1. Overheard at one of the outdoor (and inadvertantly public) portions of a wedding I attended this weekend:
Hairy bearded gentleman in Restroom Creep-brown overcoat, circa Woody Allen in "Manhattan"--gesturing furiously towards musicians making klezmer-type "Hava Negila" music (with accordion, violin), bride in long white gown and veil and tall, blushing groom holding respective ends of kerchief while raised in chairs over dancing guests (young tattooed types in ironic formalwear) performing extremely respectable hora and singing the Hebrew lyrics with lust and vigor comparable to the version at any Brooklyn simcha on the black-hat side of Williamsburg:
"This is shabbos! Don't they know? They should--they should stop! They were married today? Just now? You can't...you can't have a wedding on shabbos!"
Ultra-thin wedding guest sporting erudite manner and pointed facial hair:
"Oh--the circle dance. Well. This isn't actually a Jewish wedding. New York, you know. Everybody's Irish here."
(Bearded gentleman's response unprintable because unintelligible. But not quiet.)
2. Stumbled across in hour 300 of paper-grading: referring to the Catholic Church's activities during the Inquisition and on a number of the more blood-drenched Crusades: "that period when [the Church] had a lapse in judgement."
More when the horror, the horror of grading is done, my friends...
Monday, May 19, 2008
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
I Heard The Earth Move (In Which Our Heroine Nods)
"Are you ready for bed?" my one true love asked.
"It's bedtime," my one true love repeated.
"I'm going to bed," he called, from somewhere near the bedroom.
I went in to kiss him goodnight.
It was somewhere in the neighborhood of 1:30 am. Early!
"You're going to be a zombie in the morning..." he warned, already half-asleep.
"No worries," I said.
"No meetings till 11 am!" I said.
"I'm working!" I said.
I figured...
up by 10.
Out by 10:30.
Work by 11.
that gave me till 3 am if I wanted 7 hours.
No problem!
That there's prime work time, 1:30 to 3!
Can't waste that...sleeping!
Sleeping, in my opinion, is for the morning. That's prime zzz time, that is.
So I had it down.
Work till 2:30.
Wash face. Brush teeth.
Read something easy till eyes close.
Asleep by...3!
Perfect. Went like clockwork.
I smiled, falling asleep, to myself, in the dark.
I would be ready, at 11 am, for the world. Awake! Alert! Best foot forward! Etcetera.
And then I subsided into surging dreams of grassy fields and Jimi Hendrix and Kermit the Frog and Gossip Girl.
(Which I've never seen. But that's the so OMFG excellent thing about dreams! Right?)
And then, without warning, right in the middle of the best part of my sleep (you know, that deep juicy part where you don't know you're asleep because you don't exist? The part where you don't grind your teeth? Or wake up screaming thinking there's someone in the room? thereby (re)traumatizing your bed partner?):
EWWWWWWWREWWWWWWR EWWWWWWWRRRRRRR EWWWWWWWWWWRRRRRRRR
It sounded like a leaf blower.
What kind of sick bastard uses a leaf blower in May?
There are no leaves in May!
Was he trying to blow the leaves off the trees?
I rolled over and hit the air conditioner.
the sound faded a bit into the rush of air.
I rolled back over.
There was sun in the room. I pulled a pillow over my face. Next to me, my one true love went "grmmmmphl."
I felt myself go heavy. The air conditioner sound was soothing, white noise. I was following a stray thought into a soft dream....
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
Something was...backing up.
Beneath my window.
I pulled the pillow down tight over my head. No dice.
I rolled over again and looked at the clock. 7:12 am.
The beeping stopped.
Ah! Heaven!
I was...almost...gone...
RRRGRRRGRRRGRRRGRRRRGRRRRGRRRGRRRGGRRRRRGRRRRGRRRGRRRGRRRGRRRGRRRGRRRGRRRGRRRGRRRGRRR
That, my friends, was the jackhammer.
Followed closely by...
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
My one true love made a small sound of despair.
The usual followed. Gallons of coffee. Cross-eyed wandering through city streets to work. That thing where you're trying to stay awake and your head just...drops? Like you're in some weird horror movie where you've become the puppet? That. Non-sequitors in conversations with co-workers. Tripping over things. (Suspicious looks from police officers on the beat.) Also Law & Order. And goat-cheese ice-cream. (Flavor: coffee.)
and that, my friends, is why I will not be telling you more about my journey to Williamsburg tonight.
Tomorrow. I promise.
Because soon, soon, I know, I will hear the earth movers singing, each to each...
"It's bedtime," my one true love repeated.
"I'm going to bed," he called, from somewhere near the bedroom.
I went in to kiss him goodnight.
It was somewhere in the neighborhood of 1:30 am. Early!
"You're going to be a zombie in the morning..." he warned, already half-asleep.
"No worries," I said.
"No meetings till 11 am!" I said.
"I'm working!" I said.
I figured...
up by 10.
Out by 10:30.
Work by 11.
that gave me till 3 am if I wanted 7 hours.
No problem!
That there's prime work time, 1:30 to 3!
Can't waste that...sleeping!
Sleeping, in my opinion, is for the morning. That's prime zzz time, that is.
So I had it down.
Work till 2:30.
Wash face. Brush teeth.
Read something easy till eyes close.
Asleep by...3!
Perfect. Went like clockwork.
I smiled, falling asleep, to myself, in the dark.
I would be ready, at 11 am, for the world. Awake! Alert! Best foot forward! Etcetera.
And then I subsided into surging dreams of grassy fields and Jimi Hendrix and Kermit the Frog and Gossip Girl.
(Which I've never seen. But that's the so OMFG excellent thing about dreams! Right?)
And then, without warning, right in the middle of the best part of my sleep (you know, that deep juicy part where you don't know you're asleep because you don't exist? The part where you don't grind your teeth? Or wake up screaming thinking there's someone in the room? thereby (re)traumatizing your bed partner?):
EWWWWWWWREWWWWWWR EWWWWWWWRRRRRRR EWWWWWWWWWWRRRRRRRR
It sounded like a leaf blower.
What kind of sick bastard uses a leaf blower in May?
There are no leaves in May!
Was he trying to blow the leaves off the trees?
I rolled over and hit the air conditioner.
the sound faded a bit into the rush of air.
I rolled back over.
There was sun in the room. I pulled a pillow over my face. Next to me, my one true love went "grmmmmphl."
I felt myself go heavy. The air conditioner sound was soothing, white noise. I was following a stray thought into a soft dream....
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
Something was...backing up.
Beneath my window.
I pulled the pillow down tight over my head. No dice.
I rolled over again and looked at the clock. 7:12 am.
The beeping stopped.
Ah! Heaven!
I was...almost...gone...
RRRGRRRGRRRGRRRGRRRRGRRRRGRRRGRRRGGRRRRRGRRRRGRRRGRRRGRRRGRRRGRRRGRRRGRRRGRRRGRRRGRRR
That, my friends, was the jackhammer.
Followed closely by...
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
My one true love made a small sound of despair.
The usual followed. Gallons of coffee. Cross-eyed wandering through city streets to work. That thing where you're trying to stay awake and your head just...drops? Like you're in some weird horror movie where you've become the puppet? That. Non-sequitors in conversations with co-workers. Tripping over things. (Suspicious looks from police officers on the beat.) Also Law & Order. And goat-cheese ice-cream. (Flavor: coffee.)
and that, my friends, is why I will not be telling you more about my journey to Williamsburg tonight.
Tomorrow. I promise.
Because soon, soon, I know, I will hear the earth movers singing, each to each...
Monday, May 05, 2008
Over the Bridge and Under the Overpass to Billyburg (In Which Our Heroine Crosses a River)
So yesterday was a beautiful springtime Sunday in New York. So my one true love and I, we decided to go adventuring in Our Fair City!
We like to walk, he and I. (We pretend it's exercise.) (With stops for coffee.) (And snacks.)
So we thought we'd walk over the Williamsburg Bridge. 'Cause I've never done that!
And besides, we had three--count 'em--three possible lunch destinations. Which is really important, because you need a destination, y'know?
And what if one was closed?
Or we got really, really hungry?
So anyway.
It was clear and bright and sunny and we headed over the bridge.
To get to the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg bridge, first you head all the way down to Delancey Street, on the Lower East Side.
(Yep. Just like "Crossing Delancey." Very good!) (Except now all of the Orthodox Jews live over on the other side of the bridge, in Williamsburg. Where they are in the process of being forced out by post-collegiate hipsters and wanna-be artists and etcetera. Who in turn have been forced out of the Lower East Side themselves by trust-fund babies and hedge-fund managers. Who will soon force all of the hipsters and would-be artists out of Williamsburg. Which is ok, because the actual artists were forced out a long time ago by the hipsters, and now it's just evolution, New York City-style. The Orthodox Jews have not been forced out of the Lower East Side. They left of their own free will. And who could blame them? I don't think my great-grandparents would have recognized that a walk-up with the tub in the kitchen had Great Resale Potential! Now, instead of seeing actual Jews on the Lower East Side, you can do a tenement tour and see simulacra of Lower East Side Jews. Who knew? We're a tourist attraction!)
Anyway, you walk along Delancey, past the superdiscount clothing marts and the fried chicken joints and the subway construction and the shadow of Blue, the Lower East Side's first! luxury! condo! (which is, indeed, very...blue) and the young dudes in hoodies and the very large woman in the very very small croptop and the guy in the wheelchair hooking at people's legs with his cane and the big white boys in ballcaps looking for a bar and the downtown hipsters with washed-out skin and shaky hands in the sunshine and the p.r. girls who moved down to the Lower East Side because they love to go out! but still do their laundry out at their parents' place in Glen Cove and the tourists from the Hotel on Rivington with the roller bags and the maps and the glazed stare. You make your way past all of that (and the African guys hawking knockoff purses) (and the shaggy-looking dude by the payphones) (and the refugees from The Delancey, punk babies and oldschool rockers blinking in the sunlight, like vampires). And you make your way to the middle of the street, because that's where the pedestrian bridge is. Because New York is a Walking City! And we don't want you to get bored. So to get to the big red shiny pedestrian walkway on the bridge, you need to dodge homeless vets and tweaked-out junkies and developers on their cellphones and more tourists and also several lanes of traffic!
And then you get on the bridge, and you start walking up. And up. And up.
It's the kind of hike where, if you were on an actual mountain, you would put your head down, and you would push forward, bull-like, staring at the ground directly in front of your feet, trying to drive your body forward through the force of your neck. Especially if there's a wind. (There was a wind). Because for quite a while, it's pretty much all uphill. But this is not a mountain. Or if it was a mountain, it would be a mountain where it was unwise to put your head down, because it just so happens that you have chosen to hike up this particular mountain right in the middle of an off-road biking race, and also a skateboard off-road challenge, plus an extra-special pellmell hill run. So you have to keep looking up.
This throws your balance off, a bit. Makes you feel as though you're going to keel over backwards. But that's preferable to being run down by the following, all proceeding down the bridge at a 45 degree angle directly at you:
weekend-warrior cyclists in spandex and headphones
weekend-warrior cyclists in spandex on cellphones
weekend-warrior hipster cyclists in hipster gear, on cellphones, with headphones
weekend-warrior hipster cyclists in hipster gear, on cellphones, with children and significant others
librarian-styled artist girls wearing cats-eye glasses on vintage bikes with iffy breaks and cool paint jobs (sometimes with decorated baskets)
post-college boys with bright new tattoos and mussed hair and black t-shirts, on skateboards, with headphones
12-year-olds on skateboards, with headphones, in packs
45-year-old fathers of two, on skateboards, with headphones, and cellphones, and children (in backpacks or on skateboards)
large Lubovitcher families out for their Sunday constituionals/shopping trips, with all the girls dressed exactly the same (eight girls in swingy blue pleated skirts and blue wool sweaters and white blouses, all different sizes)
groups of teenage girls, moving in swarms
large blonde dudes on cellphones, in packs
hipster couples on cellphones
hipster couples with children riding moving toys with pedals and poor directional control
graffiti artists on their knees in the middle of the pavement, adding embellishments to the bike-lane markers and the stickman figures on the tarmac. (Oh--so you think there's a bike lane? Oh. Wait. Sorry. I will explain. There are only two lanes. They are each approximately the width of two adult humans walking abreast. So on each lane, there's a stickman painted going in one direction, and a bike painted going in the other direction. Apparently, the idea is not "bikes over here; walkers over there." The idea is, "you should be forced to look your enemy in the eye as you prepare to engage in mortal combat which may result in (a) the gory flattening of pedestrians or (b) the flinging of cyclists over the side of the pedestrian walkway into the traffic below." This is what, in New York City, we call Traffic Management.)
(Total sidenote: ever since we walked over the bridge, the Brooklyn Funkessentials song "Stickman Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge" has been playing over and over in my head. Great song. Excellent song. Fantastic song. However.).
