bigoted tailors; heroine stories

daisy and i just got a total score of 841 in scrabble. four bingos... guess what they were?

wish i may, wish i might...

okay so there are cons to city life. i admit that it sometimes sucks not to be able to see the sky. it's not necessarily worth moving to montana for, but it would have been nice to see jupiter and mars set just after the sun did tonight. we went up to the roof before sunset, and venus was bright under the thin crescent moon, but as the clouds got dark it became clear that our horizon of skyscrapers wasn't going to cut it. i suppose it was pretty cloudy out, anyway.

here is the article at marssociety.org

happy 2009.

happy birthday to me

it's my 30th birthday. after midnight, it won't be my birthday anymore; i'll just be 30.

daisy and i went to toys r' us in times square; if you asked me where i wanted to be on my birthday that's the last place i'd say. but we got the diamond edition of scrabble with the black tiles. the blanks have pictures of diamonds on them. it's great.

we went for sushi. we went out for dinner on a saturday night. which, if you asked me what i wanted to do on my birthday, is the last thing i'd say. it was delish.

we got a bottle of pierre gimonnet and on the way home from dinner we stopped at fish's eddy and bought two flutes. they were 25% off. which is quite a mark-up in this economy.

on an unrelated note: i submit that if you live in new york city and you get the urge to spend a little money frivolously on the off chance of winning a little more, take a cab instead of buying a scratch off lottery ticket. since i moved back, i've found three cell phones, several twenties and once, a hundo -- all in cabs i've taken when i should have saved money and taken the train. so there you go. you won't win $1000 a week for life, but you might get twenty bucks right now.

incidentally, if you asked me what my ideal birthday surprise would have been, i would probably have said catching the cash cab. but a girl can't have it all in one day. although that bottle of bubbly is about to get me closer.

community supported...?

so last week i'm at [neighborhood watering hole on east 14th street] to visit a friend who recently started working there. the crowd is predictably awful (beer pong is actually involved) and it's too loud for conversation and the teevee is blocked by various unattractive heads so i can't even rilly see the game (since when do i care?) and i go to the bathroom, which has only one stall. some drunk chick comes in right after me making a phone call to someone who seems to have no idea who she is ("it's cat... cat... cat! hi, it's cat... catherine?") and presently there is a loud crash, distinctly ceramic in timbre. drunk chick: "oh, nothing. i'll call you back." she scoots; i leave the stall to find the sink completely cracked in two, the bowl part resting on the wet, paper-strewn floor at an artful angle against the pedestal base, which now supports nothing but a jagged top edge.

i just wish i had seen exactly what happened there.

. . .

yesterday was the first delivery from the csa that my mom signed up for this year. in case you are unfamiliar with the awesomeness known as "community supported agriculture," it's a program wherein people in urban areas can support local farms and eat more naturally and sustainably. the season is from june through november, and each week mom and a co-worker are splitting a seasonal selection of fruits and vegetables (from windflower farm) and eggs (from elihu farm) in upstate new york (you can get flowers, too)... hopefully we'll be spending many a tuesday cooking up some deliciousness. and then eating it.

the first installment included radishes and romaine lettuce, bok choy, russian red kale, garlic scapes, strawberries, and chicken eggs. garlic scapes are my new favorite thing; they look like long green beans or flower stems, but they grow in a spiral shape and they have a lovely garlic flavor. you can just cut them into small pieces and saute them; if you are a big onion-slash-garlic fan they even good raw, if you mince them up. the kale was so fresh even the stems were edible before cooking -- firm but not too stringy, with a nice bitterness. daisy tossed the bok choy and the kale in a wok with some scallions and scapes. the radishes and lettuce only needed some oil, vinegar and lime juice. we tossed the radish tops right in with the rest of the salad. mom made savory crepes with smoked salmon, scallions and creme fraiche for some protein and we had the greens with tricolor couscous. yummers.

dream a little dream of...

okay so i totally dreamed about POO last night.

i'm not trying to advertise this. but i didn't remember it until the middle of my shift at work and then i was like WHOA. i feel like it was two distinct dreams, but both were poop-related. in one, i definitely stepped in a pile of shit, barefoot. i felt like it was kinda gross but in the dream i was very methodical and practical about trying to scrape it off.

in the other dream, i was taking a crap with the door open. i didn't want the door to be open but somehow i was powerless to close it, and everyone was totally talking about me whilst i shat.

these must be stupid work anxiety dreams. but there's surprisingly little um, "information" online about this. not like when i dreamed about trying to catch a frog, a really vivid dream that stayed with me when i woke up, and i looked that up online and found a shitload (heh) of hits that all said dreaming about trying to catch a frog was about your loved ones being concerned about your health. or whatever. something specific and scary. and apt, like a horoscope or a fortune cookie or whatever crap you feel like paying attention to.

anyway there doesn't seem to be a consensus how one should interpret a dream about public defecation. or even about stepping in poo. vulnerability, helplessness...?

smell my feet!

ahh, halloween in new york city... need i say more? well, i will anyway. the restaurant was slow, but we did have a table of asian 20-somethings in crowns, antennae, horns and other head-gear, and at one point a cuadrilla of chanting tacos marched past the door. rice krispies treats had been prepared for the trick-or-treaters, and one youngster rolled in with a spattered shirt and a hoody and politely averred "actually, i'm a murderer." later, the manager's hubby strolled in clad as bob's big boy, complete with fat suit and pompadour, oversized "sandwich" and rosy cheeks.

