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.