So anyway of these groups (except the grafitti artists) are moving extremely fast down the slope that you are laboring to walk up, and this is why you should never ever put your head down. Except to avoid tripping over the grafitti artists.
So even if it's a beautiful spring day in New York City, by the time you get up high on the bridge, you've removed your jacket and your skin is glistening wetly and you're feeling a little ripe and your hair is sticking to your face and your glasses are sliding around on your nose, and you're trying to remember if the Brooklyn Bridge is anything like this challenging, and you're concluding, nope, not at all, plus also there's the view, because the Williamsburg Bridge? Actually, very little view. A great deal of view-blocking metalwork. And then, every once in a while, glimpses of the water, far, far below, winking in the sunlight, deceptively cool-looking, deceptively clean-looking. (As though, if you took it into your head to dive in--and you made it past the four lanes of traffic below you--it would in fact not eat away your skin and tear apart your bones in 40 seconds flat.) This only makes you feel hotter and sticker and smellier and less ready to...sit down to lunch!
Then there's the excellent view of the defunct Domino sugar refinery. One grim nineteenth-century red-brick factory, ready for condo-ization! And one lowslung yellow structure from the 1970s. (Why was everything yellow in the 70s? A mystery.)
And that's pretty much it. Mostly, you get an excellent view of the punk couple in his-and-hers mowhawks and Doc Martens and torn black jeans and safety pins and striped t's, pretending it's new and revolutionary and veeery scarey (so cute! so sweet! so old-fashioned!), and the tourists with their wheelie bags wondering if this is the Brooklyn Bridge, and the artist kids taking digital photos of one another, and the girls-who-work-in-publishing shlepping their shopping home. There are the people who are on the bridge because it's a beautiful day, and then there are the people who are on the bridge because it's faster than the L train, which is, of course, under construction, this being the L train and this being the weekend. There are quite a number of these people.
After what feels like about three hours, we are over the hump and on the downward slope towards Brooklyn. I do not feel like a stickman. Or like Walt Whitman (though I guess with him it was the ferry). Or like an urban explorer. I do feel like kicking the next twelve-year-old skateboarder who flies at me while texting on his iphone.
My one true love mentions that a colleague of his runs the bridge. Voluntarily. Every night. "18 minutes," he tells me. Apparently that is in both directions. Apparently his colleague is an alien plotting to take over the world and should be taken down immediately. Alert the government. Alert the media.
The metalwork begins to drop away. We pass a house with a backyard filled with oil drums, some standing up, some lying on their sides, some piled up high over other oil drums. I wonder, idly, if this is some sort of Terrorist Threat. It being next to the bridge and all. (But the Government would have noticed, right? Seeing as there's all that law and order on the bridge.)
We pass an apartment building with a rooftop patio featuring three barbeques and an assortment of scavenged-looking plastic chairs. The bottom floors have boarded-up windows. The top floors have white curtains, blowing in the breeze.
And then, miraculously, we are...off the bridge!
And in the middle of eight or ten lanes of traffic, all moving at different angles of direction.
And then we are under an underpass.
And then we are walking over broken, weed-choked sidewalks and bits of shattered glass, past more boys in hoodies, past two old ladies on a stoop.
And then there is a dog, a beagle, looking out a window right at us.
And then there is the Williamsburg Northside Preschool (big fancy red awning, funny kid-type letters and a stick drawing) and then there is a youngish couple on his-and-hers cellphones and then there are three very skinny women with yoga mats and then there is coffee, and then there is ironic hair, and then we know we are...in Williamsburg!
Sweaty, unhip, raggedy refugees, yearning to breathe the post-industrial no-longer-quite-so-carcinogenic free air.
The shopping girls, in their tight tight jeans and their little waist-cut big-buttoned jackets, step carefully around us on the sidewalk, clutching their lattes.
Next: lunch!
We like to walk, he and I. (We pretend it's exercise.) (With stops for coffee.) (And snacks.)
So we thought we'd walk over the Williamsburg Bridge. 'Cause I've never done that!
And besides, we had three--count 'em--three possible lunch destinations. Which is really important, because you need a destination, y'know?
And what if one was closed?
Or we got really, really hungry?
So anyway.
It was clear and bright and sunny and we headed over the bridge.
To get to the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg bridge, first you head all the way down to Delancey Street, on the Lower East Side.
(Yep. Just like "Crossing Delancey." Very good!) (Except now all of the Orthodox Jews live over on the other side of the bridge, in Williamsburg. Where they are in the process of being forced out by post-collegiate hipsters and wanna-be artists and etcetera. Who in turn have been forced out of the Lower East Side themselves by trust-fund babies and hedge-fund managers. Who will soon force all of the hipsters and would-be artists out of Williamsburg. Which is ok, because the actual artists were forced out a long time ago by the hipsters, and now it's just evolution, New York City-style. The Orthodox Jews have not been forced out of the Lower East Side. They left of their own free will. And who could blame them? I don't think my great-grandparents would have recognized that a walk-up with the tub in the kitchen had Great Resale Potential! Now, instead of seeing actual Jews on the Lower East Side, you can do a tenement tour and see simulacra of Lower East Side Jews. Who knew? We're a tourist attraction!)
Anyway, you walk along Delancey, past the superdiscount clothing marts and the fried chicken joints and the subway construction and the shadow of Blue, the Lower East Side's first! luxury! condo! (which is, indeed, very...blue) and the young dudes in hoodies and the very large woman in the very very small croptop and the guy in the wheelchair hooking at people's legs with his cane and the big white boys in ballcaps looking for a bar and the downtown hipsters with washed-out skin and shaky hands in the sunshine and the p.r. girls who moved down to the Lower East Side because they love to go out! but still do their laundry out at their parents' place in Glen Cove and the tourists from the Hotel on Rivington with the roller bags and the maps and the glazed stare. You make your way past all of that (and the African guys hawking knockoff purses) (and the shaggy-looking dude by the payphones) (and the refugees from The Delancey, punk babies and oldschool rockers blinking in the sunlight, like vampires). And you make your way to the middle of the street, because that's where the pedestrian bridge is. Because New York is a Walking City! And we don't want you to get bored. So to get to the big red shiny pedestrian walkway on the bridge, you need to dodge homeless vets and tweaked-out junkies and developers on their cellphones and more tourists and also several lanes of traffic!
And then you get on the bridge, and you start walking up. And up. And up.
It's the kind of hike where, if you were on an actual mountain, you would put your head down, and you would push forward, bull-like, staring at the ground directly in front of your feet, trying to drive your body forward through the force of your neck. Especially if there's a wind. (There was a wind). Because for quite a while, it's pretty much all uphill. But this is not a mountain. Or if it was a mountain, it would be a mountain where it was unwise to put your head down, because it just so happens that you have chosen to hike up this particular mountain right in the middle of an off-road biking race, and also a skateboard off-road challenge, plus an extra-special pellmell hill run. So you have to keep looking up.
This throws your balance off, a bit. Makes you feel as though you're going to keel over backwards. But that's preferable to being run down by the following, all proceeding down the bridge at a 45 degree angle directly at you:
weekend-warrior cyclists in spandex and headphones
weekend-warrior cyclists in spandex on cellphones
weekend-warrior hipster cyclists in hipster gear, on cellphones, with headphones
weekend-warrior hipster cyclists in hipster gear, on cellphones, with children and significant others
librarian-styled artist girls wearing cats-eye glasses on vintage bikes with iffy breaks and cool paint jobs (sometimes with decorated baskets)
post-college boys with bright new tattoos and mussed hair and black t-shirts, on skateboards, with headphones
12-year-olds on skateboards, with headphones, in packs
45-year-old fathers of two, on skateboards, with headphones, and cellphones, and children (in backpacks or on skateboards)
large Lubovitcher families out for their Sunday constituionals/shopping trips, with all the girls dressed exactly the same (eight girls in swingy blue pleated skirts and blue wool sweaters and white blouses, all different sizes)
groups of teenage girls, moving in swarms
large blonde dudes on cellphones, in packs
hipster couples on cellphones
hipster couples with children riding moving toys with pedals and poor directional control
graffiti artists on their knees in the middle of the pavement, adding embellishments to the bike-lane markers and the stickman figures on the tarmac. (Oh--so you think there's a bike lane? Oh. Wait. Sorry. I will explain. There are only two lanes. They are each approximately the width of two adult humans walking abreast. So on each lane, there's a stickman painted going in one direction, and a bike painted going in the other direction. Apparently, the idea is not "bikes over here; walkers over there." The idea is, "you should be forced to look your enemy in the eye as you prepare to engage in mortal combat which may result in (a) the gory flattening of pedestrians or (b) the flinging of cyclists over the side of the pedestrian walkway into the traffic below." This is what, in New York City, we call Traffic Management.)
(Total sidenote: ever since we walked over the bridge, the Brooklyn Funkessentials song "Stickman Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge" has been playing over and over in my head. Great song. Excellent song. Fantastic song. However.).
So anyway of these groups (except the grafitti artists) are moving extremely fast down the slope that you are laboring to walk up, and this is why you should never ever put your head down. Except to avoid tripping over the grafitti artists.
So even if it's a beautiful spring day in New York City, by the time you get up high on the bridge, you've removed your jacket and your skin is glistening wetly and you're feeling a little ripe and your hair is sticking to your face and your glasses are sliding around on your nose, and you're trying to remember if the Brooklyn Bridge is anything like this challenging, and you're concluding, nope, not at all, plus also there's the view, because the Williamsburg Bridge? Actually, very little view. A great deal of view-blocking metalwork. And then, every once in a while, glimpses of the water, far, far below, winking in the sunlight, deceptively cool-looking, deceptively clean-looking. (As though, if you took it into your head to dive in--and you made it past the four lanes of traffic below you--it would in fact not eat away your skin and tear apart your bones in 40 seconds flat.) This only makes you feel hotter and sticker and smellier and less ready to...sit down to lunch!
Then there's the excellent view of the defunct Domino sugar refinery. One grim nineteenth-century red-brick factory, ready for condo-ization! And one lowslung yellow structure from the 1970s. (Why was everything yellow in the 70s? A mystery.)
And that's pretty much it. Mostly, you get an excellent view of the punk couple in his-and-hers mowhawks and Doc Martens and torn black jeans and safety pins and striped t's, pretending it's new and revolutionary and veeery scarey (so cute! so sweet! so old-fashioned!), and the tourists with their wheelie bags wondering if this is the Brooklyn Bridge, and the artist kids taking digital photos of one another, and the girls-who-work-in-publishing shlepping their shopping home. There are the people who are on the bridge because it's a beautiful day, and then there are the people who are on the bridge because it's faster than the L train, which is, of course, under construction, this being the L train and this being the weekend. There are quite a number of these people.
After what feels like about three hours, we are over the hump and on the downward slope towards Brooklyn. I do not feel like a stickman. Or like Walt Whitman (though I guess with him it was the ferry). Or like an urban explorer. I do feel like kicking the next twelve-year-old skateboarder who flies at me while texting on his iphone.
My one true love mentions that a colleague of his runs the bridge. Voluntarily. Every night. "18 minutes," he tells me. Apparently that is in both directions. Apparently his colleague is an alien plotting to take over the world and should be taken down immediately. Alert the government. Alert the media.
The metalwork begins to drop away. We pass a house with a backyard filled with oil drums, some standing up, some lying on their sides, some piled up high over other oil drums. I wonder, idly, if this is some sort of Terrorist Threat. It being next to the bridge and all. (But the Government would have noticed, right? Seeing as there's all that law and order on the bridge.)
We pass an apartment building with a rooftop patio featuring three barbeques and an assortment of scavenged-looking plastic chairs. The bottom floors have boarded-up windows. The top floors have white curtains, blowing in the breeze.
And then, miraculously, we are...off the bridge!
And in the middle of eight or ten lanes of traffic, all moving at different angles of direction.
And then we are under an underpass.
And then we are walking over broken, weed-choked sidewalks and bits of shattered glass, past more boys in hoodies, past two old ladies on a stoop.
And then there is a dog, a beagle, looking out a window right at us.
And then there is the Williamsburg Northside Preschool (big fancy red awning, funny kid-type letters and a stick drawing) and then there is a youngish couple on his-and-hers cellphones and then there are three very skinny women with yoga mats and then there is coffee, and then there is ironic hair, and then we know we are...in Williamsburg!
Sweaty, unhip, raggedy refugees, yearning to breathe the post-industrial no-longer-quite-so-carcinogenic free air.
The shopping girls, in their tight tight jeans and their little waist-cut big-buttoned jackets, step carefully around us on the sidewalk, clutching their lattes.
Next: lunch!
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Speaking of Elephants (In Which Our Heroine Learns the Perils of Exercise)
Ah, what a healthy Sunday evening. Doing the laundry; watching a little bit of Jason Bourne killing the bad and avenging the good; doing a little bit of work emailing; eating salad.
And drinking a beer, of course.
We think Bass is a great match for spinach salad.
