counter-tourism

I was standing in line at the crummy little cafe across the street from my mega-huge midtown office, staring with desperate longing at my cup of coffee that woman was slowly mixing sugar into. The woman right in front of me, whose husband was paying for their pancakes and who was clearly from a landlocked state, turned around, looked right at me, and then wordlessly started reaching towards the black patent-leather purse on my shoulder.

I stared RIGHT. AT. HER. Why in god's name was this strange little pantomime happening? Why was she reaching toward my PURSE? Was she going to ask where I got it? Would I tell her the truth and say, "T.J. Maxx, baby," or would I be a snob and lie and say, "Europe" or something? Or was this some new, direct form of pickpocketing, a postmodern commentary on theft and awareness? WHY WAS HER HAND GRAZING THE SIDE OF MY PURSE WHILE SHE STARED AT ME? WHY?

Seconds later, I realized her head was gesturing towards the serviceman with the handtruck that was trying to walk past me, that she was alerting me to shift out of the way in some bafflingly genuine and completely foreign approach to "love thy neighbor". My startled and horrified face shifted into an awkward moment of gratitude as I moved out of the way, and our little tete-a-tete (or main-a-bourse) was over. She bought her syrup-drenched pancakes and joined her gaggle of blonde children all wearing tevos, and I got my life-affirming black coffee and crossed the street to enter the monolith that consumes my days.

But I couldn't stop thinking about the difference between the moment where I thought that this crazy country bumpkin madam was trying to either rob me or get a jump on my bargain, and the moment where she thought to gently alert a young woman to the obstacle behind her. Am I this jaded, that someone's simple gesture of thoughtfulness causes a kerfuffle of confusion and defensiveness? What does it say that one of the reactions I considered, in that split second, was to smack her hand away, kid-from-cookie-jar style?

Or is she the weird crazy one? Who motions wordlessly to someone's PURSE, who actually puts their fingers on another woman's handbag, instead of simply nodding behind me with their head and USING LANGUAGE? She wasn't foreign or non-English-speaking because I heard her ask the cashier if she had napkins, in a very midwestern nasal drawl. Did I mention how weird it was that she put her FINGERS, the tips of her FINGERS, on my PURSE? It was just surreal.

New Yorkers, in spite of and perhaps because of the close quarters in which we live, tend to keep our hands as far as politely possible away from our fellow travelers. I've actually seen someone fall over into a pole to avoid a woman's protruding elbow on an otherwise absurdly crowded train. But how are tourists supposed to know this? My usual solution is to rudely shove them out of my way or cut deliberately obnoxious paths through their meandering chattering herds. When I'm not being incredibly nice to individual tourists who look lost (which, screw you, I do all the TIME), I am being passive-agressively evil to large cow-like gaggles of them.

Maybe this isn't fair to them, though, not knowing the lengths to which we'll go to not touch each other in the most crowded city ever. Maybe, when they fly in to JFK or ride into Port Authority, it should be one more travel advisory we give them: "Please note that the natives here do not like being touched, approached, or hugged without explicit consent. Please do not touch someone's elbow if they're about to walk into oncoming traffic - scream at them like any other civilized person. And please never, never, EVER touch a New York woman's handbag without express and often written permission. Enjoy your stay."

craaaaaaaaazy

Contrary to the renditions below, I am not wearing a frilly pink skirt today. I am wearing my beloved new jeans that are nearing the end of their wear cycle and need to be washed. This means they've sort of stretched out in the waist and derriere area and I can practically pull them off without unbuttoning a thing. Ladies, you know what I'm talking about. I am going out to dinner with Kate and Jen, to sit around and eat frites and drink rose and gossip about all of you, and the frumpy-butt effect has left me feeling less than fabulous. And frites, rose, and gossip on a hot summer night, well, that demands fabulousity.

The question becomes, can I go to a laundromat, take off my pants, throw them in the dryer, and prance around in my skivvies until my jeans shrink back up to a comfortable fit? Or is this only acceptable in Aerosmith music videos?

