets up with various sticking materials, but nothing ever took, so I resigned myself to hiding in my closet to put my underwear on for a month.
And I’d listen to Switzerland every single morning. I mean every single morning. Wen was always upstairs listening to cool stuff like The Blow from the crappy speakers attached to our TV (since we didn’t have a proper stereo), and I was always trying to drown him out with “I Buy the Drugs”. Which is totally a romantic song, right? “I am your man and I buy the drugs.”
I have no idea why the album hit me in just the right spot at that particular time. Maybe it’s because I was in such a state of oh-my-god-why-did-I-decide-to-stay-here? that I needed the tongue-in-cheek-ness of it to keep me focused on my yay-I-have-the-chance-to-do-whatever-I-want-to-with-my-life-in-NYC! thoughts and to keep my mind off my oh-crap-I-have-no-money-I-need-to-find-a-new-apartment-I’m-not-tough-enough-for-NYC thoughts. It was super-exciting to live in Brooklyn for the first time in this huge apartment and super-exciting to start looking for our next new place in my now-neighborhood of Williamsburg with Wen and super-exciting to be dating this person who felt different than everyone else from the moment I met him, and I really associate the album with those feelings and that time.
And now I have a boyfriend who loves it, too. Kamran and I agree that this is the best song on the album:
And now that I’ve told you my life story, tell me yours. What songs do you associate with certain times in your life? If you’re really motivated (and I hope you are), write your own blog/journal entry about it and let us know in the comments so everyone can enjoy.
On one hand, who cares? It’s good money for the transit authority, and everyone will continue to call it Atlantic-Pacific, anyway. On the other hand, corporations have way too much power in the country already, and it’s sickening to know that anything and everything is for sale here, especially dignity.
My friend Beth and I went to see Brüno on Saturday afternoon. I won’t give anything away, but the movie can pretty much be summed up in the following question, uttered by the guy next to me:
Did that urethra just speak?
Basically, if you enjoy David Letterman’s Top 10 Reasons to See Brüno, you’ll find the movie ten thousand times funnier:
But if you thought Borat was offensive and belittling, you’ll find it ten thousand times worse.
Did anyone else see it/love it? Did you think it could be construed as offensive to The Gayz?
I was coming out of Grand Central the other afternoon on my way to Kamran’s apartment, crossing to the south side of 42nd Street, when I noticed a businessman on a bike yelling at the cab driver behind him. They were stopped at the red light, and the bike rider was turned around, one foot on a pedal and one foot on the ground, yelling over and over, “Get out of the car!” He had his suit pants rolled up to expose his dress socks pulled to mid-calf and his leather briefcase strapped to his back. The cab driver was leaned back in his seat, hands gripping the wheel, yelling out his open window, but I couldn’t understand him. A driver in a car to their right leaned out his window, looking confused. Everyone on the street watched them, waiting to see what would happen when the light turned green.
I stopped at the corner to wait, and as expected, when the cars around him started moving, the guy on the bike just stood still, foot still planted firmly, looking smug. After maybe five seconds of this, the door of the cab behind the bike rider flung open, and a blonde girl about my age leaned out and yelled, “If you don’t move, I’LL MAKE YOU!” But then, you know, she sat back down and closed the door. Evidently feeling as if he’d proven his point and knowing that plowing over bikers is an everyday occurrence for cabbies, the biker started moving, weaving in and out of cars as he made his way leisurely across town.
While watching our favourite Canadian teen drama, Degrassi, from noon until 8 p.m. one day last week while I was visiting Ohio, Tracey and I luckily captured this Fruit by the Foot commercial on her DVR:
It’s sort of the worst recording ever, but the hilarity of the commercial cannot be diminished by screen lines or weird camera noises. Am I right?
To welcome me back from a week away from the Internet in the great barren plains of Ohio, you can politely click on the link below to read a story about how one man changed the course of my entire day:
