so most of you have prolly gotten emails from me about that 'video games that help you focus' story i'm working on. i have spent 2+ weeks thinking about this stuff, and so it has dawned on me that journalists lead strange lives. here are some highlights:

i heard from an equipment salesman that fortune 500 companies (which he would not name) and the accounting firm ernst & young have had these programs in place to help their employees' business performance. after i got off the phone with him i realized he was just reading off the sidebar on his website. he wouldn't give me any more details about what these companies had been up to. so i, like a freak, called up ernst & young and said, 'so, there's this thing where you play a video game with your mind, and you do it by sticking electrodes on your head...no, i'm not kidding. this is real...did you ever have a program like this for your employees?' she had to get back to me on that one.

and that, strangely enough, happened not to be the most out-of-left-field question this PR lady had been asked recently.

i also ended up calling an indiana funeral/medical services company that another equipment website claimed would appear in a harvard business review article about their success with the technology. no luck their either. not sure what's up, but maybe these salesmen just make stuff up, not expecting the mothers of ADD children to call Polly PR to confirm.

i've also been getting hundreds of message-board postings via email, mostly from professionals on a yahoo forum. they are a wild bunch, posting robustly even at 11pm on a saturday night during the holiday season. [and i, the shut-in journalist, was close at hand to read them.] aside from all the expected internet-forum backbiting and mudslinging, one of my favorite dr.s must use bartleby's quotations like a thesaurus. there are like 3 mentions of historical figures, along with the quotes they are most famous for, in every email. george santayana, fdr. it's the email signature as email. this person also wedged in a comparison of the group's debate about licensing to the christian reformation. just as luther proclaimed that all should have direct access to god through personal readings of the bible, so too should neuroscientists be generous with their prefixes: ph.d.s and other fancy-degree holders shouldn't monopolize the administration of brain training.

here are kt, me, & D at homecoming, behind summit, which is where we spent most of the weekend when we weren't at the depot. all had homework/projects to do, and it was a little bizarre to be back there doing work, walking around the same places, and yet being strangely disconnected from everything going on.

"if i start having marxist thoughts about elvis, you start having technological solutions."

i miss the quoteboard aspect of communal college living. the heading is what i said to ed when he kept having those shower-inspired good ideas while i was busy working on an assignment.

you've probably never desired to read a marxist essay on elvis, but i have just finished one, on the day of the birth of my Mother, no less. and though she may not remember to call herself such, she may indeed be a bit of a marxist and maybe even an elvis fan?

the assignment was to find a way to write about the most-written-about figure in pop culture from our own critical angle. it took me about twelve minutes to open the only book that they actually had at the library out of my list of twenty and find my hook. i use it in a paragraph about clearasil. really--i consider myself lucky. i've never been a savvy researcher. things just happened to go my way this time. and now i can't sleep because i got so jacked up on caffeine to finish this thing (dragged ed on a 2am walk around park slope), and it's only kicked in now that i'm finished.

so i'm drinking a beer and posting halloween pictures.

i was a corkscrew for halloween, the anthropomorphic kind with the head that twists and the arms that you push down. terrible thing was, i brought a bottle of wine to the party in williamsburg, and there was no corkscrew to be found. so i walked around dumbly with the unopened wine, dressed as the very thing i was missing. i even had a bit where i spun around and jacked my arms up and then sprung through the air. meant to drop a cork when i did it, but i couldn't open the wine to get it...

first pic shows my headpiece and 'wings' (made out of a fresh direct box, tinfoil, and foam coil), the second my legs as the twisty stick-in-the-cork part (foam coil wrapped in aluminum tape).

wasabi peas may smell like cat food, but they set your nose aflame

update since the last time i posted:

school.

that is all. oh wait, and rain. now cold.

i have been hunkered down all weekend making a dent in work incredibly slowly. i definitely feel that good writing and good grooming are mutually exclusive.

here is a review of shopgirl by one of my profs. also amusing are the letters he got in response. i like the one from bashir.

also don't miss the new yorker talk of the town on harriet miers.

subway wit

must give emily credit for noticing this. i walked right by it. must be because she is randier than i? or i am dislexicer. disexlic. i am afraid of what that means. which is why i will dream about it. or did. last night. uggh.

diaries of a painfully inexperienced reporter

i've been out on two reporting missions for my intro class—one to a polling place in alphabet city last week for the democratic mayoral primaries, and one today, at a meeting in protest of VA hospital consolidation. i find that it is easiest to get old men to talk to me. they slow down because they see a nice young lady, which is when i swoop in and...ask nearly incoherent questions while scribbling sloppily in my notebook. i think i need a tape recorder so i can go around brewton-style.

at the conference today i met a man without a bladder. he was very nice despite his bladderlessness, which i suppose indicates that a bladder isn't a crucial component of congeniality, tho it must surely help. i did wonder, as i sat in that overly air-conditioned hotel ballroom for two over hours, how in the world all those senior vets managed to stay there without a trip to the bathroom. perhaps they are all lacking in bladders.

vegan mac&cheese is gooey cardboard

i just made one of those boxes of vegan convenience food that is so freakin unexploitative it calls into question its very existence. the box contains nothing you might remotely associate with dairy or dairy alternatives; not only is there no lactose, whey, or egg, but also no soy or nut products, and no candida albicans, whatever that means. the box is made from 100 percent recycled paperboard and was printed using soy-based inks. aside from the soy disparity, i'm pretty sure the box and its contents are one.

