February 2012
1 post
December 2011
5 posts
Spies
manabouttown:
mollykay:
Since our apartment looks out on a bunch of other people’s windows, I often get this weird feeling that I’m being watched. SOMETIMES IT IS TRUE.
Is this acorn shortage-related? Today was a big day for squirrels outside the window! The above was taken by Molly Langmuir, the below by Abby Manock (via fb).
What on earth is going on? I googled “squirrels...
This guy
Since our apartment looks out on a bunch of other people’s windows, I often get this weird feeling that I’m being watched. SOMETIMES IT IS TRUE.
All the broken legs
After work I met a friend at a bar and we caught up until, in the middle of a story, this guy came over and asked if he could buy us drinks and talk to us while he waited to go meet his cousin.
I’m not sure why we said yes, but for me at least, I was curious. He had said the whole thing in such a funny way, staring off into the middle distance, talking in this flat tone. Like he was...
XXXmas
It says something negative about my state of mind, I think, that today I mistook the humongous shiny Christmas tree ornaments decorating the lobby of the building where I work for gigantic, larger-than-life grenades.
Taxicab Confessions
It was weird, because the day after I wrote about my silent cab ride home, I took a cab to LaGuardia, and about one minute into the ride, my cab driver told me that his favorite part of his job was talking to customers. And from there, without much prompting, he started in on a discussion of how it could be hard to tell if customers were rich are not—for example, one time this guy in a long...
November 2011
3 posts
11/22/11
I finally left the office at 1am, my scarf wet and smelling musty still from when I’d gotten stuck in the rain a few hours earlier—the first time I’d made it outside all day. My brain felt like it had been shaken up, turned upside down and emptied out onto the sidewalk. Which is a strange way to feel after you’ve spent over 14 hours cramming your head with information.
On the...
Seediness
After going over some of my older clips a few days ago (they covered, among other things, the closing of a porn theater, an ex-con MMA fighter, a day in the life of a bunch of gutter punks, and a pervy doll repairman on the Upper East Side) I think I finally came up with a satisfactory answer for people who ask me what my beat is.
Manic Panic
Mirabelle, who came home from Massachusetts this week with a defiant blue streak in her hair, seems to have finally hit those awkward teenage years. I’d like to say we didn’t wash it out because we’re cool like that, and happy to let the animal who lives with us express herself however she pleases. But the truth is that we’ve just been busy with other things. Which makes me...
August 2011
1 post
The rapture having come and gone
My ride to work takes me across the Manhattan Bridge, and right at the beginning I can see straight into the Jehovah’s Witness headquarters, this tan collection of buildings that takes up about four square blocks. In general I don’t pay much attention to them other than to wonder vaguely what goes on there (and, occasionally, what ungodly sum of money that property must be worth at...
July 2011
1 post
105 degrees
Here is how I know that I’m really not lying when I say the heat doesn’t bother me much: this weekend the only thing that stopped me from buying a fall-type sweater was that it was about $80 more than I wanted to spend (it was $80).
May 2011
3 posts
Making them all your own
I’m not sure why, since I don’t much feel like a young bull or an old bull and certainly don’t have any interest in making a whole field of lady bulls my own, but this clip (from this 2005 New York Times article by Dan Barber about working for David Bouley) really spoke to me. I guess it could be that, a little bit in the way of Stockholm syndrome victims, sometimes I really do...
I probably just try too hard to group everything...
Celebrity sightings, like all things, come in threes, and one thing I’ve noticed about things that come in threes is that there are usually two that are mostly the same and then one that is slightly different. This weekend, for example, I saw Erin Wasson and Alexander Wang, but then I also saw Alexis Bledel.
Alexander Wang and Erin Wasson are similar for lots of reasons, but most...
Now this is the kind of wedding photography I like...
April 2011
9 posts
One way to show you're serious
In Cobble Hill, no less.
The silver lining?
I may not have eaten anything other than a banana and some crackers in the last 48 hours, but on the upside, the stomach flu I got last weekend has left me with a vastly augmented sense of smell. On the subway today, for example, I not only noticed the strong cologne the man next to me was wearing, I also whiffed the unwashed hair of the woman a few seat’s down and knew someone else had a...
