Alice in Newyorkland

On Ugly Canadianism

2011-05-03T23:54:00.001-04:00

On Ugly Canadianism

...so let me preface this by saying that I was not, in fact, among the people at Ground Zero yelling “U-S-A!” and waving flags. That I think the killing of Osama Bin Laden is an enormously complicated kind of thing. That I do not approve of killing people. And that I am not a big fan of the wars the US has enmeshed itself in over the last ten years--or of extraordinary rendition--or of interrogation by torture. Also: I think Guantanamo should close tomorrow.

And also: I like hockey better than football. I remember Pierre Trudeau and Bob and Doug Mackenzie fondly. I prefer tea. And universal health care. And even though I’ve been in New York for quite a while now, I still, apparently, say “oot and aboot.”

...so ok? Have we got that out of the way?

Now then. About that smug Canadian grin you’ve got plastered all over your face.

I’ve seen it everywhere on the web over the last couple of days. Canadians are “disappointed” in Americans. They’re “not surprised” that people in the US are reacting in such “terrible” ways. They hope, as one of my Canadian facebook friends put it, that “we, Canadians, can do better.”

Really, Canada? Really?

Another facebooker wrote, “War is just another sporting event to be won or lost for Americans...”

Yep, that’s right. All of us in New York: we’re very big on sports. That’s what we’re known for, we Manhattanites. When we’re not painting our entire bodies in team colors, we’re busy cheering on every life taken overseas, because we love war! And we love winning! And this event is all about winning!

I guess that’s how some Canadians know that the intemperate reactions some people in New York displayed have got nothing to do--for instance--with all those people who went to work one morning in September and then...never came home again. Or those tv images, played over and over, of stockbrokers and secretaries and copywriters and other kinds of people leaping from windows a mile up in a sky to avoid being burned alive. Or the crowds that staggered, silent zombies covered in terrible dust, up our city streets, away from the destruction. Or the posters everywhere, faces of ordinary people pastered on walls and lampposts, with phone numbers written below and “please call.” Posters that stayed up for months. Thousands of them.

Not to mention the damage to the city--infrastructural, economic, social, political, every kind of -al you can think of. Or the changes to the way we live, the permanent ones. The adoption into common parlance of the term “go-kit.” The soldiers with bomb-sniffing dogs on the subways. The secret map every New Yorker holds in his or her head of how to get the hell out of Dodge if something else goes down.

And as my Canadian friends know, there were no subtleties to the reactions on tv--because people south of the border aren’t really capable of subtlety, right? I mean, no less an authority than the CBC, in an article entitled “Bin Laden’s Death Cheered by Americans,” claims “the crowd [at Ground Zero] included people who live nearby, emergency workers, and survivors of the attacks....everyday New Yorkers.” So I guess it’s irrelevant that all of the media coverage I watched, well into the wee hours of the morning, showed hordes of college-age kids doing the yelling and the cheering. Every once in a while a reporter would snare an actual grownup who’d lived through the attack--a retired firefighter with lung disease from working on the pile, for example--but the grownups weren’t screaming and yelling. They were talking about, for instance, “remembering my 343 brothers” (those would be the firefighters who died in the attack, fyi). So the reporters? Not so interested in what the grownups had to say.

The kids made much better tv.

I bet a lot of those kids weren’t really around for 9/11: as it turns out, New York is full of college kids from...other places. Perhaps they were just doing that thing that kids (people) do: trying to make themselves part of a major historical moment they neither witnessed nor understood.

But never mind that. In the US, we love violence! And war! Savages, we are! This whole celebration thing is nothing more than “An example of the dumbed downed American population,” as one thoughtful poster wrote on CBC’s site.

I have to tell you, my friends: that smugness is pretty ugly.

It is absolutely true that Canadians have a lot to be smug about. For instance: health care. (For now.) A social net. (For now.) More trees. (See above.) Less war-mongering, definitely. Canada has social programs, gun control, and superior brewing. Got it. Canada = Nirvana (with snow). As a Canadian born and bred, I buy it. I may, in fact, be the biggest Canada-booster in New York City.

But saying that everyone in the lower 48 is a warmongering xenophobe is a lot like saying all Canadians are royalist Tories--or, conversely, that Michael Moore is right, that Canadians are naive folk who don't lock their doors and have no concept of the real world. Why is it ok to rely on stereotype and generalization and to take sensationalist media coverage at face value only when you're talking about the US?

And let me tell you: when you apply that smug attitude to something as layered and complicated as 9/11 and its aftermath: oh, Canada. You’re not looking so good.

tidbits (in which our heroine scatters crumbs)

2008-05-19T00:12:00.005-04:00

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...

I Heard The Earth Move (In Which Our Heroine Nods)

2008-05-06T23:08:00.005-04:00

"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...

back to the rabbit hole...

Over the Bridge and Under the Overpass to Billyburg (In Which Our Heroine Crosses a River)

2008-05-05T23:46:00.007-04:00

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!

back to the rabbit hole...

Speaking of Elephants (In Which Our Heroine Learns the Perils of Exercise)

2008-05-04T23:29:00.006-04:00

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?

back to the rabbit hole...

What's in a Name? (In Which Our Heroine Is Blinded By Science)

2008-05-04T01:29:00.007-04:00

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?

back to the rabbit hole...

just a taste (in which our heroine donates her body to culinary science)

2007-06-11T15:22:00.000-04:00

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.

back to the rabbit hole...

footloose (in which our heroine is down at heel)

2007-05-25T23:40:00.000-04:00

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."

back to the rabbit hole...

r u on facebook?

2007-05-22T15:39:00.000-04:00

When my mom and her sisters were teenagers, they used to play this game. My aunt would say, "Let’s count friends!"
And so then they would count friends.
Every time, my mother says, my aunt would win. (Maybe she cheated. Or counted her lab partner. Or friends of friends who weren't really her own real friends. My mother has her suspicions).
"I win!" my aunt would crow in triumph. "I have more friends than you!"

My mother laughs when she tells this story. But not really.

I have been thinking about my aunt's friend-counting game lately. Because of this thing with Facebook.

Apparently, my hometown is the new worldwide capital for Facebook membership.

I am only moderately surprised to hear this. I have had a Facebook page for two years, because of a group we set up for a class I was teaching. I forgot all about it, more or less. Every once in a while, I would get a Friending invitation from a student. I would ignore it. It would go away. Facebook, I felt, was a forum for teenagers to talk about their Very Important Sexual Exploits and to count their own friends. Not being a teenager--being, in point of fact, old and married and so over the whole friend-counting thing in my mature years (not to mention the Sharing of Sexual Exploits thing), I saw no compelling reason to look further.

But suddenly, in the last two weeks, I have been inundated with requests for Friend status from people I haven't seen in twenty years.

Often, these are people I went to high school with--people I have just fallen harmlessly out of touch with, for one reason or another. Most of the people who Friend me seem to still more or less where I left them twenty years ago, except that twenty years ago they were much more interesting. Witness the Wall writings on their profile pages:

"Hey, man! You’re on here, too! Cool!"
"Hey, great pic!"
"Haven’t seen you in twenty years! Rock on!"
"Your [choose one: kid/cat/dog/life partner] is soooooo cute!"

When I was in high school (back when last I saw all of these people), we wrote on actual walls. We wrote, "Peace not pieces" and "oh, man, what kicks!" and "little green men everywhere". We drew peace signs and Hunter S. Thompson-esque characters and little green men. We used colors. We were profound. We thought, we contemplated, we chose exactly the right spot. It was posterity, after all. Don't wanna fuck that up.

We would never have written "nice to see you on here!" or "cute cat!"

On other occasions, they are people I have fallen out of touch with for extremely good high-school-calibre reasons.

Sometimes, for instance, they are people with whom I had one of those dramatic, life-stopping, whispering-by-the-lockers, late-night-phone-call fight-type-high-school things. Something about a boy, or about a lie that somebody told, or about a secret that was scandalously not kept. The kind of thing that generates notes passed in class (once upon a time before the dawn of texting, when "notes" were "written" on "paper" and "passed") saying "she’s such a bitch!" and "I can't believe she’d do that to me!" and "I'm never speaking to her again!"

And then I didn't. And she didn't. Until--for instance--last Tuesday at 11:23 pm.

The message exchange in these hyper-charged cases usually goes something like this:

New-old friend: "Wow, haven't seen you in twenty years! What have you been doing?"
Me [I have given up pondering the unfathomable range of this question and have resorted, as is required, to sound bytes]: "Teaching lit at a college in Manhattan. Doing some writing about food. You?"
N.O.F.: [Choose one of] "Working in financial services!"--or--"Full-time Mom to my three amazing kids!"
Me: "That’s great!"
And that is usually the end of that. I never hear from the other apparently not-so-interested party again.

Sometimes, I hear from ex-boyfriends, or (in the parlance adopted by all members of Facebook, regardless of age) "dudes I hooked up with." (I don’t think that "hooked up with" carries all of the necessary emotional baggage that, for instance,"had a thing with" suggests. Or "spent the night with." But I suspect that when I say those things, I sound vaguely like Barry White. So. Not saying them. There. Very hip, I am.)

These dudes-I-hooked-up-with-back-in-the-land-before-time Inbox exchanges are a little different. They go a bit like this:
Dude: "Alice! How the hell are you?"
Me: "I'm all good. You? What’s your life like?"
Dude: "I'm awesome. I'm [choose one: making a documentary about insects/running my own computer business/working a day job and trying to write that novel/selling bikes in Vancouver just like I was way back when!]"

{I will not comment on what this reveals about my taste in men in my younger years}

[here is where I provide unsolicited information about my own life, figuring that perhaps it will be interesting to this man who has contacted me out of the blue and who was last seen exiting my futon lo these many years back. This will elicit no specific response whatsoever]

Dude: "Hey Alice, remember when we did that thing? You know: with the shower, and the Oreo cookies, and the blue paint? Man, that was hot!!!"

Me: "Y'know, it's a bit weird to read about that and look at pictures of your wife and your three adorable kids."

Dude: "Hey, don't look at pictures of my kids when we're talking about this! Hey, remember that other thing? With the ice cubes? And the Sambuca? And the Pop Rocks? That was hot! Smokin'! I"ve been thinking about that a lot!"

This, in general terms, is the end of the conversation.

But at least I can sort of understand these attempts at reaching out to touch someone, so to speak. (Not in an I'm-right-there-with-ya-wow-that-was-hot-let's-get-together-you-bring-the-Pop-Rocks kind of way. Or even in a leering hey-big-boy-thinkin'-alllll-aboutcha kind of way. More in an I’m-a-little-grossed-out-right-now-and-I-so-don't-miss-my-early-twenties-when-I-clearly-had-no-judgement-whatsoever-and-btw-you-got-really-fat-and-when-did-you-lose-all-your-hair? kind of way. But still).
The frenemies? The I-remember-you-vaguelies? The I-didn't-like-you-at-all-in-high-schools? huh.

To be honest, I can't quite figure out what I'm still doing on Facebook. It's not like I'm looking for activities to fill my vast stretches of free time. And also it's not like this is the most scintillating platform out there. It's not even as interesting as those "my sister doing leg lifts!" clips on youtube.

I mean: let's face it. Facebook is basically boring. You put up a picture or three (your kids; your cats; your desk at work); you post a status report ("Alice is...very tired!"); you write on someone's wall ("hey, Alice! Good to see you on here! Cute pic!"). You can list your favorite bands ("Depeche Mode still rocks!") and your favorite movies ("Rocky Horror Picture Show! Risky Business!!") If you really want to, you can note every move you make, all day and all of the night. But that's about it.

I do almost none of these things. God forbid the whole world should know how I spend my time. And like I want my students to learn all about my political views and my predilection for Romi and Michelle’s High School Reunion?

And yet somehow, despite my own complete disdain for this totally useless platform, I can't quite turn away. I did put a great deal of thought into choosing my picture. And every once in a while, I do update my status report ("Alice is...contemplating orange").

And I do like to check my Friends Status page.

I mean, I’ve been on my grads-of-my-high-school-in-the-eighties group page for a whole week now. Why is nobody new getting in touch?

If they don’t want to be Friends, couldn't they at least poke me? Just to be nice? Just to make me feel like I belong?

Don't they like me?

And why is nobody writing on my Wall?

I’ve had about forty-seven Friend requests from my students. Should I be Friends with my students? If I were Friends with my students, I'd have lots more Friends..
.
Wouldn't it be good to have lots more Friends?

But then wouldn't they be the wrong Friends?

Would that make me like those weird guys in their forties who hang out in Tompkins Square sharing their pot with the fifteen-year-old private school kids?

I could probably be friends with some of the people on my people-from-my-high-school-in-the-eighties page. Like the guy who blew up his own backyard by accident. Or my summer-camp boyfriend from when I was fourteen. (I dumped him, but then he invited me to a Men at Work concert and my mom made me go, perhaps thinking this was my one and only chance. We sat so far out to stage right that I could barely see the speaker stack. Then he tried to kiss me.)

But wouldn't these be The Wrong Friends, too? In different but important ways...

To be honest, I have poked only one person who didn’t poke me first.

I am afraid of poking.

Sometimes I am afraid of poking because, while I would like to see what the person in question is doing, I would not actually like to have that person come back into my life.

Some people who have poked me or friended me are clearly of the same mind, except that they have no shame about, for instance, making other people feel bad. This one person who Friended me, for instance. Whom I haven't spoken to since way before graduation. Obviously, she wanted to know what I was doing, in my life. But I guess she's still not over that thing in Grade 12 Biology with that boy and that other boy and that thing that I said to the one boy, about her and the other boy, that this boy told that other boy, who got really mad at her about it, and then they weren't going out anymore, and anyway later he came out so obviously they weren't getting married and having twelve babies and living happily ever after in the suburbs anyway so why should she care?

But I guess she still does. Because now that I have given in, have acquiesced, have generously let go of the past (I mean, it's not like she was this totally innocent angel or anything, and there was this other time with this boy and this other girl who was a total bitch but anyway and she told this other girl...well, anyway, I'm over it), she does not actually want to be friends. Just...Friends.

Of course, this is a woman who posts pictures of her cats. Whose political views are "conservative." Who lists herself as "former kindergarten teacher and now full-time Mommie!" Whose husband works in "financial services." Whose favorite tv show, apparently, is American Idol.

But still. Why doesn’t she want to be my friend? or even, really, my Friend?

Maybe I am not Friendable?

Maybe it's my picture? I could change my picture. Do I look like a crazy person in my picture?

I suppose I should in fact find this whole thing reassuring. I am not, after all, living in a housing development ten minutes away from my parents, working in "financial services," posting pictures of cats.

But somehow I don't.

[short interlude]

--sorry. Was just checking my Facebook page again. Just in case there had been a change. I mean, I don't want to be unfair.

I don’t think my picture makes me look like a crazy person, really.

But still. Nobody else has Friended me. Since the last time I checked.

So anyway while I was there, thought I'd look up this boy I had suuuuuuch a crush on in Grades 11 and 12, but he only wanted blonde cheerleader-type girls and anyway I could never think of anything funny or clever to say around him so I'm sure he thought I was really stupid, but sometimes he'd drive me home and we'd sit in the car and just...talk...or sometimes at school out on the steps near the auditorium while we were cutting social studies, and once he bought me a donut, and then I knew I really felt it, this connection with him that was so real, like we were soul mates or something and if only I could make him see how much I loved him he would let me save him from all his secret pain (I knew, I knew) and we would look into one another's eyes and be perfect together, or maybe I could have a horrible accident or be attacked by muggers and he could save me and I would be tearfully grateful and then in a flash he would see it all and would no longer be afraid to declare his love for me and we would go to the prom together and it would be...beautiful.

But anyway I couldn't find him. Or at least there was somebody with his name, but there was no picture and the site was locked, "only my Friends!", so I couldn't see if it was him.

And I guess I could have poked him, just to see, or sent him a message, and then, you know, see.

But I didn't.

I mean, he could always poke me.

My site may be locked, but he can see my picture, right?

I mean--ok--I'm upside down in midair in my picture. So it's kind of hard to tell it's me I guess.

But it could be.

So why hasn’t he poked me?

If it's him.

But maybe it isn't him?

Maybe it's some twelve-year-old frat boy from Duke who just happens to share his totally white-bread name?

But I mean why hasn't he Friended me?

Doesn't he want to be my Friend?

Of course he doesn't want to be my Friend.

I'm such a dork. So not-a-blonde-cheerleader-type. Who would want to be my Friend?

I think I'll go sit in my room and listen to The Smiths. Or maybe P.I.L. Or some Siouxie.

And I'll paint my nails black. And read me some Jack Kerouac. And sit in bed writing about my Feelings.

Oh.

Wait.

Right.

This is why I hate Facebook.

Are you on Facebook?

Are you my Friend?

back to the rabbit hole...

cozy well-located downstairs apt OR: down the manhattan real estate rabbit hole

2006-12-13T01:03:00.000-05:00

So my sweetie and I, we’re still looking at real estate, ‘cuz owning a home, you know, that’s the American dream, am I right or am I right? And it’s every American’s God-given right, and dammit, we want our rights!

So we’ve been looking at some apartments. Used to be, that meant we got online, and—while, for instance, we were supposed to be, for example, finishing a book—we looked at, for instance, every single apartment in our price range in the Greater New York City Area. And then we went to every single open house. And it was always the same thing. If the apartment was equipped with a reasonable facsimile of all the mod cons (running water! A roof! One or more windows! Floorboards that were reasonably close together!), the crowds went wild. The broker’s list went on and on and on. By the time we got there, invariably somebody had parked a stroller in the middle of the living room as if it were a flag; several people were yelling at the agent; somebody’s dog was threatening to pee in the corner while the owner stood her ground, declaring that she was first; the apartment…was long gone.
Somebody had just come in and bought it. Just like that.
As if it were jeans. Or...coffee.
Starbucks coffee. Really expensive coffee drunk at far too high a temperature and invariably leaving a slightly burnt aftertaste.

But then the market softened. And things got so much better! And we saved and we saved and we saved (baby don’t get no new pair o’ shoes when there’s 4 rms 2 fl baths quiet gd light drmn bldg in the offing) and then we were really, really ready.

So then we got an agent.

She’s lovely, our agent. Reminds me of my mother, kind of, only if my mother wore leopard print and black spike heels. We walk everywhere, or take cabs. To get to really feel the neighborhood, you see. Also the last time she took the subway was the blackout in ’67.

So last week, we went out to View Properties! For roughly three times the price of my sister’s three-bedroom house in in the best school district in one of Toronto’s finest neighborhoods (with parking, fireplace, half an acre of yard, and full basement, thank you very much), we saw the following:

· A construction site for a thirty-foot-wide tower with a stunning view of the very glamorous Fifth Avenue rug district. Anticipated completion Spring 2008. Or so. 50% sold!

· Renovated 2bd 2bath in Prime Chelsea! with open kitchen, wall of factory windows, central air, FABulous light, and windowless master bd next to the central air conditioning unit and the garbage chute.

· Amazing new construction! Completion Spring 2008! Give or take! 2bd! 84-sq-ft balcony! Stunning birds-eye view of 24-hour musclehead gym and vent to Popeye’s!

· a second-floor apartment in Tribeca with an unobstructed view of the back of the next building. Enough light to make a giant squid feel right at home. And a major, multiyear construction project next door. Again with the no windows in the second bedroom. But wait—there are, in fact, windows! Secret windows! They’re right there, under the drywall, right next to where the new building is going up—with the window treatments intact under there! The showing agent knocks on the wall. Hear that hollow sound?

· an apartment in a fancy new glass tower with views of the Hudson. If you’re on the 26th floor. From the second floor, which is In Our Price Range, you get the Escalades stuck in traffic on the West Side Highway at eye level. But the windows are really very good. And there’s a screening room and—wait for it—a pet spa!

· an apartment in a converted tenement around the corner from City Hall, “outside the Tribeca historic district” (that is, on one of those streets where dubious cut-rate luggage purveyors hang their wares in stalls-cum-stores cheek by jowl with Wendy’s, Arbie’s and at least four Jamaican patty shops. Which, ok, who doesn’t love Jamaican patties?). The (new) elevator in the (newly converted) building was broken, so we walked up the (cigarette-butt-littered) staircase to the model apartment on the second floor, where the (um…eager) German showing agent (um…eagerly) showed us the “attenshun to deeeetail” that the developers had built into the place. To wit: under-countertop lighting in the kitchen. To properly demonstrate this detail to us, the agent turned off all the other lights in the apartment and then—ta da!—flicked on the counter lights. And there they were: little twinkle lights! Over the counter! Plus also there were other details, like the glass panels in each of the bedroom doors (!) and the building going up approximately six inches from the bedroom windows, a detail we noticed only after we had successfully detached the permanently closed blinds the agent had helpfully installed on the back windows. “I know it’s a bargain,” she called after us as we headed down the stairs behind our (valiant, lovely, long-suffering) agent (our Virgil, in this Gotham Inferno). “The price it is right!”

· New conversion, three buildings in one. Very historic, though also, alas, technically “outside the Tribeca historic district.” Also, directly above a subway stop. The apartments were almost unimaginably massive. Sixty-foot-long living rooms. Eleven-foot-high ceilings. Room for unicycling! I thought, cheering. Space for extended games of Twister! The building was nearly finished, so off we trooped, led into the freezing cold darkness of the place by Jennifer, the perky, multiply pierced showing agent, demurely outfitted in J. Crew. On the fourth floor, I found myself suddenly hiking uphill. “This is above the original slant roof of the first building!” Jennifer chirruped. “The developers wanted to keep the feel!”

· A new development right smack dab in the middle of the Chelsea projects. Noon. Silence in the streets. The “sales office” is…a construction site. Cables dangle. Hammers swing. Our agent wobbles on her black velvet spike heels. We find the showing agent in a half-built room behind plastic curtains at the top of a treacherous staircase with no sides. He offers us plastic chairs from the ice age and keeps his gloves on. The model kitchen and bath, he assures us, are coming “soon!”

But we are not discouraged. We troop onward, determined, brave, hardy, forging our odessey through the wilds of Gotham. Just tonight, my sweetie showed me a listing for a new West Chelsea development. Water views! Gym in building! Screening room! Library! Rooftop garden! Pet spa!

We’ve made an appointment for this weekend.

back to the rabbit hole...

that daring young girl

2006-11-21T00:35:00.000-05:00

So this weekend, I decided to do something new. Something that would challenge me. Something that would change my life, help me to see the world in a whole new way. Face my fears. Yaddayaddayadda.

If this were the eighties and I were a man, I would be going off to the deepest darkest woods-outside-a-major-metropolis to pound on my chest with my confreres and read aloud from Iron John. But though this moment in time may look like the eighties (I mean, you shoulda seen the chick in line in front of me at the movies last night. We’re talking acid-washed skinny jeans, black beat-up cowboy boots with fake-silver tips, a purse with a zipper and some skinny fake-silver buckling, one of those cotton shirts that looked like they came out of a teeny tiny waffle iron, in black—even gummi bracelets. The only thing that wasn’t from the eighties about her was her haircut, which was somewhere between the slutty big sister on That Seventies Show and Roller Girl. But anyway), this is, in fact, not the eighties. And also I am not a man.