the pervasiveness of vegetarian- and vegan-friendly convenience foods puzzles me. the whole point of the original convenience foods was to make replicas of homemade dishes so high in starch, animal fat, and salt that it doesn't matter how preserved and freeze-dried and pouchified they are—you still have the important conveyors of flavor. to then go and replace the animal products with something unfatty and unflavorful becomes an exercise in masochistic deprivation. all for the sake of what? having an imitation of something that is itself an imitation of a home-cooked meal? i'm sure if plato could've foreseen road's end organics' dairy-free mac & 'chreese' (cheddar style), he would've been furious. we're talking shadows of shadows here.

i once picked a fight with a soy-yogurt product representative giving out samples at my health food store. i informed her that nondairy foods should give up the fight, accept their unsuppressably unique flavors, and go and develop foods that work with, rather than against, these foreign textures and tastes. manufacturers of nondairy goods, i call on you to untether yourselves from the hegemonic reign of dairy and to adopt an adventurous new approach of culinary medium specificity! if it does not look like cheese or yogurt, i promise to still try it.

except keep making soymilk and those tofutti cuties, because they are good. rice dream can go fuck themselves.

last day of freedom slash boredom

school starts tomorrow. soon i will find out if my brain still works.

yesterday ed and i went to coney island. i've been in new york for two years and three summers before that, and yet i had never gone to coney island. craaazy place. you can get on the F train downtown and an hour later emerge, alongside throngs of people carrying towels and pails and impatient children, at a giant raucus yankee carnival on the beach. we walked along the boardwalk and then sat on the beach and went swimming (water very cold) and ate a mango on a stick carved both to enhance its bitability and its resemblance to a flower. then we looked at the games and rides and walked up to neptune ave for pizza at the famous totonno's, which has some or other claim to being the oldest pizza in new york. it didn't taste old, but did happen to be a little bland. the crust found great favor with ed, and the cheese was quite fresh. i prefer the spicier, greasier varieties myself.

les achats sur (ou avec?) l'herbe

for my last day in austin dorothy and i took a little nude shopping trip around the city. very popular with the kids these days. what better way to ensure that you come home in some new duds than the threat of getting arrested? i just love the way strapless dresses make pictures far more suggestive.









this is dorothy and travis's cat marilyn, who likes to climb in the 'cuties' clementine box. shown here with human-assisted mohawk.












here we are at the airport, properly attired. sad to leave dorothy and her city's perfect union of egg muffin and soy latte.

in austin the icecream melts really fast

here are dorothy and me modeling our skirts, together for the first time since d made mine last year. we have just eaten a very elaborate fish dinner with two sauces and wilted greens and are now waiting for our starlight-mint-doctored icecream to re-harden in the freezer. it melted after like 5 minutes in the 90+-degree kitchen.

have gone swimming twice, in two different spring-water pools. this is a bike-friendly town with plenty of trail access to the colorado river. and margaritas and barbeque. the only chorizo i've had so far tasted like cat food (but was compensated for by the 'STERONG' prickly-pear frozen margaritas), so we'll rectify that situation soon. PIE HEAVEN party is friday. ed'n'i'll be making my improv blend of chocolate peanut-butter oat-cereal bourbon ice cream goo with a graham-cracker crust to hold it all together and qualify it as a pie. dorothy will finish solidly inside the category with her two-time hit, the corn and tomato savory pie.

mother earth plies her trade

for sale at the health food store in gainesville, fl:

consumer hobo

look at this hat i found on the street. i think it may actually be a pink fluff-muff (with a black velvet reversible inside) or even skank tube top for a very small person, but i have chosen to wear it as a hat. when i first picked it up (off of a fence displaying free stuff here in the slope), along with a very large multicolored satisfyingly nubby scarf covered in cat hair, it was to be a hostess gift for dorothy or b, but, sorry girls, it would look adorable with your blond hair, but this one is mine. it probably makes me look like a tripped out hopper chick, but maybe that is what i am going for here.

ed and i made a giant trip to bed bath & beyonce today, an excursion which gave rise to my carrying a supersized shopping bag on the stick of a mop, hobo style. hence the title of this post and all of its i-ronic implications.

also we have wireless now, so i am blogging from bed while drinking beer. surprisingly easy to get used to. it is now easier for me to take a photo of myself on my cellphone, text it to gmail, and post it on my blog than it is to get a glass of water. the other day i was in the gap's underwear section and they had a bra promoted with the tag 'wireless.' i find this substantially more amazing than my technological feats. i mean, if i can put my boobs to work in terms of connectivity, how much better off wouldn't we all be?

blithe abuse of consumer technologies

with this post i join the ranks of indulgent and shameless bloggers who subject everyone to low-res cameraphone documentation of their lives. ahh it feels good to succumb. this is of ed and me on our way to a party in carroll gardens, where we ended up knowing everyone twice over through two separate paths of connections: the prolific brooklyn–austin exchange program, and ed's workmate jordi, who had extended the invitation.



on saturday lacey and her friends invited kt and me to the beach. we ended up going to the rockaways, in queens, which was quite close thanks to l's car and quite beachy thanks to water and sand and neighboring mexicans who taught us how to say bottleopener in spanish when we asked for one (forgot the word). it might've been a dirty word which is why they laughed at us, but kt said the woman, not the man, told her the word so it was less likely to be dirty? who knows. here are kt and lacey posing. immediately sent to dorothy, which prompted a call from her. see cameraphones are great.



here are josephine and holly after dinner the other weekend at a yum i-talian place in park slope.












and here are the trees and fire escape outside my kitchen window. maybe i will take another without the screen.