Rules of the Road
For the pedestrians:
This one is apparently hard to comprehend, but the basket on my bike is actually not a trash can. I know the two things have some important qualities in common. For example, the basket is also a metal receptacle, and it too is conveniently located at around waist level. But while I know it can be a hassle to have to carry your garbage around until you reach an actual garbage...
Things I did before work today
-Exercise
-Eat breakfast
-Meditate
-Cook myself a lunch
-Start my taxes
-Do my laundry
So far my theory that my entire life would drastically improve if I just started getting up earlier seems to have been fairly solid.
Free chilling service
Everything really is so much more relaxed when you get out of the city.
1982 had greener grass, I think
Last week I wrote the text for this photo essay in New York magazine about a bunch of different artists’ New York apartments from 1887 to now, and in the process did a lot of thinking about a New York that was dirtier, poorer, and more dangerous but also imminently more livable. My favorite picture shows Cindy Sherman in her bathrobe with her blind pet dove. Originally the dove had not been...
On the scale of phobias
Most illogical: Elevators. Just in general, these days, but specifically I am afraid of the elevator at the Clark Street 2/3 stop, which you have to take between the street and the subway. One hot day last summer it was incredibly crowded, and as it inched down into the ground it suddenly occurred to me that not only was I in a suspended metal box crammed so tightly with human beings that no one...
March 2011
7 posts
Lonesome Dove
There’s certainly something honest and good about a book that doesn’t try to pretty things up at all. It’s a relief, in a way, how the characters don’t necessarily do the right thing in the end, and just because people love each other doesn’t mean they’re supposed to be together, and how people’s feelings, even the good ones, are never purely one thing...
Thank goodness there were no blogs when i was 14
Because my mom is nice like this, a few weeks ago she randomly gave me this little necklace with a picture embedded in it that showed the phase of the moon on the day I was born (and glowed in the dark, too). It turns out I was born under a full moon, which is cool, I think. But the real blessing, I decided, is that I didn’t know this in high school, when such a detail undoubtedly would...
$5,670.00
The kind of thing you find stuck to your shoe after a day spent visiting stores on Madison Avenue.
Witch fail
tulletulle:
also last night when sophie and i were googling free love spells i got an idea for a moovee
During my sophomore year in college two friends and I found ourselves in similarly unpleasant relationship situations with ex-boyfriends from whom we couldn’t seem to extricate ourselves. Finally, one night we decided to do something about it and looked up some spells. The one we...
Goonies never say die
Some thoughts on movies I’ve watched in the last few days (I’ve been watching too many movies)
Tron—This movie is very psychedelic. I liked that Jeff Bridges didn’t end up with the girl, that was sort of cool. (Does Jeff Bridges ever end up with the girl?) Also, that now I can finally see the sequel.
The Goonies—This is a great movie. My only regret is that I didn’t see...
I'm not sure any of this is ethical
I went to the kind of middle school that had ethics classes. I really liked the school, by the way, I feel really lucky I got to go there for middle school and high school and if I’m ever in a position to donate money somewhere I will donate there way before I donate to my college. However, all I remember about these ethics classes is the rumor that passed around about the teacher one year,...
Speaking of my memory
Exhibit A: This past summer I lived in a few different places and after the first week or so, when it became clear that my moving around was going to last at least through September, I decided it would be sort of cool to take a picture of myself every place I stayed. Of course, me being me, I forgot to do this everywhere but one place. But that’s not even the real problem. Here is the one...
February 2011
11 posts
You can run but you can't hide
I didn’t drink much in high school, a rare out-of-character move for me at a time when I was basically trying to do everything I wasn’t supposed to as quickly as I could. So it is ironic that in spite of the fact that I smoked whatever I was able to get my hands on, the rumor, a result of my strangely pink cheeks, was that I was an alcoholic. Whereas these days my pink cheeks are long gone but I...
2/22/11
I woke up on Tuesday morning to my radio alarm playing audio of the quake in Christchurch and was about to get up to hit snooze when I remembered that my dad was in New Zealand, and supposed to spend at least a night in Christchurch, although I wasn’t sure when. He travels a lot and it is sometimes hard to keep track of exactly where he is in the world, but I knew he was definitely in New...
Safety first!