If I were my and it was still the eighties, I would probably go to a march. They were exhilarating, marches. March Against Nukes. March for Women’s Rights. March Against Oppression. A zillion people, pounding down major city streets, diverting traffic, holding signs! Shouting! In unison! Singing, even! Everywhere, pierced kids (before piercing was cool), punk kids, hippie kids, protesting The Man! Fighting The Corporate World! Making Change!

Possibly my favorite march ever was March for Earth Day. But that was in part because Earth Day was attended by boys, including boys I was interested in, including particular boys (boy) I was interested in and had had a thing with and about whom I had bonded with another girl who had had a much bigger thing with him and still sorta kinda was and thus I should not be interested in. The particular boy, I mean. And, of course, there’s nothing to lend a frisson of excitement to a march like marching very, very close to such a boy. There were no boys of interest at the March Against Nukes. And the only boys at the March for Women’s Rights were boys with issues. Some of whom I had dated. The boy from my Victorian Women Novelists class, for instance, who “really just liked cuddling” and wanted to know “if I really enjoyed that,” that of course being an activity undertaken entirely for his benefit, so the question was confusing. Also the boy I first met in a travelers’ hotel in Greece, beautiful boy with long black hair and soulful eyes, who lo and behold! hailed from my hometown—just down the street, even! He had issues with my incense and candles because they reminded him of church, which in turn reminded him of his mother, who seemed to play a major role in his imaginative life. He never asked me “if I really enjoyed that,” instead choosing “to do everything for beautiful you.” This, I think, might also have been about his mother. Then there was the boy from my Post-Colonial Literature class, who shaved his head and wore a tie and was very nice. Whenever he tried to kiss me, which was surprisingly often, generally in public, and always without warning, I ducked. He didn’t take this to heart. I found that creepy.

Actually, come to think of it, if this were the eighties and I was looking for a thrill, a challenge, something crazy, I’d probably skip the marching and go straight to the boys.

Ah, the boys. The boys who were bad for me. (If only I’d listened to my cat. But don’t girls who listen to their cats end up like Jackie O’s cousins in Grey Gardens? Only without Jackie O). The boys who were bad for themselves, in which case I was simply collateral damage. The boys who were bad for everybody involved. The boys who didn’t like me. The boys who liked me too much. The boys who liked themselves far, far too much. The boys who wanted to get it on in the bathroom while their girlfriend was in the other room. The boys who couldn’t help themselves.

But I digress.

(Or maybe I would go dancing. Which was a total rush. And which was also about boys, but not directly, and not boys you knew. Really).

(If it were the seventies, I suppose I would get my consciousness raised, or look at my vagina in a mirror surrounded by Other Supportive Women, or something. Though I wouldn’t burn my bra. That was a pr stunt. And my grandmother always taught me that a well-made piece of underwear is a valuable commodity.)

In the nineties, I didn’t need to seek out thrills. I was in graduate school.

But here we are in the—what? Nobody has made that clear yet. The oughts? How ponderous. The double zeros? Ugh. Well. The First Decade of the Twenty-First Century. Consciousness raising is not an attractive option, and anyway, my consciousness is puh-len-ty raised, thanks very much. (See “boys,” above.) No need to break out the hand mirrors. Since I am married to a man I like a whole lot, the whole boys thing is sort of out of the question. And when it comes to marches—well, the thrill is gone. Perhaps there’s something about standing on a street corner shouting while wearing combat boots, torn fishnets, and a miniskirt that just doesn’t translate to my own contemporary moment right now. (Though I still own the cowboy boots. I haven’t tried it with the cowboy boots). Perhaps it’s the internet: even the anti-vivisection-and-also-pro-women’s-rights-and-also-pro-abortion-plus-generally-anti-oppression white woman with the flattop who stood on what seemed to be every corner I’ve ever found myself on in Manhattan shouting, “SIIIIIIIIGN THE PETITION!” has disappeared, gone virtual, moved her shoutin’ to YouTube. The thrill of MoveOn.Org just can’t match the thrill of standing on the street, in the sleeting weather, singing slogans at an unresponsive building which probably has nobody in it because it’s Sunday but that isn’t the point, the point is to demonstrate our collective power! Rise Up!

Whatever. It’s over.

And, believe it or not, I am no longer in graduate school.

So what do you do for kicks these days, kids?

For a while, just living in Gotham was enough. Walking home alone at 1 am, when the streets are slick and black and the stores are closed and gangs of drunken frat boys turn ugly. Arguing with strangers on the streets. Yelling at cabbies who make right turns on red. Trying to figure out whether the guy weaving down the street just ahead of you muttering about God and damnation is a crazy person off his meds or a drunken broker on his cellphone. Getting out of the grocery store at 8 pm on a Sunday alive. Times Square, at any hour, on any day, in any weather.

But then New York became The Disney Store. The Safest Big City in the USA.

And here I am, doing the nine-to-five (or the eleven-to-eight, or whatever), and not finishing the book, and going to yoga, and shopping at Whole Foods, and maybe it all felt a little…prosaic. Like a life of too much television, which I am also living (it is not my fault that there is a Law & Order drama-form on television every hour of every day). So maybe I felt like I needed…a little kick.

So I thought perhaps I’d get up on a Sunday morning and eat some oatmeal and then throw myself off a platform thirty feet in the air while holding on to a really heavy stick suspended from a couple of ropes.

back to the rabbit hole...

vafer-theen

2006-11-03T01:59:00.000-05:00

Issues that have been troubling me recently:

1. Calorie-Restricted Diets. By which I do not mean counting calories. I mean those smug and hardy souls who weigh and measure everything they eat, use a computer program to track calories taken in and expended (not to mention nutritional requirements), and consume meals based around unnatural vegan non-soy food products. All of this, mind you, is to help in the fight to live forever. Which is what it will probably feel like, even if you die in a month's time, if in the interim you weigh 85 pounds, lack a libido, have terrible breath, are cold all the time, and subsist on fibre supplements and nonfat ricotta.

I think perhaps these people are vampires.

I suppose I am not the target audience for Calorie-Reduced Diets. I suspect that if I walked into a CR meeting, people would laugh at me. Quiet sniggering behind the hand. "Can we help you, dear?"

I am almost convinced that the CR people are the parties responsible for the pumping of doughnut scents into the air outside of Dunkin' Donuts shops (the scents most certainly are not coming from the Dunkin' Donuts themselves, which taste and smell like semi-hardened glue. With sprinkles) (and don't even get me started on the new barrista coffee drinks). I think the CR people are singlehandedly keeping the whole Hallowe'en candy thing alive, and also that they are the forces behind the new chocolate store around the corner from my office. I think that the CR people aren't just about getting skinny, eating tempeh, and living forever. That's not enough for them: it's the contrast they need, lived experience to go with all those charts and graphs about the lifespans of CR vs nonCR mice and all. I bet they like to watch the rest of us get old and sick and broken-down. In private, they sit around talking about us. "Did you SEE that poor girl? She must have eaten...an entire sandwich! WITH the bread!" "She was breathing heavy when she got up. I think she's got heart trouble already. Such a shame--she's not even forty!" "She must have weighed...oh, a hundred and twenty pounds at least!" "Oh, those silly, silly eaters..."

(they toast one another with water glasses)

2. Those strange late-night television game shows involving guessing at how much money is in play, via a paid phone call. I don't understand. Perhaps I am an alien.

3. The gentleman dressed as a complete set of male genitalia on hallowe'en, surrounded by a large circle of his friends, who demonstrated their support by shouting, "fuck! fuck! fuck!" in unison as he rubbed himself up against a series of young women, mostly dressed as (a) dirty nuns, (b) bunnies, or (c) some combination of (a) and (b). ( Perhaps an entire fraternity took a wrong turn at Dartmouth and found itself inexplicably in the Village?

4. The fact that one of my students thinks I am married to the guitarist for Iron Maiden.

xoxo
alice

new girl in the big city

2006-10-31T01:15:00.000-05:00

My first night in New York, I lay in a strange bed in a stranger’s apartment next to my boyfriend (who, by the way, I had spent a grand total of 28 days with ever, and guess what? I was moving in with him! Into a 400-square-foot apartment! In a strange city! In a foreign country!), listening to some maniac using a power saw at 2 am. What kind of person used a power saw at 2 am? Clearly, only the kind that is a maniac intent on overcoming that Manhattan twelve-locks-on-the-door problem in one fell swoop: the kind that is hellbent on murder, mayhem, and other such big-city American shenanigans. What had I done? Why had I left Canada? Didn’t I know that New York City was full of evil nuts wielding weapons not restricted south of the 49th parallel? I had read about Kitty Genovese! I knew no one would call the cops! The maniac sawed with demented impunity as I lay shaking, weeping under a stranger’s duvet (white, flowered, immaculate), waiting for the crazy fuck to come storming through the door wearing one of those hockey masks, yelling and revving on that ripcord like nobody’s business. Splatter everywhere! The pristine country-white built-ins ruined, ruined! Nice Jewish Girl Murdered By American Maniac On First Night In New York! Her Butchered Torso Found In Bed Next To Butchered Torso Of Non-Jewish Yankee Boyfriend Who Did Not Go To College!

Oh, the horror!

My sweetie snored gently, undisturbed.

Down the hall, the cat threw herself against the door of the room we’d locked her into, over and over again. Thud (thud). Thud (thud). Thud (thud). She liked to aim for the spot where the door hit the ceiling, and she could do it from standing on all four paws, straight up. We knew because the doors were glass (this room would have been the dining room, if it wasn’t already full of two-year-old moving boxes and discarded baby furniture. The dining table was in the living room), and we had seen her do it about forty-seven times that night. We also knew because my one true love stands about six-foot-one, and the cat had shot straight up from the floor to claw at his face, unprovoked, more than once. It went like this: my sweetie entered the room. The cat looked up, all innocent-like. My sweetie paused. The cat wandered over and rubbed herself against his ankles. Was she—really—was that—perhaps—a purr? Just as my honey opened his mouth to say, “see? She likes me! She really likes me!”, the cat, making like the electrified kitties on one of those old Saturday morning cartoons, shot straight up into the air, all four paws extended out and down, like she’d been goosed with a cattle prod. She landed, every time, with her claws in my sweetie’s head, he screaming, she screaming, me screaming, he and I pulling at the cat, trying to get her OFFFFF! OFFFFF!

So then we locked her in the undined-in dining room.

It’s not like he was mean to her. My sweetie likes cats. Really. He’s a total softie when it comes to cats. Even though he’s allergic—like really allergic, not the deathly kind where your throat closes but close enough, the eyes swelling up and the full-body hives and the whole nine yards. And he was willing to risk all this, to be with her! To love her! And she was having none of it. Which is, in fact, weird, since in general, people with allergies are total cat-magnets, and not in the trying-to-claw-your-face-off kind of way. Once, I had this cat, and also this sort-of boyfriend or whatever. The sort-of boyfriend (or whatever), he was allergic to cats. And the cat, she was part Himalayan, a stray with long, fabulous, Marilyn-Monroe glamorous white fur and a purr you could hear coming at you from the other side of the street. The boy was no good, and the cat knew it. So she would do this thing, where we would be in my room (in my hovel of a basement student apartment, occupied also by my roommate who was also my friend until her unemployed alcoholic boyfriend moved in—he had this rule, that you couldn’t drink till eleven because that’s when the pubs opened in England, so he watched cartoons on the couch with a beer open, waiting, beside him, till the clock struck the hour? I never totally got it because what about the time change? But anyway) so anyway we would be in my room, doing stuff, and then the unboyfriend would get up to go pee or whatever, and the cat? She would come tearing down the hall from the other end of the hovel and take a flying leap from the doorway onto the bed (which was a futon so the leap was small, but anyway) and then she would roll over and over and over on the bed, till it was covered with hair and dander. Then he would come back in, and he would swear at her and try to kick her (nice, huh?), but she would just do the Marilyn thing, play dumb, but you don’t love me? But I love you!, kiss-kissing at him, purring, making up to him. Which only made him flee that much faster.

Such a smart kitty, she was!

So much smarter than me!

That’s what cats usually do, when people are allergic: they immediately demonstrate undying love and affection. (Or people who are afraid. My mom is more or less afraid of all non-human life forms which possess the power to move independently. When we were kids, she would stand inside the plexiglass storm door, screaming, “Go home!” at the local dogs, when they wandered across the lawn. Shockingly, they generally did not go home. At least not immediately. We waited. It was not uncommon for us to be late for things. My cat always went directly to my mother as soon as she settled herself anywhere in the apartment, climbed unstoppably into her lap, kneaded and turned and sat down to purr and demand petting. “Go home!” my mom would whisper. “Go home!”) Cats always head straight for the vulnerable person. It’s this sense they have, this built-in radar that lets them get back at the world for all the ways we’ve fucked them over, burying them in pyramids with dead pharaohs and spaying them and feeding them cat food and all. And they do it while professing unending devotion and sweetness. Worse than thirteen-year-old girls, they are. They never let on that they’re attacking, even as they’re shaking that dander all over the allergic person. This cat, however, was straight-up hating on my baby. And she didn’t care who knew it.

Just like the serial killer with the power saw. Same thing. Only without the hockey mask. Like something out of Poe, this cat was.

My first day in New York City had felt like a movie, or perhaps several movies. It was one of those movies where the pretty young couple cross arms and whirl around, laughing, by the fountain at Columbus Circle. And it was Pretty Woman, after the part where she finally gets to shop. And it was also a Woody Allen flick, and maybe Bergman. And that cat was definitely all David Lynch, all the time.

And now we had entered onto the Texas Chainsaw Massacre portion of our evening.

I trembled. I shuddered. I pulled the duvet (white, flowered, spotless) over my head. That would stop him. Definitely. For sure he’d never know I was under here.

And then the noise stopped.

I heard—was that? Maybe?—the sound of a door groaning open. Against its will. Had we locked the door? Triple-locked it? Were our keys in the outside lock? Had we just invited the murderer in?

I called my sweetie’s name, once, twice, softly, softly, so as not to let the murderer know that I was awake, because that would be much worse.

“Mmmmppphllkkkk,” said my sweetie. He snored once, elbowed me in the nose, and rolled over, wrapping the duvet around himself. Leaving me exposed, naked, vulnerable, just waiting for the kiss of those metal teeth on my bare breast!

I listened hard. Not footsteps. But…something…

Ah. Perhaps this was an undead murdering chainsaw-wielding lunatic, slithering across the floor?

(You know there’s a reason I loves me my Ambien).

The bedroom door, open a crack, cracked open.

I gasped. Tensed. Peeking from under my eyelashes, feigning sleep, I waited for his grey-green, undead, wild-eyed face to emerge over the edge of the bed.

A second. Then another. And another.

And then---

Something flew past me, over my head, as I lay cowering there! “ARRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” screamed my sweetie. “Get it off! Get it off!” The duvet shredded; feathers flew everywhere; my boyfriend danced across the bed, clawing at his head, at the thing attached to his head, screaming. The dining room door had been opened! The cat, apparently, had developed opposable-thumb technology!

And then we heard the voice.

I can only imagine the scene from the vantage point of the doorway. First, the cat, locked in the dining room, probably mewing piteously like some sort of sad condemned prisoner. Then the bedroom door; the floor strewn with lingerie, the wine glasses, half-empty, next to the bed (white duvet, with flowers); the cat attacks; a crazed naked man stumbling around on the bed roaring with a cat attached to his head; the downstairs neighbor banging on the ceiling; me hiding under the covers, only my eyes and my hair showing, shrieking about chainsaws; outside, the chainsaw.

To this day, my one true love swears that it was not he who got the dates wrong. “I reconfirmed it on the phone! I said, see you Thursday! Not Tuesday in the middle of the night! Thursday! You heard me on the phone!”

There was, of course, hurried flight. We left our things. They packed a bag for us, left it with the doorman next day, with a note. Don’t call. They kept (a) the vegetable peeler from my sweetie’s knife kit; (b) his $6 sunglasses from a street fair; (c) my new bra. Pink and purple. With lace. We did not ask for these things back. Not even the bra.

These days, when I hear a chainsaw in the middle of the night, I do what any self-respecting New Yorker would do. Winter or summer, I turn on the air conditioner to drown out the noise, roll over, and go back to sleep.

In our new building, there are no pets allowed.

back to the rabbit hole...

Real Estate (Part 1): In Which Our Heroine Contemplates the Provinces, or: House-Hunting in Brooklyn

2006-10-02T01:36:00.000-04:00

So my one true love and I, we’re in the market for some real estate.
I know, I know: that’s fabulous news! Because the real estate market is in free fall! Going down, down, down, down—it’s all dealsdealsdeals, get ‘em while they’re hot! I mean, in Miami, they’re paying your mortgage for you! In Vegas, check out the two-for-one deals on brand-new condos (in America’s Fastest Growing City)! Across the country, developers are taking a bath—sellers are desperate to make a deal—real estate agents are serving up cocktails at open houses in hopes of getting someone drunk enough to do the deed (watch out for those roofies!). It’s a buyer’s party!
Ah, yes. But we, my friends, live in Manhattan.
And it’s true: the market is “adjusting,” even here, on our near little, dear little island off the coast of America. Prices are “normalizing.” Stock is “rising,” perhaps even “faster than demand, in some neighborhoods and at particular price points.” Well, hallelujah.
But, of course, when real estate prices have gone up ninety percent in four years (yes, that’s right. 90%). (Did I stutter?), we’re talking about a slightly different kind of adjustment.
But still, on we slog. It’s important to us. To our growth as persons. To our adulthood.
In the place my sweetie’s from, being a grownup means three things:
a) owning an automobile of note
b) having a child (or two or three or four)
c) owning a home (preferably with ample space for said automobile and with individual rooms for said children)
(This state of affairs is, of course, not so terribly different from things in my own hometown. But I seem to have had some difficulty absorbing the rules. Obviously. Otherwise, how the hell did a Nice Jewish Girl like me end up in a joint like this?).
Anyway. So. Since it seems unlikely that we will accomplish (b) in the allotted time, and since (a) would probably cost more in time, trouble and tow fees than private school would, and since we are unable, despite our protestations to the contrary, able to completely throw off the yoke of our suburban training, we have concentrated on (c). We are Trying to Buy a Home.

In a normal city, this would be an easy thing: there would be a Multiple Listing Service; we would have an agent who had access to all the listings there were; we would go see real estate; we would Make Decisions. But there is no MLS in Manhattan; every realtor has “exclusive” listings that she doesn’t have to share with anyone else. No single realtor, in other words, knows…well…very much.
No matter. We are young(ish) and strong(ish) and resourceful and self-sufficient. We will Do It Ourselves! We will find our own home! We will use…the Net!
(What else is there?)
So. During the week, at times when I should be doing other things (grading papers, preparing for class, sleeping, exercising, cleaning my spacious-and-lovely-but-washer-and-dryer-and-doorman-free-and-not-ideally-located rental apartment, etc), I get online. I look at New York realtor websites. I look at New York real estate webspiders. I look at New York real estate gossip pages. (Oh, yes, really).
I “save” and “print” and “download” and “send this listing to a friend.” I send two-bedrooms-two-baths in Chelsea, in the West Village, in the East Village, in Gramercy, in what is euphemistically known as “downtown.” (That would be the area formerly known as the Financial District, and now known as the Poor Abused Neighborhood Near Ground Zero Filled with Dust and Tragedy Tourists and Hawkers). And then, every Sunday, we suit up and set off to See Some Places.
Sometimes, we go to Brooklyn. ‘Cuz Brooklyn, it’s cheaper than Manhattan. And there are beautiful old brownstones there. And places with decks. And yards. And trees. For maybe less than a million dollars. Can you imagine?
So. Once every six months or so, my sweetie says, “I think we should look in…Brooklyn!” and off we go. We look in Brooklyn Heights, which is a beautiful neighborhood just across the Brooklyn Bridge, the kind of neighborhood you expect to find in Manhattan if you watch a lot of old Woody Allen movies. Brownstone blocks. Stately old homes. Stoops. We trot up wide brownstone staircases and take elevators operated by actual elevator operators to spaces with roofdecks and libraries and old-fashioned kitchens. It’s all lovely, and we troop dutifully from room to room with the thirty or forty or fifty other people who think so, too, all craning their necks to check out the moldings and riffling through the linen closets. The broker has run out of sign-in sheets and info sheets and business cards, but it doesn’t really matter because the place basically sold three hours ago, and now she’s just waiting to go home and trying to stop that three-year-old from laying her chocolate-ice-cream hands on the sofa and WHY do people insist, in Brooklyn Heights, on bringing very large dogs to open houses? Especially when it rains.
Or else we find ourselves in a very sweet, very old-fashioned, very cosy place, with a fireplace in the living room and two adorable little bedrooms upstairs, in which my six-foot-one darling has some difficulty standing up straight. The shared laundry is in the basement, which is a root cellar dug in 1856 which has been settling ever since. And the co-op is “very relaxed,” but so is the stair rail, and perhaps the stairs themselves.
Plus also it’s clear that we would have to know our neighbors very, very well. And this, of course, is what we love about Manhattan: no knowing of the neighbors!
So. After Brooklyn Heights, we try Cobble Hill. Which is quaint and earthy and has really great Italian groceries and trattorias—the old straight-from-Sicily kind, not the fusion-Mario-Batali-knockoff-themepark kind—and is laid-back and low-rise and has parks. Lovely! And also it’s very safe, owning to the ongoing and longtime residential presence of members of the Family Business in the neighborhood. So, you know, no drug dealers. Or carjackings. Or home invasions.
So then we see three apartments in succession with kitchens that belong in an Ikea reject lot and funny-shaped bathrooms and bedrooms that are…underground. Invariably, these are being sold by a very nervous fifty-something woman with a high voice and a great deal of silver jewelry. Or a fat man whose fingers twitch for a cigar. Once, the fat man stomped on an enormous waterbug right in front of us. In what would have been our kitchen.
So then we head to Carroll Gardens.
In Carroll Gardens, we see beeeeee-u-ti-ful apartments! Gorgeous spaces! Two-story living rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows! Renovated bathrooms! Third bedrooms! Upstairs full-height office spaces! Fancy kitchens! Walkout decks! Gardens! And all in our price range! We could make a deal Right This Second!
It’s enough to make a girl sit down and cry with happiness. Enough, even to make a girl consider Crossing a Bridge.
But then we draw a deep breath (in order to get ahold of ourselves, to think clearly, to be yoga about the whole thing) and we begin to cough and choke, and then we spew out some black stuff that seems to have got into our lungs somehow, and then we rememberthat Carroll Gardens is conveniently located pretty much right on top of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
So. Then we go to DUMBO (that’s Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass to you). Once upon a time, before the latest real estate boom, DUMBO was—how do you say?—a slum. Much like Williamsburg to the east. (We’re not even going to discuss Williamsburg. Undergraduates and Lebovitcher families. That’s all I have to say). But then, you know, the kids, the artists, they came, and they made them the studios, and they made them the galleries, and they made them the performance spaces. And so and then the restaurants, they came too. And the boo-tikes, the ones that sell hand-sewn one-of-a-kind dresses or twelve thousand kinds of skater shoes. And then there were complaints, and commissions, and save-our-waterfront campaigns, led by the artists, who were outraged—outraged!—that the city was trying to develop this little piece of heaven that they had made their own, this weedy, sketchy, cracked-sidewalk ‘hood that they had turned into Bohemia. And the poor people in the meantime all left to go somewhere cheaper, since those damn artists had driven up all the rents and the bodegas and the Pathmark had closed (the Pathmark was now a club that opened at midnight and featured chocolate-covered go-go dancers or some damn thing). And by then of course the downtown trust-fund babies and the young Wall Street cowboys and the public relations girls were moving into the Next! Hot! Nabe!, so the artists started getting tossed out of the squats—and so there were more protests, and the artists complained about exploitation, and the all-night parties and self-conscious Rent imitations slowed to a crawl, and then the developers came.
And so now DUMBO is this weird little suburb, a post-urban apocalyptic landscape of hilly cobblestone streets, abandoned warehouses, the unbelievably huge Jehovah’s Witness complex (this, my friends, is where The Call is printed!), funky theatres, sketchy lurkers, and four-million-dollar steel-and-glass condominiums. To get to many of said condominiums, you get off the subway, and you walk down a dark and deserted pathway, and through dark and deserted streets, and past Jacques Torres Chocolate and the one sushi restaurant and the brand-new boo-tike grocery store, and then there you are: feng shui lobby décor. Uniformed doormen. (Cool uniforms. No gold braid). Carpeted hallways with grey stone walls. Two bedrooms plus study facing Manhattan. Corian baths and kitchens. The works.
So we go to look, periodically, at events in DUMBO. But aside from the obvious problem of me being flat-out afraid of coming home alone after dark, which given my hours would definitely put a Crimp in my Lifestyle, and the other obvious problem of there being Nowhere to Eat, which basically means my one true love would shrivel up and die, there’s also the further problem of location, location, location.
For instance: we take a thrilling open-car elevator ride up to a building under construction in the Heart of Dumbo. Very Charlie-and-the-Chocolate-Factory, the whole thing is, except for the release forms. (Wait—maybe there were release forms in the new version. But not in the original? I can’t believe Gene Wilder had release forms). And we meet a charming blow-dried sales agent who hands us a brochure and invites us to look at blown-up copies of the floorplans we’ve already seen on line, and sends us off to look at two “model apartments” (that is, two apartments that are actually finished and have walls and everything). The signs—in the elevator and downstairs in the space-that-will-be-the-lobby-but-is-now-a-hazardous-construction-site and in the sales office and in the halls—say that we are Not Permitted to Visit Apartments Without an Agent Present. But the agent, he is Very Busy. He cannot be bothered with us. We don’t look, apparently, promising. So off we trip.
We open a door. We see a top-of-the-line open kitchen; a thirty-foot living room; a wall of windows, looking out at the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. The view is spectacular. Movie-spectacular. Wall Street spectacular (the movie, not the street). We oooh. We ahhh. We imagine, for a moment, that we must have been mistaken for zillionaires. We imagine showing our mothers this apartment. (“oh my!” they might say. “you are clearly the most successful of all!”) And then, because the Agent is not Present to stop us, we open a window.
My true love’s hat blows straight back off his head. My ear drums ring. As we slam the window down, a subway train approaches on the Manhattan Bridge. Closing the windows, we discover, does not help. If our mothers were here, we would not be able to hear them telling us how fabulous and successful we are. We would have to read their lips. I do not want to learn lip-reading, at my advanced age.
We get back in the great glass elevator and leave DUMBO.
Then we go to Smith Street and we have lunch and we wonder about the Great Brooklyn Restaurant Revolution. And then we have a beer and a bite sitting on a patio, and we watch people go by on the streets, in their Birkenstocks and with their triple-strollers and talking about pottery and self-discovery and in their very poorly-fitting natural-fiber clothes. And then my one true love remembers that he is allergic to hippies. And then we go back to Manhattan.