salaciousness in the NYT

this is pretty fun:

first read the new nanny diaries are online (sunday styles, 7.17.05)

then read the blog in question, instructions to the double

onesies for little rebelsies

ok, since ed hasn't posted about this i'm stealing it. a few times we've walked by this boutique on 5th ave that sells these che guevara onesies. if there can be said to be a heartbeat of park slope, this is surely it. it has everything: decadence, preciousness, rebellion via materialism, baby-centricity—this little playsuit is the locus of park slope identity.

sometimes when i walk around and see all the little kids here against the backdrop of lovely brownstones, trees, cafes, and gay-friendly shops, i wonder where they will go to rebel and be edgy once they are teenagers. their parents already patronize all the coffeeshops and alt-looking places here, so they'll grow up seeing the slope as a firmly entrenched establishment, whose tropes they will feel compelled to kick sand at using whatever style of boot is popular by then. i mean, if you wore che when you were still pooping yourself, you are obviously going to have to find your own style of heroes to commodify.

oh my god saturday night i dreamed i was being turned into a bug. a SCARY bug. i was still me but i had bug features stuck on, particularly my left arm and abdomen, which were so gross i don't even want to describe. at first i thought it would go away, like with physical therapy or something. but then it wasn't and i was noticing weird antennae everywhere and i slumped and was like oh god god god please make it go away. ed woke up and assured me that i was not a bug. still it was bad. THEN last night i was making a salad and tossing it and noticed something moving and there was this big spider/not-spider bug crawling around covered in berry vinaigrette, moving slowy and creeping through the organic spring mix. it had to have been in the lettuce bag, eating and shitting the lettuce since being packed away at earthbound farm and barely surviving the journey through those microengineered eighteen layers of semipermeable plastic. otherwise i would've seen it crawling on the counter and scaling the slippery pyrex upside-down. which, judging from its motor skills, was not so plausible. i am now afraid to eat the lettuce (and too lazy to wash it) even tho ed promised that no spider eggs would hatch in our stomachs and eat away at us from our insides.

please no kafka jokes.*

*unless they rule. (unlikely)

cleanliness and grooming aren't necessary, but they make you feel better

been doing an okay job not descending into total slothitude at my one-month mark of unemployment. managed to email some stuff to the profs in charge of my program, doing this new gyrotonic thing (via work-study a.k.a. cleaning so i don't have to pay tons of dollars) under the aegis of this really cool girl i met at the co-op, watching admittedly too much pirated gilmore girls, reading some things, and trying not to run up the daytime minutes on my phone. might try kickboxing at the gym tomorrow. ed and i are about to embark upon a sunday-night pizza retrieval operation.

post-employment: phase 1

been unemployed for nearly two weeks now. this state of grace began, after my last day of work, at a karaoke bar, where ed and i performed a drunken but still well-coordinated 'billie jean' for my ex-coworkers.

i have spent the two weeks capitalizing on intro offers for various forms of exercise, being victimized by three different cell phone companies, and reading things that i've been meaning to read for a while. ed and i found a new copy of the dvd outfoxed for the taking on a stoop, so we will watch that sooner than i will finish reading the vinland (icelandic) sagas, also from the stoop.

i also, through no fault of my own, am now the owner of a cameraphone, so be expecting gratuitous and low-res pictures of me and/or my possessions and habitat to appear in your inboxes.

cumming attractions...

new to our apartment: the moving image. yesterday ed and i found a large nice-looking but old tv sitting on the sidewalk next to our place (since monday is trash day, the sunday evening walk takes on new furniture-acquiring dimensions). of course it acted busted when we (he) took it upstairs and turned it on, but he figured out what was wrong and tonight soldered something onto something else after taking the bad thing away. and now there is an aqua teen dvd playing in our 'parlor,' a.k.a. 'the five-thing room,' since only about five things (not including people) can fit in there at once.

'a-' is the new 'homo-'

lots of people are now claiming an 'asexual' identity and asking that others not try to 'fix' them, says the nyt.

thought this was interesting, tho it would probably make a better premise for an onion article. some bleary-eyed porn producer could lambaste the new brand of sexual deviants for not being up to anything kinky. or they could do a series of people claiming new identities left and right. the noisemakers, the outdoor adventurers, the people who like to eat sandwiches mid-act. they should all run out and form a club before they can be stigmatized, or worse, studied by graduate students.

it happened

i got laid off from my first job. it was hard to keep a straight face during the whole thing. the vp who did it (i must've been about her sixth that day) had to effect this pained demeanor (even tho she knew i was leaving anyway) and give the 'it's not you it's the position' speech. by the end she was dropping all the key verbs: 'you have until june 17...if you wanted to ____ before then....if you feel ____ is difficult for you....of course we could....but s--- is on vacation and the paperwork....' lots of sideways glances and buried ante-ante-antecedents. if i wanted to what? scream like a banshee and set the place on fire? decry the decline of life as i know it because my filing techniques are, it turns out, entirely stoppable?

the museum is a sad and warped place and can only become more so with this new round of absurd cuts. it doesn't really affect me—my life will only be made easier with a june 17 departure date, severance, and unemployment—but i'm angry on behalf of my friends there. the cut people are lucky; it's the ones who are staying who are really being shat on. i wish our board's bad behavior would incite large-scale resignations on principle. i wish workplaces everywhere had informal unions of conscience (not consciousness; i'm sick of all those articles about jesus on the job) so that badly run institutions would have to make wiser decisions if they wanted anyone at all to work for them. um. i wish bullies weren't so effective.