Good...and good for you!
Ok, I know what you're thinking: what am I thinking? I am a woman born in the last 100 years! A Jewish woman! In my family, when we say, "You've lost weight!" that means "I love you!"
But recently, things have...changed.
Here's the story:
Not too long ago, I finally finally finally finished the revisions on an academic book. It was hard work and required a lot of time staring at the screen; staring at my notes; staring at my facebook page; staring at yootube; and etcetera. So that didn't leave me with a lot of time to go to the gym. Or to yoga.
Or even to run around the walking loop right outside my window.
I was...busy!
So then once the book was finally finally finally finished...
well, then it was definitely time to get back in the gym.
(I always know when it's time to get back in the gym. It's not just that my clothes don't fit anymore, or that bits jiggle, or that my colleagues start asking me if I'm pregnant, though it's all those things, too! But mainly it's when my One True Love actually responds to me when I say I'm getting so fat. When things are good, he says, "Right, baby. You're an elephant." When things are not so good, he says, sweetly, "Well, you've been finishing a book! You'll have lots of time to get healthy now that you're done!" For "get healthy," read, "get your ass in gear 'cause you're endangering the furniture.")
So I went back to the gym.
I want to make this clear: I like the gym. I like feeling my muscles kick in; I like exercise fatigue; I like watching the trainers and silently telling them how stupid they are while I work out alone on the cardio equipment. I have, at various points in my exercising life, done all kinds of gym activities. I have spun; I have rebounded; I have done low-impact and high-impact and step; I have jumped rope and lifted free weights and lifted Nautilus weights and done sit-ups upside down on all manner of equipment. Once, a long time ago, I had a trainer, who made me run up and down the stairs until I wanted to vomit. She had long white nails and excellent makeup and regularly found herself hit upon in bars by men wearing wedding rings, and Miami was her favorite city in the world. Under her tutelage, I began to dream of the day when I could crush men with my thighs.
There are, of course, things I do not like about the gym. For instance. I do not like fighting over the cardio equipment with scary old women who rubber-band their reading material to the machines and men who smell of very well-aged sweat (and who always, for some reason, wear sweatbands). Also I do not like working out next to someone who is talking on her cellphone. Also I do not like working out next to people who are very thin and do not sweat and have good workout clothes. (This last is less of a problem at my current gym than it was at my old gym, which was very popular among anorexic teenage models.)
Another thing I don't really like about the gym very much: running.
I like the apres-run well enough. I like it when my legs are tired and I'm drenched in sweat: I feel strong, virtuous, healthy! I like saying, "Oh, I was running yesterday and now my legs are so sore!" I like all that.
But when I'm actually running, I don't really like running very much. In fact, I loathe running. What I like about running at the gym is tv.
It is very important, I have discovered, to choose your gym tv shows with care. I am, for instance, in the ordinary course of things, a big fan of CSI--but all that standing around talking quietly in the lab under blue light? Doesn't work so well when you're running. It's too...slow.
The Girls Next Door, on the other hand? Excellent gym tv! There's always someone's dog running off and doing something it shouldn't; there's always a GirlFriend of Hef's squealing about something; sometimes there's a disco! It's fast-paced! It's action-packed!
Family Guy is also excellent gym fare.
And just about anything on MTV.
In other words, at the gym it is very important to impersonate a 14-year-old boy with your brain.
It's also important to find the right program. I like Interval Training. Because you're running for 30 seconds--and then you're not running for 30 seconds! And that's the best 30 seconds ever. Until the next 30 seconds when you're not running!
In my opinion, in order to fully enjoy the 30 seconds when you are not running, it is very important to run really really hard to get there for the other 30 seconds. It goes much quicker that way. I think it is possible that this other 30 seconds is in fact shortened when you run faster. Like maybe it only takes 20 seconds. Because, you know, you've already covered the ground. So the machine, it doesn't want you just wasting time running in place or anything.
Right?
So it is just possible that, in pursuit of my 30 seconds Off, I ignored certain warning signs. Like when I tripped over my own feet, for instance. Or when my knees hurt. Or when my side hurt. Or when the lower part of my stomach on the right and most of my right hip felt like they were being pried apart with a crowbar that had been heated over a lively fire for some time.
Because it was only for 30 seconds! and then it stopped! and then it was only for 30 seconds!
So that's how I ripped the hell out of my right-hand rectus abdominus muscle.
What, you may ask, is your rectus abdominus muscle?
Well, kids, that's the musle that runs up the front of the body on either side of your belly button. In those color drawings of people without any skin, or in the photos of that show where you look at the preserved bodies of political prisoners from China without their skin, it's the big ropey thing on either side of the body. The really big muscle. The one that looks important to maintaining, for instance, the ability to stand up.
And guess what? It is!
The rectus abdominus muscle, I have learned, is also helpful if you like to sit down. Or stand up. Or reach for things. Or roll over. And walk without wincing and bending over and generally acting like you're a thousand years old. And etcetera.
I tore mine and tore it good.
So then there was no more gym.
And also: there was no more yoga!
Because, it turns out, your rectus abdominus muscle? It controls pretty much everything you do in yoga. Including...breathing!
In fact, when you tear your rectus abdominus muscle, you more or less can't do anything except lie on your side on the couch with your legs over a pillow, watching tv, since happily, this is not the muscle that controls your eyes.
Also, you can eat.
Goat-cheese ice cream, for instance? Goes down great!
Pasta? Perfect!
So that's what I did for a while. And after some time had passed, I could get off the couch without wincing. I could walk without looking like I was a thousand-year-old woman in need of one of those wheelie-walkie thingies. I could roll over in my sleep without waking up screaming. It was amazing progress!
So this week, I tried going back to the gym. I was disciplined. I was good to myself. I only went on the elliptical trainer. Which is, in my opinion, for wimps.
Apparently I am less than a wimp. It hurt. I stopped.
On Friday, I thought I would try to go back to yoga. I would be mindful. I would practice ahimsa! Non-violence! Towards myself! I would not push it. I would be gentle to my body!
I did sitting-in-a-crosslegged-position. I did cat and cow. I did downward facing dog. I did...plank.
That was the end of yoga for me.
Maybe forever!
Maybe my body, after all, is trying to tell me something.
Because it's not like this is the first exercise-related injury I've ever had.
There was the time I ripped the great big muscle in the front of my thigh. Swimming.
(Swimming fast. In a race. But still.)
There was the time I gave myself rotator cuff inflammation in my right shoulder. (Also swimming!)
There was the time I fell and reactivated the rotator cuff inflammation and also ripped some other things in my shoulder.
There was the time I ripped a muscle at the top of my thigh that can only be repaired with surgery (that was a yoga injury!).
There's more, but I won't bore you.
So maybe I'm just not meant to exercise.
Maybe I'm meant to eat!
Because in the meantime, my one true love and I, we've been spending a lot more quality time together.
And my one true love: he exercises. He has a trainer. He has more than one working ab. He is Fit!
And so he gets hungry.
And he deserves too!
And so he likes to eat.
And I don't want him to have to eat alone! Because that's just cruel.
So we eat pizza with pepperoni. And eggs on toast. And hamburgers. With onion rings.
(We love onion rings).
And I know this is all very bad.
Except that a strange and miraculous thing has happened recently.
I...have Lost Weight.
My belt? 1 loop tighter. My jeans? Almost fitting! On the pepperoni diet, I have lost five pounds!
So tonight, when we broke out the salad, I made sure we each had a beer to go with it. Because you are what you eat. And if you're not careful? If you don't get healthy by eating a balanced diet? Elephants!
My intentions were good. I woke up ready to go to yoga--
but I've got this abdominal injury? caused by running? which I was doing to get back in shape after my three-week book-finishing marathon?
And drinking a beer, of course.
We think Bass is a great match for spinach salad.
Good...and good for you!
Ok, I know what you're thinking: what am I thinking? I am a woman born in the last 100 years! A Jewish woman! In my family, when we say, "You've lost weight!" that means "I love you!"
But recently, things have...changed.
Here's the story:
Not too long ago, I finally finally finally finished the revisions on an academic book. It was hard work and required a lot of time staring at the screen; staring at my notes; staring at my facebook page; staring at yootube; and etcetera. So that didn't leave me with a lot of time to go to the gym. Or to yoga.
Or even to run around the walking loop right outside my window.
I was...busy!
So then once the book was finally finally finally finished...
well, then it was definitely time to get back in the gym.
(I always know when it's time to get back in the gym. It's not just that my clothes don't fit anymore, or that bits jiggle, or that my colleagues start asking me if I'm pregnant, though it's all those things, too! But mainly it's when my One True Love actually responds to me when I say I'm getting so fat. When things are good, he says, "Right, baby. You're an elephant." When things are not so good, he says, sweetly, "Well, you've been finishing a book! You'll have lots of time to get healthy now that you're done!" For "get healthy," read, "get your ass in gear 'cause you're endangering the furniture.")
So I went back to the gym.
I want to make this clear: I like the gym. I like feeling my muscles kick in; I like exercise fatigue; I like watching the trainers and silently telling them how stupid they are while I work out alone on the cardio equipment. I have, at various points in my exercising life, done all kinds of gym activities. I have spun; I have rebounded; I have done low-impact and high-impact and step; I have jumped rope and lifted free weights and lifted Nautilus weights and done sit-ups upside down on all manner of equipment. Once, a long time ago, I had a trainer, who made me run up and down the stairs until I wanted to vomit. She had long white nails and excellent makeup and regularly found herself hit upon in bars by men wearing wedding rings, and Miami was her favorite city in the world. Under her tutelage, I began to dream of the day when I could crush men with my thighs.
There are, of course, things I do not like about the gym. For instance. I do not like fighting over the cardio equipment with scary old women who rubber-band their reading material to the machines and men who smell of very well-aged sweat (and who always, for some reason, wear sweatbands). Also I do not like working out next to someone who is talking on her cellphone. Also I do not like working out next to people who are very thin and do not sweat and have good workout clothes. (This last is less of a problem at my current gym than it was at my old gym, which was very popular among anorexic teenage models.)
Another thing I don't really like about the gym very much: running.
I like the apres-run well enough. I like it when my legs are tired and I'm drenched in sweat: I feel strong, virtuous, healthy! I like saying, "Oh, I was running yesterday and now my legs are so sore!" I like all that.
But when I'm actually running, I don't really like running very much. In fact, I loathe running. What I like about running at the gym is tv.
It is very important, I have discovered, to choose your gym tv shows with care. I am, for instance, in the ordinary course of things, a big fan of CSI--but all that standing around talking quietly in the lab under blue light? Doesn't work so well when you're running. It's too...slow.
The Girls Next Door, on the other hand? Excellent gym tv! There's always someone's dog running off and doing something it shouldn't; there's always a GirlFriend of Hef's squealing about something; sometimes there's a disco! It's fast-paced! It's action-packed!
Family Guy is also excellent gym fare.
And just about anything on MTV.
In other words, at the gym it is very important to impersonate a 14-year-old boy with your brain.
It's also important to find the right program. I like Interval Training. Because you're running for 30 seconds--and then you're not running for 30 seconds! And that's the best 30 seconds ever. Until the next 30 seconds when you're not running!
In my opinion, in order to fully enjoy the 30 seconds when you are not running, it is very important to run really really hard to get there for the other 30 seconds. It goes much quicker that way. I think it is possible that this other 30 seconds is in fact shortened when you run faster. Like maybe it only takes 20 seconds. Because, you know, you've already covered the ground. So the machine, it doesn't want you just wasting time running in place or anything.
Right?
So it is just possible that, in pursuit of my 30 seconds Off, I ignored certain warning signs. Like when I tripped over my own feet, for instance. Or when my knees hurt. Or when my side hurt. Or when the lower part of my stomach on the right and most of my right hip felt like they were being pried apart with a crowbar that had been heated over a lively fire for some time.
Because it was only for 30 seconds! and then it stopped! and then it was only for 30 seconds!
So that's how I ripped the hell out of my right-hand rectus abdominus muscle.
What, you may ask, is your rectus abdominus muscle?
Well, kids, that's the musle that runs up the front of the body on either side of your belly button. In those color drawings of people without any skin, or in the photos of that show where you look at the preserved bodies of political prisoners from China without their skin, it's the big ropey thing on either side of the body. The really big muscle. The one that looks important to maintaining, for instance, the ability to stand up.
And guess what? It is!
The rectus abdominus muscle, I have learned, is also helpful if you like to sit down. Or stand up. Or reach for things. Or roll over. And walk without wincing and bending over and generally acting like you're a thousand years old. And etcetera.
I tore mine and tore it good.
So then there was no more gym.
And also: there was no more yoga!
Because, it turns out, your rectus abdominus muscle? It controls pretty much everything you do in yoga. Including...breathing!
In fact, when you tear your rectus abdominus muscle, you more or less can't do anything except lie on your side on the couch with your legs over a pillow, watching tv, since happily, this is not the muscle that controls your eyes.