NEXT: MANHATTAN!

back to the rabbit hole...

Room for Dessert (In Which Our Heroine Lives the Glamourous Life)

2006-08-21T01:01:00.000-04:00

Often, when I go out to dinner with my sweetie, we end up talking shop with the restaurant folk--or, more accurately, he talks shop. I sit there and try to look ornamental. And drink my wine.

Sometimes, this discussion will happen after we have been delivered the Table Full O' Desserts, the signature closing afforded all VIP guests in serious New York restaurants. Here's how it works: first we order some food ("just a couple of courses, light...really, man, we've been eating all weekend"). Then six or seven courses show up ("Chef says he really wants you to taste the Braised Lamb Brains in Huckleberries and the Foie Gras with Lime"). (I am aware that eating said Foie Gras with Lime makes me a bad human being in the eyes of many people. I am aware that several state legislatures, in fact, have outlawed foie gras. All I have to say, as an ex-ethical-vegetarian, is that you should check out the life experience of a Tyson chicken or a farmed salmon before you cast the first stone. And foie gras, by the way, tastes much, much better than a farmed salmon).

Now, I know that being fed large amounts of generally yummy, very expensive food--at discount prices!--is not really the sort of thing that you are allowed to complain about. I am aware that it's sort of like being a movie star and complaining about how hard you worked on that last movie you did--the one that filmed for two whole months, and paid you seven million dollars--after which you were so exhausted, you had to take three years off to travel and recover. Or like Tyra Banks lecturing the teenagers on America's Next Top Model about how difficult modelling really is.

But this sort of eating is, you must understand, really something that you have to train for. Like those guys in the hotdog-eating contests (have you seen that Japanese cat eat? The one who wins with the hot dogs at Nathan's in Coney Island every year? And weighs about 100 pounds soaking wet? I mean. Well).

There's the pre-app. Then the app. Then the between-course course. Then fish; seafood; poultry; meat; maybe meat again (more serious meat). And then, finally, we arrive at dessert. Which could be one course. Or two. Or, on occasion, three.

The rule is: the chef checks the plates, so we have to finish everything. Otherwise, there will be a whiff of insult. Chefs being very sensitive to insults about their food, and being possessed of unnaturally long and accurate memories when it comes to such things (quote: "oh, yeah, I remember that nasty bitch! She came in two years ago! She asked for salt to put on my lamb loin!"), we can have none of that. And while a tasting menu, in the ordinary course of things, is made up, appropriately, of tastes, teeny-tiny portions designed to give you a bite or two of a series of flavors, when the chef is showing off for another chef, sometimes the portion size begins to stretch.

So. On occasion, dinner with my sweetie is a challenge. But I have a little more leeway, being (a) a girl and (b) the Wife of the Chef. If I get to feeling like the Romans, I am occasionally allowed to call it quits. I have, once or twice, sent back half of my Duo of Beef untouched. I have been known to not eat the fifth Medallion of Venison on my plate. These are the kinds of devil-may-care, I'm-all-right-Jack decisions I have learned to make in my thirties. (I owe it all to yoga. Breathe in. Breathe out. Center yourself in your body. Be in your body. Bring awareness to your body. Be aware that your body is so full you are beginning to resemble the gentleman who asks for the bucket in that Monty Python sketch).

Nevertheless, my newfound self-respect and determination to be in my body does not extend to ignoring the dessert menu. This is not because I am a slave to sugar. In fact, I don't really like dessert very much, unless it's chocolate or fruit. And nine times out of ten, if it's chocolate, it's full of cream and I'm allergic to it. (Which is a cruel joke on the part of God and one very good reason that I think that if he exists, he doesn't like us very much. Or at least--me). Plus also I'm not supposed to eat dessert because of that hypoglycemia thang.

So I would, often, prefer not to order dessert at all. Particularly on nights when I have given up on extending my belt and have instead removed my pants entirely. (I like to wear very long tunics to such dinners). But that would involve insulting another whole sector of the kitchen, and I just don't have it in me to do that, weakling that I am. Sigh.

So when the dessert cards arrive, we order one each ("We'll have one Cherry Pie Redux with Homemade Vanilla-Mint Gelato and one Mixed Sorbets. And that's it, man. Really") and we get...eight. Or nine. Four or five waiters show up, bearing pots and bowls and sauce beakers and all manner of things. (If there is a thin, carb-counting social-type New York woman at a nearby table, she usually has some not-so-sotte-voce things to say about this. As though it were our fault. I like to think that she's just jealous, but I suspect I may be lying to myself.)

My honey, who is at heart a good American boy who loves him his ice cream and his pie, smiles widely. I reach for my Lactaid pills.

It is at this point, often, that the chef or manager or owner or sommelier chooses to come sit down with us. When I say "us," I mean "my husband." The restaurant person in question will give me a kiss--rank stranger or no--tell me that it's very good to meet me, nod politely when I tell him how delicious everything was, and then sit down, signal for a glass of wine, lean towards my one true love, and say, for instance (in the intense tones of the truly fervent), "have you got a really good fish guy?"

(I say "he" because (a) 99% of upscale New York chefs and restaurateurs are men, for all sorts of spurious reasons that I don't have time to get into here; and (b) I have noticed that women tend to ignore me less. And also that they tend not to kiss me.)

On more than one occasion, I have left my honey at the table, tripped off to the bathroom, and returned to find a man in whites blithely occupying my chair.

And I must admit: I have nothing to say about the fish guy. Or about the price of chicken. Or even about the temperament of one stove brand over another.

So I drink my wine.

And sometimes, if the wine is all gone, I eat my dessert. And my sweetie's dessert. Maybe even I'll just have a touch of that other dessert there that we didn't order, but we shouldn't let it just melt away to nothing without even trying it. And that other one there--it's lemon--and I loooooove lemon--so I just have to have a taste. And--

If the restaurant person and my husband get into the question of what you do with sea urchins, or start to go back and forth about pork producers, I can gain ten pounds just over dessert.

The other night, we were at a restaurant we love. It's the kind of restaurant where I always have to have the same pasta, even though everything else is really good, so then I order it and then it comes as a middle course and then the braised sweetbreads arrive, but it's so good you just can't. Say. No. It was a hot late-August night, and New York had emptied for its annual pilgrimages (the Upper East Side was at the Hamptons, the Upper West Side upstate in the Catskills, and the hipster denizens of the East Village were hanging out at their parents' pools on Long Island), so the restaurant was quiet. The waiters were passing the time by improving their palates on the wines-by-the-glass list at the bar. We were feeling easy, relaxed.

The desserts arrived. ("Just a couple of extra tastes for you to try here," the waiter said brightly).

I finished my wine.

The owner appeared.

"How nice to see you!" he exclaimed. He kissed me on the cheek. "You look fabulous!"

(That's what I do. I look fabulous).

Then he sat himself down with his back towards me. A waiter hurried over with a glass of wine for him. He took a sip, settled himself, leaned towards my husband. "So," he said, slowly, deliberately, "we bought this new ice cream machine."

"Oh, yeah?" my husband leaned forward, his eyes shining.

I lifted my fork.

A little bit of this. A little bit of that. Some more of that other thing.

(Mmmm. Pie.)

And then, somehow, it's all gone. Empty dishes litter the table.

My husband and the owner have moved on to the Great Wine Cellar Comparison.

I sit back, luxuriating in my beltless dress. Very important to dress appropriately for all occasions.

My husband catches my eye. "Ok, man--we should get going," he says.

The owner politely gets to his feet, turns all the way around, politely remembers me. "So good to see you!" he enthuses, leaning towards me for another kiss.

He pauses. Looks me over. Looks me over again.

A light comes into his eye. I know this light. It is the glimmer of Something Polite to Say to The Wife!

I wait, expectantly.

"Did I hear," he asks, still leaning towards me, his voice rising and strengthening with the conviction that there is Conversation! To! Be Made!--he pauses, smiles charmingly, "Did I hear that you just had a baby?"

He looks at me, happily, expectantly.

I would like to look withering, but I cannot seem to manage it.

I would like at least to look shocked and offended. I have trouble with that, too.

I would crawl under the table, if only my swollen frame would fit.

"Uh--no, actually," I manage. I think my voice might be perky.

And that, my friends, is how you get dinner for free in New York City!

back to the rabbit hole...

2006-08-15T00:06:00.000-04:00

Overheard on the way home down Fourteenth Street, after a night of drinking draft Dos Equis and plotting how to get out of academia:

"Moonraker! Hey! Hey, Moonraker! Yeahyeahyeahyeahyeah! Moonraker, baby!" (so saith a man with a wide face and a SmithBarney t-shirt lying on the street outside my favorite falafel shop at 11 pm). (I think he was speaking to me).

"Ok, but now no kissee! No jokee! No having sex!" (a middle-aged Eastern European cab driver in a short-sleeved, button-down nylon shirt to a couple in an ancient Honda Civic in need of a boost from his jumper cables).

"I think it's going to hurt too much, you know?" (a forty-something man in a Yankees cap and square metal glasses)
"Well, ok--forget the eagle. How about a star?" (a skinny forty-something woman in walking shorts).

"Well, come on, dude--have you checked out findavirgin.com?"

Disco Inferno (In Which Our Heroine is Accosted at the Gym)

2006-08-14T01:30:00.000-04:00

I was at the gym today.

(Well, hooray for me!)

I was heading to the cardio area--dressed, I will note, all in black; carrying my ipod and my New Yorker--when a person tapped me on the shoulder. Insistently. Sharply.

My gym is populated mostly by young men of moderate musculature who look too fit and prosperous for the East Village but who are generously tattooed; by very skinny, very young women with invisible muscles and body piercings; by academics (this should require no explanation of musculature whatsoever); by underemployed trainers from Staten Island; and, occasionally, by non-academic middle-aged white people. The type who carry Friends of the Earth canvas shopping bags and six or seven newspapers at all times and do not own ATM cards and believe that Speaking to the Manager is a leisure activity akin to stamp-collecting or sudoko.

The female of this breed is equipped with very sharp fingers (albeit without well-groomed fingernails). I knew her shoulder tap immediately, having encountered the species many times before (like, for instance, at the Greenmarket, when one of her kind feels that I may be hindering her access to the veyr best tomatoes. Or in line at the grocery store, when she Only Has These Five Items So Can She Puh-Leeeze Go First? and then she has coupons and can't find her checkbook and needs four more pennies). I reached for my headphones, but it was already far, far too late.

"Do you like this music?" she demanded.

She was wearing a greying ponytail and a ratty, baggy white t-shirt with some long-defunct company's logo on it and the kind of sweatpants that go in at the ankle and the waist and out in the middle (Cotton Ginny sold about 5 million pairs of these in 1981 or so). Under the t-shirt, she bulged as people bulge after many years of pretending to exercise while reading the newspaper. Her eyebrows needed care. She looked...tired. Long-term.

In other words: she was decidedly middle-aged.

The music, by the way, was standard-issue gym house music: badumbadumbadumbadumbadumbadumbadumbadum, fast and repetitive and with a lot of bass. Perfect for moving really fast on a cardio machine, and also for doing situps.

"Because I just went and complained!" she continued, loudly, querelously. She gave me a we're-all-in-this-together look. "It's awful!"

Why was she telling me?

There were lots of other people in the gym. Like that guy over there, with the knee socks. Why was she talking to me?

Did she think I was--like her?

In league against Those Damn Kids With Their Crazy Loud Music?

Next thing you know, she'd be offering me a section of last Wednesday's newspaper and a rubber band to attach it to the cardio machines. Or telling me about her recent surgeries.

I am not--let's be clear here--middle-aged. Certain individuals of my acquaintance have begun to use this expression with reference to themselves, and, occasionally, by extension, to me and all other people in our age range. I in no way believe that this term applies to me even in the strictest interpretation of the term, since I certainly do not intend to kick off before I hit seventy-five. In point of fact, since I do not intend to be middle-aged until my fashion sense resembles my mother's and I, too, begin reading the obituaries at breakfast, I am hoping to hit this milestone in exactly never.

"Actually, I do like it," I said, in my best not-friendly voice. I tossed my hair like a young Tori Spelling. I tuned my ipod to Death Cab for Cutie.

I giggled.

I must have looked 22. At the most.

"You doooooo? Oh."

I'm sure that kid on the ab machine was checking me out. For sure.

I felt kinder. Perhaps she had mistakenly spoken to me--young, vital, downtown-hip me (instead of, say, the guy in the knee socks--who also had a beard) because she was having trouble with her vision?

She was, after all, pretty old.

Maybe her poor old ears couldn't tolerate all that loud music anymore.

Whereas I: I loves me the loud music.

I explained, in a nicer voice, about needing something fast to work out to, about my own motivation level, about what happens when you complain about the music (generally, selections from the slower Eurythmics oeuvre or Elton John).

So here I was, breaking my cardinal rule about talking to needy people at the gym out of pity for this aging woman, who was practically turning to dust before my eyes while I grew younger, visibly, each instant! (I sucked in my gut.) It was like...like Dorian Grey! (I pushed out my chest and enhanced my cleavage).

"Oh," she said, nonplussed. She paused.
"But then," she asked, "--what's wrong with disco?"

As I walked away, the house music cut out abruptly. Badumbadumbadumbadum became dadadee dadadadaDA dahhhda dahhhda-uh-uh-uh-uuuuhhhuuuh..."there must be an angel,/playing with my heart..."

The man with the knee socks looked blissful.

I climbed on to the elliptical trainer and hit me up some B-52s.

Rock on.

<

In Which Our Heroine Eats Out

2006-08-11T01:35:00.000-04:00

So my one true love and I went out to dinner. It was Saturday night. We went anyway. This is our own fault.

A friend of my sweetie’s had opened a brand! new! restaurant! and we wanted to check it out. To be supportive, because friends don’t let friends fill their restaurant with strangers on the first Saturday night they’re in business! Also it was finally not ninety degrees, which meant I could wear my hair down without melting into a puddle. So I didn’t have to go about with my hair in what my the Barbie people call a “high pony” on top of my head. Because, I mean, Barbie she has those superhigh insteps to balance her hair, whereas I have what one might delicately call flat feet. Plus she’s taller than me. And then of course the boobs. So it’s just a better look for her, the high pony.

So anyway, it was an exciting night, and we were all dressed up in our casual downtown best and ready to eat!

The restaurant was lovely, too, all exposed brick and soft yellow light, the tables and art and everything very handcrafty and cool. The air conditioning worked; there were house cocktails; the crowd was young and downtownish and not in ponytails. (Well, there was the guy who insisted on wearing his motorcycle helmet indoors, but we think his mother might have ingrained a serious fear of falling on his head in him as a child, which was not his fault). We ordered a fancy bottle of wine and the food started coming and it was pretty sweet.

But the thing about New York restaurants is: it’s not just all about you. I’ve been places—other, foreign places—where your dining experience might as well be taking place in a lunar module for all the interaction you have with other people. We once ate at this gorgeous restaurant in New Mexico, for instance—all whitewashed walls and glimpses of a verdant garden—where we had a whole little nook-room-thing to ourselves, and all we heard was soft jazz and the soft murmur of highly paid waiters ,and until I went to the bathroom, I had no idea there were actually other people there.

But in New York it’s a whole different thing. This is a city where restaurants take out the sound baffling and install tin ceilings on purpose. A city where a certain prominent midtown restaurant was roundly criticized, after a major renovation, for installing high-backed chairs, which gave people a modicum of privacy and focus on their own table and thus completely derailed the all-important activity of scoping out everyone else in the room. A city where lawyers knock knees with movie stars who share banquette space with graduate students who cuddle up next to uptown dowagers. New Yorkers do not go out in public to eat in private. New Yorkers go to restaurants to show off; to scope out other people’s clothes; to talk to strangers; and to make loud comments about one another behind the menus.

If you’re a people person, eating out in New York is awesome.

If, on the other hand, you’re the other thing, then sometimes the experience can be less than optimal.

So: Saturday night. Hot new Noho restaurant. Platefuls o’ deliciousness. Excellent wine. Good-looking wait staff. Sealed cork tables. All good, right?

Well, ladies and gentleman, let me introduce you to my friend Leslie.

Leslie was the nice lady who was seated next to us (on the banquette, approximately six inches away), with a gentleman friend whose name we didn’t quite catch. He was a steel-haired, dieted-down gay man in a pressed shirt and a smirk. She was a sharp-faced, undersized mid-century tawny bottle blonde (my sweetie says she was fifty-five, but I think he’s adding five to ten for cigarette damage and nastiness) in leopard-print wannabe Manohlos and one of those ubiquitous Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses that only look good on women without any breasts whatsoever. (This one looked good on her). She was sitting on the banquet with her spike-heel-shod foot up on the brand-new fabric (on my part of the brand-new fabric), attempting to parse the carb content of her friend’s meal. (Her verdict? “That’s got to be 40 grams. Don’t you dare eat that! I wouldn’t eat that! Disgusting! Didn’t you tell them? You did! You told them! I heard you!”) As soon as I sat down, she shoved my (teeny tiny vintage) handbag further away from her sorry, skinny little ass with her heel. “Excuse me,” I said. “It fell over,” she said.

We proceeded from cocktails to wine and appetizers. Meanwhile, Leslie and her friend complained about the prices (“I mean, do they actually think it’s worth it? Just look at that portion size! What—are they trying to tell us we need to go on a diet? Is this health food?”), about the fat content (“oh my God”), about the speed of service (“I mean, there’s like twenty of them, and they’re all just like standing around! We so ordered before that other table—I can’t believe it! They must have totally forgotten about us. Can you believe it? It’s like an hour already!”), about the bathroom (“you wouldn’t believe it. You shouldn’t go in there. You really won’t like it. I know it’s going to upset you—do you have to? I mean—there are no more hand towels”). They took turns going outside for cigarettes, to keep their palates fresh.

Her voice had that brash, authentic Old New York category that reminds me of a cat being tortured.

He was mellifluous, chuckling away at top volume. “These people!” he yodelled. “Let’s get our friend the waiter in the white collar over here,” he sang. “Do you think they could move slower?” he shouted.

And then they ordered coffee.

My memory of events is not exact (the wine was very good) but I know they asked for double espressos each. Clearly, the night was young; the steel-haired man was working his cellphone, trying to find a friend who was still talking to both of them. They had things to do, places to ruin, people to alienate. A server arrived with two slightly oversized white espresso cups.

“That’s a double?” Leslie brayed. “How is that a double? I asked for a double, right? I did! I said a double! That’s not a double! Is that a double?”

The steel-haired man looked at his espresso. He stuck his index finger in the cup. “This is cold,” he said with well-articulated distaste. “This is not drinkable. Hey, take this back, please!”

