Sunday, January 29, 2006
Houston, We Have Apartment
We have an apartment, wooo! On February 15th, Amy and I will officially be Hell's Kitchen residents, and I couldn't be more excited. The neighborhood looks lovely, the place is BEAUTIFUL, and there are tons of perks, such as a working fireplace, roof access, and a key to the wonderful garden down the block. All this is thanks to our awesome broker, Alex. If you're looking for a place in Manhattan, let me know and I'll give you his number/email. He chauffeured us to every apartment we looked at with him, and he has an EMT parking permit, so he can park anywhere. He also prescreened apartments after the first two, so he could tell us whether they'd be worth our time or not, based on how we'd reacted to other places. Two thumbs up. Anyway, when I go later this week to measure completely I'll take some decent photos and possibly post them. Our apartment. So hot right now.
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
The Defense
Well, I made #4 on The BEAST's 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005. I suppose we all did, but I feel I should at least answer the charges. Here they are:
The evidence: Nita Lowey, bitch.
Sentence: Yeah, I suppose I'll take it. But considering I'm not totally guilty on all the charges, and they really have no evidence, I think I'll instead take a deathbed realization that my live was only wasted opportunities and not stupid mistakes...I've made a few stupid mistakes, but I'm much more of a wasted opportunities sort of gal, wasting opportunities such as college. And I think I deserve befuddlement, not scorn, and, God no, not indifference. The cold, meaningless demise? Sounds about right. Although if, in honor of my death, we could keep the thermostat at 72 degrees for just a couple of days, that would be great. I'll let you know when I'm a few days from death and willing to use all my money to pay for the wasted oil that went into heating my final hours. But hopefully the price of oil will be down by then.
In other words, I'm creating a special circle of hell for incompetent and/or scheming realtors, along with blood-sucking insurance companies. A small, vaguely special place in heaven goes to the guy in the breakfast cart who knows my order and smiles when he gives me my coffee and to the young, upbeat cab driver who makes talking about the weather seem like something slightly more than smalltalk.
4. YouOK, let's start with my pleas to the charges, in order: guilty, guilty, guilty, not guilty unless you count caffeine as an antidepressent, only slightly guilty, guilty, guilty. I guess I didn't do to well.
Charges: Silently enabling and contributing to the irreversible destruction of your planet. Absolving yourself of your responsibility to do anything about it that your immediate neighbors don't. Assuming that it's normal behavior to spend several hours each day totally inert and staring into a cathode ray tube. Substituting antidepressants for physical motion. Caring more about the personal relationships of people you will never meet than your own. Shrugging your shoulders at the knowledge that your government is populated by criminal liars intent on fooling you into impoverished, helpless submission. Cheering this process on.
Exhibit A: You don't even know who your congressman is.
Sentence: Deathbed realization that your entire life was an unending series of stupid mistakes and wasted opportunities, a priceless gift of potential extravagantly squandered, for which you deserve nothing but scorn or, at best, indifference, and a cold, meaningless demise.
The evidence: Nita Lowey, bitch.
Sentence: Yeah, I suppose I'll take it. But considering I'm not totally guilty on all the charges, and they really have no evidence, I think I'll instead take a deathbed realization that my live was only wasted opportunities and not stupid mistakes...I've made a few stupid mistakes, but I'm much more of a wasted opportunities sort of gal, wasting opportunities such as college. And I think I deserve befuddlement, not scorn, and, God no, not indifference. The cold, meaningless demise? Sounds about right. Although if, in honor of my death, we could keep the thermostat at 72 degrees for just a couple of days, that would be great. I'll let you know when I'm a few days from death and willing to use all my money to pay for the wasted oil that went into heating my final hours. But hopefully the price of oil will be down by then.
In other words, I'm creating a special circle of hell for incompetent and/or scheming realtors, along with blood-sucking insurance companies. A small, vaguely special place in heaven goes to the guy in the breakfast cart who knows my order and smiles when he gives me my coffee and to the young, upbeat cab driver who makes talking about the weather seem like something slightly more than smalltalk.
Sunday, January 22, 2006
Touching Base
Wow; it's been too long. As you can probably guess, this means I've been a busy, busy girl for the past three weeks. I am now officially "Staff Writer for the Web" for Seed, which means very little change in what I actually do and very much welcome change in what they pay me. Because I am now officially a working woman, I've started the apartment search with Amy (Greenwood...a good friend of mine from high school who just got back from touring The World). We've been casually looking for about two weeks and just decided to pick up the pace by calling a real broker and getting her to find us the best places the day they come out. Last Thursday we saw the best place yet: a two bedroom on 56th between 9th and 10th with enormous bedrooms, a nice bathroom, and a small-as-all-hell-assuming-souls-are-planck-length living space. The last attribute is why we didn't take it. We planned on going on an apartment binge on Saturday, but apparently nobody shows on Saturday, so we were only able to see one apartment. It blew.