Anyone?

helpful tips

in the summer, in the city

I've been: sweating my fairywings off wearing fishnets in the sun, driving around Brooklyn, getting drunk with Barrie and talking about soulmates, taking epic naps, getting excited about our trip to England, playing with Stuart's newly shorn hair, reveling in our air conditioning, referring to the laptop as "the baby", singing lullabies and power ballads on stage, thinking about baseball games, having dreams about saving Ernest Hemingway from himself in a post-modern world, listening and laughing to So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, enjoying pints of Stella, hearing lines of Midsummer in my sleep.

All things I'd post about, again, if I wasn't too busy doing them. What have you been doing?

Wednesday's bag

To amuse you, on a day where I'm too busy to do it myself, I present, "The Contents of My Purse", or, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love This Meme." Click the picture to get flickriffic notes on each item.

the weather sucks

The weather sucks and we have rehearsal every night this week, leading up to our first weekend of performances, which means we have a kitchen full of dirty dishes that neither of us can bring ourselves to clean in the hour before we leave for work and in the 20 minutes between getting home at 11 and falling asleep at 11:30.

The weather sucks and it means I find myself picking fights with everyone and everything, from a tricky doorknob to the guy on the subway who kept looking over my shoulder into my book.

The weather sucks and I think it's the reason I keep getting a headache even though I'm trying to stay hydrated. Advil isn't helping, reading the screen isn't helping, the only thing that would help is crawling under my desk and sleeping.

The weather sucks because the humidity makes it feel like you're stepping into an ocean of warm dank water, like you live in a street puddle, like you want to tear your own skin off because you're pretty sure that the feel of air on your exposed muscles and veins would actually feel sort of cool and pleasant before all the PAIN KICKED IN.

The weather sucks and it makes me hate New York in all its thereness and its concreteness and its peopleness and its breezelessness and I hate it when I hate New York because if I've got Stuart as a husband, then I guess New York is my wife or something, and she's making me sleep on the DAMP HOT COUCH.

THIS WEATHER SUCKS.

the play's the thing

If you've been wondering (and I know you have) about this play that Stuart and I keep randomly referring to in blog posts about how we're far too busy to post, is this the post for YOU. But only if you're a New Yorker or you will be in New York sometime in the next month. For the rest of you, sadly, I have nothing to tell. Go buy a tee shirt to ease your sorrow.

So! New Yorkers! I'd like to take this opportunity now that I have your rapt attention (and I do) to give you four hilarious opportunities to see me make an ass of myself. Well, not an ass, since that part is reserved for the brilliantly hilarious Dave, as our Bottom, in a Midsummer Night's Dream. So, not an ass. A fairy then, as well as a girl-ified and bitchified version of Egeus. That's Lady Egeus to you, buster.

Communicable Arts, an organization of intrepid souls that bring summer Shakespeare to the parks of Brooklyn, has been hard at work this summer and there are four awesome locations for us to enchant your imagination and make you laugh until you totally fall over. At any of these four, you'll see me wearing such bright colors as to attract bumblebees, you'll see me singing (o unholy nightmare), and you'll see Stuart playing a Wall. You can't miss that, right? No, you can't. Here, without further much ado, are the four locations and some info about all of them and how to get there. Blog readers, start your calendars.

Saturday, July 23, 12 PM
Von King Cultural Center Amphitheatre
670 Lafayette Avenue, between Marcy and Tompkins Avenue.
Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn
G train to the Bedford/Nostrand stop. Walk east on Lafayette Avenue to
Marcy.

Sunday, July 24, 2 PM
Maria Hernandez Park
Knickerbocker to Irving Aves, Starr to Suydam streets
Bushwick, Brooklyn
L train to Jefferson Street stop. Walk two blocks on Wyckoff Avenue to
Starr Street and two blocks South to Irving Avenue.

Saturday, July 30, 12:30 PM
New Lots Library
665 New Lots Avenue at Barbey St.
Brownsville, Brooklyn
3 train to New Lots/Livonia Avenue stop. Walk along New Lots Avenue 4
blocks to Barbey Street.

Sunday, July 31, 4 PM
Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition
499 Van Brunt Street
Red Hook, Brooklyn
F train to Jay St / Boro Hall, then B61 to Van Brunt or
G train to Smith/9th Street, then B77 bus to Van Dyke and Van Brunt.