“Oh my god, it’s cold!” wheezed Leslie. She thrust her cup across the table at her silver-haired friend, who in turn held both cups up above his head as though he were appealing to the gods to come and claim these travesties.

The server in the white collar came over and plucked the espressos from his hands. He did not pour them on the silver-haired man’s silver hair. Discussion followed. Some time passed. More espresso arrived.

“I made these myself,” said the server in the white collar. He hovered, waiting.

“This is a double? Really? Would you call this a double? This is not a double!” said Leslie.

The silver-haired man stuck his finger in his cup. “Nope—cold,” he pronounced.

Leslie actually tasted hers. “It’s bitter!” she shrieked. “It’s too bitter! I’m an espresso expert, and this—this is cold and bitter! This is not right! I mean—God! This espresso tastes like they squeezed it out of an old shoe!”

The server in the white collar began to look as though his outfit was choking him.

My sweetie, whose leg had been jittering up and down faster and faster—who was turning pale with the effort of restraining himself—who had stopped eating completely, and was no longer even drinking his delicious wine—which I myself suddenly felt a strong urge to swill—could stand it no longer. “I’m sorry—“ he began—

“Yes? What do you think? I know you’re listening in!” rasped Leslie, crow-like.

I kicked him under the table. He ignored me. “Espresso is not supposed to be hot,” he spit through gritted teeth. “My family was in the coffee business in Italy for three hundred years, and I know something about it. Espresso should be bitter unless you put sugar in it, and it should be room temperature, and that is definitely a double.”

Leslie thrust her cup at him. “Stick your finger in it!” she demanded. Having not been brought up in a barn or on Long Island, my sweetie failed to comply instantly. “Go on! Stick your finger in!” she insisted. When she reached for his hand, clearly with the intention of helping him along, he stuck out his pinkie finger and dipped it in her espresso.

“That’s exactly the right temperature,” he stated, flatly.

“Well, I can’t drink it now—your finger’s been in it!” she shrieked triumphantly.

* * * * *
The next day, we go to Chinatown for a late lunch. We are seated, as per ancient Chinatown tradition, with all the other white people on the side of the room closest to the bathrooms. On one side was a large family group—Mom, Dad, two blonde angels; Mom, Dad, a red-headed angel. On the other: a youngish couple, he in ball cap and Blackberry, she in expensive blonde hair and flip-flops, plus an huge-ish diamond engagement ring. (Right next to the bathroom door are the guy in those sweats from 1982—grey with the tight ankles—and the woman who took off her sneakers to intensify her enjoyment during her meal).

Before we have even sat down properly, the expensive blonde leans over. “Those kids have spilled three times,” she whispered in her loudest voice.

Startled, the smallest angel knocks over her soda, just as the server leans across the table. An orange puddle spreads across the server’s white uniform top like some sort of virus. The angel’s mother, a hefty woman in red, smiled benignly. “I think we need some more soda over here!” she announces.

“See?” the expensive blonde asks, peering into my sweetie’s face as though there are diamonds hidden there.

Five minutes later, the second-smallest angel does it again, with a windup this time. Orange soda splatters across the table and hits the wall above his mother’s head. The guy in the ballcap roared with laughter. “I can’t believe it!” he bellows across us, chortling. “You people should go to McDonald’s or something!” He looks earnestly at me. “Can you believe it? I can’t believe it!”

His fiancée is busy with the waiter. “What is this? We didn’t order this. We don’t eat this. Take this away and bring us egg foo young!”

The waiter respectfully attempts to explain that this restaurant serves nothing even remotely resembling egg foo young.

“I want egg foo young! Egg foo young! Hon, can you explain it to him? He doesn’t understand me! EGG FOO YOUNG!”

The waiter, sighing, goes away.

The kids are now shrieking as only small children whose parents like to ignore them can do. And, indeed, the hefty woman and her equally sizable sig oth are pretending that they are enjoying a lovely meal without children. I fasten my Evil Teacher Eye on her. “Kids,” she purrs finally, “you can play, but let’s keep it down a bit, ok?” Since “playing” involves beating one another across the face with chopsticks, it seems to me that shrieking is probably an integral part of the game.

On the other side, the egg foo young arrives. Ahhhh. Happiness.

* * * * *

Moments into our journey home through the crowded Sunday Chinatown streets, a nice-looking middle-aged woman in wide canvas walking shorts chases us down Mott Street, skinny teenage daughter in tow. “Excuse me! Excuse me!” she calls, grabbing my one true love’s arm. She smiles up at us, all Midwestern friendliness. “Can you help us? We’re looking for Little Italy. Where’s Little Italy? ‘cause it’s like we’re a minority here!” she chuckles happily, conspiratorially, expectantly, clutching my one true love’s reassuringly white arm. I can feel my smile freeze.

“Sure,” says my one true love, my knight in shining armor, my hero. “You just head down this way…” he points to her map—“and then turn that way, and then look for East Broadway!” She smiles cheerfully, thanks us, and heads off for the heart of Asian gangland.

Next weekend, we’re staying inside and ordering in. The delivery people can leave the food in the hall; we’ll slide the money out to them under the door. As my sweetie puts it, “This is New York. You can get anything delivered.”

back to the rabbit hole...

in which our heroine reaches out to touch someone

2006-08-04T16:41:00.000-04:00

hey kids, i love it when you care enough to drop me a line...but if ya wanna talk, leave yer email address, too, 'cause when you just hit my email button, google makes your email address anonymous...and my thoughtful replies to your fabu questions just...come right back at me...like that boomerang on peewee's playhouse last night...
(yes, it's insomnia season at alice's once again...)
(were you aware that lawrence fishburne played the cowboy on peewee's playhouse? boy, would morpheus be embarrassed. and you shoulda seen his hair...)
(and what is WITH the "vibrate" feature on that talking chair?)
(no wonder they trailed the poor man to that x-rated theatre...)
(and about those cross-dressing dinosaurs...)

in which our heroine learns to love dry ice

2006-08-03T10:46:00.000-04:00

Some words there are that just make you want to weep with happiness. Even if they don't actually seem to mean anything. Like "precancerous." Such a lovely bumping-along kind of sound it has--nothing like the sibillant, snake-tongue-like "basal-cell." It's a happy, joyful, let's-write-a-camp-song kind of word!
But what exactly is "precancerous"? It's not baby cancer cells; it's not actual cancer; perhaps it's cells that, infused with that purple csi dye and examined under a big cobalt zillion-dollar microscope after being removed from, for instance, the left side of your nose, are glimpsed auditioning to be cancer.
"And what do you do?"
"I'm working on squamous-cell. I stretch myself out and let my edges go all raggedly. It's a real gift--it's what I'm meant to be."
"Thank you--next!"
"I'm the next great melanoma--I have fabulous range and stretch. See?"
"Thanks--next!"
"If you just give me a chance, sir, I know I could be the best basal cell the world has ever seen. I get basal cell. It's--it's in my genes. I go deep into it, you know?"
"Thanks, kid. We'll think about it. Our people will be in touch with your people."
So we're putting the kid on ice before he gets too big for his britches, lets success go to his head, and actually believes he's become the hard-ass, unrehabilitatable character he's playing. Rubbing him out with a q-tip and some of the really cold stuff. Hasta la vista, baby!

full stop (in which our heroine answers the phone)

2006-08-03T01:16:00.000-04:00

So I had this day, today, that just so intensely productive--and let me tell you, being productive in the heat wave is not my usual state of being--and I went to work and did all this stuff--meetings and scheduling and payroll issues and staffing and registration questions and General Organizational Tasks--I even cleaned off my desk, which is something I generally leave to the gnomes and borrowers, except it's such a shame because the large rodent who periodically visits my office seems to have eaten them or at least frightened them away and so the desk thing has been a problem--but today I took it in hand--I culled, I sorted, I Made New Files...then I went to the library and optimized my research time at the computer and was all high-tech and not luddite, and the librarian taught me how to send articles to the printing station once again (I'm hoping he's going to give me a Frequent Flyer card next time) and then I discovered that the best sandwich place in the whole world had opened around the corner, so since I was hungry from all that research I had the one with bacon and avocado and also turkey which is very low-fat and good for you and carmelized onions--so then I went to the gym and it was such a sweet day because the ipod worked and there were the Ramones, and everything is better with the Ramones.
So then I go back outside and it's like a zilliion milliion jilliion degrees--but that's ok--'cause I'm moving slow and I'm listening to vintage ska(it's too hot outside for the Ramones) and I've got the handkerchief going...and anyway EVERYONE is sweating today (except that weird woman in a sweater set who must surely be French) so I don't stand out so much--and I go to the grocery store and there's People magazine with Lance Bass coming out on the cover and I buy it because it's important to support people who come out and that cover should sell just as well as the Angelina Jolie Brad Pitt baby cover (or--ok--close--because what could be more important than Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's baby?) but anyway there's a Good Social Reason to buy People magazine and that just always makes me so happy--plus there is *not* a Simpson *or* a celebrity baby *or* a celebrity wedding (true love forever and ever this time for sure) *or* a jailed murderous spouse on the cover, and what are the chances of that, these days? And then I notice that inside, there's a 4-page piece on Israeli and Lebanese teenagers, so you see this is really a Socially Conscious Issue, and I should be proud that I bought it. Almost like reading The Nation. Or listening to Jeananne Garofolo on Air America--which in fact I would do much more often if it wasn't for the ads for hair-recovery systems and GoToMeeting.com constantly interrupting the left-wing ranting and bantering--and yes, I know that somebody has to pay for it, but couldn't they just have a pledge drive like any other well-behaved politically palatable radio outlet? Not that I like pledge drives, but at least you could turn those off. So anyway I head home with my magazine and also my soymilk and my 100% recycled toilet paper--which two items should tell the 15-year-old clerk right there that I'm only buying this magazine to support good sociopolitical issues, and by the way I shut off my air conditioners when I'm not home, too--because I support Al Gore and global warming is bad and also if there's a blackout--and everybody thinks there's going to be a blackout--I really don't want it to be my fault--and as I head in the door one of my neighbors is a couple of steps ahead of me and he doesn't wait the elevator for me even though he looks right at me and you pretty much have to wait at that point, but I am zen and I breathe in breathe out and let it go, and besides he probably smelled nasty in the heat and what if I got stuck in the elevator with him?--so I take the next one and it's all good and I walk in the door and the apartment is Still Not Hot and I breathe an enormous sigh of relief and strip off my sweaty dress and pick up the phone to call for takeout because god knows I'm not cooking in this weather--not even salad--
and there's a message waiting--
and I pick it up, and it's the dermatologist--
not his assistant but the man himself--
and that's never good--
and he's got the results of my biopsy--
and I should
call.

Friday Night at the Movies (in which Our Heroine Contemplates Fashion and Jarlsberg)

2006-07-31T01:02:00.000-04:00

I have some issues with Friday nights. That’s when the young, dressed-by-People-magazine hordes pour over the bridges and through the tunnels into Manhattan, mixing and melding with the after-work party crowds, seeking adventures and hookup in the Big City. Park Avenue South and the aptly-named Meatpacking District morph into something resembling that “grown-up party island” at Disneyland; college kids take over the streets of my neighborhood, shrieking into their cellphones and throwing up over the curbs; restaurants are packed with buttoned-down Upper East Siders, overage giggling groups of Sex and the City wannabes, and men in herds. My personal vision of hell is the scene outside Spice Market in the depths of the Meatpacking District at midnight. On Friday nights, I like to barricade the doors, pull the blinds, do my nails, and watch Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion for the 47th time.

I am, I will admit, a particularly cranky New Yorker. I hate maneuvering through crowds of noisy drunk people on the street—women clacking along in stilettos they can’t handle and microminis that have long ago given up trying to make friends with their thighs; men with sleek hair and fancy cellphones; everyone smoking and throwing their cigarettes in the street as though it were one huge ashtray (would you do this in your backyard in New Jersey?), stumbling and gripping the arms of strangers, laughing in huge HAW HAWs like lost members of the Hee Haw cast. Shrieking. For no particular reason. (If I were queen, everybody would have to keep their voices down to a low murmur and wear soft-soled shoes in public.)

And then restaurants ? Well. At places without reservations, the anxiety totally gets to me (what if I miss my name and we don’t get our table? What if the host forgets about us? What if we get bumped for somebody more important? I hate getting bumped for somebody more important. I don’t care if Uma is downstairs. I was here first). I also have a lot of hostility towards really loud tables with lots of drinking going on, particularly if flash photography is involved, which it always is now because everybody has a camera on his or her cellphone—because of course it’s really important to record every moment of your existence or else you cease to exist. Or maybe you need to take lots of pictures to show how many people like you? Like my aunt, who used to count her friends and make my mom count hers, so that she could prove she was the most popular (people who say “let’s count friends” are always already very definite about the outcome).

And why must all of those women who wish they were Carrie Bradshaw be so high-pitched all the time? Always giggling. And squeaking. I’m always surprised that there aren’t packs of dogs following them around from bar to bar. And drunken Wall St guys hitting on anything in the vaguest shape of a female and drinking ridiculously expensive wine that they don’t appreciate? And walking slow. Why do people from out of town always need to walk so slowly? And in such large groups!

So as you can see, I am not suited to Friday nights out.

But sometimes, I get to feeling…like everyone in the world is out on Friday night except me, and maybe that means that I don’t really have any friends and I’m not popular and I’ll never be cool and I’m missing out on Something Really Great and I’m just a sad, sad girl…

So then I go out.

Last Friday night was one of those Friday nights. I just couldn’t face Romy and Michele telling off their high school nemeses for the forty-eighth time, and there was nothing on tv except Independence Day. Again. (Oh look! A stripper with a heart of gold! Bill Pullman as the President! Will Smith punching out an alien! America’s the best!) So what do you do on Friday night when you just have to go out? Well, you pick the absolute safest option: you go to the movies, of course.

So my friend Katherine and I took ourselves off to see The Devil Wears Prada.

The movie had been out for a while (going to see a just-released movie on Friday night is not a safe option) so we figured things would be quiet, but as it turns out, the theatre was so busy we had to fight our way to a ticket terminal. And the crowds weren’t exactly your ordinary Friday-night-movie types. This particular megacomplexthing is usually crowded with bored couples of all sexual orientations in ballcaps; girls in packs, giggling; teenagers on dates, skittish; greying men in greying jackets sitting alone with big bags of popcorn and the assorted refuse that seems to follow them around; roaming packs of boys; mothers with gaggles of children, generally up far past any kind of respectable bedtime and watching movies well above their age brackets; ladies of a certain age, generally in pairs or trios, in slacks. There is, one could say, no fashion at the movies.

But on Friday night, there was some serious fashion going on. Twenty-something women with perfect eyebrows sported knockoff Galliano three-quarter pants, Stella McCartney-esque baby-doll dress-top things (worn variously, depending on confidence in thigh size, as dress or top), big clunky belts, perfect unmarked pale-colored espadrilles (evidence of minimal contact with the actual New York City streets), dangly earrings, smoky eye makeup, artful hair. There was a woman with a fabulous, tiny jeweled purse, and another wearing knee-high boots and black leggings and a jacket with tight black sleeves (in July! In Manhattan! In a heat wave!) The line for the bathroom was epic. Inside, women who looked like they had never used public toilet facilities before in their lives jabbed furiously at the soap dispensers. The scene at the mirrors was very, very focused.

Apparently, everybody in Manhattan except me either has a personal assistant or is a personal assistant. Or is perhaps in p.r.

The movie-watching experience was a bit out of the ordinary, too. Generally, viewing a wide-release Hollywood movie at Union Square is not unlike being inside a third-grade classroom with a substitute teacher. Things fly through the air. Commentary is provided. Musical chairs is played at unexpected intervals. Etc. Or sometimes it’s like being in a locked room with three or four hundred copies of my grandmother. (“Did you hear what she said?” “She said it was all over!” “Can you believe she said it was all over?” “Oh my God, it’s all over.” “That’s what she said.” “I can’t believe it!” “Believe what?” “That it’s all over!” “Is that what she said?”)

The assistants, on the other hand, were beautifully behaved. Nobody kicked my chair. Nobody told characters in the movie “you bad, brother!” or “shut uuuuuup!” or “I hate you!” Nobody threatened the people in the seats near them. Nobody tossed foodstuffs. Nobody got up to go to the bathroom forty-seven times, rasping “sorry, honey” every time, in a Harvey Fierstein voice.

Bliss, right?

But sort of invasion-of-the-body-snatchers, Stepford-Wives-esque bliss.

It seemed that everybody but us thought the movie was a documentary. There was a lot of tension in the theatre. When Andy had tough choices to make, you could positively hear people sucking in their breath. While I was giggling at Meryl’s elegant sadism, and Katherine the freelance writer was laughing uncontrollably at the inevitable bad-boy-writer’s claim that he has lots of time to sit around thinking up cheesy seduction lines because “I’m a freelancer,” everyone else was watching intently, silently, as serious as if this were the story of the invasion of Lebanon or Capturing the Friedmans.

When Andy finally Made the Right Decision, there was teary laughter. A few little bursts of applause. Everyone was so relieved. Though they were conflicted about the giving away of the clothes.

Myself, I wasn’t exactly feeling the real. Because beyond the most basic issues—the idea that anyone in Manhattan would think that unfettered ambition was a bad thing, for example—there was a…reality problem. Ahem—about that boyfriend?

Nate, the protagonist’s love interest, is laid-back almost to the point of being comatose. He is sweet, balanced, supernice. His only flaw? Resentment at Andy’s long hours at work, her failure to see that hanging out is a quality-of-life issue.

Oh. And he’s a cook.

I know a thing or two about cooks. I happen to share my life with a cook. (Well: not anymore. Now I share my life with a chef). I can spot a cook at forty paces.

And Nate, he is no cook.

For example.

Early in the movie, Nate sits down to dinner, apparently at prime time, in the restaurant he is supposed to work at. He is wearing street clothes and drinking wine and joking with his friends and his lover in dusky candlelight. Ah, the culinary life! So romantic! So warm! All about good friends, good meals, good living!

My husband laughed so hard at this he nearly choked.

Also, in the world of the movie, working at a magazine is much, much harder than working in a kitchen. Poor little Andy, subject to a sadistic boss who ridicules her fashion choices, won’t let her go to the bathroom, and makes her run tiring and difficult errands! While Nate, apparently, enjoys luxuriously easy working conditions, in the company of some unseen chef who is so overwhelmingly reasonable he lets Nate leave at the stroke of dinnertime, gives the kid the night off whenever he wants it, and never, ever makes him come in early. Just like real life!

And this cook, he complains all the time that his girlfriend works long hours. That he never sees her. That she is married to her job. He lectures her on what’s important. Real life! Gallery openings! Cupcakes! Long leisurely dinners!

My husband laughed so hard at the idea of a cook complaining that his significant other worked too many hours, he had to sit down.

Also, Nate has lovely unscarred, unburned hands, which perfectly match his downtown skinny-cool-boy physique. Apparently, Nate’s job does not require him to heft heavy pots or any of that nonsense. He’s one of them intellectual chefs, maybe. I hear they can just think the food.

But he must be a natural talent, because although he seems to have no ambitions whatsoever beyond cooking Jarlsberg-grilled-cheese sandwiches for his girlfriend (and eating cupcakes from the Magnolia Bakery, which is proof positive in my opinion that he has the palate of a lizard, since Magnolia Bakery cupcakes, famous though they may be thanks to Sex and the City—why you would trust four women who collectively way less than 200 pounds on the subject of cupcakes I know not—taste exactly like calcified sawdust topped with frosting), though he never seems to be at work, though he never even talks about food (except those grilled-Jarlsberg sandwiches), he is suddenly, at the end of the movie, rescued from his paper-napkin-restaurant gig and flown off to Boston (at the restaurant’s expense, which happens all the time) to interview for a sous chef gig at the Oak Room!

But my favorite thing about Nate? It’s those late-night grilled-cheese sandwiches.

You know that expression about the shoemaker, and how his children don’t have any shoes?

Yeah. Well.

So according to the story, Nate goes off to work at some point in the late morning, since he is invariably still in bed when Andy rushes off to the office or job interviews or Calvin Klein or Paris or whatever. He must stay there for—oh, I don’t know—at least six hours?—since he seems to be done by dinnertime. When he gets home, he opens up a bottle of wine and gets busy with the fancy cheese.

My husband? He comes home and orders in.

Sometimes after work he’ll go so far as to crack a beer himself. Or to put something in the microwave. I think once he cut up an apple.

He doesn’t crack open a bottle of good wine. He doesn’t get his pans all heated up. He certainly doesn’t shop for groceries at Dean & DeLuca on the way home. At the end of a 14-hour workday at the stoves, he wants absolutely nothing to do with the inside of a kitchen. When he’s not working, we go out to dinner. Or I make salad. I make a mean salad. We eat it in front of the television, while we watch Independence Day.

Katherine and I left the movie theatre surrounded by personal assistants debating the finer moral points of the movie.

“Would you have walked away?”
“I could do it. She was bad. It’s bad to work for someone who’s bad.”
“Career women can be so sad. Career women like that, I mean. Not like us. Old ones.”
“But what about when she gives all those clothes to Emily? Could you give away all those clothes?”
“Do you think she had to? Ethically? Because, like, they were already hers.”
I don’t think I could do that. Really. I mean, that’s her identity, really. It’s wrong to give away your identity like that. My clothes are me. Her clothes are her. Clothes make the person. You know?”

As Romy puts it, on the subject of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, “I just get so happy when they finally let her shop!”

We made our way through the East Village Friday night. As Dickens put it, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar.* A blonde girl shrieked into her cellphone. A boy threw up in a gutter. On the corner, a man in shredded powder-blue sweatpants and combat boots shook his head endlessly and asked everyone who passed what time it was, was, was. Through an open service door at the restaurant on the corner, we glimpsed white-coated cooks sweating over their stoves, tossing pasta, yelling their time estimates out to the chef. My cellphone rang. It was 12:30: early, early. Last orders still coming in, people still eating their steaks and picking at their salads. But my husband was cutting out and coming home.

* Little Dorrit, page 895. And you thought this post was long!

back to the rabbit hole...

In Which Our Heroine Asks an Important Question

2006-07-29T21:25:00.000-04:00

Why do you think it is that people insist on talking on their cellphones in bathroom stalls? While they're using the toilet (as my grandmother would put it)?
When did it become social acceptable to pee when you're on the phone?
How do people on the other end react when they hear flushing?
Am I the only one who finds this odd?

slicin' and dicin' (in which our heroine visits the doctor)

2006-07-26T18:01:00.000-04:00

So I started the morning off at the dermatologist's, just to confirm that the tiny red dot-thing on my arm was really just a tiny red dot-thing on my arm, and not—say—cancer.

