Friday, December 23, 2005

Home (cough) Again

Yes I am home. And I am sick.

Spent the weekend in Salt Lake City. Family, Food, Mary, U2, concert, a mad rush to finish those last two papers. I'm not complaining. I'm just glad I missed out on the whole transit strike.

And now this whole semester has come crashing down on my head in the form of a chest cold.I blame the million and one screaming snot-nosed babies on my flight into Chicago. Still better to be sick at home than sick in New York. And it's finally ending. I think I'll go ahead and sleep through Christmas and my birthday right into the New Year. Except for the six hours I'm going to be out partying with this crazy bitch.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Progress Report

Done: 1 paper & 2 apps

To do: 2 papers (~30 pages) & 6 apps.

I've reached the Zen equivalent of absolute misery.

Saturday, December 03, 2005

'Tis the Season to Feel Nauseous

Holy crap! Is it December?

School has a way of taking over. Right now I'm supposed to be busy but I'm caught in that inertia panic mode where I have so much work that I can't do anything except futz around on the internet.

October and November melted away into a muddle of presentations, tests, and application hurdles. Just have to push through. 8 applications. 3 papers, 2 plane trips, 1 concert, and a partridge in a pear tree.

I've been meaning to blog about a couple of things, but writing right now is hard. Writing about New York is especially hard. I'm in this bubble of uncertainty until I find out if I'm getting into grad school. It makes one not want to look to closely at the future. A future in which I will be 27 years old, unemployed, and 80 grand in debt. I'm pretty confident. But I'm also not finished.

Off to work I go.

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Buzz Buzz

Cold and rainy weekend. Friday night was happy, as in University sponsored happy hour in the West Village, made even happier by free drinks. They won't fund the Masters Students but if we start a club they have all this money available. Ours is not to reason why. Ours is to order free vodka tonics and talk about school.

Friday was special because I got to see some of my old Masters Seminar compadres. Every 1st year Masters Student has to take a seminar on How To Be A Graduate Student. We all bonded over deconstruction theory and the shared experience of going deeply into debt in the name of a career that may never pay us anything. Our last class was a six hour marathon in which we all delivered our papers over wine and Chinese food. It was the sort of experience that one simultaneously misses desperately and hopes never to repeat.

I lost touch with far too many of them. One in particular. Mikka was one of the few who I saw outside of class. We had an abortive adventure in Long Island last fall, involving the Gin Blossoms, a Yankees game that ran over, and a train we needed to catch far too early. Good times. Anyway she was there. And Mike. And Spence came. Each time I have a fun outing I feel the residue of this past summer finally slipping away. It's hard to be social when broke and stressed.

I made up for being social by not leaving the house at all this weekend. Bad weather kept us in. Plus I spent half of Friday night getting eaten by mosquitoes. Our new apartment has torn screens. Fun. Worst place to have a mosquito bite? The pinky knuckle.

Tea, Pizza, Cocoa, Mansfield Park, Netflix.

Sunday, October 02, 2005

Just A Perfect Day

Fall is a good time to be in New York. Especially considering how miserably hot this summer was. S and I were sitting in Washington Square Park on Friday, after having cappuccino and chocolate mousse cake at this Italian place (R dubbed it The Pane and the Chocolate in lieu of actually pronouncing the name), and he said, “I hate days like this because they fool me into thinking I don’t hate New York.” And he’s right. In the summer, the heat makes everything worse. The subway platforms, the missed garbage pick-ups, the people everywhere. Everything smells. On a really bad day you end up showering at least twice, because you come back feeling like you’re coated with grease. By the time August hits, and you’re waiting for the subway on a platform that is ten degrees hotter than it is outside while watching two rats fight on the tracks, you think that you’ve had it. New York has beaten you.

And then the weather cools. And somehow the sidewalks don’t seem so crowded. The smells that cut through the air aren’t of sweat, and urine and garbage, but of roasting nuts and coffee and sausages. And you’re aren’t running from air-conditioned place to air-conditioned place, so that if you have an hour to kill you can sit in the park, and pretend to read while you watch the dogwalkers try to keep their leashes from tangling, and nannies running after toddlers, and listen to a parkbench debate between NYU professors.