Dating Mike again is going extraordinarily well. I feel totally at ease with him—mentally, physically and emotionally. I guess that's the big perk of dating someone you've already had an intense, long-term relationship with: You don't have to get past the awkward getting-to-know-you stage. I hate that stage...with friends, coworkers, teachers, whatever. I like to be free and easy with people. It's also great that Mike doesn't socialize much and doesn't socialize at all with people I know. I'm so much more comfortable one-on-one than in group situations...or public situations. Spending hours chilling in his (awesome west village) apartment is simply perfect. The time-limit looms (September, when he goes to some random still-unknown city to teach private school), but it's a ways off, and I'm happy to enjoy the time while it's here.
More thoughts later...right now I'm exhausted.
Dating Mike again is going extraordinarily well. I feel totally at ease with him—mentally, physically and emotionally. I guess that's the big perk of dating someone you've already had an intense, long-term relationship with: You don't have to get past the awkward getting-to-know-you stage. I hate that stage...with friends, coworkers, teachers, whatever. I like to be free and easy with people. It's also great that Mike doesn't socialize much and doesn't socialize at all with people I know. I'm so much more comfortable one-on-one than in group situations...or public situations. Spending hours chilling in his (awesome west village) apartment is simply perfect. The time-limit looms (September, when he goes to some random still-unknown city to teach private school), but it's a ways off, and I'm happy to enjoy the time while it's here.
More thoughts later...right now I'm exhausted.
Monday, January 02, 2006
Vacation Winds Down
For the last time for a long time I've spent 10 days lazing about, sleeping late, and hanging out with friends in restaurants and coffee shops. It has been a lovely 10 days, and I will miss them dearly as I return to 7 am wakeups, 9 hour workdays and a bare-bones social life. It took me until Friday to really drop work from my mindset. With a combination of evil hormones and worker's residue, much of last week was spent in a restless state of anxiety I couldn't quite shake. And then it shook, and I revived myself as I was from June through September. It's such a lovely, easy way to be.
I might as well chat about the cryptic comments from a couple of weeks ago. I'm currently dating—but not in a relationship with—my ex. He doesn't want anything serious, which right now I'm all for, but I'm of course concerned that will change over time. At least the lack of seriousness and future dampens the "crawling back home (without ever going abroad)" feeling that was initially pretty strong. As it stands, seeing him is just a nice way to pass time, and I'm good with that. The other concern is that I really like hanging out with him and flirting with him and looking at him, and I trust him and feel close with him, but those things don't necessarily add up to wanting to date him. I'm not sure I do. Hopefully this will all become clearer with time. Hopefully nobody will get hurt. Hopefully the whole world will eventually find love and happiness. It's a lot to hope for.
I might as well chat about the cryptic comments from a couple of weeks ago. I'm currently dating—but not in a relationship with—my ex. He doesn't want anything serious, which right now I'm all for, but I'm of course concerned that will change over time. At least the lack of seriousness and future dampens the "crawling back home (without ever going abroad)" feeling that was initially pretty strong. As it stands, seeing him is just a nice way to pass time, and I'm good with that. The other concern is that I really like hanging out with him and flirting with him and looking at him, and I trust him and feel close with him, but those things don't necessarily add up to wanting to date him. I'm not sure I do. Hopefully this will all become clearer with time. Hopefully nobody will get hurt. Hopefully the whole world will eventually find love and happiness. It's a lot to hope for.
Reading Kids' Diaries
I think we should read kids' diaries. I'm also just a little bit pro-Bush's-spying-program, assuming he really is just scanning for terrorist plots and not preventing robberies or extra-marital affairs or meetings where people get together and burn Bush effigies or anything crazy like that. But that's not today's topic. I'm not talking about violating civil liberties for the sake of security here, I'm talking about violating civil liberties for ART.
If there is one consistent problem with all fiction (and even non-fiction) it is the unrelenting portrayal of children as adults perceive them, never the portrayal of children as they are. Now, I can't capture children as they really are—at age 22 I'm hardly in that position, and I never was able to keep a diary as a kid—but I do remember thinking, when I was a child, that every portrayal I saw was horribly charicatured and never represented the world I knew.
