I went apartment-hunting this weekend with my friend Jack, and this was the view from one of the units we saw:
In the larger version, you’ll note the group of identical buildings in the lower righthand corner. That’s government housing. For poor people. Poor people with a great view.
It just ain’t right.
No, we actually did go to the Hamptons. And here are the pictures to prove it:
Most of these were taken by my friend Anthony, who I want to be when I grow up. He took more than 1000 photos during the trip, if that’s any indication of what a good time we had. The pictures of us playing drunken Cranium (which I don’t even like) for five hours every night have been omitted. As have the pictures of me crying for another five hours after I fell down Rollerblading.
You should’ve seen the look this guy gave me when he saw me taking a picture of him.
People in some foreign countries don’t have any water at all, and we spray ours all over the sidewalk. I find it kind of sad and kind of awesome.
(Mostly awesome.)
Anyone who’s lived in NYC for five minutes can tell you that the electric company, ConEd, sucks. Now that I’m nearly halfway to becoming a “real New Yorker” (they say it takes 10 years, and if how New York you are is based on how much you despise all other New Yorkers, I believe them), I have a few horror stories of my own. But Monday night’s takes the cake.
On Monday morning, I posted about tiny and therefore easily air-conditioned apartments being a good reason to never leave Manhattan, and Bachelor Girl said, “At least you live in a place where you will not DIE without air conditioning.” I should’ve known it was foreshadowing.
So, my friend Tessa was staying with me, as I mentioned, and after work that day, we met up with her-friend-who-I’ve-also-hung-out-with-once, Mark, and my friend Ash at Caravan of Dreams, a raw organic vegan restaurant that goes against everything I believe in but is delicious. Afterward, we went for a couple of hours of karaoke, which turned out to be amazing, because I somehow only make friends with people who have incredible voices.
Tessa and I got back to my apartment at around 11 p.m. and sort of started getting ready for bed but then ended up chatting for 45 minutes or so about how much better we are than everyone else, how people try to ruin our lives because we’re so great, the usual. And then all of the lights went out. Had I been awake alone and, say, in the bathroom, I would’ve freaked the hell out. As it was, we sat in shock for three seconds, and then I realized I was holding my BlackBerry and scrolled the trackwheel on it so the screen would give us a little light. The air conditioner was oddly still on, so I went over and switched it off to see if that would fix anything, and then we went to my bedroom window to see if the whole block was down, but the houses across the street were still lit. Tessa has some experience with fuse boxes, so she went to work on ours, flipping everything every which way, but nothing changed. I tried to turn the air conditioner back on, but of course it wouldn’t work anymore.
We slipped on our shoes and trudged out to the street, and while the houses across the street really were lit (with one smug asshole surfing on his computer right in front of his bay window), neighbors on my side of the street were all filing out of their houses in confusion. A ConEd emergency truck parked right in front of us and set about making some horrendous noise as it worked on the cables below the street, no doubt waking up anyone who had been sleeping peacefully and hadn’t noticed the power go out (my roommate).
We stood outside for perhaps 15 minutes, figuring 95 degrees and a slight breeze was better than 95 degrees and a non-functioning air conditioner, and then a girl from my building came out and announced that ConEd had called and left her a message about how it was a planned outage meant to last anywhere from two to six hours. WHO PLANS AN OUTAGE ON THE HOTTEST DAY OF THE YEAR THUS FAR? And who thought midnight, when there’s nowhere to be except your apartment, was a better idea than, say, noon, when most people are at work, anyway, and everyone else can just walk down the street to an air-conditioned coffee shop? Oh, ConEd.
The thing is–despite the fact that:
1) we had to sleep through the sweltering heat that night with no relief,
2) the two to six hours ConEd promised turned into twelve, and
3) Kamran’s Manhattan apartment has free and unlimited air conditioning,
I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. All of us hanging out on our stoops, my landlord’s non-English-speaking Italian mother coming out of our building in her housecoat, an old lady who still had electricity yelling from her window for everyone to shut up and let her sleep . . .
It was so Brooklyn.
As you’re reading this, I’m on my way to spend the next four days with eleven of my closest friends in THE HAMPTONS!
Our house has a pool! And I’m bringing my new Rollerblades so my friend Christine can attempt to teach me to skate on the boardwalk and fail miserably! And we’re going to have “Top Chef”-style cooking competitions! And my friend Chantee says she wants to be on my team because she “trusts my palate more than most Food Network stars’”! And hopefully we’ll escape the weekend without anyone getting alcohol poisoning or accidentally sleeping together!
It’ll be my first time there, and just the idea of it makes me feel all snobby and pretentious. I love that.
