i just walked past a group of black people protesting how rolling stone/miller beer's eight-can series of rock musicians 'white washs' music made great by blacks. they were outside a big business center, which i entered for its starbucks, where i found a black man behind the counter and asked him to make me a white hot chocolate.

behavioral finance?

i just ran across this term in some verrrry interesting media-bigwig bios i'm editing, and it sounds very, very creepy. creepy as in let's take advantage of the way this term mimics the credible-sounding behavioral science, and then let's sock 'em with our catlike cataloging skills when their pants/defenses are down.

praytell, what is behavioral finance? is it the prediction of consumers' spending patterns w/r/t our biological and social profiles? this sounds scary. or could it be the more straightforward practice of giving people money when they behave a certain way? like, prostitutes are financed when they behave in a blowjob sort of way around certain men.

i've been to two doctors today and have two more to go. needless to say, there have been/will be more post-physician icecream treats. well, the chiropractor doesn't count as a physician. have i mentioned i'm going to a REAL spine m.d. next month? i am stoked. smoked. lately i've been asking every m.d. i go to if i can blame this-or-that problem on the chiropractor. they always smile and say sure.

the last doktor i go to tonight is the shrink. yay! i have been waiting for this for a while. and really, it was easier than my insurance-phonecall-avoiding mental block told me it would be. i hope this woman is cool. over the phone she sounded a bit dull. but no worries if we don't work out...there are more shrinks in manhattan than there are people.

this morning the warmly paternal yet brusque orthopedist (#1) diagnosed me with patella-blahblah syndrome, so i am skipping happily (he told me i can skip) back to physical therapy, and tomorrow i will finally achieve what i have been lovingly referring to as my epantsipation (he told me i can wear my mary janes instead of sneakers).

greg is having a dance party on sept. 11. there will be twin kegs. rob is coming up. everyone else come! you can stay with me.

it's time for a haircut when

an intern mistakes you for an older, heavier, blander person she has already met.

my hair has gotten too long to wear down, so i've had it back in boring buns and ponytails, but this is the last straw. why couldn't she have confused me with someone better looking?

really i don't begrudge new people their confusion; i have been guilty of fusing plenty of very distinct faces in my effort to absorb the large amount of information they take for granted. when i was new this older lady would confuse me with another new and unfortunately frogfaced girl with a mop for hair and BANGS, but i got back at her by confusing her with a really spacy older lady who works on the same floor.

if there is an edge, hyphens will push me over it.

and i hope there are a lot of phoebe's bran muffins on the other side.

october 22

i have just been informed in pleasant, measured tones via modern telecommunication that this is the date on which my right ankle will surge. it's a little too close to thanksgiving for comfort, since holiday airports are already a nightmare when i have two functioning feet, so i asked them to call me if they can work out anything sooner.

for now, there will be lots of fun and revelry-making: kt's tennessee lakehouse with the rest of jam304 for labor day, homecoming maybe, and medonna III (new york) with brewton as choreographer in mid-october. then the Punishment arrives, with lots of hobbling and whining to follow.

for right now i am excited because rania, my favorite person from high school, is coming to nyc to work at the human rights watch! rania is one of the frankest, most refreshing people i know, and in high school we had lots of fun cutting each other's hair and dancing in the rain. we even had a crush on the same egomaniacal (to us, 'inspiring') boho-boy, and only now are we wise enough to know that we two make far better company than he.

so rania's coming over for dinner tonight, and she is going to meet ed, and we are all going to drink wine and eat this chick-pea and spinach stew i have yet to make, as well as a key lime pie that ed and i made last night while drinking brazilian sugar cane liquor and taking turns shouting over the phone with russ, who is moving to chicago in a week and whom i've just realized i can't visit when emily does because duh, that's in the middle of the week and some signs i'm picking up from my environs (gray desk, plastic 'walls,' staples catalogs 2002 and 2004) are suggesting to me that i just might have a job.

the point of copyediting is to keep people from sounding stupid. there are some people whose stupidity i am tired of concealing from the world.

this article makes me want to cry. it's one of those life-is-shit-but-so-and-so-overcame gigs. but it's so true! life is shit! i am lucky to have what i have, but i have nothing if i am shitty to myself all day, which is harder to avoid doing than it sounds.