Exhibit A: Bullies. Stories about children are rife with bullies, children who live to make other children feel bad, and that's fine, because there are plenty of bullies in elementary school and middle school. They were, however, never of the Malfoy-Crabbe-Goyle variety. Never one obvious leader with cronies who had no other friends who would show up just to torture people. As I recall, it was the legitimately popular kids who were bullyish. The vast, vast majority of boys, especially around age 13, are obscenely insecure. It's not like college (or even high school), where the secure crowd rises to the top and wins everyone's love, and an insecure minority are stuck being assholes whom everyone kind of hates but may have some power due to sheer force. No no no. In middle school, the entire popular crowd is insecure and generally takes it out on anyone they can. And they're less explicit about their bullying. There's no obvious building themselves up...it's just about shooting the other person down. It's about exchanging looks with a group of five that say "Wow, this person just made a really bad choice. Why would anyone do THAT?" It's not about shoving people into lockers. It's about subtle mockery and exclusion. It probably wouldn't look that bad if an adult listened to the whole thing.
I'm a little too caught up in exhibit A to run through other exhibits, but they would partially concern the inner life of children. What do they think about? I famously thought about my kindergarten teachers molesting miniature versions of the von Trapp children. What do normal children think about? The exhibits would otherwise concern the interactions between children. What do they talk about? What kind of signals do they give? I have relatively little recollection. I don't think TV shows, books, plays and other art forms portray these accurately, even when they capture something fundamentally true about people. They fail to capture childhood as it is, not how we vaguely recall it to be or see it in other children. I only know because I was overwhelmingly frustrated as a child by the innacuracies. I just didn't do anything about it.
Which is where the civil liberties violation comes in. Isolate children from portrayals of themselves. Force them to keep diaries under the guise of secrecy. But then read the diaries. Read them all, and from them get an idea of the collective experience of individual children.
Of course this is impractical, but we should find some way of getting the information from them without letting them just confirm our suggestions, without them just spewing back the portrayals of them they've seen. Save art! Help human understanding! Exploit children!
If there is one consistent problem with all fiction (and even non-fiction) it is the unrelenting portrayal of children as adults perceive them, never the portrayal of children as they are. Now, I can't capture children as they really are—at age 22 I'm hardly in that position, and I never was able to keep a diary as a kid—but I do remember thinking, when I was a child, that every portrayal I saw was horribly charicatured and never represented the world I knew.
Exhibit A: Bullies. Stories about children are rife with bullies, children who live to make other children feel bad, and that's fine, because there are plenty of bullies in elementary school and middle school. They were, however, never of the Malfoy-Crabbe-Goyle variety. Never one obvious leader with cronies who had no other friends who would show up just to torture people. As I recall, it was the legitimately popular kids who were bullyish. The vast, vast majority of boys, especially around age 13, are obscenely insecure. It's not like college (or even high school), where the secure crowd rises to the top and wins everyone's love, and an insecure minority are stuck being assholes whom everyone kind of hates but may have some power due to sheer force. No no no. In middle school, the entire popular crowd is insecure and generally takes it out on anyone they can. And they're less explicit about their bullying. There's no obvious building themselves up...it's just about shooting the other person down. It's about exchanging looks with a group of five that say "Wow, this person just made a really bad choice. Why would anyone do THAT?" It's not about shoving people into lockers. It's about subtle mockery and exclusion. It probably wouldn't look that bad if an adult listened to the whole thing.
I'm a little too caught up in exhibit A to run through other exhibits, but they would partially concern the inner life of children. What do they think about? I famously thought about my kindergarten teachers molesting miniature versions of the von Trapp children. What do normal children think about? The exhibits would otherwise concern the interactions between children. What do they talk about? What kind of signals do they give? I have relatively little recollection. I don't think TV shows, books, plays and other art forms portray these accurately, even when they capture something fundamentally true about people. They fail to capture childhood as it is, not how we vaguely recall it to be or see it in other children. I only know because I was overwhelmingly frustrated as a child by the innacuracies. I just didn't do anything about it.
Which is where the civil liberties violation comes in. Isolate children from portrayals of themselves. Force them to keep diaries under the guise of secrecy. But then read the diaries. Read them all, and from them get an idea of the collective experience of individual children.
Of course this is impractical, but we should find some way of getting the information from them without letting them just confirm our suggestions, without them just spewing back the portrayals of them they've seen. Save art! Help human understanding! Exploit children!
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