My major concern on the way to the dermatologist’s was that I be on time, since he is, as far as I can tell, the only doctor in the city who is always on time, and it makes me feel bad when I keep him waiting. Which I unfailingly do. Once, for instance, there was a subway delay, and I was positive that if I walked from 68th Street that would be faster, and then of course the second I stepped off the train the p.a. crackled “stand clear the closing,” and the doors hit me in the back as they slammed shut and the train rocketed away, so then I didn’t have any choice and I started walking, and it was hot and I got all sweaty (which isn’t nice when you’re going to see the doctor), and then of course it took twenty minutes to get from 68th and Lex to 80th and 5th, because of course I plumb forgot, once again, that the Upper East Side is not actually two blocks wide, and, further, that the blocks are more spacious up there, just like everything else on the Upper East Side.

So then I was late.

This other time, I was going to the downtown east side office, in the mistaken belief that I live downtown on the east side and that this would therefore be faster. Of course, when I say “downtown” I mean “south of 14th Street.” Other people sometimes say “downtown” when they mean “south of Canal Street,” which is a whole different flavor of downtown. There’s no grid down there: the streets aren’t laid out in a convenient pattern of right angles; nor are they named things like “First Avenue” or “Twenty-third Street.” Instead, they loop around, cut themselves off, change their minds, and call themselves by different monikers every time the block changes. So in fact, downtown downtown is not only nowhere near where I live, but also nowhere like where I live. Plus also half of downtown downtown is always closed for security reasons. And on the east side of downtown downtown, away from that memorial-that-looks-like-a-construction-project-with-tourists-and-people-selling-t-shirts, everything looks the same: discount women’s clothing stores, big limestone buildings from the last century, big limestone buildings built in the eighties to sort of look like the last century, drugstores, Starbucks, people in suits. It’s like that dream where you’re running down a corridor and it just keeps going and going and you don’t know if you’re passing things you’ve passed before or different things that look the same or are you running in place or--?

So then I was late.

So my major aim for this morning was to Not Be Late. I woke up at 2 am, 3 am, 4:30, 5:15, and 6:25, in a panic, sure I’d somehow missed my alarm and slept through my appointment. As a result, I missed my alarm and slept through my shower time. Better funky, I thought, then late.

I caught the express train uptown. I sprinted past Don’t Walk signs. I weaved my way through traffic and dodged nannies with Bugaboo Frog strollers (just like Gwyneth Paltrow’s) and tottering ladies of a certain age in golden wigs and leopard-print high heels and rouge. Made it with seconds to spare. Phew! And you know? Maybe it was just as well I hadn’t had time to bother with a shower. Because what a waste, all that water for nothing, right?

I should note here that I prefer to visit the downtown branch of my doctor’s office. At the downtown branch, the nurse is a brisk young woman in dark pink scrubs who exerts an iron control over her exam rooms. The floors and counters gleam. The paper on the exam chair is crisp and fresh. You can just about hear the gloves snapping.

Not so much at the uptown branch. Here the nurse is a middle-aged woman in polka-dot scrubs and shoes that look like they’ve seen some traffic, perhaps in Chinatown. The office is shared space, so there are decorations perhaps unsuited to a dermatologist’s office: warnings about disposing of sharps if one should have to shoot oneself up (substances left vague); a periodic table of desserts, with calories where the atomic number usually goes. The countertops are piled with tongue depressors and informational pamphlets and shiny sharp-looking equipment and Kleenex boxes and jars of colored liquids, and also there is a book on contagious skin conditions, with a brightly illustrated photographic cover depicting nine! different! ailments!—orange pustules and oozing bits and bright red open sores.

The book does have the virtue of distracting me from the unfresh nature of the paper liner I am sitting on, and also from the fact that the nurse is now muttering as she hunts through cabinets that look, inside, similar to the back of my coat closet for something the doctor may need that is undoubtedly hygienic.

I am here because I have a tiny little itchy red bump on my upper left arm, and I am, due to the events of last December (of which more in a moment), paranoid—a paranoia that goes far beyond my usual hypochondriachal state, which leads me to lie awake at night, convinced that I have black lung or flesh-eating disease and will be dead before morning .

Happily, when the doctor comes rolling in, he immediately informs me that the little red bump is a burst blood vessel. Phew again! He also tells me that the itchy brown bit on the other side of my bicep is a bug bite. And that this other thing on my leg that I’ve been noticing more lately for some reason is an old bug bite.

(It’s been there so long I was convinced I had a tumor running all the way through my calf and up into my thigh, which would explain the otherwise completely inexplicable pocket of fat at the top of said thigh. It must be cancer. Right?)

What a day. On time and the thing on my arm isn't cancer!

That little pimple-thing that sort of comes and goes on the side of my nose that I haven’t been worrying about, though? Because the last time the doctor looked at it he said it was “nothing”? Well, that there could well be a little bit of cancer. Maybe we should just take a little look?

I brace myself. “Taking a little look” means “getting out the big needle and plunging it into the patient’s face in preparation for the wielding of the scalpel.” And, indeed, before I have time to draw breath, the doctor is looming over me, his eyes suddenly magnified bug-style by his glasses, and I am writhing on the end of something very sharp and apparently hot. Maybe he keeps a needle primed in his pocket for emergencies? Maybe he’s just a sadist who likes to give everybody needles?

“Well, that must have felt like nothing!” he says brightly. “When you had the surgery, that would have been like twelve needles going into your nose, or maybe more, right?” He looks at me expectantly.

While we’re waiting for the local anesthetic to take effect (the doctor has jogged off to another patient; the nurse is now rummaging in the apparently bottomless drawers beneath the exam table, looking for bacitracin to put on my soon-to-be-born biopsy wound), let me fill you in on “the surgery.”

One day last summer, in the great tradition of overprivileged, overanxious, self-obsessed New York women, I had a facial. (It’s important to understand that this was not a luxury: it was necessary maintenance. Like changing the filter in the air conditioner. In my apartment, we have to clean the filters about every other second because they fill up with black shmutz that just floats around in the air here, settling on windowsills and turning the pigeons dirty grey. Just think about what that does to your pores.)

So anyway. As anyone who has ever had a facial knows, after the aesthetician has softened your skin with masks, hydrated it with lotions, pampered it with steam, and generally made it let down its guard so it’s totally unprepared for assault, she proceeds to dig out every single pimple, blackhead, whitehead, and pore blockage that she can find. This extremely expensive piece of self-indulgence feels a lot like being pinched by your mean cousin while also being the victim of a voodoo-doll pin attack at the very same moment. And because it is always good to connive in your own pain and victimhood, this is also the moment when the facialee reminds the facialist, “That huge one on my chin is starting to come back again,” or “do you think you could use the needle on the little ones on my forehead?” or “there’s this tiny one on the tip of my nose that my husband says makes me look like a witch—think you can get rid of it?”

In the case of this last, the aesthetician probed with her instruments of probing, and concluded that the witch’s bump was “a growth,” and that I should “see a dermatologist about it” “right away.”

So of course I promptly made an appointment four months later when my one true love handed me the phone and forced me to call.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” said the doctor, “but let’s just take a little look. Just in case.”

A week later, I received one of those discreet phone messages that really reinforces your belief that it’s going to be great when that shared-medical-record-database idea gets off the ground. “This message is for Alice from Doctor Needleboy’s office. The doctor says you have to come in right away. Your biopsy came back positive.”

“Well, it’s pretty much what we expected!” said the doctor brightly. (Didn’t we expect it was “nothing"? just seconds ago?) “It’s a basal-cell carcinoma, which is non-fatal, but it does have to come out right away! It’s in a bad spot, I’m afraid!”

Later (that is, at 2 am), on the web, I discovered why it had to come out right away. I won’t ruin your appetite by linking to the pictures. Suffice to say that I now believe that Picasso was working from the life on quite a number of his faces with those weird crevasses and craters. My nights were immediately filled with visions of myself as The Woman Without a Face. Teaching, swathed in bandages to hide the horror below. Lurking in the shadows, a hat pulled low over my eyes. Small children run screaming. Dogs growl. My husband leaves me for a younger woman with intact nasal cavities.

I am not much given to the phrase “my mother was right,” but here it is. She told me to wear sunblock when I was busy spending my days lifeguarding and teaching swimming outdoors and rehearsing shows in the park and getting around on my bike. She told me I would get skin cancer. But did I listen? No! And now look!

(She also told me that I would get impetigo from going barefoot. I don’t know what impetigo is, but if it’s anything like skin cancer, I don’t want it. Perhaps I can do yoga in socks? I hear it's the next hot thing.) (And what if she’s right about the microwave, too?)

I received a great deal of advice from my colleagues, a number of whom have had basal-cell carcinoma. Given the low correlate between academics and sunshine, I wonder if there’s an epidemiological subset that the scientific community has not yet considered. Perhaps one can get basal-cell carcinoma from the reflected uv rays emanating from student papers?

I visited the surgeon. “It’s in a bad spot, I’m afraid!” he said in a chipper tone. He assured me that the scar would be "a very thin line--almost nothing.” When Christmas break came around, I was exempted from being the only Jewish girl at Christmas morning mass in my in-laws’ suburban church, and also from visiting outlet malls in Florida with my parents and sisters. Instead, in the dead center of a New York City transit strike, my one true love and I bundled up and trudged a hundred blocks north to the surgeon's office to get rid, once and for all, of my cancerous, face-eating witch's bump.

The surgery was done in stages (in between which I sat in a little room and ate stale cookies while my temporary bandages leaked and my one true love listened to his iPod and we both tried not to share at the woman with the melanomas on her legs). Between that and the reconstruction and the very long time I lay in the surgeon's chair with nothing to read, all alone, and waited for him to come back from lunch, the whole thing took about seven hours. I was awake for all of it (and let me tell you: Valium isn't everything it's cracked up to be). The surgeon, an irrepressibly cheerful man, talked about his children and when he used to live downtown and asked me lots of questions about my work and my apartment and how I felt about the transit strike as he cut away at my face. He was kind enough to show me the tumor after he removed it. It was roughly the size of a cherry pit. “A little bigger than we expected!” He asked if my sig oth would like to see it. I strongly suspected that my sig oth would not like to see it.

When we left the hospital just after 5:00, I was heavily bandaged about the nose and couldn’t wear my glasses. My knight in shining armor tried, valiantly, to flag down a cab. The official rule for cabs during the transit strike: you must pick up multiple passengers and drop each passenger as close to her destination as possible; fees are to be flat rate; price-gouging is not allowed. The unofficial rule for cabs during the transit strike: the passenger who promises a big fat fee at the end of the ride gets the cab all to herself. My husband’s plea, “but my wife’s just had surgery!” garnered many variations on the theme of “get the hell away--this is my cab. Get your own!" Ah, the great generosity and sense of community among New Yorkers during a crisis! One person (in a cab, alone) said something to the effect of clearly my legs had not been operated on, so what was the problem? Drive on, driver!

Of course, the fact that the bandaging made it look like I'd just had a nose job didn’t help.

Eventually, after a walk of some thirty blocks (a very slow unhappy walk: since I couldn’t put my glasses on, I had no depth perception, and so was constantly in danger of walking into things, with my nose, of course), my husband stepped in front of a slow-moving cab (everything is slow-moving during a New York City transit strike) and refused to move until the driver put me in the front seat. There were two women in the back, but they agreed between them that it would be “too crowded” for my husband to get in. Ten blocks (and half an hour) later, these same two women decided that they would get out and walk. The conversation about payment went like this: “Well, you were going to take me to the Seaport—which is usually $18 from my apartment—but you only took me like a third of the way—so that’s $6, right?” They had apparently been in the cab for nearly an hour and a half.

The cab driver looked closer to tears than I was. “This must be terrible for you,” I said. “Did you have a nose job?” he asked. “Skin cancer,” I said. “Oh,” he said. He put on the radio.

We listened to traffic reports.

People got into the cab; people got out. Some of them paid. Some of them didn’t. After a long, long time, the driver informed me that we were six blocks west of my apartment. I gave him all of the money in my wallet and got out. I instantly realized that I had no cell phone, no money, and no house keys, and, further, that I was walking in traffic alone without my glasses. And nobody would help me—people were actually crossing the street to get away from me—presumably either because (a) I looked like the Frankenstein monster, what with the emerging black eyes, the bruising, the bandages, the stiff-legged, cautious walk with arms protectively outstretched, etc; or (b) they all thought that I had just had a nose job and so was obviously utterly undeserving of aid.

This auspicious start to my recovery was followed by two weeks of lying extremely close to the television, taking pain pills and drinking tea and waiting for my bandages to be reduced enough to allow for the wearing of glasses. My one true love brought me fabulous take-out sushi and changes my bandages and covered the mirrors, so that I had no idea how much I looked like the Frankenstein monster (the old version, not the De Niro take) until I went back to the surgeon to have the stitches taken out. It’s amazing how noticeable a bandage on the face is. Or a scar. Especially on the nose. I tried to count my blessings. I tried to remember that the cancer was gone, and I didn't look too much like a Picasso. I tried to be grateful for my health and my luck. Especially when strangers stared openly at me in the street. Sometimes for whole minutes. And when small children came up to me and asked, “What happened to your face?” (I adore children).

My mother told me that scars “give you character.” My husband sought out scar-repair materials on the web. (There are lots of creams and unguents and potions. None of them work worth a damn. Most of them smell like onions, which is no small thing when the scar in question is in close proximity to one’s nostrils). I contemplated the ruin of the beauty that I never, until this moment, thought I had. Too late now!

Seven months on, I am finally getting used to the half-a-butterfly scar that takes up the entire side of my nose (the tumor was “a little bigger than we thought!”). I have stopped jerking my head away and yelling "nose!" when my husband gets too close to my face. I am able, once again, to do headstands and crow pose without fear that, should I land on my face, my nasal cavities will collapse completely. Children and strange academics have mostly quit staring and pointing at my nose.

And now here I am, once again, in the doctor’s office, awaiting the scalpel.

The doctor returns, takes up his instrument, slices. The anesthetic has, happily, completely frozen my upper lip but left the side of my nose untouched, so that I am able to experience in the full range of sensations that are part of the biopsy process. The nurse, who has not found the bacitracin, sticks a bandaid on my face and puts an instruction sheet in my hand. (The first instruction is, “apply bacitracin or neosporin at least twice (2x) a day”). On the subway, a small child stands directly in front of me and stares up at me solemnly, chewing on his finger. (His mother is one of those subway mothers who puts on her iPod and stares into space and pretends that she doesn’t have any kids until it comes time to herd them off the train). He takes the finger (grimy; well-chewed) out of his mouth. He points. “What’s wrong with your face?” he demands.

My mother also told me that once you start drinking alone--never mind drinking gin alone in your apartment in the middle of the afternoon-- it's a short, slippery slope to becoming a homeless alcoholic who dies ignominiously in an alley surrounded by garbage and stray cats. I wonder if she's right about that, too. Bottoms up!

back to the rabbit hole

Wildlife of England: Part I (In Which Our Heroine Communes with the Animals)

2006-07-23T22:26:00.000-04:00

It was a glorious day in London--hot, clear, sunny--and my one true love and I were wandering through Regent's Park. The meadows were crowded with pale-skinned English people vigorously worshipping the sun; everywhere we looked, everywhere we wandered, there was a vista of pasty skin sizzling in the heat, the sound of screaming children kicking around soccer balls and head-butting one another, the aroma of bodies unaccustomed to sweating, or to the need for the liberal use of deodorant. Ah, summer in the royal dominions!

We stopped to contemplate a map. Sunbathers and kids to the left. Sunbathers and kids to the right. To the south: the lovely little garden area where we had recently been attacked by an enormous pigeon who settled on the ground in front of us, hissed (I swear), squacked and then suddenly flew straight at our heads. We looked at the arrows pointing north, to the Regent's dominion of the animals. Why not...go to the Zoo? we thought.

We are not regular zoo-goers. We do love us a good aquarium, but that's a different sort of experience. Very few mammals, in an aquarium. Not so many...smells. Or...sounds. Or...guilt. Mostly just the peaceful magnified thrum of water pretending to reverberate, tide-like. Dark, quiet rooms featuring large tanks of underwater creatures swimming peacefully about. Very calming.

But zoos are a whole different kettle of fish. I always figured that if I wanted cute baby animals--well, that's why God invented the Discovery Channel. No fuss, no muss, no odours or cranky kids wielding dripping ice cream cones.

But as it happened, we had just read an article about giant panda bear conservation. Zoos, this article made clear, were good for the animals. Out in the world, where habitat was disappearing and hunters roamed the remaining wilds, the animals didn't have a chance; giant pandas, for instance, were being singlehandedly saved from the ravages of Chinese industrialism, fur hunters, and the bear-gall-bladder industry by zoo conservation and breeding. Zoos, it seemed, were the new not-wearing-fur. Suddenly, it seemed like the right thing to do: we would be doing something good for the world, for conservation, for Al Gore, by paying our entrance fee and visiting all those much-loved, well-protected animals inside!

So off we tripped to the lions and tigers and bears.

Oh my.

To begin with, the zoo is not a cheap date. It cost us 15 British Pounds Sterling each to get through the gates (that's thirty bucks to you). Then there's the optional 1.50 donation to the zoo, which of course you have to pay. This isn't America, buddy. In England, you must stand behind the yellow line at the luggage carousel (or risk serious disapproval from your fellow luggage-awaiters, sometimes expressed in extremely sharp jabs on the shoulder); you may not cross the street anywhere but at the prescribed spots when the light is the correct color; and when an optional fee is suggested to you in a public forum, you must pay it.

There is a great deal of collective moral imperative in England. Perhaps Nietzsche never visited. Because of the food, maybe. Or the weather?

So. Here we are, queuing. (Gonna see polar bears!) Just us and about 43 groups of retirees and families with small children, plus one young German couple in leather biker gear. In the beautiful, yellow, soul-warming, skin-searing, sweat-inducing, faint-causing British sun, which beats down cheerfully on the parking-lot-like queuing area. It's a good thing the weather is so nice and no one is in a hurry, since the gentleman currently at the admissions hut is protesting the patently unfair policy that compells him to pay the child-over-three admission fee for his three-and-half-year-old daughter: I mean, really! She was under three only seconds ago! and she is very small--so small she probably won't be able to see any of the animals anyway, and thus will only be visiting the zoo in a technical sense--and could certainly pass for a two-year-old.

He is eloquent. He is forceful. He is whiney. He is definitely not English. He carries on until the woman in the little admissions hut agrees to give the kid a special just-past-three-but-very-small rate.

The gentleman offer up his black Amex. He and his family make their way through the turnstiles in a leisurely fashion.

Then another gentleman, also accompanied by small children, comes *back* to the admissions shack from the (shady, animal-filled, halcyon) Other Side. Leaning across the turnstile, he explains that, it seems, there may, in fact, have been some sort of, so to speak, error, because, you see, it appears that this other gentleman who just passed through--or, rather, his daughter, properly speaking--sorry--has been admitted, as it were, without fee, even though, as it appears, so to speak, she is, in fact, over three, that is, three and a half, actually, and, as it happens, the current gentleman's own child, who is, one might say, just three, and so, it would seem, actually, as it were, younger than the other gentleman's daughter, had to pay, or rather--sorry--more properly--he himself had to pay, on her behalf--as it were--the full child's fee, and so he wondered, you see, if just possibly it might be possible to, as one might say, refund the fee, since, perhaps, that might be, as it were, the policy?

(This gentleman was English.)

My suggestion that he speak to a manager and let the queue get on with things was received by my fellow queuers in the same spirit as my incursions over the yellow line at the luggage carousel at Heathrow.

After a while, the gentleman in front of us began a discussion with the woman in the admissions hut about his status as a retired person and the delicate and apparently complicated question of whether he was a retired person in the eyes of the law of the zoo--that is, whether he was old enough in a technical sense--since he had, it would seem, retired early--just took the offer from the company--I mean, how could ye turn it down, ye know?--and now he potters about, ye know--quite likes to walk in the parks of an afternoon--but such a day as this, he thought, Haven't been to the zoo since the kids were small, so.

A while after that, we were allowed to max out our credit cards, pass through the hot metal turnstiles, and emerge on the other side, actually in the zoo, clutching our maps and pamphlets. Shade! Soda pop machines! Monkeys! and Lions! and Tigers!

Oh, my.

The London Zoo, we soon discovered, is Under Construction. The Gorilla Kingdom, to take an example. This spectacular Zoo Experience is much touted on the billboards in area outside the turnstiles, and it is a major focus of my one true love's interest in the Zoo. But in point of fact, it does not, at the moment, actually exist. (Opening Easter 2007!) (Though we did visit the extremely cool squirrel monkey area, in which the tiny monkeys are not behind a barrier but right there, in trees in big habitat-planters right in front of you, like in the mall, except that unlike the mall it is unwise to bring food or drink into the spider monkey area unless you're interested in a form of spider-monkey-to-human group hug).

The Small Mammal area also is not currently extant, though apparently, if only we had been in attendance at feeding time, we might have observed the Komodo dragon paralyzing an unspecified Small Mammal with his killer saliva. (As it was, we got to see the Komodo dragon...sleeping). The polar bears are MIA, too. (I imagine that, somewhere in the depths of the London suburbs, there is a storage locker, in which the polar bears sit playing cards with the orangutangs, and the sloths and marmosets sort and fold their long-forgotten summer things into cardboard moving boxes.)

So not everybody was in residence, as it were. And when you took a good look around, you could see why some folks might prefer to summer elsewhere. The brown bears were splayed flat like big overheated dogs on the concrete floor of their concrete bunker--sorry--den--at the back of their concrete habitat. In the lion area, three elderly Kings and Queens of the Jungle lay as far back as possible, not moving at all. (Next to the lion viewing area was a large red buzzer, to be pressed in the event, the sign said, of a Lion Emergency.) The Sumatran Tigers declined to range across their territory, which looked just like Sumatra except that it was 10 feet by 12 feet and filled with spindly English trees and spiky English weeds. The red-faced black spider monkeys and the sloths were in actual cages, right next to the parrots, along the concrete path to the bathrooms. The giraffes were no longer in their barren little yard (reminiscent of the front garden of a terraced house on a suburban housing estate), having been herded into their very tall concrete stables. The penguins, relocated during the renovations from their accustomed concrete Antarctic Elysium to a temporary lodging in a shallow, algae-ridden pond, hard by the gift shops and the restaurants, sat listlessly in the sun, molting, occasionally persecuted by ducks and pigeons. Inexplicably, a single, ancient turtle occupied the drained pool area of the former penguin habitat, otherwise filled only with trash and remodelling debris.