Also, you can eat.
Goat-cheese ice cream, for instance? Goes down great!
Pasta? Perfect!
So that's what I did for a while. And after some time had passed, I could get off the couch without wincing. I could walk without looking like I was a thousand-year-old woman in need of one of those wheelie-walkie thingies. I could roll over in my sleep without waking up screaming. It was amazing progress!
So this week, I tried going back to the gym. I was disciplined. I was good to myself. I only went on the elliptical trainer. Which is, in my opinion, for wimps.
Apparently I am less than a wimp. It hurt. I stopped.
On Friday, I thought I would try to go back to yoga. I would be mindful. I would practice ahimsa! Non-violence! Towards myself! I would not push it. I would be gentle to my body!
I did sitting-in-a-crosslegged-position. I did cat and cow. I did downward facing dog. I did...plank.
That was the end of yoga for me.
Maybe forever!
Maybe my body, after all, is trying to tell me something.
Because it's not like this is the first exercise-related injury I've ever had.
There was the time I ripped the great big muscle in the front of my thigh. Swimming.
(Swimming fast. In a race. But still.)
There was the time I gave myself rotator cuff inflammation in my right shoulder. (Also swimming!)
There was the time I fell and reactivated the rotator cuff inflammation and also ripped some other things in my shoulder.
There was the time I ripped a muscle at the top of my thigh that can only be repaired with surgery (that was a yoga injury!).
There's more, but I won't bore you.
So maybe I'm just not meant to exercise.
Maybe I'm meant to eat!
Because in the meantime, my one true love and I, we've been spending a lot more quality time together.
And my one true love: he exercises. He has a trainer. He has more than one working ab. He is Fit!
And so he gets hungry.
And he deserves too!
And so he likes to eat.
And I don't want him to have to eat alone! Because that's just cruel.
So we eat pizza with pepperoni. And eggs on toast. And hamburgers. With onion rings.
(We love onion rings).
And I know this is all very bad.
Except that a strange and miraculous thing has happened recently.
I...have Lost Weight.
My belt? 1 loop tighter. My jeans? Almost fitting! On the pepperoni diet, I have lost five pounds!
So tonight, when we broke out the salad, I made sure we each had a beer to go with it. Because you are what you eat. And if you're not careful? If you don't get healthy by eating a balanced diet? Elephants!
My intentions were good. I woke up ready to go to yoga--
but I've got this abdominal injury? caused by running? which I was doing to get back in shape after my three-week book-finishing marathon?
What's in a Name? (In Which Our Heroine Is Blinded By Science)
I am of the opinion that, in the general run of things, I am fairly tech-savvy. I mean, don't get me wrong--I'm no technological genius. I'm not one of those people who can't wait to have email installed on the insides of her eyelids. I have never twittered (though it is not because I am afraid) and I have not yet written a book through texting. I do not own a device the size of my fingernail which is equipped with an mp3 player, email, web-surfing, a still and a video camera, a constant reading of the outdoor and indoor temperatures anywhere in the world, a telephone, an e-book, a live version of Waiting for Godot played by fleas, and a teeny tiny chef serving up omelettes on demand. But for a person over 21, I think I do pretty well. I youtube. I facebook and myspace. I post with abandon. I subscribe. I...shop.
I even own a kindle.
But every once in a while, I am reminded that I am, in fact, an English major.
Like today.
So I had all this stuff I wanted to post about today. On my blog, y'know?
Which I haven't been doing so often, as you might have noticed.
(Sorry, kids. Alice was busy. Writing...books. Like this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Urban-Italian-Simple-Recipes-Stories/dp/159691470X/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209882650&sr=8-1
Plus another one. More soon on that.)
So anyway, I had this...stuff. That I wanted to post about.
It was going to be an awesome post. Amazing. Mind-boggling, even. You would have laughed till you cried. Laughed till you couldn't breathe. Really.
So I went to my blog page. And I hit login. And I typed in my Secret Information.
And Blogger politely informed me, "You have no blogs!"
Huh.
Must have mistyped.
I tried it again. Email! Password!
"Start a blog now!"
Once more. emailpassword "Welcome to Blogger! Getting started!"
Huh. Huh.
So then I thought,
"Wait. Didn't I set up a special secondary email account just for my blog?"
So then I thought, "What would I have called said email?"
and, further,
"On which free service would I have set up said email?"
So then I tried some things.
I tried aliceinnewyorkland. I tried alicenyland. I tried...
well, I tried all kinds of names.
Some of them were blog-like.
Some of them were me-related.
Some of them were nasty.
Some of them were nastier.
Some of them were just *daring* gmail (or yahoo or hotmail or whatever) to come out and have a fair fight. Put 'em up!
After a while, it occurred to me...that my associated email address...was probably on my profile page. On my blog.
So that was good. That helped a lot, y'know?
But then there was the problem of the password.
I tried one out: my allpurpose, go-to password. The one I love. The one I hold dear. The one they'll definitely get out of me if they threaten to start pulling out my fingernails.
No dice.
Several variations on said password.
Still nothin'.
I pulled out the antique filofax where I keep all of my usernames and passwords. (I know...you're never supposed to write them down in the same place. But it's very secure. Really. No one would ever think to look in that bright red faux-leather binder which always sits on one side of my desk. What are the odds?)
There was the username and password for my various online shopping endeavors.
The username and password for my work email.
The username and password for a defunct bank account.
For hotels.com; for expedia; for various jobsites and Professional Activities and, of course, for facebook.
But blogger? Nothin'. Nada. Zip.
So I tried the password for work.
And I tried the password for the defunct bank account.
And I tried six or seven shopping passwords.
After the first three, gmail started asking me to type in the letters in the little box, the way they do, you know, so they don't think you're a computer trying to break in or anything.
So I did that.
But have you ever seen the way gmail prints those anti-computer nonsense words?
These guys, they make Ticketmaster look like amateurs!
The letters are printed on top of each other, bleeding into one another, shading in one another. One word had letters that were upside down. One was an Escher drawing. One required me to find Waldo.
So then I didn't do so well at that.
And then gmail, it thought I was a computer.
And then it shut me out. And I'm pretty sure it sent me an invisible shock through the keyboard. And I thought I heard my hard drive...screaming.
So you know how when you can't remember your password, the system will send a message to a related account?
And you can reset it?
Yeah! Great!
But this led me to a whole other problem. Because when I'd created a secondary account for my blog, way back when, I was Very Concerned with Anonymity.
Because of Professional Considerations.
(I'm over that now.)
So the secondary account? It was on some other free email service. I don't know which one. Also I don't know what my user name was. The password? Fuggedaboutit.
So then I tried to go to the Help function on blogger.
Do you know what happens when you hit the Help function on blogger?
"Please choose one of the following," the page says, and offers you...choices. Among these choices:
"I can't log in."
"My blog has disappeared from my page."
"I can't find my blog online."
"I've forgotten my password."
There were several other choices. None of these choices were "I can't remember my password and also I can't remember the name or password of my affiliated email address so you can't send it there but really I'm me and this is my fucking blog and perhaps you could send the message to this other email address that I actually use and for which I can remember the password? Or maybe you could call me. That would be nice--a phone call would be nice--would you like my digits?"
So I chose "I can't log in."
That yielded some excellent choices. Like "I've forgotten my password." And "I've forgotten my affiliated email address."
I tried out both of these. Even though they weren't exactly right.
The first one gave me the opportunity to reset my password for my gmail account.
So then I did.
So now I have a new password for my actual the-one-I-use-every-day gmail account. I believe I have reset it five times.
The second one...sent my password message to my secondary email address.
You know? The one I can't remember.
So then I found this other option, about getting a list of all the email accounts affiliated with the account.
Only that link was broken.
For a while, I thought I'd hit paydirt: an actual link to other humans! A means of communicating! Not a Help page! Not another Help page! Not a "Group Help!" page.
(I know it's very old-media of me, but I kind of think that when you're unable to access your own blog, posting this information to a "group" cannot possibly result in anything good. It reminds me of that girl in grade school who would wheedle, "you can tell me! I promise, I won't tell anyone! Really! Cross my heart and hope to die!" and then you would tell her, and then you would walk into your classroom, and there, on the board in 2-foot-tall letters, would be "Alice Loves Yair," or, "Alice Wet Her Bed!" or "Alice is Alienated and Unpopular and Is Going to Require Therapy!" and everyone would be pointing and laughing.)
So I thought, for a little while, that I had actually found a link to a human being who worked for google/blogger and would be paid to be discrete. Kind. Nice to old ladies and the differently abled and others who forget their own blog access codes.
Instead, what I'd actually found was another form. "Please complete as many fields as possible," I was instructed. "The number of correct answers will determine the strength of your request. If you do not complete as many fields as possible, we will determine your request is weak and we will not reply."
Well, then.
I would not hold back.
I would tell them anything they wanted to know.
My mother's maiden name? My grade school? My favorite color? Whether I really had a thing for Yair in fifth grade?
No problem. I was ready! I would spill! I would be authentic! I would be...Strong!
"What is your primary associated email?" the form asked.
"What is your secondary associated email?"
"When did you first use your blog?"
"List five email addresses used regularly."
"When did you last access your primary associated email?"
I was not Strong.
I was...Weak.
Here is what google sent me in reply, some time later:
Thank you for your report. We've completed our investigation. Because our
investigation was inconclusive, we can't provide you with access to this
Google Account. At Google we take privacy and security of our users very
seriously. For this reason, we're unable to reveal any further information
about the account you'd like to access.
To continue using Google Accounts, please visit
https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount and create a new account.
We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your cooperation and
understanding.
Regards,
The Google Team
I wept, just a little.
Then I sat and stared at my computer in despair. I was never going to be able to be Alice again! I was shut out--shut out of my own blog! I was in the gulag! The diaspora! The Fallen World! There would be no climbing back up to heaven for me...
My one true love glanced up, just then, from his music-making. (He had been wearing his headphones and, thus, had been spared much of my cursing, moaning, beating of my breast, damning of blogger, and etcetera.)
"Why don't you just start Alice2?" he asked reasonably.
I do believe I growled.
He blinked. And put his headphones back on. Rapidly.
But just then...I remembered.
That post I wrote? The very first one? About sleeplessness? And Ambien? And etcetera?
(It's in the June 06 archives, if you're wondering. Laugh-out-loud funny. Really. Much funnier than this lame post.)
That post had made me think about being awake, when I was five. And an insomniac. And convinced there was a witch on my windowsill just waiting for a vulnerable moment to swoop down and get me.
(Very Carmilla, no?)
And that made me think, I recall, about my cousin A., who used to sleep over. Because he would fall asleep first. And then I would feel bad. Like I was the last person awake in the whole wide world.
And that made me think about how A. used to beat me up, when I, for instance, won at Monopoly. Or cards. Or swimming. Or anything, really.
And that in turn made me think of when I used to get sent to my room by my mother for fighting with my cousin.
And that made me remember the wallpaper in my bedroom when I was little, Mary Mary Quite Contrary in her garden, a black-and-white drawing, very '70s, just begging to be colored in, really. (How could you blame me? You couldn't blame me.)
And that led me to my grandfather coming to visit, which took me straight to Hallowe'en when I was six, which led me to hoarding my candy under the dining room table, which led directly to...
My password!
So here I am. Aren't you so so glad I'm back?
I even own a kindle.
But every once in a while, I am reminded that I am, in fact, an English major.
Like today.
So I had all this stuff I wanted to post about today. On my blog, y'know?
Which I haven't been doing so often, as you might have noticed.
(Sorry, kids. Alice was busy. Writing...books. Like this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Urban-Italian-Simple-Recipes-Stories/dp/159691470X/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209882650&sr=8-1
Plus another one. More soon on that.)
So anyway, I had this...stuff. That I wanted to post about.
It was going to be an awesome post. Amazing. Mind-boggling, even. You would have laughed till you cried. Laughed till you couldn't breathe. Really.
So I went to my blog page. And I hit login. And I typed in my Secret Information.
And Blogger politely informed me, "You have no blogs!"
Huh.
Must have mistyped.
I tried it again. Email! Password!
"Start a blog now!"
Once more. emailpassword "Welcome to Blogger! Getting started!"
Huh. Huh.
So then I thought,
"Wait. Didn't I set up a special secondary email account just for my blog?"
So then I thought, "What would I have called said email?"
and, further,
"On which free service would I have set up said email?"
So then I tried some things.
I tried aliceinnewyorkland. I tried alicenyland. I tried...
well, I tried all kinds of names.
Some of them were blog-like.
Some of them were me-related.
Some of them were nasty.
Some of them were nastier.
Some of them were just *daring* gmail (or yahoo or hotmail or whatever) to come out and have a fair fight. Put 'em up!
After a while, it occurred to me...that my associated email address...was probably on my profile page. On my blog.
So that was good. That helped a lot, y'know?
But then there was the problem of the password.