Check out my second NYC neighborhood “erotica” on the NabeWise blog.
For those of you at work, the dirtiest thing in it is the word manbits.
For those of you not at work, please feel free to write your own slash based on the relationship between the Wall Street bull and the 1 train and submit it in the comments.
My jack-of-all-trades friend Alan Corey of A Million Bucks by 30: How to Overcome a Crap Job, Stingy Parents, and a Useless Degree to Become a Millionaire Before (or After) Turning Thirty fame is a bigshot over at NabeWise, a new website devoted to revealing what makes NYC and San Francisco neighborhoods worth living in.
He asked me to do a series of guest posts about the neighborhoods I love most . . . in the style of a romance novel. Having never read a single romance novel in my life because I’m too much of a literary elitist, I was obviously the perfect choice for the task.
And it’s almost word-for-word what I sent them! Although the things they decided to leave out were obviously the best parts. Such as the phrase “like a mouthful of man-nectar between parted lips” and my mention of “buttflaps on old-timey pajamas”. Who doesn’t love buttflaps?! What I’m saying is–if you notice the same weird mistakes in the article that I do, rest assured that I wasn’t the one who made them. Not that I need to defend my reputation to you assholes.
Anyway, go read my post! And (please) make all of your friends read it, too, so I’ll have motivation to start on a super-sexy blogging-related Harlequin romance novel.
I spent my entire morning commute yesterday thinking that something was crawling on me. Now, my morning commute is only five stops on the train, but rush hour trains are always held up at the stations by passengers trying to cram themselves in, so five stops can take a half an hour. So picture me feeling itchy all over for a half an hour, adjusting the tags on my shirt and jacket in case that was the problem, furiously scratching the places I felt it most.
At first I thought it might be my imagination, because I do drop acid before going to work every morning, after all. But at one point, I actually felt like something was crawling on my ear. And I felt like the guy across from me on the train was watching it happen. I tried to distract myself with my Kindle, but I kept having to reach up every two minutes to brush existent or non-existent things off of my face. I wanted to get out a mirror and have a look, but I thought it was better to not know for sure, considering what my reaction might be.
I had it in my mind that it might be a spider, and I am totally scared of spiders. Like, scared in the way that if someone put a fake one in my lunch or on my pillow, I would never talk to that person again. Growing up on a farm, I was running downstairs nightly to wake my dad up and make him kill one I had or had maybe spotted on the wall beside my bed. Even now when I go to Ohio to visit, I’m on a constant look-out for spiders all over the house, and last time I was home and made my sister kill one for me that was dropping from the ceiling, she asked me, “How did you manage to survive twenty-some years in the country?” In that same trip, I made my best friend, Tracey, reach across me while we were in the Taco Bell drive-thru to pluck one of those little hairy spiders off of the armrest attached to my door. I really think I’m more equipped to deal with cockroaches somehow.
Anyway, I finally got to work and ran to the bathroom to check out my face. I didn’t see anything, so I officially chalked it up to my wild imagination and did my business. As I was washing my hands, though, this cute little spider came down on his web right in front of my face FROM MY HAIR. It was then that I remembered walking underneath a tree and noticing a spider hanging from it at the very last moment that morning, but never did I consider that it might have jumped on me. I tried to scream, but only air came out, and even though the last thing I want to do in the world is purposely touch a spider, I reached up and smacked it away.
And then I frantically checked the floor for it, but it was nowhere to be seen. And then I spent the rest of the day itching myself and being completely miserable.
You already know that if you were to ask me what my two favourite things in the world are, I’d answer:
1) karaoke
2) jerking off
So when my friend Emily told me that a bar in our neighborhood was doing Karaoke Chatroulette on Monday nights and that I was destined to see lots of heaving wangs, I was sold. In Legion‘s back room, you’ll walk in to find a young tight-jeaned male or female singing on stage and a projection screen behind him or her showing the performance, our Chatroulette chat partner, and the chat screen.
While our brave friend belts out “Pour Some Sugar on Me”, another girl in a heart-patterned 80s-era sweater types “sup dad” to the old man we’ve randomly been assigned to chat with. When he just stares at us, we next him and see a teenage girl and her boyfriend sitting in bed together, smiling and waving; they ask us to sing some Talking Heads and bounce around every time we say “burning down the house”. We next them and end up with a Ben Gibbard look-alike who plays his guitar along with the karaoker ruining Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy”.
It was all really PG-rated for the first half-hour I was there, and I was really upset. Emily had promised me girls pleasuring themselves with giant dildos and then pausing to type to us! But then we saw one guy jerking off, and then we saw another and another and another and another AND ANOTHER AND ANOTHER!!