after work we twisted a hooter in the usual place, and gave the clip to a posse which included a fortune teller brandishing a magic 8 ball. on the way to our next destination we encountered the joker, catwoman and the penguin; the ghostbusters; a sloth of care bears, and captain crunch, among other savory characters.

at von we picked up a cowboy who corralled us over to max fish, which was predictably packed with freaks. donald and daisy duck were notable in their rentables (i can only imagine how many people must have fondled donald's fuzzy tail without his knowledge). there was a kissing booth (she was only charging a dollar!) and lots of gals with fairy wings that smacked people in the face as they maneuvered through the crowded bar. by far the best naked card was played by a skinny chick who must have been over six feet tall, "dressed" as a cheetah (a leopard?) in nothing but four-inch heels, a furry black sumo-style tail-thong, and black spots painted all over her bare skin. when she entered the room she was like moses parting the red sea, and everyone's eyes were hers. any other day of the year she might just have been arrested. another scanty standout was a mermaid, with shiny pasties only slightly covering her boobs, which i must say trumped leopard girl's by a long shot.

afterwards we went for pizza and saw the whitest mr. t ever, and some dude at one of the tables was wearing black contacts that were scarier than any other spectacle that evening. i'd had enough of long lines for one night, so i scooted up the block for the much less popular street hot dog option. the lady (!) at the cart seriously tried to charge me THREE DOLLARS. we ended up compromising at $2, which is highway robbery anyway but everyone's gotta squeeze out a living somehow, and jacking up prices for drunk people on holidays is like, a tradition or something.

as the night wore on i found it increasingly difficult to tell who was dressed up and who just dressed like that all the time. needless to say there were lots of pigs about.

i do so love to stick a knife into a pumpkin whose guts have been scooped out, and i carved one at work and one at home this year. pictures are (will be) included but can only hint at their glowing orange awesomeness, much as one girl's summary can never fully capture the insanity of this annual event in our fair city. a good jack o' lantern, like a good get-up, is always better seen in person. of course you can't keep the magic around for too long; them things start rotting within a couple days of being carved up. but take heart: pumpkins come and go, but halloween festers forever.

asanas sin gafas.

so i went to yoga with my mom this evening, at a community center on the lower east side/alphabet city. it's really only the second time i've ever gone to a yoga class, and like the few other remotely athletic activities in which i've deigned to partake during my life thus far, i tend to vaguely dread it on my way there, but once i'm actually doing it, i'm glad i got off my ass and did it.

it was only 7 bucks for a two hour practice. the pace was really slow (by the end i was almost falling asleep in the resting pose) but this was perfect for me as i pretty much have no idea what i'm doing, and i had to take off my glasses and i don't wear contacts, so i really needed that extra time to figure out what was going on in each pose. at one point the instructor said, "if your vision gets a little blurred while doing this pose, that's normal." well, that was a relief.

i took off my glasses before even entering the room so i had no clue what the teacher or anyone else really looked like. the instructor was much hotter when i couldn't see him that well. just saying. some things are like that; they look better out of the corner of your eye, and once you focus on them too much they start to suck. (i suppose that's not a very positive, post-yoga view of the world. whaddya gonna do about it?)

(as an aside, i am fully aware that i am way behind on this yoga thing and that all the kids are doing it. i mean, any activity where you can hang about in pajamas and fart in public is going to develop a following, right? these days you can buy yoga mats at the supermarket and yoga bags at the bookstore and yoga pants made by bambu. indeed, the company that makes rolling papers also sells comfy yoga pants bearing their logo. i found that rather weird, until i took off my glasses and turned my head a little to the side so i could only see it in my peripheral vision. then it just started to seem normal.)

during the meditation bit towards the end, when i closed my eyes and focused "on a point between [my] eyebrows and on [my] heart," my eyes suddenly filled with tears. i'm not sure why. i think my heart and i really need to have a sit-down.

at the end of the session the yogi said that with more and more practice, "we can become able to sit for as long as we want." how peculiar to think of sitting as such an achievement, but it really is. the hardest part of that stuff, for me, is the breathing and the sitting still -- two things i theoretically mastered as an infant, but then i somehow forgot how to do them correctly... now i really have to focus to get them right. in time, maybe they'll become second nature... again.

walking back to the train, we saw a black cat fall out of a window and land on the sidewalk, on one of those metal hatches. at first he just looked like a bag of trash, a heavy bag of trash that thudded when someone carelessly threw it out of the window... but then a tail and a leg twitched slightly, and went still. people stopped, people gathered; my mom and i crossed the street to get away. hours later, i still can't stop thinking about that poor kitty's last plummet: the rattle and bang of his body on the metal, his contorted final position, the small crowd that surrounded him but kept their distance... the thought of someone coming up the block, someone who loves him, and seeing him lying there... or going up to the apartment and calling to him when he doesn't appear at the door... the panic, the grief, the guilt for not closing the window... if only it had happened five minutes later, if only we'd taken 7th street instead of 6th... i would have missed the sad scene entirely.

i'm aware that there is pain in the world, but i'd much prefer not to witness too much of it. or at least be able to take off my glasses first, so as not to stare it full in the face.

(...so i'm a coward. whaddya gonna do about it?)