I tried one out: my allpurpose, go-to password. The one I love. The one I hold dear. The one they'll definitely get out of me if they threaten to start pulling out my fingernails.
No dice.
Several variations on said password.
Still nothin'.
I pulled out the antique filofax where I keep all of my usernames and passwords. (I know...you're never supposed to write them down in the same place. But it's very secure. Really. No one would ever think to look in that bright red faux-leather binder which always sits on one side of my desk. What are the odds?)
There was the username and password for my various online shopping endeavors.
The username and password for my work email.
The username and password for a defunct bank account.
For hotels.com; for expedia; for various jobsites and Professional Activities and, of course, for facebook.
But blogger? Nothin'. Nada. Zip.
So I tried the password for work.
And I tried the password for the defunct bank account.
And I tried six or seven shopping passwords.
After the first three, gmail started asking me to type in the letters in the little box, the way they do, you know, so they don't think you're a computer trying to break in or anything.
So I did that.
But have you ever seen the way gmail prints those anti-computer nonsense words?
These guys, they make Ticketmaster look like amateurs!
The letters are printed on top of each other, bleeding into one another, shading in one another. One word had letters that were upside down. One was an Escher drawing. One required me to find Waldo.
So then I didn't do so well at that.
And then gmail, it thought I was a computer.
And then it shut me out. And I'm pretty sure it sent me an invisible shock through the keyboard. And I thought I heard my hard drive...screaming.
So you know how when you can't remember your password, the system will send a message to a related account?
And you can reset it?
Yeah! Great!
But this led me to a whole other problem. Because when I'd created a secondary account for my blog, way back when, I was Very Concerned with Anonymity.
Because of Professional Considerations.
(I'm over that now.)
So the secondary account? It was on some other free email service. I don't know which one. Also I don't know what my user name was. The password? Fuggedaboutit.
So then I tried to go to the Help function on blogger.
Do you know what happens when you hit the Help function on blogger?
"Please choose one of the following," the page says, and offers you...choices. Among these choices:
"I can't log in."
"My blog has disappeared from my page."
"I can't find my blog online."
"I've forgotten my password."
There were several other choices. None of these choices were "I can't remember my password and also I can't remember the name or password of my affiliated email address so you can't send it there but really I'm me and this is my fucking blog and perhaps you could send the message to this other email address that I actually use and for which I can remember the password? Or maybe you could call me. That would be nice--a phone call would be nice--would you like my digits?"
So I chose "I can't log in."
That yielded some excellent choices. Like "I've forgotten my password." And "I've forgotten my affiliated email address."
I tried out both of these. Even though they weren't exactly right.
The first one gave me the opportunity to reset my password for my gmail account.
So then I did.
So now I have a new password for my actual the-one-I-use-every-day gmail account. I believe I have reset it five times.
The second one...sent my password message to my secondary email address.
You know? The one I can't remember.
So then I found this other option, about getting a list of all the email accounts affiliated with the account.
Only that link was broken.
For a while, I thought I'd hit paydirt: an actual link to other humans! A means of communicating! Not a Help page! Not another Help page! Not a "Group Help!" page.
(I know it's very old-media of me, but I kind of think that when you're unable to access your own blog, posting this information to a "group" cannot possibly result in anything good. It reminds me of that girl in grade school who would wheedle, "you can tell me! I promise, I won't tell anyone! Really! Cross my heart and hope to die!" and then you would tell her, and then you would walk into your classroom, and there, on the board in 2-foot-tall letters, would be "Alice Loves Yair," or, "Alice Wet Her Bed!" or "Alice is Alienated and Unpopular and Is Going to Require Therapy!" and everyone would be pointing and laughing.)
So I thought, for a little while, that I had actually found a link to a human being who worked for google/blogger and would be paid to be discrete. Kind. Nice to old ladies and the differently abled and others who forget their own blog access codes.
Instead, what I'd actually found was another form. "Please complete as many fields as possible," I was instructed. "The number of correct answers will determine the strength of your request. If you do not complete as many fields as possible, we will determine your request is weak and we will not reply."
Well, then.
I would not hold back.
I would tell them anything they wanted to know.
My mother's maiden name? My grade school? My favorite color? Whether I really had a thing for Yair in fifth grade?
No problem. I was ready! I would spill! I would be authentic! I would be...Strong!
"What is your primary associated email?" the form asked.
"What is your secondary associated email?"
"When did you first use your blog?"
"List five email addresses used regularly."
"When did you last access your primary associated email?"
I was not Strong.
I was...Weak.
Here is what google sent me in reply, some time later:
Thank you for your report. We've completed our investigation. Because our
investigation was inconclusive, we can't provide you with access to this
Google Account. At Google we take privacy and security of our users very
seriously. For this reason, we're unable to reveal any further information
about the account you'd like to access.
To continue using Google Accounts, please visit
https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount and create a new account.
We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your cooperation and
understanding.
Regards,
The Google Team
I wept, just a little.
Then I sat and stared at my computer in despair. I was never going to be able to be Alice again! I was shut out--shut out of my own blog! I was in the gulag! The diaspora! The Fallen World! There would be no climbing back up to heaven for me...
My one true love glanced up, just then, from his music-making. (He had been wearing his headphones and, thus, had been spared much of my cursing, moaning, beating of my breast, damning of blogger, and etcetera.)
"Why don't you just start Alice2?" he asked reasonably.
I do believe I growled.
He blinked. And put his headphones back on. Rapidly.
But just then...I remembered.
That post I wrote? The very first one? About sleeplessness? And Ambien? And etcetera?
(It's in the June 06 archives, if you're wondering. Laugh-out-loud funny. Really. Much funnier than this lame post.)
That post had made me think about being awake, when I was five. And an insomniac. And convinced there was a witch on my windowsill just waiting for a vulnerable moment to swoop down and get me.
(Very Carmilla, no?)
And that made me think, I recall, about my cousin A., who used to sleep over. Because he would fall asleep first. And then I would feel bad. Like I was the last person awake in the whole wide world.
And that made me think about how A. used to beat me up, when I, for instance, won at Monopoly. Or cards. Or swimming. Or anything, really.
And that in turn made me think of when I used to get sent to my room by my mother for fighting with my cousin.
And that made me remember the wallpaper in my bedroom when I was little, Mary Mary Quite Contrary in her garden, a black-and-white drawing, very '70s, just begging to be colored in, really. (How could you blame me? You couldn't blame me.)
And that led me to my grandfather coming to visit, which took me straight to Hallowe'en when I was six, which led me to hoarding my candy under the dining room table, which led directly to...
My password!
So here I am. Aren't you so so glad I'm back?
Monday, June 11, 2007
just a taste (in which our heroine donates her body to culinary science)
So this morning I got up early and went to yoga, and we did lots of twisting which is very cleansing, and the teacher said, "be sure to drink a lot of water and eat fresh foods today!" because of all the cleansing, and I felt very cleansed and also thinner, and then I came home and took a shower and drank a lot of water and then my one true love and I went to the Great Pork Festival.
We shook hands with all the barbeque people. We compared notes and shared bites with other chefs and assorted foodbiz people. We stuck our noses in smokers.
Our Virgil on this voyage through the Madison Park barbeque inferno was a food writer of our acquaintance. Josh is a pro--the real deal. This is a man who has strong feelings about the consistency of tinned chocolate pudding; who knows the history of the taco; who can talk with equal authority about the minutae of esoteric Japanese seasonal cuisine and the tiniest details of Texas vs Carolina pig-smoking technique. And he's literally written the book on meat.
Josh had been eating pork and drinking bourbon for approximately 36 hours. His eyes were bloodshot, his fingers swollen. Still he soldiered on, tasting, sharing, inhaling smoke and nitrates, talking at top speed. He was tireless, unflagging. A true professional.
At our first stop--a station belonging to a Texas bbq outfit which opened an outpost in the city this very weekend--he handed me a brontosaurus-sized rib, dotted with great restraint with sauce. He eyed me approvingly as I gnawed on the thing like a hound--then critically, disappointed, as I failed to polish it off. "Is it too chewy?" he asked, voice full of concern. "Should we get you another one?"
At our second pulled-pork station, he reached up--risking his fingers as the bbq chef’s scimitar ravaged the pork butt on the cutting block--and grabbed me a handful of pure fat, still bubbling, held together with the brown, crackling skin. "Taste this," he urged, with enthusiasm.
My sweetie looked at me expectantly.
This was research!
So I did.
Such is the glamorous life of the chef's sig oth.
The other weekend, we went for a long walk (very healthy!), down through the Lower East Side, and then around and through the Seaport, and up through Battery Park City. We contemplated walking across the Williamsburg Bridge, but then we were just in Williamsburg a couple of weekends before.
Good trip, that Williamsburg one. We went to this little indoor-flea-market-type-place (where they were also selling vintage buttons, with, like, Blondie on 'em, and Iggy Pop, and of course the classic Never Mind the Bollocks one and the timeless masterpiece checkerboard-black-and-white The Beat--and I thought about it--but would I look, like, cool--or like I was still wearing my Never Mind the Bollocks button from the first time round? I mean, I see junkies in the East Village all the time still wearing their leathers and spikes and eyeliner and sometimes even their mohawks from back in the day--and they’re still extremely...hip--but in an East-Village-punk-authentique kind of way, like the Last Living Confederate Widow or some such, especially now that CBGB is gone. (Maybe they should give them some sort of official cultural title? Historical Ambassadors?) But then I saw this woman the other day, forty-something, in purple stirrup pants, and leg warmers, and eyeliner inside the bottom eyelid. Without irony. Does she notice that suddenly everyone is dressed like her again? Or did she just never notice when the thing died the first time? Bet she has Flashdance on her iPod.)
So I didn’t buy the buttons. My sweetie bought a t-shirt with skulls, and then we stopped in at this classic-diner-type-hipster-place. (The guy at the counter next to me was reading one of the His Dark Materials books. And there were several men in checked shirts and ironic glasses, which I thought were so over already but I guess the proto-Devo geekboy look is just perennially cool, and they were with tall thin women with swingie hair and interesting boots and sometimes with hats, and also there were at least three women in overalls). We had coffee and an appetizer, so to speak--just some fries, because they have legendary fries, and a bite or two of the pie. Which is said to be truly great pie.
This was research. For my honey's work.
Also it was to tide us over while we were waiting for our reservation at Peter Luger’s--you know, that's the steak place? with the ancient old-school Brooklyn waiters with the slicked-back hair, and the no décor? And it's stockbrokers having hair-of-the-dog, and families celebrating birthdays, and a couple where he wears the gold and she has very expensive breasts? We were very restrained, at Peter Luger's. Because that's the right thing to do, and also it' a fortune. And after all this was just lunch. So instead of ordering mammoth zillion-dollar steaks, we had burgers. But then we ordered the onion rings, which are I mean really great but still--but they are truly really great--and then also we add in a couple of beers and then maybe a couple more, and then plus we have to have dessert so we have dessert and with dessert we need to have a cup of coffee--so anyway then it’s a hundred bucks plus tax and tip and also I’m feeling maybe a little had-it-up-to-here (here being somewhere in the vicinity of your gag reflex) and all we’ve had is lunch, a coupla burgers.
But they were truly great burgers.
And if my sweetie decides to open a steakhouse one day--or a burger joint (very hot right now in New York--have I told you about our extensive burger joint research? Maybe later)--or perhaps a diner--all of this will be very useful and important!
So anyway. We’d just been to Williamsburg, so when we got to the bridge we kept going down towards the bottom of Manhattan--past the funky little bars and bodegas on Avenue C, past the projects and bike shops, past those weird co-op apartments looming up next to the bridge--all the way down to Chinatown and around to the Seaport.
Very healthy, walking. Very good for you. Burns many calories. And it was hot and we were sweating so much we had to stop for a couple bottles of water along the way, so it was all very cleansing. Like a bikram yoga class. Only not boring. And not led by a man dressed all in white and wearing a Rolex and sitting on a platform above eye level, cross-legged, wearing a Madonna headpiece-thing.
So by the time we got down to the Seaport--not the touristy bit with the Sharper Image store and that place with the Bodies exhibit (all those dead political prisoners from China pumped full of chemicals and stripped naked without their skins, not terribly appetizing in my opinion)--but the other bit, with the refurbished colonial buildings, really pretty and cobblestoney and Olde New Amsterdam-style out front and then teeny tiny high-tech apartments for Wall Street jockeys inside--we were ready for lunch. And conveniently, there's this little pizza shop, which a different food writer had said was the Real Thing. Straight from Italy it is, except that the server was this twentysomething blonde cornfed person who kept playing with her hair as she told us the specials and who said her mom had a lot of opinions about the pizza.
And, I mean, we’d worked so hard! We were starving, almost. Must have sweated out six or seven pounds at least!
And it's possible that my one true love will be putting pizza on the menu soon. So this is extremely important and relevant research.
So then we ordered two pies. Small ones, I mean. Personal-size.