As I was walking past the courthouse after work yesterday, the big pink hippo party truck outside caught my attention. I noticed the red lights and letters across the front and tried to figure out what kind of event was going on, but I just couldn’t comprehend what was being spelled out.
Eventually, I realized it was supposed to say Vanity Fair, but um, it doesn’t. Hmm?
NYC winters are so depressing, as I may have melodramatically mentioned before, that I think you can physically feel the weight lifting when it gets above 50 degrees. To celebrate being able to wear hoodies instead of parkas, I’ve been taking off down unfamiliar streets after work every day and walking until I miss my TV too much and have to hop on the subway to get home as fast as possible.
It’s so nice to see places I wouldn’t otherwise have reason to and to not care how slow the tourists in front of me are walking when I get up to City Hall or Chinatown. And when I stopped to take this photo, a man in a suit coming out of one of the judicial buildings passed by and said, “Isn’t that magnificent?! I took a picture of it just yesterday.” BFFs!
The only problem is that I keep seeing all of these happy couples out walking through the parks and holding hands, and I have to remind myself that Kamran will be graduating from law school in a year and will be so powerful and important that he’ll be able to leave work every day at 3 p.m. to come pick me up for all of the wandering and Staten Island Ferry rides I can handle.
Of course, they don’t know this, so I have to take out my cellphone and say things like “no, I love you more” to the nonexistent person on the other end to prove my happiness.
He may be no Banksy, but I sure love my Dickchicken:
Pussy Ham, not so much.
Can you believe there’s actually an anti-Dickchicken Facebook group? Who could possibly be annoyed by this?!
My friend Alison works for a concierge company that books activities for clueless NYC tourists. Because she spends so much of her day recommending Broadway shows and selling expensive dinners, she’s constantly being wooed by theatres and restaurants. Last week, she let me be wooed with her.
We met at an Upper East Side restaurant for fried hors d’oeuvres that I couldn’t eat because I was trying to play it cool on the calories before my impending trip to Ohio to see my family. (Every time I lose five pounds, my great-aunt, godloveher, likes to hug me and tell me how she and my great-uncle were so worried I’d end up “round-shouldered” and alone.) Afterward, we boarded a shiny new tour bus to take us the twenty blocks down Broadway to the theatre district, and I had to look on as Alison ate a Magnolia Bakery cupcake:
I’m not really up on my Broadway, so I hadn’t heard of Million Dollar Quartet and honestly wasn’t expecting much from it. Especially when the theatre where it was playing, the Nederlander, was one of the tiniest I’ve been in. Of course crap doesn’t make it to Broadway, though, and the size of the theatre made it so that our front-row mezzanine seats were approximately a foot from the stage.
The musical revolves around the night in 1956 when Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis all came together in Memphis to record an impromptu jam session. It’s really a musical for people who don’t like musicals, because it actually makes sense when the actors break into song. And there’s nothing cheesy about the music or lyrics; it feels like you’re at a rock concert, only you don’t have to put up with any deafening 1950s-era Elvis fans.
All of the performances were spot-on, but Johnny Cash blew our minds with how close his voice sounded. And at the end, when I thought, “Okay, this has been nice, but there’s nothing they can do at the end that’ll surprise me,” they totally gave me chills with something as simple as taking a picture. You’ll understand it when you see it. And you should see it.
You should also wait outside after the show like we did and happen to run into Elvis. And when he tells you he’s on his way to dinner like he did with us, remind him to stay away from the fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches lest he die an early death.
Me. Tomorrow.
I’m bringing my friend Beth, who hopes we have to take a shot every time he says “BAM”!
When I got off the subway last night in Brooklyn, there was a Latino man in a velour Statue of Liberty costume singing along and dancing to the Spanish-language music on his headphones in the middle of the street.
I learned this weekend that the difference between having a car and not having a car means having Cheesecake Factory or not having Cheesecake Factory. My car-owning friend Beth has been inviting me to ride to Jersey with her to go shopping for months now, but something has always stood in the way of me going. This weekend, though, the stars aligned, and she picked me up at 4 p.m. with the promise that she and her friend Sylvan would wear out my Sauconys.
I sort of expected the same kind of shopping experience I used to have in Ohio, when my best friend, Tracey, and I used to spend the day shopping at DEB, Claire’s, and Maurice’s. It was a major thing when a Hot Topic went in, though we were already past our wallet-chain-and-skater-jeans phase by the time that happened. (Okay, so maybe I was the only one of the two of us who went through that phase.)