Let me know in the comments or by email (especially if I don't already know your pretty face) if you're going to be there so that when you come up after the play to say hello (and I hope you do), I don't spray you with mace or kick you in the shins. (Not that I ever do that. Ever.) But really, introduce yourself, I'll probably hug you.

nighttime games

There's been a disturbing cross-effect of sadness that's taken up residence in these morbid pockets of my mind, due to the London bombings and reading The Time Traveler's Wife. It's not that I'm morose all the time or even part of the time but merely some of the time, which for me is enough because generally, I might be one of the least morose people you've never met. But you can't help but think of death and loss and sadness when those two things are happening simultaneously even if they have otherwise absolutely nothing to do with one another.

September 11th and the twin tower collapse is long enough ago that when I'm not being specifically asked (in a curious, prod-the-animals-in-the-zoo sort of way) by non New Yorkers to recount that day, my only reference to it is the practical aspects of finding my way home and my loved ones again, should something similar ever happen in the city again. Stuart and I have our meet points and a landline because if we're both wandering the city after a disaster, we need to get back to each other safely and with the least amount of personal panic possible. The disaster area downtown is just that - a disaster area downtown. Two discreet and once-majestic buildings fell to the ground, atrociously, horrifyingly, on one day in September.

My reaction to the London bombing has been different because I live in a city with a subway system. And a subway system is different than a building because a subway system is everywhere at once, and anyone I know could be on any given train at any given time. And I don't know where they are. I know what buildings they work in, and that mental checklist in a time of crisis would go quickly. But to imagine the horror of knowing my friends, my loved ones, are underground, and not knowing where, and not knowing where they are in relation to a crisis - it's stilted my mind. I cannot think myself logically around that fear.

Which is difficult for me. When I was a small kid living in Africa, I never consciously knew that there were things to worry about. As in, we didn't ride around the city in fear of our whiteness, of our stand-out-ishness. There were stories, there were hijackings, there were safety measures. But I was never afraid of these things on a daily basis. And yet, when I felt unsafe at night, when I couldn't sleep, I would play the robber game. I would play this game in my head where I was a thief, a ne'er-do-well, and I was trying to get into our house. I would watch my fictitious robber climb over walls, aha! Get stopped by the guard. I would watch him break a kitchen window, aha! An alarm would sound. I would even watch the crafty bugger get into the house unnoticed somehow but oh, yes, we had a full-coverage metal gate at the top of the stairs to protect the sleeping inhabitants from harm. This would, implausibly, soothe me. It would remind me that we'd done all we could, as a family, to safeguard ourselves.

I've been finding myself playing this game for a week, with the subways. Where am I? What time do I pass through what stations? What time (more importantly to me as it always is with love) is Stuart on the W? What time is he on the 4/5? When, presuming the unthinkable (now readily thinkable) happened, would I have to launch into a full scale freak out? Could I somehow talk myself through disaster and avoid freaking out?

Therein lies the problem. None of these safety measures are mine. Many of them have proven fruitless. For everthing England went through in the 1980's, for every death they've tried to prevent, over fifty still happened. That's fifty people, let's say there are at least twenty people that love each of those fifty people to the point of heinous grief at their loss, and now, look: that's one thousand immediately grieving, stricken, robbed people. And no nighttime games they might have played to assuage their greatest fears helped when their loved ones were simply on the wrong train at the wrong time in a system with no way to prevent being on that wrong train at that wrong time.

If I stay up at night thinking about the morbidity of my own helplessness, there isn't a headgame I can play to ease it. There isn't anything I can do. It's just scary. I'll end this here and I won't give you any answers and surely, you won't have any for me, and we don't have any for the people who have been robbed, bereft, heartbroken.

So it's not so much a dilemma as it is a horrible fact.

mister murphy, I presume

It's my fault that it's raining, says Stuart. He's holding me entirely accountable. As he was leaving the house this morning and I was sleepily standing in the entrance hall in my peejays because he never leaves the house in the morning without me wrapping myself around him and covering him with kisses several times in the house and once on the landing, he went for the umbrella.

"No, it's not going to rain, it's just low cloud cover because of the high humidity and the cold front," and I swear to God, I believed it. I heard the weatherdude say something like that, yesterday! On the television! I mean, he promised! So out of some deference for the weatherman and the fact that I have plans to take Stuart's good friend Gemma to Central Park tonight to hear the NY Phil, I made Stuart leave that damned umbrella at home.