when i leave reality, realty is there waiting for me

my compulsive 'nesting' efforts via craigslist have taken me to many different neighborhoods, most recently murray hill and yorkville. murray hill i found especially unsettling. it's nice, clean, and hip in a safe, this-was-edgy-ten-years-ago,-have-i-got-it-right-yet? sort of way. it's the kansas of manhattan (even tho the people who are actually from kansas are all in williamsburg). all the new york fixtures are there—duane reades, pizza places, dry cleaners, delis—but nothing else is. it's a clean, generic new york neighborhood. i didn't know that existed. i knew there was anywhere, USA, but i didn't know there was anywhere, NYC. everything was rootless and scary. the whole point of being a young person in new york is the way the purpose and importance of the place is allowed to stand in for the obvious lack of those things in your own life. and now i'm finding out that i can be anywhere and be in new york at the same time.

which may explain why i have red hook envy. i'd rather be nowhere than anywhere. faced with the many aspirational-lifestyle themeparky 'nabes' hyped in time out, i'd feel downright transgressive moving to an overgrown weedlot waterfront only accessible by bus. whenever i read about the bakery on van brunt with its malted chocolate cake or see a mention of the liberty tap room's six-point ale or remember the roofdeck view of the apartment ed and i saw, i am struck by the overwhelming singularity of each thing—there just isn't anything else. park slope has so much. i couldn't begin to pick a restaurant. i want the choices made for me and i want the things around me to be monumental. living in red hook is the real-estate equivalent of the raw-foods diet. it is extreme and not always satisfying and often lonely. but it has definition. that is about all it has.

i can see that i'm better of in park slope, mainly because i'd spend most of my red hook time transgressing on the bus, loaded down with groceries from whole foods.

$2.75 POM and 33-cent cinnamon

yes, this weekend ed and i joined the park slope food coop, where there's only a 21 percent markup in exchange for three hours of work per month and a sort of dippy but admirable (and sometimes downright grudging) community work-together feeling. unlike at the sleeker, anti-dismemberment chains like whole foods, here our human imperfections are in plain sight, not buried beneath shiny curved surfaces and customer service jargon, where words like 'team member' supplant the wordlier 'cashier.'

one month to go at the museum. there's a board meeting soon and a probable round of layoffs, so i'm glad to be kicking it before i get kicked. i don't really wanna be laid off from my first job. tho maybe i won't give notice with 'hr' (it's only one person) and see if my boss and i can swing a freelance deal for the fall, making it seem as though i hadn't planned on leaving at all. not sure how much i want to work when i start school, tho.

i just got called drew barrymore by a gay bike courier

i snuck out of work to get a muffin and was about to cross the street when i heard a particularly effeminate 'toodly-doo' issuing from the direction of a particularly scruffy-looking bike courier. this person was all the way across the intersection from me, waving and blowing kisses, and i decided the attention was not meant for me. until. five seconds later he was circling around me, still doing the dainty waving and kiss-blowing, calling 'dreeewww, teeheehee, dreeewwww! drew barrymore! teehee,' and then circled back to the street he came from, still waving and laughing and blowing kisses. i gave a mock wave back, and the glee continued until he disappeared down 54th.

perhaps he was taking the drugs. still, it was educational. i didn't know they had gay bike couriers.

i think i will further today's themes of gayness and celebrity. i think i'll go to the moma for lunch.

postscript (unintentional self-parody)

when i got to d.c. on friday, kt and i passed a bum near union station who asked for money for food. i offered him my banana, he took it and said thanks, and then i started to walk away but then turned back around and added encouragingly, 'it's organic.'

i was twenty feet away before i started laughing.

goodbye whole foods, hello brook(lyn) farm

i will be frequenting the wf less once i join the park slope food co-op. i'll pay a fee and work four hours a month in exchange for a delicious and reasonably priced variety of organic and often local produce and products whose organic-hood and naturalness is perpetually under review and rigorously compared to other possibly even more insanely ecologically friendly goods. after reading on their website about the tightly legislated standards and policies of their research team, i got so excited by their hyperbolic commitments and their success in applying them (people who don't live in the neighborhood or even in nyc belong and shop there) that i wanted to jizz all over the screen. except i was at work. i was trying to explain my excitement to coworkers before a meeting without using the word jizz and i think i ended up pounding at my heart and saying something vague and lame like 'resonating.' hmm i suppose all romantic language is the result of self-censorship from coarser expressions.

moving day

i just wrapped up a roll of tp in anthropologie tissue (left over from some frustrating and since-returned purchase) and the effect was amazing. this is a company that can make even toilet paper look romantic.

re: lewis lapham hangup

the tribeca film festival is showing the american ruling class, which is somehow billed as an energetic combo of fiction and documentary satire without ever being called a mockumentary. heard it wasn't that great, but i must say i'm curious. lapham wrote the screenplay, in which two yale grads (fake) are taken around by mentor lewis lapham (real) to meet major cultural figures like vonnegut, cronkite, and robert altman, as well as targets like larry summers (all real). if they're using real cultural elites, why use fake ivy elites?

the ny times noted with (understated) amusement that the afterparty for the film's premiere was held on the floor of the new york mercantile exchange (see 'bashing the rich, then celebrating at a hub of commerce', april 18, if it's still up).

i'll have to see if i can catch the last screening tomorrow. may be in the throes of moving, though. whenever we get internet in the new place, i'll post pics for y'all. before and after, for sure. we'll be painting before we leave for july, getting a cat after we return. i keep asking ed what color he wants to paint the cat, but no decisions have been made.