In other words, the London Zoo is sadly in need of the services of a decent architect and a decorator who really listens to her clients. Clearly, the last designer had some strong ideas of her own--that whole colonial, Bringing-the-Light-of-Empire-to-the-Dark-Places-of-the-Earth, wool-suits-and-steak-dinners-in-the-tropics, Father-knows-best, interests-of-science kinda 1820s thang. I get that whole center-of-the-civilized-world blah-blah-blah, but I have the feeling that the African hunting dogs ranging across their barren high-walled pit might, perversely, prefer something a bit more...African. And those bears? Those were definitely North American bears. I was feeling for them, let me tell you, because their splayed-on-the-floor, miserably un-climate-controlled, utterly un-American digs of course immediately gave me flashbacks to my room in Yorkshire (about which see Part II of the Wildlife of England series, below). I had a burning desire to set 'em all free: open the cages! Pick up that turtle! Bring the bear some ice, for God's sake! I had visions of the lions and tigers, prowling through the high grass, stalking their pale, pasty, sun-worshipping prey in the Regent's Park. Rise up, fellow colonials! I cried, silently. Let the Empire strike back!

So here are the highlights of our visit to the London Zoo, for 15 British Pounds Sterling plus an optional 1.50. We:
-played find-the-sleeping-snake-in-the-dimly-lit-tank in the reptile section
-observed a sleeping Komodo dragon named Louis and contemplated what we imagined to be his ferocious, dinosaur-like nature, with the help of information cards and a small child who roared repeatedly at Louis through the glass
-got lost and ended up in a construction zone due to poor signage
-looked at a pair of apparently comotose tigers
-visited the squirrel monkeys in the squirrel-monkey mall
-found the turtle in the empty penguin pond
-viewed the molting, miserable, overheated penguins by the gift shop
-met a crazy lady in the bathroom
-got lost again due to misleading signage
-discovered a gaggle of British businessfolk, penned into a special area near the bears, eating, drinking, mating, roaring

The closing bell sounded. The animals trooped obediently into their sheds as we tripped obediently down the path to the turnstiles and out into the fields of the Regent's joy. All around us, pale people sizzled, still in the sun. Leaving the Zoo behind, we headed off to the pub to watch the World Cup final. Culture! History! Head butts! Ah, the wild kingdom!

back to the rabbit hole...

Wildlife of England: Part II (In Which Our Heroine Contemplates Habitat)

2006-07-20T00:47:00.000-04:00

I am an absolute princess when it comes to hotels. As far as I'm concerned, great hotels are the best reason to travel. Give me a high-floor, quiet, nonsmoking room, also equipped with a soaking tub for two, a shower head with sixteen adjustments, bedding with a nine-zillion thread count and a gratis fruit bowl, and my trip is complete. Like my friend Mitchell's grandmother, who declined to get off a cruise ship to see the Taj Mahal (I believe she was very much involved in a card game at the time), I figure that culture is an optional extra. (Spa bath with rose petals first. Pompeii--maybe later).

Faced, on the other hand, with unclean bathrooms, saggy beds, televisions chained to the wall (like for instance at that Motel 6 in Delaware with the hooker in the next room), I have been known to cry.

For this reason, I never, ever trust to the gods of tourism. I do research: I cross-check TripAdvisor with Conde Nast Traveller and Time Out and the guidebooks; I parse hotel websites like some people do crossword puzzles; I will, in fact, go to just about any length to avoid the misery of thin towels, old cigarette fumes and a dearth of plush bathrobes.

But when it comes to conferences, even I can be induced to lay aside my hotel standards and put up with inferior linens and so-so maid service. I have stayed at grade-B Marriotts and unrenovated Hiltons across the land in pursuit of knowledge, informed debate and additional lines on my curriculum vitae. I have Frequent Guest cards. I am an expert at getting immediate attention from housekeeping for purposes of having, for instance, odd bits of wood removed from my bed. I know how to order a hotel meal so as to avoid unpleasantness (the secret is always steak, or eggs, or steak and eggs. It is never a good idea to order something with "fusion" in the name from room service. Ditto anything overly dependent on the phrase "fresh").

I do this because, regardless of the relative quality of the official conference housing venue (where there is never, ever a high thread count), I know the importance of staying with the conference group. If you fail to do so--if you choose luxury over location--you will suffer.

At academic conferences, as in high school or at summer camp, the cool kids always stick together; and the cool kids always stay at the conference hotel. If you fail to do so, you will not be part of the in-crowd, and the members of the in-crowd will not talk to you; they will not eat with you; they might even make fun of you. (Since cool academics were never the cool kids in high school or at summer camp, they make up for the sadness and loneliness of those days by alienating and being mean to one another at every opportunity). Not wanting to end up sitting with the large woman in the bedroom slippers at every session (there is always a large woman in bedroom slippers, or the equivalent), I purposefully avoid investigating other housing options when I go to conferences. Where there are events, there goes Alice.

My trip to England was organized around a conference up north, in the cathedral-ridden country near Newcastle (to which you should never bring your own coals). In this case, housing was to be provided in 18th-century town houses lining the cobblestone streets of this ancient town. The website waxed rhapsodic, reflecting on sylvan views of river gorges, high hills, a history of Norman invaders and Prince Bishops and serious reflection and study in a deeply calm environment. Each building, each room, was historic and unique.

Lovely, I thought. Tea, with cosies on the teapots; singing round the piano; formal gardens; views of heather-clad hills. In my room, perhaps a big old wooden bed, and a Victorian press for clothes, and a fireplace. A maid to wake conferencees in the mornings and to make up the fires, perhaps. Bells. I made a mental note to prepare, in my packing, for the possibility of needing to dress for dinner.

"Facilities," the site noted (in small letters) were "shared."

Well, "facilities" in America means, like, the gym. Or the conference room. Or, if you're into New York City real estate, the feng shui garden or the pet spa or the foosball room. Of course they're shared. You can't give every single person her own pet spa!

On the train ride up from London, happily ensconsed in my "Quiet Car" (the English are so civilized!), I reflected (quietly) on the north country, as I knew it from my studies. In Victorian novels, heroines travel to Yorkshire to go on walking tours; or to inhabit vast, windy mansions; or to take up poverty-stricken residence in tiny, cosy cottages; or to be murdered by vampires, or by crazed stalkers, or by evil, greedy, philandering husbands; or they come to murder rivals, or husbands; or to suffer from terrible fevers. The landscape, in these novels, is windswept, eerie, empty; there are hills to stride across in long skirts and petticoats, bogs to get lost in during rainstorms, and so forth. What could be better? I hoped for candles. And wet weather. Perhaps I could knit a rough wool sweater before I got off the train.

My vision of the romance and authenticity of the area was, I must admit, a bit shaken when the taxi driver at the train station informed me that there was a "special extra fee" "just today" for anyone requesting the five-minute drive "to the college," but I recovered my sense of place immediately. "A Heathcliffe type," I told myself, "or one ofthose men straight out of Hardy"--listening carefully for the slightest hint of a northcountry burr in his voice. And then the air was clear and pure; the narrow streets were cobbled; the college, a series of houses directly opposite the spectacular medieval cathedral, looked historic and charming, as promised, when I alighted from my minivan carriage.

My confidence was a wee bit undermined when the porter unlocked the door to the dormitory-house, ushered me inside a pitch-dark hallway, and turned immediately to relock the latch and the enormous, unwieldly deadbolt. (It was about 1:30 in the afternoon). "Don't forget to lock that behind ye," he admonished me as he headed up the black staircase with my bag, me stumbling behind him, wishing for a candle.

We advanced across a slightly less impenetrably dark hallway on the second floor (featuring the only full-length mirror on the entire floor and, for some reason, an iron but no ironing board); through an extremely heavy fire door; past a cave of a kitchen with a string dangling from the lightbulb. In a small, crooked hallway lined with closed doors like something out of Alice in Wonderland, he stopped abruptly at a door marked #2b, hit one of those European timer-style lightswitches and fumbled with what appeared to be the same key that opened the front door latch. He leaned his shoulder into the door, shoved it bodily open, and dropped my bag on the floor. "Here y'are," he said cheerily. "Just remember to keep that door locked there, luv. Loo's down the hall."

And he was gone, before I had a moment to look about me, or to request my candle, or my maid, or to ask what he meant exactly by "down the hall." The door slammed heavily behind him. I wondered, idly, if I would be able to open it again. Perhaps I would be trapped inside forever, immured, in impeccable Gothic fashion, in my room at a college in Yorkshire by an evil porter with terrible plans for me.

Then I gathered my wits, as a heroine does, and looked about me.

The room, presumably, was every bit as old as the two-hundred-year-old building in which it was housed; but all traces of that period had been carefully eradicated by the fifty thousand or so inhabitants who had seemingly passed through since. It is, of course, lovely to be up to date. Though I adore the evocative architecture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I fully understand that most people do not want to live in that era. I myself enjoy hot and cold running water, air conditioning, Poggenpohl baths and space-age mattress material as much as the next person. I'm sure I would be very happy in one of those delicious Mayfair flats, all Georgian pomp and circumstance on the outside, all high ceilings and posh window treatments and high-tech everything on the inside. But this room here was a long, long way from Mayfair up-to-date. More like '70s-dorm-by-way-of-the-Soviet-Union up-to-date.

The walls were painted a sort of pale yellow, an evocative, historic color which I imagine when I think, for instance, of fever hospitals. The paint had been peeled away, apparently by the liberal application and subsequent removal of poster tape, in innumerable small spots, revealing the previous paint color--a deepish green, which evokes, for me, morgues. The carpet was a dusty, fusty industrial blue wall-to-wall, which, however, seemed to have been cared for only with an authentic Georgian carpet-sweeper. There was a smell of old wet wool and dust and something else. I thought that perhaps the something else came from the half-size refrigerator near the door, liberally decorated with magnets and stickers (using one of those word-magnet kits, somebody had intoned, cryptically, Gothically, "starve diet or eat horrible die").

In terms of furniture: there was an Ikea-style particleboard clothes closet, once white, now mostly the color of painted particleboard on which tape has been firmly applied and then stripped off. It came equipped with its own smell. There was a small metal...bedstead I would call it, if this was a nineteenth-century novel. Cot, I will call it, since it isn't. A narrow army-style single with a thin mattress covered in scratchy industrial-style sheets (the sort that are also used as tablecloths at bar mitzvahs) and a pillow that looked a lot like my laptop, were I for some reason to encase my laptop in a napkin. A mirror was conveniently located about seven feet up the wall, over the bed (apparently the previous resident was that rare creature, a British basketball player). There was a bureau with drawers which I prudently did not open. There was a desk and a desk chair, presumably from the Soviet version of Ikea in the 1970s. There was a goose-necked lamp prone to falling over and burning things. The overhead light was yellowish and flourescent and flickered a great deal. That was all.

There was no fireplace. And I couldn't find the bell pull for the maid anywhere.

The shared facilities were indeed down the hall, lit by another dangling lightbulb accessed by another dangling string. There was a prefab shower, a tiny sink, a toilet, a metal rack for putting toiletries on, and, for some reason, a wooden pallet, leaning against the shower. The walls were that same yellow. The ceiling dripped. An elderly sliver of soap sat by the tap. There was no mirror.

I suppose it was better than a chamber pot.

Though it didn't hold a candle to that Motel 6 in Delaware.

But 2B had one redeeming feature: the window. It was an enormous casement, reaching nearly to the floor and all the way to the ceiling, and it filled the wall between the desk and the bed entirely. When I heaved it open, the room was suddenly outdoor space, flooded with the scent of grass in the sunshine and things that bloom on trees and things that bloom in the garden (I was going to say hydrangeas, but I don't really know what a hydrangea is); with the sound of songbirds; with the soft cool feel of a northern summer breeze. Below the window was a just-kept-up-enough garden with big old trees; beyond a high hedge, fields stretched away towards the hills. The light was that gold from the old beer commercial that starts with the guy on his tractor harvesting wheat. Instantly adjusting my historical-cultural references, I deemed Room 2B my Room with a View. I wondered if Helena Bonham Carter was in residence. Or--better yet--Julian Sands. I bet he'd have a nicer room. With tea. And a maid. But would he still trade if I told him I was married?*

(*Note: I am aware that I have just outed myself as a bad literary scholar by referring not to the names of the characters of the Forster novel (of course I don't remember the names of the characters) but to the names of the famous actors who played them in the movie (Julian Sands? Come on. I was a 17-year-old girl in 1985. Of course I remember Julian Sands). You might suspect that I am the sort of academic who has read People magazine on occasion. As cultural critique, you know. Perhaps I am even the sort of academic who sits in her room with a view reading Bergdorf Blondes, but hides it under a copy of Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds whenever she hears anyone coming. Perhaps. I'm not telling. I'm in enough trouble already.)

Never mind the shared facilities. Never mind the cot. I would not be a princess; I would be a plucky heroine, the type who marches across muddy fields with no thought of her skirts and never complains of the cold. I would sit by my window and contemplate the natural world. I would manage.

(Perhaps I could avoid using the facilities entirely. It was only three days, right?)

I hauled on the door till it opened a crack, stuck my foot in the space and slipped through, and tripped off to our Welcome Meeting, where we were applauded for travelling such long distances in the interests of scholarship and collegiality. We were also given some advice: all room and house doors must be kept locked at all times, and our keys must be kept about our persons. This was especially important in the current High Thief Season because, it seemed, the front door key really did open all of the room doors as well. We were further advised that it would be collegial to refrain from entering one another's rooms uninvited with our magic keys.

Meal times were announced. "Please be prompt for meals," the organizing person said. "We have a great deal to do, and we don't want to waste too much time eating."

Oh.

I went to some talks. I encountered a pair of drunken locals wandering around the bedrooms, trying doors. I met a friend who teaches in a town nearby, and we had burgers at a pub near the river. (I tried not to think about Mad Cow Disease, and took comfort in the fact that all the prions must surely have died in the eight hours or so that this burger seemed to have been cooked). We went rowing on the river (upon which occasion I was shamed by the women of the local sculling team and drove us into the riverbank three times and a bridge twice and was quite unable to return us to the dock and ended bathed in sweat and nearly lost my shoe, but otherwise it was very lovely and evocative and all that). We looked at the cathedral.

Then I went back to the college, and locked the door behind me, and felt my way up the pitch-black stairs. I took a shower in the shared facilities (at which time I learned that prefab showers in England are apparently made for garden gnomes, and that, for this reason, I would definitely not be shaving my legs until the shared facilities were well behind me). Then I made myself a cup of tea, and sat down by the window in my Room with a View to finish working on the talk I was giving the next morning.

It gets dark very late in Yorkshire in the summer: it's not dusk till 10 pm or so, and not properly dark till nearly 11. I was jet-lagged and travel-worn, but as I gazed out over the garden in the gloaming, the soft light and cool air acted as a balm on my ragged nerves. Somewhere nearby, a choral group was rehearsing. I breathed deeply. I sat back in my chair, my feet up on the windowsill.

Five minutes later, a bat bounced off my foot and flew away screaming.

Me too.

The garden, I now saw (once I had finished hyperventilating and could see anything again), was one big old bat party. Suddenly, the sky had absolutely filled with them: diving, swooping, screaming, flying off in packs, flying back in packs, taking off on their own to show off their stuff, doing wheelies right past my window at a hundred miles an hour.

I don't like bats. I have never liked bats. There were several instances of bats being caught indoors in my childhood (through the cottage door; down the chimney) and they never ended well. I remember being on a sleepover at day camp when I was eight or so. Bats were circling high above the playground where we were hanging out, and two of the counsellors spent some quality time sitting beside me and talking about the real vampire bats from South America, the ones that bite cows. Then they moved on to the chupacabra story, and the thing about bats getting tangled in long hair, and so on. It was a long time ago, but those things make an imprint on the young mind. I don't like flying things that sleep upside down and fly around screaming all night. I have been to the bat cave at the museum (I didn't like it) and I know that most bats consume fruit or bugs or both, not blood, and I am aware that the tangled-in-the-hair thing is *probably* a myth, but I would prefer not to test this theory. Particularly not when I am a lone helpless female immured in her dormitory room. What if a bat got in and it couldn't get out and neither could I?

Especially since this was Yorkshire. Whitby was just down the road--the town where Dracula made landfall on his first trip to England, one dark and stormy night. The book doesn't talk too much about Dracula's eating habits in Yorkshire--it's just Lucy, Lucy, Lucy--but you know he didn't really count on her for nutrition, since it took her so long to un-die, so he must have had some take-out or something from the locals--so who knows whether any of these flying rats hurtling past my window are actually the undead spawn of the Dark Count? Especially since vampires need hallowed earth to sleep and the cathedral was just across the street and there were approximately five zillion graves over there and more hallowed earth than you could shake a stake at. I could almost smell the rusty aroma of blood on the air. I know a vampire has to be invited in and all that, but what if the bats hypnotised me, like Jonathan in Castle Dracula was hypnotised by the flying specks that turned out to be the sister vamps, and then--and then--

I wrestled the window shut as fast as I could.

Peering about in the flickering light, I tried to see if perhaps a tiny bat had got in without my knowing it. I balanced on tiptoe on the cot and tried to see the top of my head in the mirror, since I was sure I felt something scrabbling around in there, getting tangled in my hair, panicking, getting ready to bite....

I took a deep breath and told myself to be calm. I tried sitting at the desk, turned away from the window, and working on my presentation; but I kept fancying I saw a pair of bright eyes at the glass. I willed myself not to do that perverse thing that makes you want to step off of high buildings and think an invitation to the vampire. But of course all I could think about was words that concerned inviting a vampire in. You know how that is?

I had a strong desire to ring for the maid.

Finally, I concluded that there was nothing to do but read a page or two of Bergdorf Blondes and--terrifying as I knew it would be--shut the lights out and try to sleep.

It was unseasonably warm in Yorkshire. Because it is never warm in Yorkshire, and because the English don't believe in such things, my Room with a View of Flying Vampire Rats was equipped with neither air conditioning (you're kidding, right?) nor a fan of any type. As I lay in bed, listening for scratchings on the window and low, diabolical laughter, peering through the darkness for glowing red eyes, the temperature in the airless room crept up towards the eighties. I was faced with a dilemma: do I open the window (and leave space for the bats to get in and suck my blood) or do I slowly suffocate in the heat?

Thank God for Ambien, is all I have to say. Only 20 mgs of the stuff (just four times my usual dosage!) and I drifted blissfully off to sleep. As I slipped away, I remembered wondering, idly, just how long it would take them to find me after (a) my heart stopped from the heat or (b) my throat was ripped open. I was saved from my usual pre-conference-talk nightmares (lost paper; unfinished paper; stupid paper resulting in loud, Pink-Floyd's-The-Wall style jeering faces) by the advent of a brand-spankin'-new series of swarms-of-vampire-bat nightmares.

I won't bore you with the story of how I woke up at 5 am. I'm not going to talk about the true horrors of the meals I was faced with in the dining hall (in part because I cannot describe food that I cannot in any way indentify--suffice to say that I began to understand why people drink so much in England, and that the cryptic legend on my fridge now made all kinds of sense). I won't get into the story of how I broke my glasses twenty minutes before I was scheduled to give my paper. Nor will I dwell on the fact that the cool kids didn't hang with me even though I stayed in the dorm (maybe because I didn't go to enough events? Like the brass band concert. Or the organ recital. See? I'm a bad academic. I was busy sitting up on a bench by the cathedral, reading Bergdorf Blondes (cleverly hidden inside the cover my Trollope book), and idly wondering about the current inhabitants of the six-hundred-year-old graves behind me).

I also won't tell you about the walk to the train station, which the porter swore would only take ten minutes, but which took me nearly an hour, because there happened to be festival in the high street--something involving union banners and five million people and a beauty queen--and there was I with my rolling luggage on the cobblestones. We won't get into the screaming child or his barking dog all the way to London in the Quiet Car. Nor will I describe the armpits of the man I was pressed against on the tube all the way from Paddington to Earl's Court, which is quite a long way if you think about it.

I don't remember much of what followed, but I'm told that the maid found me prone on the bed, in my London hotel room, clutching a plush robe to my chest and gripping the remote to the air conditioner, the mini-bar bottles all arrayed around me like little glass dolls. Apparently, I was mumbling, "400-thread count! Soaking tub!" I am told that I called room service seventeen times in the first half hour, and that I ordered everything on the menu, including the children's meals and breakfast. And though I don't remember (ah, Ambien!), my one true love tells me that I continue to have nightmares, during which I grab the sheets, shake them in some invisible antagonist's face, and cry, "Frette linens! Frette linens! You shall not enter here, you nasty flying rat!"

back to the rabbit hole...

Alice is Skipping Town

2006-07-04T23:03:00.000-04:00

...she's off to the land of crumpets and clotted cream and football hooligans.
See y'all in a couple of weeks!
xox
Alice

that wacky, wacky internet world

2006-07-04T01:57:00.000-04:00

One of my oldest and dearest friends drew my attention to this. He's got a short post about it on his fabu blog. just...yep. take a look. yep.

How Alice Got Her Glow On (In Which Our Heroine is Afflicted)

2006-07-01T21:30:00.000-04:00

It's a beautiful evening in New York City: breezy, cool, temperate. Lovely.

The husband and I have just arrived home from dinner at a tiny, delicious restaurant in the West Village, where we shared a half-bottle of wine. And a beer. And some sambuca. Plus we had dessert twice, since on the way home we passed a new ice-cream-and-sorbet place on East 10th Street, and they make the ice cream themselves, and how could you not?

As a result, we walked all the way home. A lovely walk through the night city.

Husband is now blithely playing guitar. I am propped up directly in front of the air conditioner, attempting to cool off my feet. I expect that I will stop sweating enough to make a shower worthwhile sometime in the next half-hour or so, as long as I drink a great deal of cold water and don't exert myself by--for instance--standing up.

Ah, summer in the city.

Sweating is perhaps my third least favorite activity, right behind budgeting and dental surgery. And everything, it seems, makes me sweat. I perspire in the winter, under my coat, at the same moment that I'm so cold I can't feel my extremities. I break into a sweat when I'm startled (by, for instance, a cab running a red light as I'm crossing the street--or a homeless crazy person yelling to himself--or a barking dog locked in an upstairs apartment--or a rat skittering across my path from a pile of garbage bags. In other words, by everything). I sweat when I worry, which is of course all the time.

I regularly slide off my extra-sticky yoga mat ("the one we sell a lot of big guys who are just starting out with their practice," the nice woman who sold it to me informed me helpfully). Sometimes even in headstand. Because of all that sweat pouring out of the top of my head.

(Do you sweat from the top of your head? No, really).

I don't know exactly what it is about me. I'm not a particularly heavy person; I drink lots of water; I don't remember my parents ever sweating much (although my parents don't walk much, either: they drive. Sitting still. In the air conditioning). I dress appropriately, in layers, and I shed. I put my hair up. Still, I arrive everywhere looking as though I've gone for a swim.