But no! This mall had a Gucci store and a Louis Vuitton, and instead of shopping for silver holographic Converse flip-flops like Tracey and I used to do, Beth was shopping for a pair of Yves Saint Laurent stilettos. The food court had a Wendy’s, which there are only, like, two of in Manhattan, and everyone there looked like a cast member from “Jersey Shore”. What fun!
When we got hungry later in the evening, Beth mentioned that another mall nearby had a Cheesecake Factory. I was like, “Excuse me?” Because, um, I would’ve pretty much given up every other activity and risked my neck on the snow all of those times before had I known that was part of the deal. Our meal was delicious, of course, and hugely-portioned and super-cheap and everything else that restaurants in Manhattan aren’t, but it felt so wrong, because
everyone in the place looked like they could’ve been from Ohio. The only time I see people who look like they could be from Ohio here is when my friends and I go bowling at Port Authority and have to pass through Times Square, but I had to sit amongst these people and digest food while looking at them. You can imagine how hard that is.
No, I’m kidding, but it was weird. It’s like I can’t bear for things to feel too familiar.
Only in NYC would I need my friend Beth to pick me up after work last Friday and drive me to my apartment with my new TV that should have been small enough to carry but would’ve taken up an entire subway car with all of its packaging. Only in NYC would I know approximately three people who own a car and would the one who drives an Alfa Romeo convertible agree to haul my new flatscreen around.
And only in NYC, after a second viewing of An Education (OMG, just as good the second time) with said Alfa-Romeo-convertible-driving friend, would I return to my boyfriend’s apartment to find a Christmas tree simply pushed out the front door into the hallway when its duty is done. And a full two weeks after Christmas, no less.
It’s kind of neat, and it’s kind of awful.
This weekend, instead of properly paying attention to me, Kamran combed YouTube for all of the songs listed in New York magazine’s Brooklyn Top 40, the top 40 songs coming out of Brooklyn and defining what it means to be indie right now. He made a playlist of them, which you can enjoy here:
I feel so close to all of these artists somehow. Both physically, because I live down the street from them, but also . . . not spiritually, because that’s lame, but somehow like spiritually, because this sound is so distinctly Brooklyn to me, and I feel so distinctly Brooklyn myself.
While we sat on Kamran’s loveseat, him reading cases for law school and me scanning blogs as we listened to the playlist for the second time, he looked over and said, “We should be doing this!” I said, “Oh, um, I don’t know if we could do this.” He said, “Well, not THIS. This is good.”
This is the song he was talking about:
We decided that when we need to feel better about ourselves and how easy making music is, we’ll listen to this:
I forget sometimes that I’m so freakin’ lucky to live in a city where this stuff is being made and is readily available to me. I saw Crystal Stilts open for Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, saw Amazing Baby open for Cold War Kids, saw MGMT play in an abandoned pool, saw The Dirty Projectors play on the Williamsburg waterfront. Remind me of this when I say I can’t be out at a show until 2 on a weeknight.
Last night at 8 p.m., Kamran and I exited a movie theatre in Times Square, accompanied by our friends Jack, Beth, and Nik, Jack’s friend Chris, Jack’s friend Alex from Romania, and Alex’s Romanian girlfriend, Simina. We were walking down 42nd Street, trying to decide which is scarier: the flesh-sucking monsters we’d just seen in Zombieland or NYC tourists. Mid-conversation, out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone bent over with liquid spilling all over her legs and the ground. She was out in the street, facing traffic, with her back to the sidewalk we were on, and I just assumed she was vomiting. She had wavy, shoulder-length black hair and a black suit jacket on. Her bottom half was nude-colored, but I just assumed she was wearing peach leggings. I couldn’t imagine a middle-aged woman wearing leggings without a long shirt covering them, but that seemed much more likely than what was actually happening, which was that
In Times Square. Which, if you’ve never seen it, is basically the center of the world. We’re talking thousands of people milling around a few blocks at all hours of the day and night, with enough lights on every building to make it seem as if the sun never sets. And mostly people who don’t live in NYC, which means a woman with her pants down in the street is about the most exciting thing they’ve ever seen. Traffic was stopped right in front of her, so people in cabs had their noses pressed to the glass not two feet away from her bare bits. The lights glared off the urine clinging to her flabby backside. People stopped and pointed her out to each other, and Kamran yelled for me to get my camera out.
But it was too late. She finished, pulled her pants up, and walked into the subway unashamed.
My office building is built to be flexible so that it doesn’t topple over in the wind gusts that roar over the tip of the island in Battery Park. On bad days, the building groans as it sways back and forth, and I know to have my lunch delivered so as to not mess up my hair. On really bad days, the door in our 25th floor lobby won’t lock because the two walls around it are so far from where they’re supposed to be.
This fascinates me.
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