Consider New York's rain as a token of my bravado, my hubris, and my inability to not believe everything I hear on television. Feel free to launch your vitriol at me from the comment box. Its hissing, spitting descent onto my head won't really bother me. I've got my spare umbrella here in the office, see.

things I am thinking about

I'm on a brand of birth control (take that, the Pope!) called Ortho Tri Cyclen and the pack is circular, so it comes with a refill and the plastic shell to put the refill in. Inside the plastic shell it says, "please reuse this dialpak" except every single time I get a new month's worth from Duane Reade, they give me the damn pink dialpak. What's the point of reusing the dialpak if I get a new one every time?

Last night we watched Family Guy for the first time. I've seen a scattered few episodes in the past but I think I might be addicted now. I don't want to be dissing on my favourite yellow cartoon family by saying Family Guy might be funnier, but right now, Family Guy might be funnier. Also, no wonder that shit is on at nine PM because DAMN that show is irreverent. Which of course, just makes it funnier.

Am I getting older because I finally love the sight and smell of roses in gardens? Long stemmed vases of them don't do it for me, but Astoria was absolutely exploding with dark fuscia rosebushes this summer and I could stare at them for hours. My parents' next-door neighbor is a landscaper and with her touch, my parents' garden is just brimming with roses and I couldn't stop, well, stopping to smell them. Also, I just bought a bottle of Evian and I don't hate it as much as I've always claimed to. I think I'm getting older.

The director of the play Stuart and I are in this summer (hi, Barrie, you rock) has decided that since I stepped in to read/block the still un-cast Egeus in Midsummer Night's Dream and played it less like a self-righteous father and more like a whining imperious Greek Mama, that she wants me to play Egeus. This is really cool because it means that in addition to being a snarky, cooler-than-thou fairy, I also get to be a bitchy indignant Greek mother. I love theatre.

It doesn't matter how tired you might be on a Sunday morning after staying out until three AM, it's always a good idea to drag your exhausted ass onto the LIRR and go to the beach. ALWAYS.

I started to count all the miniscule little scars on my knuckles (I was told at a young age that I have Keloid's, a skin problem where scars rarely disappear) and I cannot believe how many I have. They're all tiny, they're all vertical across the horizontal wrinkles of my knuckles, and I think with a really good D-SLR and the right lighting, I could take radically cool pictures of them. I think I might do that one day.

I want a lakehouse somewhere.

I am reading Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife and it is simultaneously one of the saddest and most upliftingly lovely books I've read in probably a year. It's affecting the way I move, the way I think, the way I throw my arms around Stuart at any given opportunity. Books like that should be given, I don't know, medals.

Holy crap HARRY POTTER WEEKEND. I need to call a Barnes and Noble and reserve my copy. This is funny because two whole months ago, I had the following conversation with Stuart:

K: Oh, no, how are we both going to buy hardback copies of HP6 that weekend? That'll be so expensive!
S: Uh, how about you read it, and then I'LL read it.
K: You'd do that? Won't you go crazy with anticipation for the two days it takes me to read it?
S: No. I'll survive.
K: Wow. You're strong.

I'm so not kidding, either, I wouldn't be able to sit there and watch him read it without reading it myself. Good thing I married such a nice guy who was NOT a spoilt only child.

London Town

Blackfriars Bridge, late 1980's.

London, I love you thiiiiis much. And by "thiiiiis", of course I mean, "enough to post what is probably the nerdiest picture of me IN THE ENTIRE WORLD."

Happy Friday, guys.

(And if you cannot get enough of nostalgic eighties photos, check out the corresponding flickr set.)

transatlanticism

My heart and furrowed eyebrows are with my loved ones and your loved ones in London. I often consider the Big Apple and the Big Smoke to be sister cities, not just being the twin empires of my heart but also two cities alike in dignity. Perhaps when the buildings fell here, four years ago, Londoners also held their hearts and hands out for our similarities, in an even greater sympathy than the rest of the world, knowing how fragile our seemingly strong metrops are. That's how I feel now. The subway here feels different today, like the buildings must have felt different in London four years ago. Perhaps I'm drawing unnecessary parallels because my mind can't settle on anything in particular, flitting about worried for everyone and everything, for the fabric of our daily lives, and perhaps that reminds me and other New Yorkers too strongly of four years ago.