This is not a new problem for me. I wasn't the kid who peed in her snowsuit--I was the kid who fainted from heat prostration on the snowbank. In high school, my best friend used to change when she got to school--pink sweatpants to mohawk and ripped fishnets in ten easy steps--to avoid getting grounded. My parents never punished me for what I was wearing (they took the wise tack of laughing at me instead), but I pretended that they would. "They just don't understand," I would whine (as I slathered blusher on my eyelids and outlined my lips with black eyeliner and hung a basketball-net-sized hoop from my left ear). But in truth, I changed in the bathroom to avoid invoking memories of gym class all day long. I have considered that surgery where one gets one's sweat glands cauterized, but in my case, this would involve my entire body, and I imagine that I would end by melting my internal organs (which would look something like the Wicked Witch of the West's signal moment, except possibly not green, and would inevitably take place on the subway, where everybody would look away except for the guy who was busy exposing himself).

But while I understand that my glowing is epic, I still don't understand why I'm alone in my affliction in the Manhattan summer. In July, this island reverts to its swamp days; it's like a tropical rainforest, only without the trees. The sun bounces off the pavement so intensely that small children and little dogs are in danger of frying in place when their adults keep them standing in one place for too long. And it's thick out--like a London fog in the coal-burning years. Some days, you need to feel your way through the streets by clutching the sides of buildings. People loom suddenly out of the haze; the cries of old people and little ones, lost and lonely, sound through the city, muffled, always already fading. Subway platforms are roaring mouths of hell. In the East Village, roads melt.

All anyone talks about, it seems, is the weather. Getting out of it. How to bear it. When it will end. If it will ever end. The horrors of global warming.

And yet, at noon on a 90-degree day (with, say, 110 % humidity) I find myself shluffing across the sidewalks at Union Square, my shirt sticking to my back, my very feet sweating in their flip-flops, surrounded by people who look...crisp. Comfortable. Professional. Well-put-together. Not, in other words, warm.

Men in three-piece suits stand on the subway platform, fully jacketed and buttoned, as calm and relaxed as though they were treading water in a cool, clean, shark-free ocean, perhaps sipping a complicated frozen alcoholic drink. Women stride down the sidewalks, long not-frizzy hair swinging in the not-breeze, makeup intact, wearing--ready?--jeans. And not those newfangled "summer-weight" jeans, either. Oh no--we're talking classic denim winter-weight ones. Which are not sticking to their legs. Or weighing them down so they can barely move. Or causing them, for instance, to faint dead away in front of those people with the stray dogs in stacks of cages at the corner of the park.

I have many theories as to how this is possible. I wonder if people wear tiny expensive air conditioners under their clothes, powered by the sun,the controls hidden, perhaps, in their iPods or Blackberries. (No self-respecting New Yorker would ever walk around wearing one of those Sharper Image fan/cooler contraptions around her neck. Not even me). Or maybe it's possible to botox your pores. Or this is some new club drug that I haven't heard about yet, which also makes sex last for two or three days at a time, the only drawback being that your entire body is numb. Or maybe everybody has actually fled to the Hamptons or down the shore and programmed clever mechanized atavars to stand in for them in order to sustain the all-important impression that New Yorkers work all the time. Or they have all been replaced by aliens without sweat glands. This being New York, all of this could be true. (Particularly the botox).

My husband says it's a question of genes: some people, he says, are just programmed to perspire. I see right through his delicate euphemism: he means Jews, who seem to have held on to that Mediterranean heat-displacement mechanism through some 2000 years of freezing cold Polish and Russian diaspora. (My people have also proudly retained their ability to sprout excessive Mediterranean-style facial and body hair, unchanged by all those centuries of exposure to fair-haired goyim who only really need to shave once a week or so. Traditiooooon...tradition!). But New York is full of Jews--and Italians, and Greeks, and assorted other southern-heritage types. There are dark-haired, dark-eyed, prominent-nosed folk everywhere you look. J-Date has a fifty-foot billboard in Times Square. I don't think WASPs are even allowed south of 23rd Street. So why am I the only one sweating?

I have tried many remedies. For instance, I resolved to sip a cold drink whenever I walked anywhere. After two blocks, my iced coffee was boiling merrily away in my grip. I tried those little blotting papers they sell at Sephora, which first of all are clearly intended for sweaty elves. They stuck to my face and refused to peel off, leaving me resembling the survivor of a terrible shaving accident. I tried carrying a fan, a lovely fashion accoutrement I picked up in Valencia, in one of those amazing old stores with shelves and shelves of boxes of fans, from floor to ceiling. Elegant women conferred in low voices with the clerks. The sun came through the blinds in slats. I pictured myself waving my fan languidly, coyly, like those Spanish roses in the old movies. Know what? That thing about using more energy to fan yourself than you generate in cool air with the fan? It's true.

I decided that maybe it was because I'm too stressed-out. That maybe all those non-sweating people were just moving less. Summer, I concluded, was the season to let it go. Slow down: you move too fast, like the man says. I concentrated on my breathing, pledged to enjoy the journey, walked in the shade. It took me twice as long to go anywhere. My husband complained that his legs were cramping from taking such tiny steps. Little old ladies in wigs and fur coats whipped by me, pushing their shopping carts. They were cool and collected, chattering away to their molting dogs, snapping at imaginary friends. I was sweating like a pig.

I have concluded that there's nothing to do but stay inside until the heat subsides, sometime in mid-September. That must be what all the other genetic perspirers are doing: it's not that I'm the only one who sweats; I'm just the only one stupid enough to go out. No more. I will order in; conserve energy by dressing in my underwear every day; watch National Geographic Explorer shows about Arctic expeditions and assaults on snow-capped mountains in Nepal (people actually freeze to death! Can you imagine? Ahhh). Meanwhile, I will search the internet and conduct experiments in my kitchen, seeking that elusive philosopher's stone, that alchemical magic, the cure for the common sweat: the truth, the serum, the potion that will set all of us, prostate on the floor before our overworked air conditioners, free. Perspirers of Manhattan, unite! You have nothing to lose but your frizzy hair and your sweaty feet!

back to the rabbit hole...

Better Living Through Medicine (in which Our Heroine Greets the Dawn)

2006-06-28T00:49:00.000-04:00

A great tragedy has befallen our house. I have run out of Ambien.

This has afforded me the opportunity to read long Victorian novels, watch That Seventies Show, and look up people I disliked in high school online.

Also I have a great deal of time to lie awake and worry.

I am a champion night worrier. Abject panic at 3 am is my primary sport.

For example: "What if this bug bite on the inside of my calf which I just noticed and which is now for sure going to itch all night long is West Nile Virus? Or Lyme Disease? Or what if it's both? From a supermosquito? Or what if Ebola has made it to the U.S. and the government is keeping it quiet so we don't panic? What if scratching makes it worse?"

Or:

"What if I didn't do the paperwork right when I sold my Volvo to that strange guy in Vancouver back in '92, and actually it' still in my name, and he gets in an accident, like for instance he gets drunk and decides to ramp down one of those huge Vancouver hills with the lights off in the dark--which I can totally see him doing--and there's a kid hitch-hiking like there always is in Vancouver and he mows right into him and the kid bounces off the windshield and the car ends up off the road with its front end in a tree and also of course the guy isn't wearing a seatbelt and it's technically all my fault?"

or:

"What if that twinge in my shoulder isn't really an old swimming injury? What if it's actually bone cancer? And I have chemo and all my hair falls out? And I can't do yoga anymore or the gym and after chemo I actually get really fat? And I'm fat and bald and can't lift my arm? And nobody will love me?"

or:

"What if the immigration people find out about that shoplifting incident from third grade and all the crazy people in my family history and they revoke my citizenship?"

My husband thinks sleeping is simple. He thinks that even for people like me, without any talent for the thing, it's just a matter of training and willpower. "I read that you shouldn't watch tv for an hour before you go to sleep," he'll suggest helpfully (just as I'm settling in to watch WWF RAW!). He tells me that I shouldn't, perhaps, eat so much ice cream late at night. Deep breathing, he says, might be helpful. And not reading in bed. So my brain understands that bed is for sleeping.

My brain already understands that bed is for sleeping. It simply believes that sleep is for weaklings. If my brain had its way, there wouldn't be any beds. The spaces where the beds go now could be filled, perhaps, with large pits filled with earth, for digging. Or hot coals, for handstands.

My inability to sleep isn't anything new: I've been an insomniac since way back. When I was five or six, I remember lying awake at a sleepover party, looking around at all the other girls, passed out in their sleeping bags on the basement floor. The daylight, I was sure, was just creeping in under the window. I'm never going to sleep, I thought, weeping quietly. I'm the last person in the world who's awake. I'm all alone. I'm never going to sleep and I'm going to DIE.

After a while, I stopped being able to go on sleepovers. Or, to be more accurate, nobody's mother would let me sleep over because I got so upset about being the last person left awake in the world that I projectile vomited.

My mother took me to a doctor who told me that

a) I would grow out of it, and
b) if I couldn't sleep, I was supposed to lie still with my eyes closed and imagine a blank page. Then if anything appeared on the page, I was supposed to imagine it being erased until the page was blank again. Then I was supposed to keep imagining the blank page.

The good thing about adulthood is that the throwing up thing got pretty much under control.

The other good thing is that after a while it was no longer the seventies, so people stopped saying things like "imagine a blank page" and started offering me pharmaceuticals.

Before offering me pharmaceuticals, the doctor always asks, "is there a lot of stress in your life right now?"

The thing about not sleeping, in my life, is that it's not caused by stress. It is stress. Also it causes stress. Like when I don't sleep and then I break things, like my ankles. Or I yell at strangers on the street when they get in my way by, for instance, walking.

My insomnia is caused by genetics. A gift, to be precise, from my mother. (Of course).

My mom is the world's greatest late-night angster, the sport's true champion--perhaps of all time. Of course, my mother, being a mother, is able to externalize her hysteria--to project it, that is, on her children. Particularly on her wayward children. Particularly, that is, on me. When I was sixteen or seventeen, I used to stay up late writing tortured poetry and wishing I was understood, and then I would burn incense to help me relax and fall asleep. (This is, by the way, no more effective than imagining a blank white page, and perhaps more likely to induce projectile vomiting). I would turn out the light. I would set the alarm. I would light a match, hold it to the incense stick, blow the flame to embers. Three wisps of smoke would be emitted. Four seconds later, a sharp rapping on my door would commence. "Are you smoking drugs in there?" my mother would croak furiously. "I was awake and I can smell that in my room! You're going to counselling, young lady!"

When I moved into my first apartment, my mother would call me and say things like, "I was lying awake last night, about 2 or 2:30, thinking about where you should put your couch. I really don't think that it belongs in the middle of the room like that, dear: you're cutting off the flow."

I am fairly certain she remained awake the entire time I backpacked through Europe.

Computers have been a great boon to my mother: where once she was held back by long-distance charges, spurious but widely observed conventions about appropriate telephone calling hours, the space-time continuum, etc, thanks to email, she is now able to worry for and about her children twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, no matter where they might be in the world. Also it affords opportunities for research. Consider a recent late-night email message to all of us (without salutation or introduction):

Please read the attached article about Teflon and other
coatings (especially on kids' clothes). Also do NOT heat anything up in the microwave in a plastic container - use a dish - and no saran in the microwave.
Also keep your gas tanks filled: when there is a power outage you will not be able to fill up your cars.
Love, Mommy
P.S. Please speak to your father about how to prepare your houses for the Bird Flu Epidemic.

Efficient! Straightforward! And without the distractions of backtalk! The Internet is such a great tool for modern living.

But I understand--I'm not judging--because I was well on my way to challenging my mother's record when I embarked on my project of better living through sedative-hypnotics. But then: magic! Take a little white pill--take half a little white pill--and my concerns about heavy metals in the water or that thing I said to the budget director at the Christmas party three months ago just disappear into the darkness. Bliss.

Or so I thought. But now that I've run out of pills, and I've had a night or two to surf the web while I wait for my doctor to send along a new prescription, I've discovered a whole new problem: sleep-eating. Apparently, people take Ambien; and then they go to sleep; and then while they're knocked out on the drug, and totally not in control of their own actions, in fact unconscious, they get up and eat everything in the kitchen! Apparently, this is an epidemic. One woman gained a hundred pounds before she figured it out.

So what if I get my new prescription...and I take a pill...and then secretly, without knowing it, I'm wandering into the kitchen in the middle of the night and randomly eating things? And of course I'll get fat right away, because I get fat just by looking at carbs, and I won't even know why, and then what if I get depressed and can't work, and I lose my job, and I end up sitting outside Penn Station with a United Homeless Organization can? Or what if I start eating cheese or chugging milk from the carton in my sleep? And my lactose intolerance makes me so sick but I don't know that I'm eating dairy so I don't think it's sick from milk, and I get misdiagnosed and end up having unnecessary surgery, and I'm in the hospital and I get an infection because everybody gets infections in hospitals, and it's flesh-eating disease?

And isn't that the dawn light creeping under the blinds there?

Excuse me. I'm feeling a little queasy.

back to the rabbit hole...

The White Rabbit's Refrain (In Which Our Heroine is Entombed by Technology and Learns to Love the Stopwatch)

2006-06-26T23:23:00.000-04:00

My dad just got a new tv. One of those fancy flatscreen HDTV dealies. 57 inches or thereabouts (ah, the suburbs). "He loves it," my mom says. "He's still reading the manual. There are so many buttons!"

Then my dad gets on the phone. "You know what I really enjoy?" he says. "I really enjoy the TVR function. I can start TVR'ing a baseball game, for instance. Then I can watch it later--with no commercials--and it takes half the time!"

My dad has a thing about time. He was, I suspect, the first person in our entire city to own a digital watch with a timer function. He times his commute to work every single day--to the second. He times plane trips, and meetings, and restaurant meals (in segments: courses, service) and sporting events. When we were kids, he timed how long my sisters and I took in the bathroom and how much time it took us to get down for breakfast in the morning. I have known him to time sunsets.

Though he isn’t an impatient man in an ordinary sense—will spend hours explaining math problems to a small child (or, for that matter, to me), plays chess, enjoys sitting quietly on the back deck with a glass of wine—my father, unsurprisingly, does not like traffic jams, long lines, or slow service, and will go to considerable lengths to avoid them. Restaurants without lots of parking are not an option. Neither is valet parking—it can take forever. When traveling by plane, he prefers to wear all of the items which won’t fit into his carry-on bag, one on top of another, rather than checking a suitcase and waiting for it at his destination. Fortunately, he is not a bulky man to begin with.

When we were kids, and we went to Florida on vacation, we used to start the two-hour drive from our vacation rental to Disneyworld at 5 am. One year, we were there before the gates opened. Which was great, because we were The Very First People In DisneyWorld! When we got inside, there was a plan: we started with the stuff furthest from the entrance and worked our way backwards, so that we beat the biggest lines. My dad likes to film things: we have some great footage of the sun coming up over the park, my sisters and I propping each other up in front of one ride or another, the youngest weeping quietly. In one extended shot, the camera pans from the cheerful waving, singing mannequins in It’s A Small World After All to my middle sister, slumped over the edge of the little coaster-car, unconscious. In another, my mother seems to be wandering in circles outside a dolphin show.

My father has been on my mind today because of the thing with the elevator. It is currently mostly hot in New York, and more than mostly humid, and apparently, in such weather, if you are an inferior type of elevator—if you are, for example, “not a goddamn Otis,” as my one true love put it—you get allergies, or swollen cords, or a brain tumor, or something. I am told that I should have noticed this years ago, but I seem to be a slow learner (it’s not like this hasn’t happened to me before—though that time I was between the seventh and eighth floors and I was all alone and the maintenance guys who finally responded to the call were arguing about whether cutting the power would or would not result in the cab crashing immediately to the basement—but that’s another story).

Anyway, so it was definitely hot and humid last night. Particularly inside the elevator, which is, incidentally, not air-conditioned. These are, by the way, brand new elevators. Our old elevators were the ones with the double doors: when the elevator got to your floor, the inner cab door would slide back, and then you would pull the outer door open. They were very elegant, Deco-style, except that management had decided to sheath their interiors in midnight blue shiny stuff a few years back. The new elevators, while they are much faster and not midnight blue or shiny inside, are not elegant. My neighbor calls them “project elevators,” because they look like the ones in public housing. Apparently those elevators don’t work so well, either—there are always stories in the papers of eighty-year-old pensioners who are forced to walk up twenty-seven flights of stairs with their groceries. And apparently they’re also upholstered on the inside in a mottled grey that reminds me of a three-day old zombie in the morning sun. In the elevator in question, the (brand-new) floor isn’t fitted right, and in one corner, you can see all the way down to the bottom of the shaft, but it’s not like you’re going to fall through or anything. At least not yet.

So at about midnight, my one true love and I are coming home from a very lovely dinner party, at which we’d consumed some excellent bistecca—very rare, very intense, just the way I like it—and some smuggled-in authentic Spanish Serrano and a fabulous flan and about twenty-seven litres of wine. So we’re feeling very happy with the world, but also just a little bit anxious to get upstairs to our apartment as quickly as possible. And perhaps just a little bit impaired in terms of our judgment.

My sweetie leans on the button for our floor and the button with the arrows indicating, “you can close the door anytime now. Really. Whenever you’re ready.”

The doors close.

The elevator goes up one level.

The doors opens at the upper lobby level. (Our building sits on a hill, and has two entrances).

My dear one leans on our button again. And the button with the arrows.

The door closes—most of the way. Not all the way.

The elevator goes nowhere.

My darling steps over to the door, presses his hands against the panel, and forces it closed.

The elevator—guess what?—goes—nowhere.

We press our floor button. It lights and goes out. We press it again. And again. Lights and goes out. Lights and goes out.

We press the button with the arrows indicating, “just hold on one second there, pal—we’re not quite ready to get going yet.” Nothing.

We press the “call operator” button, and the “call connected” light goes red, and a voice (a very young voice) says, “hello: security?” Just like that. Not “Hello, Security!” but the other thing.

“Hi: we’re stuck in the elevator at [I give our address],” I say, standing very close to the speaker.

“Hello?” queries the very young voice.

“Hello, can you hear me? We’re stuck in the elevator—” I try again.

Ten minutes later, the person on the other end of the crack security system in the excellent new elevator is On It.

12:45 am. My beloved has begun to eye my purse, measuring its properties as a waterproof vessel. I sit on it.

It is very warm in the elevator. Which is not air-conditioned (did I mention that?) Also, unlike every other elevator probably in the world (definitely unlike every Otis elevator in the world) it does not have a fan. I study the ceiling panel and wonder what I would make of it if I were Spiderman. Or that Tom Cruise character from the Mission: Impossible movies. At the moment, I would prefer to be Trinity from The Matrix, and not only because of the outfits. I shut my eyes. This elevator is not here, I think. C’est nest pas un elevator. It’s all in your mind.

If I’m just a human battery, I wonder, could I jump-start the thing? Would I need cables?

A nice person who was hoping to take the elevator wanders by, bangs on the door, and is rewarded with voices from inside the hot tin can. He tells us that he’ll call security, and he asks us how many of us there are, and then he is gone.

We should have lied, I tell my one true love. We should have told him there are eighteen of us in here, and we’re running out of oxygen. We should have said that at least two of us are pregnant and the stress is getting to us and we’re going to have our babies Right This Second In This Broken Elevator! That’s what we’ll say the next time someone asks.

We try my unreliable one-step-up-from-a-freebie camera-less, Internet-less, ringtone-less cellphone. Nothing.

We try his fancy-dancy fully loaded works-at-the-bottom-of-the-well (so you won’t miss a single email!) Blackberry. Still nothing.

I take off my shoes and sit on the floor. He is of the vociferous opinion that touching the floor of the elevator with my bare skin is uggy and will give me impetigo. I am of the opinion that my shoes hurt and I have to pee and sitting down makes everything better. Besides, the elevator looks much bigger from down here.

He tries to make the umbrella function as a fan.

I suggest we play word games, to pass the time.

He wields the umbrella menacingly.

He tries his Blackberry again.

We call the security operator on the call button again. “Hello? Security?” he says. “Where are you? Are you the people in the elevator? I can’t hear you? Which building are you in?”

At 1:15 am, we consider pressing the button of last resort: the one with the bell on it. The one that makes the alarm ring really, really loud, so that everybody knows that we are stuck in the elevator and somebody does something about it. But there are two problems with this approach:

We know from experience that our neighbors are a lot like Kitty Genovese’s neighbors. Nobody will hear nuthin.’

There is no way to turn the bell off once we have turned it on, and it will ring loudest…inside the elevator.

All in all, we figure we’re better off sitting on the floor planning our epitaphs. We figure we can make it for at least another day, having in our possession a pint of soymilk (plain; intended for breakfast) and a tin of cinnamon-flavored Curiously Strong Mints. We figure if the temperature goes up any more, we will lose so much liquid from our bodies through evaporation that the lack of toilet facilities will no longer be an issue. We reassure one another that sweat is actually nature’s way of cooling the body, not nature’s way of telling us that we are having a heat-induced heart attack.

At 1:45, we have stripped down to our skivvies and are lying flat on the floor, trying to find the last cool spots, when the door is suddenly assaulted by a thunderous weaponry. We scuttle to the far corner, clutching our sodden dinner clothes. The door creaks open an inch—two inches—a large hand appears, forces it all the way back, and holds it open courteously for us. Two faces peer in at us as we scramble into our shoes. “Thank you! Thank you!” we gasp, pouring ourselves out of the steaming cabin.

My sweetie sprints for the stairs at top speed. When I try to follow, the nice man in the security outfit stops me. “We need to take a report!” he says sternly. “What’s your name? What apartment are you in? What’s his name? What apartment is he in?” (pause) “Is he or is he not your husband?” (Yet another person who seems inexplicably put off by our failure to share a last name. What is this: the fifties?) “Now, do you know what time the elevator stopped like that, exactly?”

I think of my dad. I think of all the years I have laughed at him, with his stopwatch, his counting of seconds, his…preparation, planning, care. His ability to never, ever get stuck in an elevator.

“12:04 am,” I say, proudly, enunciating each word. “And forty-three seconds.”

I sign the report. I open the door to the stairway. I check my watch. Then I sprint up the stairs, clutching my soymilk.

Television Nation (in which Our Heroine goes to Columbia, snags a PhD, and finds herself addicted to What Not to Wear)

2006-06-23T23:08:00.000-04:00

("Shut up!" says Stacy.)

I could probably make a case for my tv habit as--say--research, if only I had a job in cultural studies. People with jobs in cultural studies can justify all kinds of stuff. ("Those charges from Chippendale's on my Visa? Oh, I'm teaching a course on contemporary masculinities! And don't worry--I'll get reimbursed for all those lapdances, hon. That there is research.")

I, however, teach 19th-century literature.

In fact, I am often shamed in class when I make a tv reference--a current tv reference--and none of my students have any idea what I'm talking about. I mean, I kind of think CSI is a pretty excellent metaphor for a lot of stuff. Say you're teaching Dracula, for instance. Blood, right? The role of science in making the world safe for humanity? Come on, people!

I mean, I'm not even talking about the obvious stuff here--Angel, Buffy. I could even make a case for Charmed.

Also South Park is perhaps the greatest teaching tool ever invented. I mean, the episode with the underpants gnomes? Underpants + ? = Profit ? I use that all the time.

