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.