pergo slope

so ed and i got a place today. and it's actually in park slope. i'd resigned myself to the idea of living somewhere on the slope perimeter, or even in some parkless section of brooklyn, but then this listing (below market value and rent stabilized) just popped up on craigslist and here we are.

it has a big bedroom on one end and then a railroad configuration of two doorless rooms and then the kitchen. fake wood floors, fake marble in the kitchen. the fake wood makes me feel slightly unsettled, which unsettles me further. why should i feel attached to the authenticity of walking on a real dead waxed tree instead of a fake one?

the bedroom has two windows that look into trees. not big ones but trees!! i suppose i'd rather look at living trees than walk on dead ones. i look forward to one day living in a place where trees are not a luxury. that just feels so wrongheaded.

the cover of this week's ny press is a cartoon by david rees called get your friedman on. it is awesome. please go look at it. the article's ok too because it makes fun of thomas friedman, albeit nongraphically.

i suppose his other option would've been 'my new flattening technique is unstoppable,' as long as by unstoppable you mean entirely stoppable.

craigslife - $900 obo (park slope)

my new pastime is looking for the many elements of my new life on craigslist. now that i may be closing in on an apartment, i'm starting to hunt for trashcans and shelves and pyrex cookware (no aluminum and no teflon, intones worried mother) on CL. damn, a lot of people sure have ugly stuff. sort of the humbling underbelly (humderbelly?) of the shiny new death-deferring no-interest-till-christmas-2013, as-seen-on-tv offerings of our daily existence.

i think i will shell out for a new mattress, tho, because of that scary new yorker talk of the town piece on bedbugs. those things suck!!

suburban oasis just 25 minutes from midtown

ed and i checked out astoria saturday night, and we were impressed. it is truly diverse, as they say. unlike most ny neighborhoods, which are predominantly one race or another, astoria is one big 'rainbow' of a party that would make any college admissions counselor cry. i submitted that it's something of a yankee berkeley (without the posturing), except i've never even been to california, so that's probably not accurate. i've noticed that descriptions of queens tend to follow that rubric—"something of a ____, but without the posturing."

there's A LOT of stuff at the last stop on the N, ditmars. we thought we were going to some dissipated, end-of-the-line area, and it was truly hopping. we ate at this italian place that new york mag made out to be an out-of-the-way find, but was actually a warehouse-sized suburban-style restaurant with valet (if you've ever eaten out in charlotte, it was like that), waterfalls, sucky murals of vineyards, and a lounge singer who performs his own stuff. it was really hard to get a table, but i had to do it because the whole thing was just so weird, so strip mall, so not new york. all the natives of suburban brooklyn and queens flock there in their cars and use the valet and eat giant plates of pasta and meat and order ex-presso. we overheard a lot of conversations about baby formula, mortgages, and the way-out-there neighborhoods (middle village, mesbeth?) i've always wondered about on the subway map, all in accents you don't hear so much in soho.

they took us into the wine bar to wait for a table. turns out the wine bar is not a bar at all but a whole separate creepy room with little tables and more murals. this is where the lounge singer puts on his 'show.' we were so weirded out by the time we got a table, and so full of the pretzels, cheese, and bread that you get before you even order, that we barely finished half of our entrees. ed's lasagna was rather disappointing, but my gnocchi with tomato sauce was pretty good. everything was real—no shortcuts or substitutions. when the assistant manager came by and saw that we were not eating and actually wanted to leave, he was dismayed and forced complimentary tea on non-tea-drinking ed and coffee on a sheepish me. the macchiato was great, i have to say, even if it contained enough milk to be a cappuccino. they tried so very hard to make sure we would come back (also a new experience in this city), but that's just never gonna happen. for a while i thought it would be a fun joke to play on my roommies when they come visit ("hey, i know this great restaurant—it's new york's best-kept secret"), but ed pointed out that anyone who lives outside of new york drives by these places all the time, and it would not be funny.

at last, word arrives

i got into nyu's cultural journalism program!!!! (i maintain that cult jism is a better term. maybe i can get them to change it once i enroll.)

found out over email—it was so weird. i've been checking my mailbox compulsively, fearfully, unreasonably, since mid-march, and it never occured to me to be afraid every time i open my email. good thing, too, considering how often i check it. i'd be an emotional wreck. oh wait...

if we were cooking roommate dinner in jam304...

i would be ranting about armpit hair and its shades of meaning. for example, right now, i have armpit hair. quite a bit of it. haven't thought of shaving in a while. not that important. it's cold out.

now, i would like for the follicular status of my underarms to have nothing to do with my identity, to not signify as a meaning-laden political choice. yes, i'm a feminist, and i happen to know my share of ani songs thanks to a rather limited cd rotation in college, but that has nothing to do with the trifling matter of shorn b.o. factories.

but no. i live in a world where R&D for razors, which resemble luxury automobiles* more with each passing day, expends more of the nation's creative energy than your average hairy folksinger can muster. of course it has to mean something when i don't use the damn things.

instead of having an apartment full of lovely lady lushes on this friday eve, i have a blog. damnit. and i have to move out of my actual apartment. screw the world!