And then it was hot (just like Italy: no air conditioning: very environmentally appropriate). And water just somehow never really cools you down.
So then we ordered a couple of beers. Which were ice-cold! So that was a good choice.
And then just a couple of sorbetti and gelati to finish. Because you need something sweet after you eat pizza.
We considered the pizza, and our opinion, and the food writer's opinion. Our opinion: eh. The crust didn't have enough salt, and so on. So then we were thinking about who's got the best pizza in the city. So then we had to find out.
This is not the sort of thing that can wait till the next time you happen to feel like pizza at an appropriate mealtime. Or even until you're hungry again. It's important.
(Things move fast, in the culinary world. And if my one true love missed it? Disaster. Potentially.)
So then we went to this little ultra-modern ultra-Euro pizzeria on the Lower East Side where the pies are all out on display behind the counter, and they were good and all but not fresh in a freshfresh kind of way. And then we went to this famous pizzeria in what used to be Little Italy and is now NoHo, with a serious old coal-burning oven from before there were laws about such things, but the cheese...huh. And then we detoured out to Brooklyn after all, because there's this old dude who makes pizzas by hand, one at a time, and it's all very atmospheric and Brooklynesque and authentique, but it takes forever and in my opinion the pizza lacks a certain something, since you can't actually taste the part where you wait in line. So then we went to this other place in our own neighborhood: straight from Naples, watery Italian beer and all, and it seemed like every Italian in Manhattan under the age of forty was there, and our server wore skinny black jeans and a hot-pink studded punk belt, and Italian music videos played on the tv in the back (lots of blue light and neon, endless ballads played by men alone on stage with guitars, then techno), and that, we decided, was the best pizza.
We had four different pies to make sure.
Now we're sure.
And we drank red wine which is very good for you and healthy.
They had dessert, but we didn't want dessert there because--you know--Italian desserts--so then we went down the street to that great little bakery and had these gorgeous dark-chocolate tarts.
And then we walked home!
So that was very healthy, the walking.
And the next day my sweetie had been reading about this fried chicken place, because he'd made some fried chicken for another food writer he knew, and the food writer had said of course that my sweetie's fried chicken was the best--but that there was this new place uptown which was really, really, good--so then, you know, we had to check it out.
Research.
(In our opinion, highly over-rated. For the record. We tried the barbeque, too. So-so. But we haven't tried the fried chicken everywhere else, so we can't seriously come to any conclusions. Yet.)
And then there was also this new gelato place that opened in the West 70s?
But I mean we walked there. From 110th Street. So the fried chicken was totally gone by then.
And for ten blocks at least there was a street fair (people selling tube socks three for $5; potted houseplants; funnel cakes; handmade handbags from Guatemala and also from Brooklyn; brand-name bras). So that right there was like speed-walking an obstacle course. Which is like at least three hundred calories more, all that ducking and weaving and sidestepping and hopping over (strollers) and unexpected full stops. It was interval training! Which is extremely good for you calorie-burning-wise.
So by the time we got to the gelato we were totally allowed to have whatever we wanted, after all that hard work in the heat, and we ordered Small anyway because we were being so restrained. But the gelato had this really chemically taste and my sweetie's melted without warning (all over his shoe in fact), so it was not a satisfying eating experience. (Which is not to say that we didn't finish it. Because the thing about frozen desserts? They change at different temperatures. And what if we didn't finish, and the chemically taste was only at the most-frozen or medium-frozen point, and actually at the least-frozen point this was the best gelato we'd ever tasted, and my sweetie didn't know, and then he ignored that technique?) And so it wasn’t entirely surprising that later--after dinner--we decided all at once that the only thing to do was to get up and go get some gelato from that place on Mott Street that we love!
Mostly for comparison's sake.
So then we did.
And we had to take a cab down because it was closing, but we ran from the cab a full block to the store, and then we walked all the way back, fast! So that was like we ate nothing, really. Nothing, with sprinkles. Rainbow ones.
And then of course we were very healthy all week. We exercised. We ate salad.
By Friday we were almost see-through!
So then on Saturday, after breakfast (oatmeal--very healthy), Josh picked us up in his '82 white Caddie DeVille with vinyl seats and red velvet upholstery for the drive out to Red Hook, to these famous soccer fields, where these very serious leagues of guys from Latin America play every weekend, but nobody watches the soccer because really it's all about the vendors who set up these tents around the edge of the park and sell homemade Latino food. Josh was doing a video blog of this other chef who makes Mexican food, and we were just along for the ride, so to speak--for research purposes. In case for instance my honey decides one day that he's going to open a Latin American restaurant. Or maybe serve Mexican specials. You never know.
It was getting on 11:30 or so--almost lunchtime--so Josh had this excellent idea, and first we stopped at Katz's Deli on the Lower East Side, for some "forspeis," which in this context means "New York Jewish appetizer consumed before eating tacos." So we had a couple hotdogs and some knoblewurst and a bag of fries, but shared between four of us so it was like nothing! Right?
And then we went out to Red Hook, and the park was crawling with Brooklyn hipsters-with-kids and Williamsburg post-collegiate babies in ironic shoes and lesbian couples dressed like 1987 the first time round and Latino families from the ‘hood, all sharing space at picnic tables and crowded on benches under the tents, staying out of the sun and eating enormous platefuls of fresh-fried food and eyeing one another’s children. We started with these huge tacos, goat and beef, with four different salsas, and aqua frescas to wash it down--hibiscus, and this other one that was just like rice pudding. It was a thousand degrees which somehow made us more hungry, even though it's supposed to make you feel full, so then we had some more of those, because we were really just there to taste but I mean. And the vendor, she made us this special dish consisting of something's knuckles--beef maybe or pork--with this vinegar sauce and cheese on top. And that was just the first stop, and there were like fifteen tents!
But we just--you know--tasted. For research purposes.
And on the way to the car--we were going to make a stop at this little wine store down the way, just past the projects, where the owner has her own whiskey made back home in Kentucky; and then we would have a drink maybe at this other place because it was 90 degrees and New York humid which is like the tropics, and as the English discovered during colonial times, gin-based drinks are ideal on days like that for warding off tropic-type insect-borne diseases (West Nile, etc), but then it was closed so we went back to Manhattan and had mojitos at the other chef's restaurant, and he had the cooks bring out just a couple of little things, tacos with cheese and beef and whatever, to compare his kind of Mexican cooking with the street-food kind of Mexican cooking from the soccer park. Research, it was. My sweetie learned so much!--anyway, we were walking to the car in Red Hook, and we passed this family hanging out at their car, and the kids, they were eating bright-orange chip-like things, from a factory and in a color not found in nature, and they were only a half-block away from the soccer fields! And I said, "oh, that was the saddest thing, wasn’t it?" and the other chef, he goes, "yeah, you know, childhood obesity--it's so sad that parents don’t know how to help their kids eat right! 'Cause that's a lifetime of bad eating habits, there, man."
And we all agreed it was very sad.
We walked home from the other chef's restaurant. All the way from the Lower East Side. At a fairly good clip. Considering.
Back at the Pork Fest, we had reached the end of the line: whole baby pig, marinated in vinegar Carolina-style (so much lighter than Texas sauce!), smoked for fourteen hours, till it was so tender the meat just fell off the bone. Chopped, shredded, served up still hot on an egg-yellow hamburger bun, with a side of vinegar slaw.
And also something flat and crackling which might have been skin but which was probably just a huge slab of fat.
My sweetie learned so much about barbeque styles, and smoking times, and vinegar versus sauce, and regional specialties!
And then we walked home, and we thought we'd better have some whiskey, just to clear the arteries, so to speak.
And then after a little lie-down (two or three hours. Very good for the digestion), we had dinner. Salad! Very light and healthy.
Josh was still there when we left, still working the Porkfest, but he was getting ready to head out. He had a date last night, he said. He was thinking about cooking a pork chop.
We shook hands with all the barbeque people. We compared notes and shared bites with other chefs and assorted foodbiz people. We stuck our noses in smokers.
Our Virgil on this voyage through the Madison Park barbeque inferno was a food writer of our acquaintance. Josh is a pro--the real deal. This is a man who has strong feelings about the consistency of tinned chocolate pudding; who knows the history of the taco; who can talk with equal authority about the minutae of esoteric Japanese seasonal cuisine and the tiniest details of Texas vs Carolina pig-smoking technique. And he's literally written the book on meat.
Josh had been eating pork and drinking bourbon for approximately 36 hours. His eyes were bloodshot, his fingers swollen. Still he soldiered on, tasting, sharing, inhaling smoke and nitrates, talking at top speed. He was tireless, unflagging. A true professional.
At our first stop--a station belonging to a Texas bbq outfit which opened an outpost in the city this very weekend--he handed me a brontosaurus-sized rib, dotted with great restraint with sauce. He eyed me approvingly as I gnawed on the thing like a hound--then critically, disappointed, as I failed to polish it off. "Is it too chewy?" he asked, voice full of concern. "Should we get you another one?"
At our second pulled-pork station, he reached up--risking his fingers as the bbq chef’s scimitar ravaged the pork butt on the cutting block--and grabbed me a handful of pure fat, still bubbling, held together with the brown, crackling skin. "Taste this," he urged, with enthusiasm.
My sweetie looked at me expectantly.
This was research!
So I did.
Such is the glamorous life of the chef's sig oth.
The other weekend, we went for a long walk (very healthy!), down through the Lower East Side, and then around and through the Seaport, and up through Battery Park City. We contemplated walking across the Williamsburg Bridge, but then we were just in Williamsburg a couple of weekends before.
Good trip, that Williamsburg one. We went to this little indoor-flea-market-type-place (where they were also selling vintage buttons, with, like, Blondie on 'em, and Iggy Pop, and of course the classic Never Mind the Bollocks one and the timeless masterpiece checkerboard-black-and-white The Beat--and I thought about it--but would I look, like, cool--or like I was still wearing my Never Mind the Bollocks button from the first time round? I mean, I see junkies in the East Village all the time still wearing their leathers and spikes and eyeliner and sometimes even their mohawks from back in the day--and they’re still extremely...hip--but in an East-Village-punk-authentique kind of way, like the Last Living Confederate Widow or some such, especially now that CBGB is gone. (Maybe they should give them some sort of official cultural title? Historical Ambassadors?) But then I saw this woman the other day, forty-something, in purple stirrup pants, and leg warmers, and eyeliner inside the bottom eyelid. Without irony. Does she notice that suddenly everyone is dressed like her again? Or did she just never notice when the thing died the first time? Bet she has Flashdance on her iPod.)
So I didn’t buy the buttons. My sweetie bought a t-shirt with skulls, and then we stopped in at this classic-diner-type-hipster-place. (The guy at the counter next to me was reading one of the His Dark Materials books. And there were several men in checked shirts and ironic glasses, which I thought were so over already but I guess the proto-Devo geekboy look is just perennially cool, and they were with tall thin women with swingie hair and interesting boots and sometimes with hats, and also there were at least three women in overalls). We had coffee and an appetizer, so to speak--just some fries, because they have legendary fries, and a bite or two of the pie. Which is said to be truly great pie.
This was research. For my honey's work.
Also it was to tide us over while we were waiting for our reservation at Peter Luger’s--you know, that's the steak place? with the ancient old-school Brooklyn waiters with the slicked-back hair, and the no décor? And it's stockbrokers having hair-of-the-dog, and families celebrating birthdays, and a couple where he wears the gold and she has very expensive breasts? We were very restrained, at Peter Luger's. Because that's the right thing to do, and also it' a fortune. And after all this was just lunch. So instead of ordering mammoth zillion-dollar steaks, we had burgers. But then we ordered the onion rings, which are I mean really great but still--but they are truly really great--and then also we add in a couple of beers and then maybe a couple more, and then plus we have to have dessert so we have dessert and with dessert we need to have a cup of coffee--so anyway then it’s a hundred bucks plus tax and tip and also I’m feeling maybe a little had-it-up-to-here (here being somewhere in the vicinity of your gag reflex) and all we’ve had is lunch, a coupla burgers.
But they were truly great burgers.
And if my sweetie decides to open a steakhouse one day--or a burger joint (very hot right now in New York--have I told you about our extensive burger joint research? Maybe later)--or perhaps a diner--all of this will be very useful and important!
So anyway. We’d just been to Williamsburg, so when we got to the bridge we kept going down towards the bottom of Manhattan--past the funky little bars and bodegas on Avenue C, past the projects and bike shops, past those weird co-op apartments looming up next to the bridge--all the way down to Chinatown and around to the Seaport.
Very healthy, walking. Very good for you. Burns many calories. And it was hot and we were sweating so much we had to stop for a couple bottles of water along the way, so it was all very cleansing. Like a bikram yoga class. Only not boring. And not led by a man dressed all in white and wearing a Rolex and sitting on a platform above eye level, cross-legged, wearing a Madonna headpiece-thing.