I was sitting on the subway yesterday zoning out and wondering absently what video game the guy next to me was playing on his phone when he looked over at me. “So you really like bike riding, huh,” he said. I wondered if he’d seen me lock up my bike before getting on the train. Or maybe he could just tell I like to ride bikes? Or maybe he was just a little crazy? But then I...
Coping mechanism
You know it’s been a bad day when the only thing that cheers you up is seeing that there are a bunch of new trailers to watch on iTunes. That Circo movie looks pretty good. Mars Needs Moms not so much.
Guns N' Rats
Back in 2003 my boyfriend lived in a first floor apartment in South Williamsburg that had rats living underneath the floorboards. All through the winter you could hear them scampering around down there, making strange scuffling noises and high pitched rat screams. It was like some hoodlum rats had picked that spot as their clubhouse and were always bringing home stolen goods and vulnerable lady...
Hundreds of items!
Spent the weekend in Virginia again
Matt told me this place offers a holy water car wash and will baptize your car. I believed him.
A cute, luminescent, goulish squid
A few years ago my dad was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences and took me as his date for the ceremony. It was a slightly awkward time for me to be surrounded by a bunch of successful scientists, who tend to be concrete thinkers with an appreciation for professional achievements—I had recently left my job in St. Louis, of my own accord, I kept reminding myself, to move back to the East...
How I learned about sex
I wrote something for The Hairpin! It is about an elaborate penis collage I made as a young child. If I made a series of these and applied to MFA programs I would probably get in to at least one.
Maybe third time will be the charm?
#1 most embarrassing thing I did in the last week: While at work (in a large but often fairly silent office) I logged on to Al Jazeera to watch streaming video of the situation in Egypt. I put my headphones on, but once the video loaded I found I couldn’t hear the sound very well. So I turned up the volume, and then up a little more and finally I could hear it loud and clear. This went on for at...
Myspace > Facebook
I logged onto Myspace a few nights ago, trying to figure out the last name of a friend with whom I’d lost touch, and found myself surprisingly appreciative for all the ways it is different from Facebook. I wasn’t inundated with feeds, for example, from every last one of the three hundred odd people I have at least vaguely known at some point in my life. Myspace was never like this. I would...
January 2011
11 posts
Saturday morning, 2011
What I woke up to. We had all downloaded Angry Birds the night before and I think at this point one of them was about to discover that at a more advanced level there’s actually an eagle that swoops down from the sky if you throw sardines. Or something? I wouldn’t know because I downloaded the free version and you have to pay for the eagle. If it looks like they were engrossed in the...
Cross cultural understanding
All the guys who work at the gas station near my apartment are from Bangladesh (there is a lone woman manager, also from Bangladesh, but the other workers detest her—she won’t even let them wear warm hats in the winter but forces them to wear the gas station baseball caps—and so I now detest her too, in solidarity) and yesterday morning, after the snowstorm, pretty much every single person...
Ways to feel better about the weather
My top three coldest apartments (none of which is my current home):
#3 A room I lived in during college that was a converted garage with walls as thin as you’d expect from a garage. There was a heater, which hung down from the ceiling and blew gale force winds of hot air through the room, but a few weeks into November I realized that I was getting nauseous and light headed whenever it...
The underminer
Last weekend I finally made myself the scarf I’d been meaning to knit for a while, and I was pretty excited about it. Until Matt mentioned it made me look like a waffle cone, I think because of the texture? (And maybe how thick it was?) And then a little while later he mentioned how I seemed to be reliving a little of my hippie phase, because the scarf was so long. And THEN today at the...
Adult fail
The other day, while watching a mother yell at her dawdling daughter to get out of the street, it occurred to me how routinely I now do many things I never would have even thought to do as a kid, simply because it was that obvious they would never have been allowed. For example, in the last week I have eaten chips and salsa for dinner, skipped breakfast, stayed up until 2 on a work night watching...
Yes
For the people who Google Search this stuff often enough that it shows up automatically, I think I have an answer for you. I also have some questions.
Little House on the Prairie
Ever since reading about how Pa Ingalls or whatever his name was had to dig actual tunnels through the snow just so Laura and her sisters could get out the front door, most snowstorms have been sort of a letdown.
Spent the weekend in Virginia