* men's = exterior, women's = interior

i woke up feeling very satisfied with myself, which is rare these days considering that any day now my fate for the next year and a half will be determined arbitrarily by a piece of mail, and that my brain has entered superscramble mode from doing every variation of a craigslist search for the "SWEEET BKLYN 1BR SUblet (byebye manhatten)" of my future.

i suspected that i did something impressive in my dream, and, sure enough, about five minutes into my shower it came back. i had gone to jury duty, which didn't look at all like jury duty. there were all these little tables with nice chairs in a darkened room, and people were scrunched around them talking intently. it was like a hotel dining area with the impersonal edge taken off—no febreeze, no offensive minimuffins. i squeezed myself into a group at one of the tables, and a friendly 40something fellow was talking about what the experience of jury duty should be like. a blond woman piped in, very excited about the idea of people coming in to little tables and talking and learning from each other. 'i could learn languages,' she enthused. and, rather unnecessarily, 'i could work on the language that so many people speak here in america.' spanish, of course, but she didn't think it PC to say as much. normally i would scoff at a declaration of this sort, but the energy of the group was so earnest and engaged in the ideas themselves that i didn't even mind. this was totally a liberal-arts circle jerk.

yes. in my sleep, i invented the academic's jury duty, which apparently combines the highbrow intimacy of a bistro with the democratic expansiveness of a walmart. the whole affair was very much in the style of those self-consciously clunky believer inquiries, like, 'what for are english departments?' except this time it was, 'what for is jury duty?'

it was one of those self-reflexive moments where we were participating in the very scene we were inventing, right as we were inventing it. sort of a phenomenological chicken and the egg performance—the kind you can walk in on in any upper-level english class. i can't remember whether i thought it was brilliant or shameful that all these people were so engaged in a conversation that would never reach high enough on the bureaucratic ladder to effect any change. was it enough that these people felt like their voices were important, or did they actually have to be important? is there a difference? there wasn't one in this case, because the thinking was the doing, and that was the point of the exercise. in the dream i tried to imagine the infrastructure that would carry people's ideas up the civic ladder, more as a perfunctory ass-covering measure than anything. you know, in case anyone demanded that reality actually match what was in their heads.

some people dream in black and white. some dream lucidly and have wild crazy sex every chance they get. this morning pretty much confirms that i dream in caricature. five years ago it was the fashion to be self-consciously self-deprecating (which is probably redundant, but then, that's in style too). what to do with a person who is subconsciously self-mocking? if someone wanted to make fun of me, they could hardly do better than to write a little one-act in which i turn a bland symbol of civic responsibility like jury duty into an opportunity for indulgent self-reflection among the citizenry...unless they have me holding a sweat lodge in the camping section of walmart.

it seems like my brain is manufacturing its very own grad school curriculum while the turbo digressive lush in me is asleep. totally the opposite of college, when i would dream i was writing a brilliant paper (i swear the phrase 'donut darwinism' really meant something at the time) just so i could keep hitting snooze on my 3am alarm.

the swindle of organic snacking

yesterday i bought some 'carrot chips' from the health-food store. there are pictures of carrots on the bag, and the ingredients list contains both carrot juice and carrot puree in the first few items. the very first ingredient, tho, is organic stone-ground corn.

it took me ten chips of a hauntingly familiar salty cornfried taste to realize that i was eating fritos.

i'm beginning to grasp the cleverness of the organic-foods spin machine. they are clearly learning from our current legislative architects, whose basic premise is: if it sounds like an improvement on what came before, it is. to question the healthfulness of these carrot chips would be, in effect, to question the judgment of our president. and that would be un-P.A.T.R.I.O.T.-ic.

so i will go back to my organic bologna sandwich and my organic creme sandwich cookies and congratulate myself on knowing the difference between what is good for me and what isn't.

the armory show

on saturday i went to the armory show (big art show at the piers in midtown) with gabriel and ginny, who adopted me into their art-world circles so that i could get in for free. the few things that i liked were all drawings with a playful/cartoony element. i definitely like my art with a punchline. marcel dzama is the only name i'm remembering right now.

some of the more silly sights:

· a giant red watering can that played 'hey-ya.' there was a toddler trying to stick his face in it.
· a print/drawing of four large hourglasses, the first of which said 'art' on top and 'life' on the bottom. i was about to roll my eyes and walk away when i saw that the next one said 'mary-kate' and then 'ashley.' the one below that was '60 minutes' and 'nightline.' awesome. the last was lame, optimism and depression or something.
· a long, vertical print/drawing called 'the pen is mightier than the sword' but with the words broken up like this:

THE
PENIS
MIGHT
IER
THAN
THES
WORD

no doykee, says sean connery on SNL celebrity jeopardy.

kindergarten snack

my gooier, crunchier answer to last summer's hippie snack is nothing but kashi heart to heart cereal (same idea as cheerios, yet so much better) and whole foods 365 creamy peanut butter (just peanuts and salt) eaten with a spoon.

i could live on this stuff. also easy to eat while multitasking at work.

i fucking hate multitasking. it is a miserable perversion of ford's already miserable assembly line in which people do not one mindless thing repeatedly, but many mindless things at once, thus removing any possibility of order and ruining the (already tenous) zenlike joy some find in monotonous repetition.

some perspective

in my old life, i would get emotional over the problem of intimacy in artificial communities, and in defending students' right to talk about such things without censorship.

in my new life, i get emotional when my solution for the dangling modifier is not adopted.

well, i could go for a quirkier occupation, like the "mouth sounds expert" who is coming to the museum's event for pucker up, a new documentary about whistling that's supposed to be as charming as spellbound and best in show.

why worry? counting all the ages i have ever been, i've found that my mean age is 11.1. my median age is 12. so much lies ahead.

i don't have a mode. working on that.

lake tea party

lake tea party
Originally uploaded by grammar lammer.

dorothy and me at katie's lakehouse in TN last august. aren't dresses fun!

the chair that no one wanted

Originally uploaded by grammar lammer.

tonight i got a call from a giddy holly, who said, 'you'll never guess what i found.'

me: what, holly, what?