So by the time we got down to the Seaport--not the touristy bit with the Sharper Image store and that place with the Bodies exhibit (all those dead political prisoners from China pumped full of chemicals and stripped naked without their skins, not terribly appetizing in my opinion)--but the other bit, with the refurbished colonial buildings, really pretty and cobblestoney and Olde New Amsterdam-style out front and then teeny tiny high-tech apartments for Wall Street jockeys inside--we were ready for lunch. And conveniently, there's this little pizza shop, which a different food writer had said was the Real Thing. Straight from Italy it is, except that the server was this twentysomething blonde cornfed person who kept playing with her hair as she told us the specials and who said her mom had a lot of opinions about the pizza.
And, I mean, we’d worked so hard! We were starving, almost. Must have sweated out six or seven pounds at least!
And it's possible that my one true love will be putting pizza on the menu soon. So this is extremely important and relevant research.
So then we ordered two pies. Small ones, I mean. Personal-size.
And then it was hot (just like Italy: no air conditioning: very environmentally appropriate). And water just somehow never really cools you down.
So then we ordered a couple of beers. Which were ice-cold! So that was a good choice.
And then just a couple of sorbetti and gelati to finish. Because you need something sweet after you eat pizza.
We considered the pizza, and our opinion, and the food writer's opinion. Our opinion: eh. The crust didn't have enough salt, and so on. So then we were thinking about who's got the best pizza in the city. So then we had to find out.
This is not the sort of thing that can wait till the next time you happen to feel like pizza at an appropriate mealtime. Or even until you're hungry again. It's important.
(Things move fast, in the culinary world. And if my one true love missed it? Disaster. Potentially.)
So then we went to this little ultra-modern ultra-Euro pizzeria on the Lower East Side where the pies are all out on display behind the counter, and they were good and all but not fresh in a freshfresh kind of way. And then we went to this famous pizzeria in what used to be Little Italy and is now NoHo, with a serious old coal-burning oven from before there were laws about such things, but the cheese...huh. And then we detoured out to Brooklyn after all, because there's this old dude who makes pizzas by hand, one at a time, and it's all very atmospheric and Brooklynesque and authentique, but it takes forever and in my opinion the pizza lacks a certain something, since you can't actually taste the part where you wait in line. So then we went to this other place in our own neighborhood: straight from Naples, watery Italian beer and all, and it seemed like every Italian in Manhattan under the age of forty was there, and our server wore skinny black jeans and a hot-pink studded punk belt, and Italian music videos played on the tv in the back (lots of blue light and neon, endless ballads played by men alone on stage with guitars, then techno), and that, we decided, was the best pizza.
We had four different pies to make sure.
Now we're sure.
And we drank red wine which is very good for you and healthy.
They had dessert, but we didn't want dessert there because--you know--Italian desserts--so then we went down the street to that great little bakery and had these gorgeous dark-chocolate tarts.
And then we walked home!
So that was very healthy, the walking.
And the next day my sweetie had been reading about this fried chicken place, because he'd made some fried chicken for another food writer he knew, and the food writer had said of course that my sweetie's fried chicken was the best--but that there was this new place uptown which was really, really, good--so then, you know, we had to check it out.
Research.
(In our opinion, highly over-rated. For the record. We tried the barbeque, too. So-so. But we haven't tried the fried chicken everywhere else, so we can't seriously come to any conclusions. Yet.)
And then there was also this new gelato place that opened in the West 70s?
But I mean we walked there. From 110th Street. So the fried chicken was totally gone by then.
And for ten blocks at least there was a street fair (people selling tube socks three for $5; potted houseplants; funnel cakes; handmade handbags from Guatemala and also from Brooklyn; brand-name bras). So that right there was like speed-walking an obstacle course. Which is like at least three hundred calories more, all that ducking and weaving and sidestepping and hopping over (strollers) and unexpected full stops. It was interval training! Which is extremely good for you calorie-burning-wise.
So by the time we got to the gelato we were totally allowed to have whatever we wanted, after all that hard work in the heat, and we ordered Small anyway because we were being so restrained. But the gelato had this really chemically taste and my sweetie's melted without warning (all over his shoe in fact), so it was not a satisfying eating experience. (Which is not to say that we didn't finish it. Because the thing about frozen desserts? They change at different temperatures. And what if we didn't finish, and the chemically taste was only at the most-frozen or medium-frozen point, and actually at the least-frozen point this was the best gelato we'd ever tasted, and my sweetie didn't know, and then he ignored that technique?) And so it wasn’t entirely surprising that later--after dinner--we decided all at once that the only thing to do was to get up and go get some gelato from that place on Mott Street that we love!
Mostly for comparison's sake.
So then we did.
And we had to take a cab down because it was closing, but we ran from the cab a full block to the store, and then we walked all the way back, fast! So that was like we ate nothing, really. Nothing, with sprinkles. Rainbow ones.
And then of course we were very healthy all week. We exercised. We ate salad.
By Friday we were almost see-through!
So then on Saturday, after breakfast (oatmeal--very healthy), Josh picked us up in his '82 white Caddie DeVille with vinyl seats and red velvet upholstery for the drive out to Red Hook, to these famous soccer fields, where these very serious leagues of guys from Latin America play every weekend, but nobody watches the soccer because really it's all about the vendors who set up these tents around the edge of the park and sell homemade Latino food. Josh was doing a video blog of this other chef who makes Mexican food, and we were just along for the ride, so to speak--for research purposes. In case for instance my honey decides one day that he's going to open a Latin American restaurant. Or maybe serve Mexican specials. You never know.
It was getting on 11:30 or so--almost lunchtime--so Josh had this excellent idea, and first we stopped at Katz's Deli on the Lower East Side, for some "forspeis," which in this context means "New York Jewish appetizer consumed before eating tacos." So we had a couple hotdogs and some knoblewurst and a bag of fries, but shared between four of us so it was like nothing! Right?
And then we went out to Red Hook, and the park was crawling with Brooklyn hipsters-with-kids and Williamsburg post-collegiate babies in ironic shoes and lesbian couples dressed like 1987 the first time round and Latino families from the ‘hood, all sharing space at picnic tables and crowded on benches under the tents, staying out of the sun and eating enormous platefuls of fresh-fried food and eyeing one another’s children. We started with these huge tacos, goat and beef, with four different salsas, and aqua frescas to wash it down--hibiscus, and this other one that was just like rice pudding. It was a thousand degrees which somehow made us more hungry, even though it's supposed to make you feel full, so then we had some more of those, because we were really just there to taste but I mean. And the vendor, she made us this special dish consisting of something's knuckles--beef maybe or pork--with this vinegar sauce and cheese on top. And that was just the first stop, and there were like fifteen tents!
But we just--you know--tasted. For research purposes.
And on the way to the car--we were going to make a stop at this little wine store down the way, just past the projects, where the owner has her own whiskey made back home in Kentucky; and then we would have a drink maybe at this other place because it was 90 degrees and New York humid which is like the tropics, and as the English discovered during colonial times, gin-based drinks are ideal on days like that for warding off tropic-type insect-borne diseases (West Nile, etc), but then it was closed so we went back to Manhattan and had mojitos at the other chef's restaurant, and he had the cooks bring out just a couple of little things, tacos with cheese and beef and whatever, to compare his kind of Mexican cooking with the street-food kind of Mexican cooking from the soccer park. Research, it was. My sweetie learned so much!--anyway, we were walking to the car in Red Hook, and we passed this family hanging out at their car, and the kids, they were eating bright-orange chip-like things, from a factory and in a color not found in nature, and they were only a half-block away from the soccer fields! And I said, "oh, that was the saddest thing, wasn’t it?" and the other chef, he goes, "yeah, you know, childhood obesity--it's so sad that parents don’t know how to help their kids eat right! 'Cause that's a lifetime of bad eating habits, there, man."
And we all agreed it was very sad.
We walked home from the other chef's restaurant. All the way from the Lower East Side. At a fairly good clip. Considering.
Back at the Pork Fest, we had reached the end of the line: whole baby pig, marinated in vinegar Carolina-style (so much lighter than Texas sauce!), smoked for fourteen hours, till it was so tender the meat just fell off the bone. Chopped, shredded, served up still hot on an egg-yellow hamburger bun, with a side of vinegar slaw.
And also something flat and crackling which might have been skin but which was probably just a huge slab of fat.
My sweetie learned so much about barbeque styles, and smoking times, and vinegar versus sauce, and regional specialties!
And then we walked home, and we thought we'd better have some whiskey, just to clear the arteries, so to speak.
And then after a little lie-down (two or three hours. Very good for the digestion), we had dinner. Salad! Very light and healthy.
Josh was still there when we left, still working the Porkfest, but he was getting ready to head out. He had a date last night, he said. He was thinking about cooking a pork chop.
Friday, May 25, 2007
footloose (in which our heroine is down at heel)
The other day, I had a crisis.
There I stood. Dressed and sunblocked and glossed and powdered and ready to go out into the world. Cellphone charged! IPod present and accounted for! Keys located!
Now all I needed was...shoes!
I stood peering into my closet.
I picked up a pair of slingbacks. No go: the inside of the front toe area hit right on a blister on my left foot I’ve been babying along.
I tried on a pair of espadrilles. And promptly tipped over. To the right.
I considered a pair of flat black slides. Simplicity itself. Didn't look great with my skirt, but (a glance at my watch) one couldn’t have everything, could one?
They cut into my skin straight across the top of my foot.
In desperation, I turned to my triedest and truest: a pair of ancient Nine West slides, black with chunk heels and red soles (!). Square, ratty, dated. But I can walk in them! For hours! Without crying!
The right slide felt a bit...odd. A bit...shaky. I stepped down and turned it over. A crack, a veritable crack--a through-and-through, right beneath the place where other people with normal feet have arches!
I contemplated. I put the shoe back on. I wobbled a bit. The shoe did not, at that moment, right there, actually split in two.
I threw a pair of Dr. Scholl's in my bag for backup, scooped up a fresh box of bandaids, and headed on out.
I am aware that there is a rumor alive in the world that all women love shopping for shoes. That shoe-shopping is the ultimate Girlfriend Activity (as in, "girlfriend, let’s buy shoes!" squealed over the brunch table at one's Best Friend Forever, who’s a bit down over her boyfriend's defection for a Gear model, the discovery she has breast cancer, the death of a pet, or similar. B.F.F. will immediately shake her hair back, slap her hand on the table, and cry, "You’re right, girl! Let’s go!" as she hastily swallows the remains of her mimosa). Studies, in fact, have been done proving that shopping for shoes is, for women, an instant cure for depression, hives and certain less virulent types of STDs.
Well.
A year or so ago, I went shoe-shopping with one of my sisters, visiting from out of town. She wanted little summer shoes; I wanted little summer shoes. Perfect! Off we tripped to Soho to find little summer shoes. And (in the fifth store we hit!) there they were: my dream summer shoes. Adorable little kitten heels (sexy, but not in a pay-me-first kind of way). Rounded cutaway at the toes (very forties pinup!) The tiniest bit of toe cleavage (very big that summer. Toes were the new breasts--did you know?). The exactly right sheen, in black or red or white, for summer pedicures. (Not that I had a summer pedicure. But for these shoes, I would! I would!).
I slipped them on, holding my breath, and stood. They glistened, on my feet. I saw my summer life transformed. No longer would I be a sweaty, frizzle-haired puddle of a human being, dragging damply down the melting summer streets of Manhattan! No: in these shoes, I would be...sultry. I would glow. I would sashay, discreetly. I would be Jane Seymour, Rosalind Russell, one of those girls. I envisioned flirty little skirts, Betty Page hair, bright red lipstick, fabulousness. My little kitten heels would tap-tap-tap down the summer pavements, and people would no longer swerve to avoid me as though I were dressed in an Army-surplus tarp and pushing a heavily laden shopping cart. Instead, they would turn, watch my hips, my calves, my hair, my feet as I sashayed on, smiling faintly to myself. I would be like one of those women at the end of What Not to Wear, except that I would not be dressed in anything involving high-waisted black pants or a blazer buttoned under the breastbone. When I entered a store, no one would presume I was there only for the air conditioning, or follow me around to make sure I didn’t drip on anything, or offer me a Kleenex. "How can I help you?" they would say, and they would mean it. Steeee-eam heat!
I was spinning this way and that before the mirror, considering buying a pair in each color, when my sister appeared. (This would be my tall, thin, gorgeous, popular sister. Oh yes. I have one of those.) She surveyed me and my feet critically. "You have weird-looking feet," she said. "You shouldn't wear open shoes like that. Maybe they have jellies?"
Pop!