do we need the possibility for advancement and future comort for happiness? for acceptance of the shit we are doing in the present? e.g., can communism work for regular people, not just monks (who are capitalists anyway because they brew beer)?

ok, everyone go read the article mr. fridrik posted in the comments to my entry on 7.14. it's about the wars on obesity. normally i pity the pro-fat wing of opinionators as both misguided AND unstylish a la the ugliness-as-conscientious-dissent soapbox occupied by BUST, bitch, and other dubiously feminist publications whose editors make a profession of marginalizing themselves, but this article makes some sense in concept, even if some of its numbers aren't so credible (an 80 pound range of 'healthy weight' for anyone, no matter how big-boned or hairy, seems unreasonable).

last night dorothy said on the phone (best read in dreamy dorothy drawl): 'i've been having fantasies about going grocery shopping with my mom, where i pick out things i want and she pays for them, and she picks out things that i wouldn't have thought of.'

my goals for the weekend are to heal from my various injuries, buy a new glug-glug jug of tangueray, read more book than news, and see the metallica movie. and maybe write a long soulful email to my brother, king of the long (and short) soulful email, and a long intelligent email to the only contact i have in the world of Jobs I Want.

don't wake that life

last night i fell asleep to waking life, which, now that i've seen it semisober, i've decided really is best watched stoned. lots of half- (or totally) baked ideas from philosophy one-oh-point-five. ed and i decided that an animation overlay of one of dr. robb's classes would be much better, and his sweaters would look faaaahbulous.

iron-maidenform girdle?

man, i can understand how people get fat working these desk jobs. food is about all you can look forward to in the course of the day, especially when svelte coworkers abandon delicious chocolate cheesecakes in the fridge in effort to offset the caloric danger to themselves and their own. the cheesecake was lunch yesterday, and i have just eaten a banana on the verge of overripeness to prevent the cheesecake from being breakfast too. also, i am trying to avoid learning too much about the scrumptious and expensive offerings of 52nd street, because lately i have been venturing out to get black coffee and just happening to run into other delectables in the process. like the $1.75 oily kindergarten-birthday-style cupcakes in a deli just a few doors down and the chocolate-covered grahams in the starbucks housed protectively by the financial center across the street. if i try the $3 pizza-by-the-slice from global kitchen, i'm afraid i will find myself living on (and for) it for the next month. i am, however, particularly thankful for the proximity of midtown's best gyro cart on hangover days.

boring old job and exciting new knee condition!

everyone i talked to this weekend about feeling restless in my job said i should get out before too long to avoid being pidgeonholed as a copyeditor. i feel like i'm starting all over again, like last summer, and i've just managed to keep myself taken care of for the past year, though that counts as a worthy goal in itself. it's tough. it's tough to think of giving up health coverage and working for free at harper's or the voice just so i can have a gamble at doing the thing i want to do. but that's why i'm here living in this expensive supercili-city to begin with. if i wanted to just support myself, i could do a much better job of that somewhere else, like, while frying fish on the beach.

tentative plan: stay at work and in apartment through christmas and have surgery on the company plan; apply for grad school for next fall and internships for this spring; consider moving to brooklyn once off crutches and if an ok situation comes along.

state of knee tendonitis: bearable and improving. the weather is too nice to miss running outside. the plan for today is walk-run intervals followed by the rolly thing (i am obsessed with this, my hard-foam cylindrical physical therapy device--much easier to manage than sitting on a tennis ball, miss kt!) some knee exercises with ankle weights, and ice & ibuprofen.

had some wacky dreams this weekend. they rely on aural puns, tho, so i'll refrain here. if you want to witness the verbal stretches my sleeping mind finds hi-larious (thomas ward would be proud), the phone will have to be your medium.