'the most fabulous chair. in the street,' says holly, who has a history of adopting chairs she finds on the street, particularly in the west village. there are four of the armless orange velvet variety currently inhabiting our apartment.

me: where are you?

holly: [giggling] the west village.

me: of course you are.

holly: it's blue corduroy and it's darling. as you know, i have no more space in my room for chairs i find in the street, so this one's yours.

me: ok, stick it in a cab and i'll pay you back. if i love it, great, if i hate it, we'll just stick it back on the street.

i hated it.

it's a component of a la-z-boy set. has that tier of fat floppy cushions, which holly described as 'vaginalike.' i took one look at this pathetic beast of a chair, grimaced, and there was much laughter. a photo shoot with Reject Chair and a somewhat baffled ed ensued. holly insisted on thoroughness before we parted with the chair, and so i was ordered to assume such poses as 'whistler's mother' as well as make various lovey-dovey faces at ed. five minutes after the chair was back in the street (which confused our brazilian doorman very much), the photos were transferred onto my ibook and i was winging it with the .2 iphoto skills i have to make a slide show. itunes automatically opened and allowed me to select a soundtrack, and so i picked what was already highlighted—the magnetic fields' 'absolutely cuckoo'—which, i must say, matched the mood of the chair photos quite well.

it's sort of sick that we have all these technologies set up so smoothly that i could instantly, effortlessly create a multimedia presentation about the chair that holly brought home from the street. and here i am posting it to my blog before the chair's even had time to get cold out there.

so, to see all twenty photos of the chair and us, click on either photo, and it'll take you to my flickr account. i'll get them up tomorrow, because all this instant gratification shit has gone too far.

so happy:

thanks for the sympathetic emails. it seems like things are straightened out. i went down there and got to talk to a reasonable woman. it's comforting to know that behind the formidable wall of the bureaucracy is a nice human being happy to sit down with me. i probably overreacted, going down there with a prepared speech (including the smart-alecky thinks i shouldn't ever say, like 'it would be lovely if i could see the future so that i could've known the post office would screw up, but if i could see the future, i wouldn't be applying to journalism school now would i?') and every piece of documentation i could think of, including my passport, but i am glad i can rest assured and start thinking about more interesting things. like the next book i want to read, on bullshit, by a princeton philosopher. see the new york times article.

so crappy:

my nyu app is being counted as late. when i called i got the troll of the graduate admissions office. you know the type--the unresponsive, dead-sounding admin lady whose every answer is constructed so that you'll hang up asap. she told me it was late and that i could send post office documentation but that it would only be 'added to my file,' end of story. i called back but i got her again, so i hung up.

i'm going down there during lunch with my whole pile of stuff to try and sort things out. i only hope i can get through to these people...my boss said you never know, sometimes screwups like this can help in the end because my application might land under the nose of someone important. eh. i'd like to think that. if i were of the 'footprints' mentality, i'd say it's all part of god's plan, but i'm much more of the onion mentality ('bullshit, god, those were my footprints'), and i can't shake the feeling that i'm pretty much fucked.

i'm a cock, i tell ya

my mother called just to tell me that it's the year of the rooster and therefore my "power year." you know, i thought i'd been so damn hyper because only this week did i return to all those postsurgery hallmarks of normalcy (going to the gym, walking more than four blocks at a time, packing a full pair of shoes when i go on trips), but you know, my recent emancipation from the binds of apapthy and juvenile tantrums must just be because the year of the rooster began yesterday. i mean, duh.

poll: has anyone ever heard or used the expression "no doykee" (pronounced "no DOY-kee") as an intensifier of "duh" and the slightly more confrontational "no duh"? it was common in my elementary school, and i want to know if it was a florida thing, or even a tallahassee thing, or even just a fad insult at my school? i.e., has anyone besides anna ever heard of it?

this came up because i have the occasional but very strong urge to use this phrase in formal situations, like, say, the meeting i'm about to go into here at work. adults, who didn't so much grow out of immaturity as learn how to sublimate it effectively (or ineffectively, as evidenced by the daily show's "great moments in punditry as read by children"), should really be more forthright with their disdain for others' opinions. except it would be dumb if i said "no doykee" to someone who didn't know what that meant. i mean, no doykee.

look at my adorable friends

brewton and ginny at joshua tree 12.20.01
Originally uploaded by grammar lammer.

finally, a photo hosting service that allows me to post directly to here, without those lame links to fotolog's weirdly sized pics and maddeningly backward apostrophes.

here are brewton and ginny at the joshua tree bar, near santa maria novella in florence. those are [brewton's host mom] manuela's fingers as she gestures at freddy, not shown.

this morning i was listening to NPR (guess i'm an adult now), and the news segment was an analysis of bush's proposed $250,000 "hard cap" on pain and suffering damages in medical malpractice suits. the segment was brief without sacrificing nuance, and it even suggested the kind of underlying cause that most newscasts avoid, the systemic kind that can't be swept away by one tidy piece of legislation. i could feel a deep love for public radio, nurtured by kodak-style dream sequences of our future together, taking root in my heart. the main point was that the malpractice liabilities that drive up doctors' insurance costs are not pain and suffering, but the actual fuckups that they make in treating people. this is not because the formerly rugged individualist physician archetype has been hijacked by a bevy of incompetent liberal ninnies unfamiliar with the maladies of jus' folks, but because medical advances over the past fifty years have created a lot more situations in which doctors can be blamed. (the example the newscast cited was that fifty years ago, diagnosing cancer early didn't matter; you were going to die anyway. now, in some cases, it can mean the difference between life and death.) in short, bush's proposed cap trivializes the problem and fails to remedy anything other than his shortage of policy initiatives to thump his chest over. all of which you could read in any times editorial, except they then played a statement from paul o'neill about how we live in an adversarial society where people think of misfortune as the fault of malevolent (suable) perpetrators.

