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.