it's one of those 'what do i do with my life?' days. it started as a busier-than-usual day at work, the drudgery levels of which are usually manageable, if not nearly suppressable, but then it came roaring to the surface when an all-staff email was sent out about the open position for a curatorial assistant. i read the description with a clenched stomach, hoping hoping hoping that it's low-level enough not to require a master's degree (it doesn't), desperately wanting to surround myself with interesting people thinking about ideas, which would be a nourishing environment for my brain, as opposed to interesting people keeping track of facts and versions of pieces of paper, which seems harmless on the surface but is mentally debilitating when you really think about it. but then there's the whole politics of even asking to change departments within the museum, of abandoning the people who so carefully taught me their...paper-shuffling techniques (ok) and who generally are charitable enough to ignore the way i slink into work late in the mornings and even later after a mysteriously long lunch. all this got me curious about what jobs are available outside the museum, which, by the way, is a very efficient way to further torture someone already deep into the let's-throw-my-whole-life-into-doubt game. i really didn't want to know that i could make $16 an hour freelance editing tv trivia questions until as late as 1 a.m. on weeknights and work weekends too, even on top of my current job; or that the magazine looking for a copyeditor whom they insist shouldn't harbor affection for the serial comma (wtf?) is, as revealed by some web investigation, an 'uplifting' christian magazine with sayings of the day and drop-down prayer menus; or that martha stewart magazine wants a copyeditor and pays much better than i currently make but still probably not enough to make it worth working there. or maybe not. does it matter, really, when the people at the top of my workplace are just as crooked and fake and vain and clueless as i imagine the people at the top of martha stewart co. are? and it's not like i'm at my job to get better at the job itself. i'm there because it's a particularly low-pain version of a profession i'm good at but not much interested in. and because it sounds much cooler than it is and could get me in the door somewhere else that's actually cooler. not so with uplifting christian mag, tv trivia, or martha stewart.

so where am i trying to go? what to do with this restless engergy?

well, for now, the answer is run. run run run, tendonitis or no.

a free REED'N. (but not the miss cleo kind)

i saw david foster wallace and george saunders last night for free at the public theater. ed's roommate jake really wanted to go, so they stood in line for an hour and a half, and i left work just in time to cut in line and consume a powerbar before they let everyone in. dfw & gs were amusing and did the usual 'writer talk' gig, shifting between clever cynicism and warm fuzziness. i was curious about how dfw would look and sound in person, and here is the consensus we arrived at by the end: math nerd who discovered weed.

seriously. he was like wayne and garth, only with these little effeminate gasps and cluck-clucks and choo-choos in between the stoner-droner stuff. and fidgety. brought a plastic fork onstage. and was dressed in (somehow) mismatched all white. he did give a refreshingly honest monologue on the franzen/oprah hooplah. one notch closer to the heart than the uge.* 'refreshingly honest' writer talk.

i'm having a birthday party at my place most likely friday the 9. more info to follow in traditional mass email form. would do it the 10, but cousin rodney's baby's christening is at a brooklyn episcopal church at 8:30 sunday morning, and it's a bit too sinister for my taste to be hungover for/puking after a christening.

this day at work has been another example of the many ways in which the president of our museum is a total fucking dunderhead. more on that later.

*is there any good way to transcribe this conversational abbreviation for 'usual'? i think we need a new character in the alphabet. same thing happens to snappy casual. it ends up looking like 'snappy cash,' which sounds like something advertised on the subway. how about a z with a little notch over it, like in czech?

reading materials

i envy alain de botton a lot and nicholson baker maybe just a little.

also i want a birkenstock tan.

good hippie snack reminiscent of preschool gooey snack

hungry for sweet crunchy sustenance? like to play with your food? need food NOW without jeopardizing your sincere intentions to eat dinner?

try HIPPIE SNACK!*

all you have to do is happen to be the kind of damn fool hippie who would actually have on hand things like this:

hippie peanut butter (concession: other peanut butter will work too)
wheat germ
grape nuts
hemp granola
maple syrup for enhanced gooeyness

directions:

1. assemble ingredients in bowl
2. moosh ingredients together (fingers work best but fork will do)
3. shovel in mouth while making 'mmm mm' noises

probably is also very good with sunflower seeds, which is the gooey preschool snack ingredient most prominent in my memory, other than sugary kid peanut butter. this snack appeared in ball form.