brilliant. it is so true. i was at peace with the world this morning as i drank coffee and listened to my beloved NPR until, on the walk to work, some asshole (see? see? delusions of others' malevolence) gave a big rude honk, directed at the car in front of him, which was turning but letting me (the wronged victim, the girl in the legbrace) and others cross the street on our walk sign. angry at this small injustice even though the honker couldn't have known he was lashing out at the handicapped, i tumbled irretrievably into the me-first indignance of every pedestrian and motorist and everybody in new york, and now another day has been contaminated by arrogant suspicion of my fellow citydwellers. it's hard to go twenty feet without experiencing or even witnessing that emotion in others, which is a big part of my problem with new york. it's a hundred times more adversarial than any other place i've lived (which, admittedly, isn't so hard to do, considering i come from small-town florida and went to school in even-smaller-town davidson). i can understand how it happens here, because we're nine million people, all with our own agenda, crammed into such a tiny space. but i still don't like it, especially when i see it in myself.

i've started drinking my coffee black. amazing. my father told me this would happen, and i didn't believe him at the time, which was when i was like three and, although (involuntarily) not a coffee drinker then, i could not fathom a time when i would elect not to add sugar to something. i also am getting gray hairs, which i don't mind at all, but all i ask is that my body stop producing pimple-causing hormones. pimples AND gray hair is unreasonable.

eh. interview was yesterday. i'm not sure if i'll make it to the next round. this one was a preliminary with HR, and as i'm sure you all know, HR ladies are demons who think you need to be metaphysically aligned with whatever job they happen to be offering. when prodded, i will always admit that i prefer editorial to production. that is what HR ladies are there to do. prod.

the other day i saw a job ad for a copyeditor for something called mediamatters.org in dc. they correct and re-spin conservative misinformation in the media. i like the idea of promoting accuracy (see the institute for public accuracy), but it sounds like they only do it when it's to their advantage.

ah. and. once again, the onion presents a dark vision of what my life could one day be like: Someday, I Will Copyedit The Great American Novel.

also don't miss The Fabulous Friends: Conservative Christian Groups' Least-Favorite All-Star Cartoon. it's a bright day out there on the internet.

yeow

days when i actually do my job are taxing. which, nowadays, is many of them. which is why i'm in the market for a new job. if i'm constantly uninitiated, i'm never responsible, eh? i wouldn't mind being worked hard if it were something i cared about, and then this bourbon here i'm drinking (i never drink bourbon) would be celebratory rather than habit-forming.

so my newsgeek interview's tomorrow, and i'm going to find out exactly who these people are who put all the damn subscription cards so loosely in the magazine pages so that they fall out at all the wrong moments. i wonder if they are creepy or dignified. or artless. or look like litterers. or if they're just like the people at the museum, and if so, are they the nice reasonable ones or the scary bulldozing nincompoops?

i may be a newsgeek!

next week i'm interviewing for a production assistant opening at newsweek, which is, like, closer to my apartment than the museum. and pays much more. it's basically my job here but for their circulation dept (i.e., those pesky blow-in cards and other satellite pieces), but i figure it'd be wise to move to a magazine, and not a terribly embarrassing one at that (yes, i admit to scoping out elle decor when i saw an editorial opening there, but i just couldn't bring myself to apply). as for the voice internship option, i'm realizing it's merely a context for networking and wheedling assignments out of editors. in theory a job at newsweek provides the same context, as long as i can manage to hang out with editorial. or move there after a year.

not sure why my nyorker subscription notice is asking me what i've been doing this week to combat the despair of the nation and the world

i've been scurrying around trying to organize my head and my priorities by shuttling objects and bits of paper around my room. i feel inundated by Big Questions and i'm attempting to get a handle on them by controlling the messy little piles that consitute my life.

all i've really done is reconfigure the piles from my desk into slightly different piles on the ironing board, which is smelly and wasn't much help last night when i was facing off against two pairs of indefatigably wrinkly pants.

my pants are still wrinkled and i don't have any solutions.

i've determined that the world is both more and less arbitrary than i thought. more arbitrary because all of my striving produces nothing but sweat and illusions, and if it yields nothing, i'm more comfortable blaming my hair and not what's under it because i can change the former but not the latter. striving is more about self-esteem and getting through the day than willing into reality some idealized lamar who lives in the future. my thank-you note to the village voice will have no effect on the world or my place in it, and neither will the resume i just sent to newsweek....less arbitrary because there is logic to how things happen, it's just not always the logic i prefer.

why aren't there peppermint lollipops?

is it because peppermint was originally consumed in stick form, and the transition just never happened when the rounded starlight mint swept the nation?

the application is done and gone. now that i'm no longer fussing over personal statements and GRE absurdities, i can go back to fussing over (or putting off fussing over) bills, bank statements, cleanliness, orthopedic woes, food, items i can't afford, my netflix queue, and grammar. eh. maybe i should find more grad schools to apply to.

home stretch

soon my personal statement will be finished and i can go back to exercising and drinking beer. until then, i am fidgety sack of bones hell-bent on picking my brain for brilliant things to say.