I'm glad that mine are okay, my Londoners. I'm heartbroken that others' aren't. I'm thinking about all of you, for your selves and your friends and your beautiful city.

cranky update: actually, I don't think I included quite the level of uneccesary but cleansing vitriol required when this happens. Fuck you, terrorists. Fuck you in the EAR. You fucking SUCK. You are fucking dingbat bastards that are totally fucktarded and deserve to be clubbed repeatedly over the head with a frozen baby seal but even the seal doesn't deserve to have to hit your unworthy fucktastic faces. I fucking hate you all. There. I feel a little better - you?

cranky paranoid update: While I'm very glad and always have been for four years now to see friendly NYPD officers in the New York subway system, being on the 43rd floor of a midtown office building and hearing screaming fire/emergency vehicles tearing up eighth avenue and down broadway is always, and continues to be, disconcerting. Also, still, Dear Terrorists, Fuck You, Love, Krissa.

all is vealed again

100% more of something: extra. extra-vagant. (It's sort of like gasting your flabber.)

Super props to Jen and Molly for figuring it out.

independence

It was about one o'clock on Saturday when Stuart woke me up from my lazy sleep but it wasn't until four o'clock that we hit the road. In between was a lot of jostling and teasing and me whining, "come ON! don't you want to go on an a'venture?" and Stuart answering, "but in Sleepy Hollow, can I actually sleep?"

We sped over the Triboro and across the Bronx on 87. "Want to bet on dogs?" I asked as the Yonkers Raceway came into view. It was closed. We journeyed on, Gorillaz on the radio.

"West or East side of the Hudson?" I asked as we neared the approach to the Tappan Zee. Stuart deferred and I insisted he decide. I placed a bet in my head - he'd say we should cross the bridge and explore Nyack.

"Let's stay on this side." So we slowed the zooming pace down to a leisurely stroll in Mom's 4Runner, winding our way through Historic Tarrytown on route 9. And then Historic Sleepy Hollow. "Sure is sleepy." And on through Historics Scarborough and Briarcliff Manor.

And into Historic Ossining. "It should be a verb," we decided. "To ossin." We laughed at the clocktower in the center square - Make Time to Enjoy Historic Ossining. "Woo!" we yelled, "that was one historic Ossin!"

We didn't think we'd find anything as exciting as a dam. As a civil engineering landmark. "An Historic Civil Engineering Landmark," Stuart pointed out as he read the bronze plate overlooking the weir, with metal ballustrades covered in spiders that fed off the reservoir's teeming insects. We watched slide gently over the stone lip and sudddenly turn loud and violent, crashing on the natural rocks and stone steps of the dam. We kissed at the bottom. We got into the car and drove around aimlessly over a one-lane bridge and chasing sunlight through dense forests to kiss at the top, with the spiders.

We looked for dinner, keeping our hopes high that the perfect nook would suddenly appear on the road ahead, a surf and turf, a seafood shack, with blue and white moldings and a grey-haired cook. We found the Oceanhouse in Croton-on-Hudson and we ate so decadently as to bely the tiny size of the restaurant - no more than seven tables and run by a husband and wife team. Fireflies flickered in the windows outside our table. Stuart slurped oysters and I paired mushroom and goat cheese, followed by my steak, finished with creme brulee.

And as we drove home through the firefly-lit night, marveling at the stars, only an hour from our home, we congratulated ourselves happily. We were proud of the dam and the Oceanhouse, as if our streak of independence itself had crafted them out of thin air, as if the sheer act of exploring had brought these delights into existence, freed them for others to enjoy as well. We were proud of our sense of a'venture.

new member of the family

We bought a sweet little iMac G3 (graphite) from a friend who was looking to get rid of it for a below-market price. It may be an old model but with TLC, there's almost no such thing as an outdated mac. And for a couple hundred dollars, it leaves the iBook to roam free around the apartment on wireless. So we brought him into the office, set him up, and voila! Two macs, happily co-existing, Ladybug and Scarab.

It looks like we're not only DINKs, we're also DITCs. Rock ON, yuppiedom.