*to be distinguished from the hippie snack promoted by the healthful and exuberant appearance of ms. dorothy

bonus: like a diy energy bar, but looks like dog food, so no one will want to eat it up before you get home

sentimental existentialism, or 'yeah, we're all going to die. together!!'

i realized as i was walking back to work after a lunchtime spent nursing a hungover emily and greg back to waking life (without doing any self-conscious philosophizing or edgy animation and with special greasy eggs and black russian toast and lots of ketchup) after d's socially exhilarating party, an arguably unwise but successful drive through and decision to park in midtown, and lots of pizza and ridiculousness and pink-bow wearing and falling-to-the-floor laughing, that i spend half my time feeling bludgeoned by the drudgery of the world and the other half feeling exhilarated through every pore by how amazing all of the people i love are and how lucky i am to know them, and i think how i want to be around them all the frikkin' time.

employment: consensual sustained low dosage of electroshock therapy

work makes me braindead. i think that is why they pay me. i am renting out my brain for $13 an hour. it is, like, a zero return for a cost of a bazillion eleventy billion. companies are all about hiring highly creative people to find solutions for their highly boring problems in exchange for lowly compensation. it's so boring, in fact, that i'm going to spare you the description of the meeting i came on here to work up the disdain to mock.

happily, today is dorothy's birthday, and tonight is one big bright bloomsday future of a bigyummy salad, playing dress-up, cupcakes from magnolia bakery, and an outing to the great lakes bar in park slope. but right now i feel like crawling under my desk for that nap.

today on mcsweeney's

diary of a congressional candidate in florida's fourth congressional district by richard grayson

a good read for those of you squandering yet another day at the boring old office. which, from what i can tell from my mostly unemployed and/or traveling-to-new-york-this-minute readership, is just katie today. so, ahem, katie, you will enjoy reading this narrative by a florida write-in candidate as you sit in your office looking for distractions to-day.

eighties movie catchup weekend!

also eighties movie ketchup weekend, judging from the volume of greasy food i ingested to combat the waves of carsick-y feeling i suffered over the weekend, even tho i don't have a car in this city!! unfair, i tell you. but my steady diet of the nyc spin on road food (much better than actual road food in an un-ac'd pickup, ms. roodtree) and my careful avoidance of anything leafy and green has evidently cured me, 'cause i haven't felt the ick creeping in since saturday. hey, yeah, i must have been metaphysically on that road trip i've been hankering for, and that explains the carsickness and all the gyro, belgian frites, pad thai, coke, popcorn, currywurst, and ice cream i stuffed myself with for three days. d, i was with you all along, says my stomach! good thing you are getting here soon, because i think it is time for some salad.

so the eighties movies i saw for the first time this weekend were heathers and say anything, both of which i liked. i loved heathers, which i found appealingly dark in some of the same ways as hal hartley's trust, except h. was almost more penetrating because it told of a warped mindset taking hold in a familiar environment, as opposed to the alternate universe of trust, where a warped mindset is the norm and people go around saying things like, 'a family's like a loaded gun; you point it in the wrong direction, you're gonna kill somebody' every second of the movie. which is great. but also easier to extract yourself from by the end because it's so obviously stylized that way. i also liked say anything, which ed and i agreed is a much more realistic movie about teen love than the shallow buttload the post-dates it.

and and and!! last night we saw the first episode of the new season of six feet under. i like this show. it makes me feel oddly (or evenly?) relieved to see these really heavy problems that are never resolved neatly by the end of the episode, and certainly not before new complications spiral out into whole new heavy issues that in turn take episodes and seasons to subside. all without being trashy. a boon, this hbo.

a bigger boon: big bloomsday birthday bar blast & dorothy and emily get here tomorrow!

upchuck update

well, i didn't end up booting, but i had a couple of close calls. i almost wished i had, even with the risk of being overheard and arousing eating-disorder suspicions, because i would've made the day go quicker. maybe i should have brought the dictionary into the bathroom, since it's really the combination of reading small print and exercising mental powers of discernment that work such antigravity wonders on my stomach. i was still feeling yuk after work and wanted to crawl into bed with a pizza, but i decided to apply katie's sister's cure and go for a run while listening to loud techno music. the run may have helped but did not work miracles, so now i am equipped with a very miraculous-smelling spicygreasy gyro, which is much better in this part of town than the pizza is.