My students look at me like I've got three heads. Apparently, they don't have time to watch cartoons. Or CSI. Or those A&E documentary-things about addicts who somehow agree to have their interventions shown on national television.

They're busy.

("Shut up!" says Stacy).

I'd like to think that I'm better than this. Sometimes I even believe it. Just the other night, I said to my husband, "boy, I must have been really depressed this winter. I just came home from yoga and sat in front of the tv--for hours!"

I thought I was over it. I thought I had better things to do. Conference papers to finish. Friends to call. Books to read. Crossword puzzles to conquer.

I think that was on Tuesday.

But perhaps I just wasn't ready yet. (Like those people on Intervention?)

Or maybe it's just that there's no good tv on Tuesday. Maybe even it was 11 pm when we had that conversation? That's a really bad slot, unless there's a Law & Order: CSI or SVU that I haven't seen yet on USA. Otherwise, it's just Crossing Jordan. And you can only watch Jordan endanger her life in order to get the forensic evidence to stick it to some baddie in memory of her poor dead mother so many times.

At times like that, you forget about how much you appreciate television.

So tonight. Tonight I went to yoga, and did a jump-back to chaturanga from Bakasana pose (if you have no idea what I'm talking about, try this. Now doesn't that look like fun?) , and worked on my handstand, and really rocked it (so to speak). And there I was, at the end of class, lying in shivasana. (That's "corpse pose," for those of you who don't, for some completely inexplicable reason, do yoga. I believe it's intended to prepare you for "when your body dies," as they used to say cheerfully at the bad evil karma place where I used to do yoga, before I decided I didn't want to be lectured by twelve-year-old trust-fund babies/yoga teachers about eating animals. But that's a story for another night, kids. Anyway. It looks kinda like this).

("We need to throw all of this out!" says Clinton).

Anyway. While you're lying in shivasana you're supposed to be relaaaaxing, but I'm usually thinking about what I'm going to eat for dinner or what I'm going to wear later (which is when Stacy and Clinton's tips come in really handy, not that I'm a candidate for the show or anything--!) So tonight, while I was supposed to be absorbing the benefits of my practice, I was busy planning the last bits of my extremely late conference paper--which I was definitely going to finish tonight--and thinking about where I would order dinner from--which I would definitely eat at the computer--and trying to figure out if I would have time to fit in a manicure at the late-night fabulous manicure shop on 3rd Ave--and if so, whether I would get back in time to call my 91-year-old grandmother who perhaps should demand more of my time than Family Guy, and whose phone calls I should definitely always take even if they do come in the last five minutes of Without a Trace just when Jack's about to wrap everything up.

I knew I could do it. I was so proud, already, lying there in shivasana, imagining myself not turning on the television at all. All night!

But then I just needed to cool down for a bit when I got home, and sometimes it just seems like you need a moment before you get in the shower, you know? And then I ordered dinner, and it's not like I can go in the shower after that, because I have to wash my hair and with my hair it takes some time, and what if the delivery person came while I was in the shower?

So then I turned on the tv. Just for a minute. 'Cause I didn't really want to get into a book and then have to stop reading, and you know you can't just pick up a paper you're working on for a minute. Just till the delivery came.

Just till I finished eating dinner.

Just till CSI was over.

But then--guess what? What Not to Wear was on!

And that woman from the Bronx who wore the psychedelic polyester shirts was in bad shape and really needed my support, and then there was that single mom/paralegal-in-training with the tight jeans who really just needed to feel good about herself, and I couldn't turn that off because that would be mean, and you should have seen her "after" look.

(Sometimes I tear up a little bit during the "reveal." I really do.)

And then it was 11:00 and I was still in my sweaty yogawear.

("You know, the Girls are almost down around your knees in that thing," says Stacy).

It seems amazing now, but there was a time when I scorned television. Yes, it's true: I did not have television. For like 10 years. Looking back, I can't imagine why it could possibly have taken me more than three months to write my dissertation, what with all the time I must have had on my hands. What was I doing?

(Drinking with the other grad students, my husband reminds me. Ah yes).

But, see, the thing is, technically, we did own a television. We just didn't get cable, and so, given our low-lying geography in terms of Manhattan apartments, that meant we didn't get any stations. We watched movies on it. And then, one summer a couple of years back, we went away on vacation, and when we got back, we found that our houseguests had rewired all of our electronics--and suddenly we got a little bit of tv. So of course we started watching it. Just late at night, you understand.

We were just...experimenting.

But after three months, we thought, this is kinda nice, and we've got it under control, and maybe it wouldn't be so terrible to have cable? Just so we wouldn't have to watch That Seventies Show all the time. So we got cable.

And then the husband wanted to get a new tv, because the old one was so aesthetically not pleasing apparently, and clearly the only aesthetically pleasing ones are big honkin' flat-screen 38-inch high-definition televisions that require their own wing. And then of course you need more cable, because you want to be able to watch Sunrise Earth in high def, right?

Unfortunately, it was only after we had invested all that time and money--only after the monkey was well and truly on our backs--that we realized that That Seventies Show was pretty much as good as television gets. But by then it was far, far too late.

So I struggle with my problem. At least I can take comfort in knowing that I'm not alone. Once I was at a conference at Princeton (yes, that Princeton), and I was having lunch with this guy who was on a panel with me--he was giving a very serious complicated theoretical paper on that big American book about the whale. You know. And we were talking about our jobs, and I mentioned how "some nights," I just want to come home and...watch Project Runway. And he immediately perked up--got more excited than I'd seen him the whole time at the conference!--and said, "didn't you think Santino totally deserved to win at the end?"

Which I totally did think!

But tomorrow? Tomorrow I'm gonna finish my conference paper, for real. I'm gonna read the Times from front to back, and I'm gonna do the weekend crossword (that's right, the hard one). Maybe I'll get that manicure. Maybe I'll go to the movies. But I'm not going to turn on that tv at all. Not even once.

("You go, girl!" says Clinton.)
(Shut up! says Stacy.)

Take the WNTW Fashion Challenge!

the bestest cookbook in the whole wide world

2006-06-23T11:18:00.000-04:00

My fabulous friend Mitchell Davis has a brand-spankin' new cookbook ! It's called Kitchen Sense, and it's pretty much about how to cook anything you would ever really want to cook, and it rocks. So does Mitchell, who is the newly minted vice-president of the James Beard Foundation, a regular contributor to food mags the world over and the author of two other cookbooks. He's also a genius, in case you were wondering.
Check out his first review. The book's on Amazon right this second.

Lift and Separate (In which Our Heroine takes to the dark place of the earth known as Spin Class)

2006-06-23T00:13:00.000-04:00

Hello. My name is Aliceinnewyorkland and I am a gymaholic.

There. I did it. That wasn't so bad.

As you can see, I have already taken the first step to recovery. (Feel free to affirm my healthy choices).

I've got a lot to overcome: nature and nurture both.

Take my grandmother, for instance. This is a woman who, at 91, still scoops the soft bits out of bagels because that's extra calories. She chews every bite twenty times to make sure that she slows down so she knows when her body is no longer hungry. She walks two miles, every day. Except when it snows. And then she complains. I think she clocks two miles around her living room on snow days.

Because she's going to get fat.

When I was 12 or 13, my grandmother used to take me to exercise classes at the JCC. This was the early 80s--the era of aerobicizing, legwarmers, leg lifts, feeling the burn, Jane Fonda. The classes were full of single women in their twenties--the sort of women who, had they been the exact same age in the year 2004, would have cried when Sex and the City ended. They had aggressively layered hair and perfect breasts and their leotards always matched their tights and their cut-off mini-t-shirts and their striped legwarmers and, usually, their shoes . My grandmother wore a pair of baggy sweatpants and a t-shirt and a headband. (I wore a pair of baggy sweatpants and a t-shirt and a headband). (She looked better in hers). She hummed along with the music; sometimes she sang. She Got Her Knees Up! Up! Up! She shadowboxed. She jumping jacked. She crunched. She got all the choreography, even the complicated stuff where you turned around and cut some fancy footwork and it was really an opportunity to pretend that you didn't get it so you could quit hopping for a second and catch your breath. She never stopped hopping. The girlies with the legwarmers and leotards didn't have a chance. Me neither.

My training in the world of exercise started early. Ballet lessons from age 4. (Did I tell you about the time my teacher tied my ankles together and made me hop around the very large studio in front of the whole class? To teach me that turning my feet out was a good idea? When I was six? And I tripped and also peed on myself?). Jazz dance classes. (On the other hand, I do a mean jazzhands). Swimming lessons. Swim team. Squash lessons. (In which Our Heroine discovers that eye-hand coordination is a vast right-wing conspiracy). Skating lessons. (In which Our Heroine discovers that she seems to have no bones in her ankles). Roller-skating. (Don't ask).

Then there was the ad-hoc stuff. I suppose today you would call these "opportunities for exercise." For instance, my mother would stop the car two miles from our house and tell us to walk home. "You all need to burn off some calories!" she would announce. (This was better than when she drove carpool and spent the ride explaining to us exactly how many holes girls have in their bodies, where they are located and what they are for. My mother was a gym teacher). Or she would send us two miles uphill, on foot, to buy milk. In those three-bag sacks. When I was ten. It was good for us.

In college, I lifted weights with the boys. (Girls didn't lift weights then. Except in porn movies). (And boys didn't seem to think it was hot). (The boys weren't so hot, either. One writer of my acquaintance worked out while reading a book--he even racked weights while reading. I met no fewer than five actuaries-in-training. And I ran into a boy I went to grade school with, who had always had social difficulties based primarily on his hygiene issues. He was now a rocket scientist--really--but some things never changed).

The hot girls took aerobics classes. The hot boys mostly stood around and watched them. Also in aerobics classes: professors. Failing to get their knees Up! Up! Up! Always stopping on the tricky turn-around stuff, usually because they tripped. Cheating on their sit-ups. Sometimes I would be in aerobics class, and there would be some complicated square-dance-based movement sequence, and there would be partners, and suddenly I would find myself standing next to the man who taught my post-colonial literature seminar. It was horrifying.

When I moved to New York, I discovered an amazing thing: gyms here are open twenty-four hours a day! Also I discovered a whole new set of Exercise Opportunities. For a time, I was a religious devotee of Spin class--in which Our Heroine clambered aboard a Really Uncomfortable stationary bike in a dark, sweaty room and pretended (with twenty or thirty other people and to the accompaniment of extremely loud music and, sometimes, slides of outdoor places where people actually ride real bikes) to be involved in a road race, a mountain climb, a bike ride through water, and some unlikely scenario involving a great deal of pumping of the upper body in push-up form while seated on the bike . There was group yelling--spontaneous and on command! There was yelping! Roaring! Group singing! I am a person who loathed summer camp, but here I was, soaked with sweat, possibly hallucinating, peddling on this stationary bike as fast as I could--at risk of serious injury to myself from flying bike peddles, even!--and singing "Rebel Yell" at the top of my lungs in tandem with twenty other people, some of whom periodically went, "Ahh--Yipyipyipyipyip!" or "Awhooooh-Heeee!"

I loved Spin class.

There were other classes. Step class. (In which Our Heroine discovered that whoever took her ankle bones had not yet returned them). Funk class. (Lots of white folk doing things they shouldn't). Hot Hip Hurray! class. (You can imagine. If you can't--don't try). I did them all. I followed teachers to gyms across the city. I fought for the prime spot in the corner next to the mirror. I dressed.

My grandmother would have been so proud!

Usually, after class, I would do weight machines for a while. And then I would lift free weights for a while. (The gym in New York was not like college. Men who lifted free weights did not read books while racking. Or, perhaps, ever. If they were actuaries, they were Incredible Hulk-style actuaries.) (Also they liked to pose in the mirror for themselves, and to run their hands suggestively over their own biceps and calf muscles.) There were now other women lifting weights. They tended to wear leotards and torn Flashdance-style t-shirts, but they looked nothing like the women with perfect breasts who were in my aerobics classes with my grandmother in the 80s. These women looked more like those walnut dolls. Also there was Drea de Matteo, who played Adrianna on The Sopranos and who was, in fact, like that in real life, as far as I could see--only with more tattoos. But she had a trainer, so it was different.

I made friends at the gym. We gossiped about teachers ("do you know she smokes?"). We subtly compared our weight-lifting regimens. ("Oh, I was doing three sets of twelve last week, but I just got so bored I figured I'd cut it to two and put on two more plates!") We did abs together. Now that--that' s a real bonding experience. I mean--friends for life.

I knew all the people who worked the desk. Guys with big headphones would slap me high-fives at 11 pm as I racked weights. The cleaners in the change room knew me. My husband and I had "dates" at the gym. My friends and I had "gym nights." Or sometimes "gym days."

You would think that, as a result of all of this, that I would look...fabulous! gorrrrgeous! Like a superstar model, baaaaybeeee!

No such luck.

I changed gyms. I changed gyms again. I upscaled and changed gyms again. (My new gym had much better towels, and the dressing room did not smell like pee. Many women put on makeup to exercise.)

My hips, they ached. My feet--they hurt. My belly--well, we won't talk about that. But it didn't cooperate. My butt, either.

One day, I had a revelation. There I was, on the machine floor, dutifully doing my leg presses. Next to me, a woman some twenty years older than me (at least) (I hope) worked the abs machine like a demon. She was chiselled. She was cut. She looked like an eighty-year-old drag queen. A little ways down the gym floor, a group of twentynothing models idly played with the thigh machine. They put one plate on. They took it off. One of them sat on the thing and moved the abductor panels a teeny tiny bit. "I'm here every single day," one of them pouted, "and I still look like this." She plucked at the place where her belly would have been, had she been of human born. "I know," another said, "but today we're really working!" Then they went and sat on the stretch mats for a while. They weighed 23 pounds, together.

Later, they went outside to smoke cigarettes and pinch the fat on their thighs.

That was the end, for me. I saw my future, and it was not blonde, dressed in pink shortshorts and giggly. Oh, the horror.

I gave up my prime locker space. I downgraded to a less fabulous gym. I discovered the joys of watching television while moving at a reasonable pace on an aerobic machine (instead of jumping up and down and Getting My Knees Up like a runaway member of the lost tribe of the Spice Girls). I thought about what to do with all of my brand-new spare time. (We got cable). I did not weigh myself.

And then I discovered...yoga.

I can stand on my head. I am working on Flying Crow, and also on handstand-in-the-middle-of-the-room. I can do 108 vinyasas in a row.

My grandmother would love it.

adventures in new york city wildlife

2006-06-21T18:02:00.000-04:00

Some people seem to be are under the impression that Gotham is a place out of the natural world--that all animal life has been banished from our concrete meadows and steel-and-glass cliffs. Like Gattika, if you will.

Oh, if only.

I like wildlife as much as the next totally phobic person, I suppose. I had a cat once. (It gave me scabies. Also flea bites). I go hiking. (We sing loud songs to keep bears and mountain lions away. I realize that mountain lions generally only attack children, but I'm not very big). (I am also aware that there is one type of bear that is kept away by singing and other loud noises, and another type of bear that is kept away only by playing dead. If you get it backwards, you're toast. I religiously read up on the differences before every vacation). I like birds. (But not when they start singing at 5 am.)

But if you're looking to escape from the natural world, the Big Apple is not the best place for you: it's crawling with fauna. New York is an ecosystem in its own right, plentifully supplied with habitats and food. We've got everything a wild animal could ever dream of: vacant lots filled with waist-high grass and trash; crumbling buildings fronted, several days a week, by easily penetrated refuse bags; a network of tunnels runnning under the city, rich with stuff dropped on the subway tracks; and then there's the take-out garbage, the apartment garbage, the dropped-food garbage, the restaurant garbage, the deli garbage...it may be tough to make it here for humans, but for most of God's creatures great and small, New York City is the land of plenty.

Our ecosystem is fairly complete. At the top are the predators. These include hawks, who live on the roofs of buildings (and sometimes on the terra cotta detailing over the doors: check out the Saga of Pale Male and Lola, the problematic squatters with the front-page rep at the gazillion-dollar Beresford co-op on 5th Avenue: http://www.palemale.com/). Wild dogs live in vacant lots in Hell's Kitchen; on occasion, coyotes are spotted in Central Park (http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/04/01/coyotes/index_np.html).

These predators feed on the little guys: squirrels (shamelessly colonizing every green space in the city, and all well-versed in the art of begging from tourists and senior citizens); rabbits (generally the catch-and-release kind that comes from pet stores and makes a quick detour to a kid's bedroom); ferrets (ditto--though these are illegal here, and generally the kids are bigger); hamsters (see rabbits); and turtles (mixed provenance--wild and via apartment-house plumbing).
I am under the impression that those famous alligators in the sewers--the other famous species of flushed pet--are apocryphal, but I don't know for sure. http://www.sewergator.com/lit/world_beneath_the_city.htm.

And then, of course, there are the feral parrots of Brooklyn. Yes, really.
http://www.brooklynparrots.com/ .

My favorite factoid about the Brooklyn parrots: in Greenwood cemetary, the staff encourage parrot communities because parrots keep the pigeons away. Darwin in action--social and otherwise!

Rats, of course, can live anywhere. In the walls; in the sewers; under the sidewalk. Once I saw a two-foot-long rat (I swear) emerge, submarine-like, from a puddle. Another time, I was working in my office late at night, looked down, and found one next to my foot. He was working his way steadily out of a glue trap. One foot at a time. He was very calm.

I was not calm.

The security guard refused to touch it. Apparently, marauding rodents do not constitute a security issue, however insecure they might make me.

One of my students took it away. She picked the glue trap by the rat-tale end and walked out with it, rolling her eyes. When I asked, in a teeny-tiny voice, what she was going to do with it, she just rolled her eyes again.

Yes, I know. Pathetic.

Mice are better than rats, definitely. But you still don't want them in your kitchen. Nor do you want to be there--alone--when one of the little sweeties springs the trap you have set for him and gets his poor little head crushed.

At the bottom of the food chain, there are, of course, cockroaches--the most populous inhabitants of our fair city. They come in a number of shapes and sizes, from teeny-tiny dots (all over your kitchen when you flick on the light) to ginormous and flying (and given, in our experience, to landing on your bare back through the open window in the middle of the night if you are unfortunate enough to live in the slum dwellings known as Columbia University graduate housing). (I will refrain from telling you about the infestation in our Columbia apartment, precipitated by the creepy old man down the hall, who brought home undergraduate girls and occasionally peed on himself).

Of course, you can always turn them into pets--or fashion statements--or both! as this enterprising gentleman has: http://www.blackchandelier.biz/servlet/the-121/Giant-Madagascar-Hissing-Cockroach/Detail or http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/62378.htm .

In recent years, we have mercifully been spared most invasions of wildlife in our very own home. Until today. This morning--early this morning--my best beloved went to take the garbage out of the bin in the kitchen. He shrieked. Which he doesn't often do.

I dropped my teacup and ran for the kitchen.

He held up the garbage bag, wordless. It was covered with tiny pale...dots.

They were moving.

There were not, so to speak, bugs.

No, my friends, these were...soon to be bugs. Former eggs. Larvae.

In other words: maggots.

In my kitchen. During breakfast.

Please note: this is not CSI. No one has recently died in my apartment. There are no bloody bits in my garbage can.

Also we clean the kitchen. Regularly. Really.

And while I am aware of the recent rediscovery of the miraculous abilities of maggots (http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/050419_maggots.html), now offered as wound-healing facilitators in a number of local hospitals, I was having trouble keeping their miraculous medicinal properties at the front of my mind.

I have spent the rest of the day being swarmed periodically by little tiny flies--fruit flies, I think--which remind me unpleasantly of grade 12 biology, when we cultivated fruit flies for a project, and one kid stored his in his locker, and they got loose, and things were never the same in that hallway.

And now I'm afraid of my kitchen.

Are there bugs in space?

it's a will, will, will, will world (or: How Mr Shortz Stole My Groove)

2006-06-21T00:06:00.000-04:00

I am, of course, well aware that people who do crossword puzzles are geeks.
I know this not only from what you might call "lived experience" (I ride the subway), but from an expert source, having recently spent a year or two watching the less-than-two-hour-long movie Wordplay (my fabulous friend Norman The Movie Genius has a review), a film about crossword puzzles and the people who love them.
Many of the people featured in the film remind me of all the reasons I don't want to move back to the Upper West Side. Lots of big prints and big glasses and big pleated skirts on the women. Big glasses on the men, too. And big pants. Mostly a whole lot of big.
These were the people who competed at the annual crossword competition at a Marriott somewhere out in the wilds of Connecticut. 48 hours of nothin' but puzzles, and the chance for the fastest solver to Take Home the Trophy!
(Is there a trophy? I didn't see any trophy. Maybe these people don't believe in trophies? Possibly they're afraid of the sharp edges? Or perhaps there are concerns about upper-body strength? I hear those Oscars are heavy.)
Anyway. My point is that I am well aware that people who are serious about crossword puzzles are also people who tend to lecture strangers in restaurants about obscure points of political history, to carry NPR tote bags, and to apply for membership to Mensa. This is not me. I have spent many, many years not being this type of person, even though I have a graduate degree in English literature, a fact--a state of being--that constantly threatens to overwhelm me and must be fought with intensive clothes-shopping, liberal use of an iPod, and the judicious application of artisanal soap.
Nevertheless. I have begun to do crossword puzzles.
It wasn't, I should note, of my own volition. I was drawn in by the man who claims to love me. Late that night, long, long after my better judgement had taken itself off somewhere to watch Family Guy, he picked up New York magazine flipped to the crossword. This is a page I don't ever remember visiting before--far, far beyond the Approval Matrix and the Ask a Shop Clerk column ("What's your favorite item in the store?" "Oh, definitely the lime-green braided hairshirt. It's so hot it just flies out the door"). "Hey, what's a six-letter synonymn for 'wallabee habitat'?"
I have a PhD in English. I read People magazine and The New Yorker. I am a cuhltaaahed New Yorker. I seized the pencil.
Sixty-seven minutes later, I was still trying to remember who Danny Kaye's father-in-law might be while simultaneously trying to reconcile a five-letter word for "as if" (12 down) with a fourteen-letter word for "utterly ridiculous" (15 down).
Last night I did the New York Times Monday puzzle. The Monday puzzle is, as everybody apparently knows, the Easy Puzzle. I did not solve it in three minutes.
Tonight, sitting at dinner in a cool little West Village boite with other cuhltaahed New Yorkers, I found my mind drifting as the conversation turned to Iraq and the budget and Hilary's chances. I thought, I wonder how tough Tuesday is. I thought, I bet I can do it in an hour. The pasta was cleared. The coffee arrived. I don't remember how I got home--just a vague memory of swimming through the East Village summer streetscape (bars, twelve-year-olds with cigarettes, garbage, upscale tenements, bars) as I worked on figuring out what Ghengis Khan would buy in a supermarket (10 letters).
Tomorrow, I'm gonna get a stopwatch.