On Friday S and I went shopping for new spectacles por moi and ended up meeting up with friends. Indian food on the Upper West Side, and drinks in the East Village. I end up being taken so many new places for food, that I never remember the names of restaurants. Since I moved here I’ve been to dozens of places to eat but I can only remember about ten. This place at really good samosas and served food out of these adorable copper dishes. At Odessa’s we met up with a bunch of students from the English department and talked about pollution in Mexico City with a first-year Ph.D who’s from there over the cheapest wine I’ve ever had here. It’s funny. We live 30 minutes outside of Manhattan but because we get Unlimited Monthly Metro Cards we end up seeing far more of Manhattan than before. Still it’s nice to leave at the end of the day. Hop the F train, nod off slightly and then go home and sleep.

Sunday, September 25, 2005

I Feel Cool

I had my first velvet rope experience last night. And I got in, and some of my friends didn't.

I wouldn't feel smug about this except that said friends are slightly obnoxious hipster fashionistas, and the bar was slightly obnoxious hipster fashionista-ish. And I got in looking very un-hipster and fashionista-like.

Yup.

Sunday, September 18, 2005

Deliver Unto Me

Lately I feel that most of my day is swallowed up by waiting for deliveries. It's the irony of online shopping convenience . Point and click, and poof you're done. Except if you miss that 8 hour window of delivery, you spend a day tracking down packages, and poof your day is fucked.

I know that it's not just a New York thing, but living in New York intensifies the cult of delivery. Not having a car just makes it inevitable. If one has more than eight blocks to go and more than an armload to carry, shopping becomes a frigging pain. Especially grocery shopping. Hence the popularity of Fresh Direct.*

Last year I sampled one of the more self-indulgent sub-groups of the cult of delivery; sending out the wash. Our coinless on-site laundry was really no more than a washer and dryer stuck in a shack, and my roommate and I discovered belatedly that we wouldn't have access to our on-site laundry during the winter because the water would be shut off. Moral: ALWAYS READ THE FINE PRINT.

For some reason (and this is still the case) the idea of spending a day at the laundromat was unthinkable. I've always had on-site laundry, coined and coinless, but always, always in or near the the building. So the concept of walking two blocks, paying to do my laundry, and losing a day of reading (or whatever) was just unacceptable. Being me, I went to Google and discovered yes indeed, one could in fact, schedule a laundry pickup and delivery, all online. It was a bit odd actually. Nobody aside from my mom has done my laundry in years and the idea of people touching, and possibly losing (er something), articles of clothing was troubling. But strange as it my seem, my roommate and I decided that it was worth a shot for the price. So we did. And for a while it was. It was very decadent to receive a bag of neatly folded, freshly washed clothing, and not have to the bear the indignity of hauling, washing, and folding. The drawback was, of course, the four hour pick up and delivery window, amounting to a total of eight hours of being held hostage in our house. It seemed worth it at the time. And then service fell off.

Yeah, it was bound to happen. Clothes came back late and damp. Pickup times were missed. Luckily right around then we got our laundry room privileges back. So things were good. Until I moved and had to figure out how to get laundry done again.

It's inevitable. Unless you physically have control over something i.e. buying it and bringing it home, or carrying and folding your own damn laundry, you are at the mercy of screw ups and even without mistakes, you still end up waiting. And paying for it.

Lately I've been splitting the difference. If I can buy it and bring it home I do. For some things, there's just no way around the delivery thing. Like the bed frame and mattress I bought. Books and stuff though are easily dealt with. On the laundry front--well--I still contract that out. Oh well.

But I do drop it off and pick it up myself,.

*Freshdirect is probably the one service I could wholeheartedly participate, if they would ever see fit to deliver to my zip code.

Sunday, September 11, 2005

Prologue

It has been suggested to me that I since moving to New York (one year ago Sept. 2nd) I've acquired a cache of semi-interesting stories, vignettes, and anecdotes. I've hesitated because the truth is I haven't done all that much. But one does not always start a blog because one has an interesting life. And perhaps the drive to post inanities will inspire me to go out to do and see more. Who knows? Anyway I'll try it, and see.