I looked down. I saw blue veins like the Alaskan pipeline, running crosswise and lengthwise and diagonally across the tops of my feet. The bones flexed and moved, under the translucent flesh, skeleton-like. (If I were a Victorian lady, translucent skin on the hands and feet would be...ethereal. Desirable. Sexy, in that weird Victorian saint-fetish way. But sadly we are not, despite Foucault, all Victorians). On my left ankle, just above the adorable kitten heel, hung the detritus of four bandages, all in various stages of self-removal and thus no longer hiding the blisters from a well-worn pair of summer shoes which had without warning decided to grow teeth and turn against me without pity. The remains of a pedicure from six weeks ago chipped off my toenails, redly, bit by bit. It looked, overall, like a moment from Dawn of the Dead had arrived at my feet. I wondered they didn't rear up and bite my sister's smugly smooth and tapering little ankles.
"I bet jellies are really good for walking in New York," said my sister. "Or sneakers. Do they have sneakers?"
My feet are difficult. They turn in; they tip over towards one another; they are skinny at the back and fat at the front instead of the other way round; they have strange and wacky bunions; they are flat. They absolutely balk at any heel higher than an inch and a half, regardless of occasion or quality of shoe (you know that thing your mother and Patricia Field always said about quality heels being different? It's a lie).
As far as my feet are concerned, adorable little summer shoes are the enemy.
For much of the year, I wear boots. Lots of boots. Low heels. Low maintenance. Low pain level.
But it was ninety degrees and sunny in New York City, and I have neither the legs nor the temperature control for boots with my little summer skirts when it's ninety degrees outside. (Every time I pass one of those skinny blonde faceless little eight-feet-tall girls in a trapeze dress and adorable little calf-height boots and no thighs, I offer up uncharitable hopes about potholes and dripping ice-cream cones and puddles.) And my last wear-'em-every-day pair of summer shoes (which I loved loved loved--good unskiddy soles; rope wedges; brown leather round the foot with lots of open bits; supercomfy) had unceremoniously broken in half (perhaps they were a little short in the last. But my toes curl anyway). The two grimy old men in the filthy little shoe-repair shop round the corner looked at the two halves sadly. "You could maybe send them back," one said hopefully, kindly. "Defective."
So last weekend, my One True Love and I gamely set off in search of a new pair of flat, versatile, neutral, I-can-teach-in-'em-or-go-to-the-beach-in-'em summer shoes. (Ever since the Tragedy of the Red Platforms, we have agreed that it is best if I do not undertake shoe-shopping unaccompanied. And I get depressed when I shop for shoes with other women. So often, they actually buy shoes that fit.) Having finally learned my lesson about those cute little Soho shoe shops with the shoes displayed on vitrines like precious objects, we headed straight for the belly of the beast: Bloomingdale's. On lower Broadway. On a Saturday. During a Sale.
(Just a little sale. We’re afraid of the big Bloomingdale's Shoe Sales. Women come out of those things scarred and battered, broken for life, clutching half of a pair of Size Three espadrilles and muttering to themselves.)
I was braced for the worst. My One True Love immediately began looking for an empty chair; I scanned the room (rife with Outer Queens princesses and NYU students and uptown girls and frazzled-looking groups of middle-aged women. And a bus tour. From Detroit. With t-shirts). I began my circuit, on the lookout for anything not blingy. And there--a miracle!--right there, among the spangled sneakers and twelve-inch heels and flipflops bearing diamonds and emeralds and pearls between the first and second toe--lo--there were the perfect summer shoes. They had no kitten heels; there was no sheen; they did not require a pedicure. But they were a pale and neutral brown, suitable for black ensembles and those with colors. They were flat. They displayed no toe cleavage. They were Versatile. Hallelujah!
Now, granted, they were a little teeny tiny bit loose in the heel. But that's why God said, on the eighth day, "Let there be heel wedges with self-adhesive backs suitable for cutting to the shape of any shoe!" And the saleswoman gave me a handful. For free.
And also, they were a teeny tiny bit tight around the base of the toes (do you call that the first knuckle of the toe? Do toes have knuckles?) (anyway). The saleswoman drew breath. I looked at her. She looked at me. We both looked at my toes. My husband was busy looking at two skinny girls trying on Paris Hilton-appropriate heels in which they would, with any luck, break their skinny little ankles and perhaps their skinny little noses (falling on their faces) and so was not paying attention at this crucial moment.
We undertook the ritual exchange. "They'll stretch, for sure," said the saleswoman, nodding with sage conviction. "Oh, I know!" I replied, going for that crucial hinge between eagerness and world-weary shoe wisdom. "It's just, I want to make sure they’re going to work for me."
The saleswoman didn’t miss a beat. "I'll get those heel wedges for you right away," she said, spinning on her well-shod heel. "You can meet me at the cash."
There I stood. Dressed and sunblocked and glossed and powdered and ready to go out into the world. Cellphone charged! IPod present and accounted for! Keys located!
Now all I needed was...shoes!
I stood peering into my closet.
I picked up a pair of slingbacks. No go: the inside of the front toe area hit right on a blister on my left foot I’ve been babying along.
I tried on a pair of espadrilles. And promptly tipped over. To the right.
I considered a pair of flat black slides. Simplicity itself. Didn't look great with my skirt, but (a glance at my watch) one couldn’t have everything, could one?
They cut into my skin straight across the top of my foot.
In desperation, I turned to my triedest and truest: a pair of ancient Nine West slides, black with chunk heels and red soles (!). Square, ratty, dated. But I can walk in them! For hours! Without crying!
The right slide felt a bit...odd. A bit...shaky. I stepped down and turned it over. A crack, a veritable crack--a through-and-through, right beneath the place where other people with normal feet have arches!
I contemplated. I put the shoe back on. I wobbled a bit. The shoe did not, at that moment, right there, actually split in two.
I threw a pair of Dr. Scholl's in my bag for backup, scooped up a fresh box of bandaids, and headed on out.
I am aware that there is a rumor alive in the world that all women love shopping for shoes. That shoe-shopping is the ultimate Girlfriend Activity (as in, "girlfriend, let’s buy shoes!" squealed over the brunch table at one's Best Friend Forever, who’s a bit down over her boyfriend's defection for a Gear model, the discovery she has breast cancer, the death of a pet, or similar. B.F.F. will immediately shake her hair back, slap her hand on the table, and cry, "You’re right, girl! Let’s go!" as she hastily swallows the remains of her mimosa). Studies, in fact, have been done proving that shopping for shoes is, for women, an instant cure for depression, hives and certain less virulent types of STDs.
Well.
A year or so ago, I went shoe-shopping with one of my sisters, visiting from out of town. She wanted little summer shoes; I wanted little summer shoes. Perfect! Off we tripped to Soho to find little summer shoes. And (in the fifth store we hit!) there they were: my dream summer shoes. Adorable little kitten heels (sexy, but not in a pay-me-first kind of way). Rounded cutaway at the toes (very forties pinup!) The tiniest bit of toe cleavage (very big that summer. Toes were the new breasts--did you know?). The exactly right sheen, in black or red or white, for summer pedicures. (Not that I had a summer pedicure. But for these shoes, I would! I would!).
I slipped them on, holding my breath, and stood. They glistened, on my feet. I saw my summer life transformed. No longer would I be a sweaty, frizzle-haired puddle of a human being, dragging damply down the melting summer streets of Manhattan! No: in these shoes, I would be...sultry. I would glow. I would sashay, discreetly. I would be Jane Seymour, Rosalind Russell, one of those girls. I envisioned flirty little skirts, Betty Page hair, bright red lipstick, fabulousness. My little kitten heels would tap-tap-tap down the summer pavements, and people would no longer swerve to avoid me as though I were dressed in an Army-surplus tarp and pushing a heavily laden shopping cart. Instead, they would turn, watch my hips, my calves, my hair, my feet as I sashayed on, smiling faintly to myself. I would be like one of those women at the end of What Not to Wear, except that I would not be dressed in anything involving high-waisted black pants or a blazer buttoned under the breastbone. When I entered a store, no one would presume I was there only for the air conditioning, or follow me around to make sure I didn’t drip on anything, or offer me a Kleenex. "How can I help you?" they would say, and they would mean it. Steeee-eam heat!
I was spinning this way and that before the mirror, considering buying a pair in each color, when my sister appeared. (This would be my tall, thin, gorgeous, popular sister. Oh yes. I have one of those.) She surveyed me and my feet critically. "You have weird-looking feet," she said. "You shouldn't wear open shoes like that. Maybe they have jellies?"
Pop!
I looked down. I saw blue veins like the Alaskan pipeline, running crosswise and lengthwise and diagonally across the tops of my feet. The bones flexed and moved, under the translucent flesh, skeleton-like. (If I were a Victorian lady, translucent skin on the hands and feet would be...ethereal. Desirable. Sexy, in that weird Victorian saint-fetish way. But sadly we are not, despite Foucault, all Victorians). On my left ankle, just above the adorable kitten heel, hung the detritus of four bandages, all in various stages of self-removal and thus no longer hiding the blisters from a well-worn pair of summer shoes which had without warning decided to grow teeth and turn against me without pity. The remains of a pedicure from six weeks ago chipped off my toenails, redly, bit by bit. It looked, overall, like a moment from Dawn of the Dead had arrived at my feet. I wondered they didn't rear up and bite my sister's smugly smooth and tapering little ankles.
"I bet jellies are really good for walking in New York," said my sister. "Or sneakers. Do they have sneakers?"
My feet are difficult. They turn in; they tip over towards one another; they are skinny at the back and fat at the front instead of the other way round; they have strange and wacky bunions; they are flat. They absolutely balk at any heel higher than an inch and a half, regardless of occasion or quality of shoe (you know that thing your mother and Patricia Field always said about quality heels being different? It's a lie).
As far as my feet are concerned, adorable little summer shoes are the enemy.
For much of the year, I wear boots. Lots of boots. Low heels. Low maintenance. Low pain level.
But it was ninety degrees and sunny in New York City, and I have neither the legs nor the temperature control for boots with my little summer skirts when it's ninety degrees outside. (Every time I pass one of those skinny blonde faceless little eight-feet-tall girls in a trapeze dress and adorable little calf-height boots and no thighs, I offer up uncharitable hopes about potholes and dripping ice-cream cones and puddles.) And my last wear-'em-every-day pair of summer shoes (which I loved loved loved--good unskiddy soles; rope wedges; brown leather round the foot with lots of open bits; supercomfy) had unceremoniously broken in half (perhaps they were a little short in the last. But my toes curl anyway). The two grimy old men in the filthy little shoe-repair shop round the corner looked at the two halves sadly. "You could maybe send them back," one said hopefully, kindly. "Defective."
So last weekend, my One True Love and I gamely set off in search of a new pair of flat, versatile, neutral, I-can-teach-in-'em-or-go-to-the-beach-in-'em summer shoes. (Ever since the Tragedy of the Red Platforms, we have agreed that it is best if I do not undertake shoe-shopping unaccompanied. And I get depressed when I shop for shoes with other women. So often, they actually buy shoes that fit.) Having finally learned my lesson about those cute little Soho shoe shops with the shoes displayed on vitrines like precious objects, we headed straight for the belly of the beast: Bloomingdale's. On lower Broadway. On a Saturday. During a Sale.
(Just a little sale. We’re afraid of the big Bloomingdale's Shoe Sales. Women come out of those things scarred and battered, broken for life, clutching half of a pair of Size Three espadrilles and muttering to themselves.)
I was braced for the worst. My One True Love immediately began looking for an empty chair; I scanned the room (rife with Outer Queens princesses and NYU students and uptown girls and frazzled-looking groups of middle-aged women. And a bus tour. From Detroit. With t-shirts). I began my circuit, on the lookout for anything not blingy. And there--a miracle!--right there, among the spangled sneakers and twelve-inch heels and flipflops bearing diamonds and emeralds and pearls between the first and second toe--lo--there were the perfect summer shoes. They had no kitten heels; there was no sheen; they did not require a pedicure. But they were a pale and neutral brown, suitable for black ensembles and those with colors. They were flat. They displayed no toe cleavage. They were Versatile. Hallelujah!
Now, granted, they were a little teeny tiny bit loose in the heel. But that's why God said, on the eighth day, "Let there be heel wedges with self-adhesive backs suitable for cutting to the shape of any shoe!" And the saleswoman gave me a handful. For free.
And also, they were a teeny tiny bit tight around the base of the toes (do you call that the first knuckle of the toe? Do toes have knuckles?) (anyway). The saleswoman drew breath. I looked at her. She looked at me. We both looked at my toes. My husband was busy looking at two skinny girls trying on Paris Hilton-appropriate heels in which they would, with any luck, break their skinny little ankles and perhaps their skinny little noses (falling on their faces) and so was not paying attention at this crucial moment.
We undertook the ritual exchange. "They'll stretch, for sure," said the saleswoman, nodding with sage conviction. "Oh, I know!" I replied, going for that crucial hinge between eagerness and world-weary shoe wisdom. "It's just, I want to make sure they’re going to work for me."
The saleswoman didn’t miss a beat. "I'll get those heel wedges for you right away," she said, spinning on her well-shod heel. "You can meet me at the cash."
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