this post endeavors to be prosaic, quotidian, and other adjectives as well

What? Hello? Hi.

I've been reading a lot for gothamist (book a week! geez! what a good idea!), writing a lot for a deadline coming up in two weeks, eating a lot of soup, and oh my god, preparing a lot of forms and applications and things. Wait, did I mention the GREs? On Thursday? And then the Bahamas? For five days after that? Not that there's any way to complain about going to the Bahamas (and not that I've tried), but whatever genius (me) looked at the December 15th deadline at NYU and then said, "hey, let's smack a five day trip right in the middle of that!" was on stupid pills (me again).

I haven't even checked on my blog in, like, three days. I feel pretty guilty about this, but then again, the pile of menacing recommendation letters that have been waiting to be mailed, and the pile of books waiting to be read, and oh, did I mention the manuscript waiting to be written? And you're sure I mentioned the GREs? They make me feel a lot guiltier. Trust me here. The guilt-o-meter, she's off the charts.

Did you know the word inimical? It means damaging. And trenchant means vigorous or incisive. And refulgent, surprisingly, means radiant or shiny. I know this because Stuart was quizzing me on them while I lay half-asleep on the couch last night. I probably knew it before then, but damnit if I don't really know it NOW.

Rufulgent: Beauty :: Psychotic breakdown : Standardized tests! See that there? Practical applications, ahoy. Oh, and in case you're wandering around with a drastic and itchy case of 8x +10 = 21 + (7x - 4x), I can probably fix that for you*.

Not that I've spent more than three? maybe four? hours studying for this test on Thursday, or anything, because I point-blank refuse to drive myself around the bend for a formality, and trust me when I say I know it is a formality. Tonight, I'm going to not study by writing, and tomorrow night, I'll probably not studying by getting drunk and watching Law & Order! That's my big study plan. Refulgent, isn't it?

Thanksgiving was full of turkey, this week is full of vocab words and swearing (which is also vocab!), and next week will be full of sand and hammocks. I tell ya, I can't complain. I'll try, but I can't.

* x = 2.2 where:

1. 8x + 10 = 21 + 3x
2. 5x + 10 = 21
3. 5x = 11
4. 11/5 = 2.2
5. thus, x = 2.2
6. Yes, Stuart, I figured that one out all by myself and a red pen. Did I get it right?

taking stock

I am thankful for:

Stuart. Pretty much everything about Stuart.
My mother, and her great cooking, great fashion advice, how she always calls me "pumpkin" and hugs me for no reason other than love, and the way she still dances around the kitchen to Carly Simon and Neil Diamond.
My dad with his excel spreadsheet advice, good spy novels, baking tips, banking tips, and how I'm just getting to know him for the wonderful man that he is.
My brother and his big bear hugs, constant older-brothering, the way he gets along with absolutely everyone, and his ridiculously huge music collection.
Our extended family that lives an hour away and has finally provided me with the joyous, boisterous family holiday I've always wanted.
Our home here in Rhode Island, with all the furniture I grew up with, and a place for my family to finally stay for more than a few years.
My friends in New York, with their quick emails, quick wit, quick helping hands, big hearts, and great taste.
My job, because it's still there even when I complain about it.
My writing, because it's good to know I'm good at one thing.
My silly little fantasies about the future, like a dog named Caspian and a summer house in Maine, because you never know, they might come true.
That it snowed this morning, waking me up with pure snowy joy and giving me a reason to bound into everyone's rooms and throw open the curtains singing Winter Wonderland.
Turkey, wine, potatoes, pie, stuffing, madeleines, sweet potatoes, corn bread, and Biscuit's delicious cranberry sauce.

For all this and more, I give thanks today.

snapshot

I stepped into the living room a few minutes ago and laughed a little at this scene, because it's pretty much the entirety of my Sunday. I haven't left my turtle pyjamas, eating clementines and finishing my book and following review. Breakfast was french bread and Gouda cheese with coffee. Dinner is Stuart's superb apple celery soup and olive-oil-and-garlic brushed croutons. My brother and Ozzie spent the first half of the day with us, lazying about and listening to me complain about Dowd. And even though it was glorious outside from the window next to Stuart's armchair (which he graciously lets me curl up in to read, well, all the time), I didn't want to be anywhere else but next to a book, a coke, and a pile of growing clementine peels. Viva winter!

tricks of the trade

I was just hashing out schedules with Shana, for a manuscript I'm working on, and saying how my own goal was to get another ten to fifteen pages written in the next two weeks (single-spaced, I can't write properly in double). And then I had a brainflash and said, "lots of dialogue! ha ha!"

Do other writers think that too? How evil is that? For some reason though, it made me giggle nonstop for about five minutes.

company calls

Visitors are sort of part and parcel when you're a New Yorker. Look, you live in the greatest city in the world, with some of the most expensive hotels. When you're out of town visiting friends and family, the words, "Oh, you live in New York?" are always followed by, "I've been meaning to go there to visit!" You, New Yorker, have an expected response of "oh, stay with me/us, I'll/we'll show you around!" It's pretty much part of your DMV exam.

And for me, it's not the city tourism part that gets me frazzled or stressed. I can reel off about twenty cool things to do in the city, for every taste, and pull up websites and hand out brochures, all in about thirty five seconds (oh, and talking faster - that's on the DMV exam too). It's the house that's got me straight tripping, uh, boo.

Last night, when I was sitting inside the bleach-filled bathtub desperately scrubbing at the grouting in the tub, I stopped for a minute. This is my brother and his friend Ozzie that are visiting this weekend. Putting aside for a minute that brother is the most obsessively neat person I know second only to my mother, it's not like the guy is fooled by my, uh, cluttery tendencies. He's known me since I was what, born? I do this with every guest we have. I go pretty much full-tilt bananas with the cleaning until exactly the moment the doorbell rings. And for what? We're never even IN the apartment when there are guests, we're too busy seeing the city.

I dragged Stuart out of the house at 11:45 PM last night, after the cleaning had passed my neurotic sleep-deprived standards, so we could go to the grocery store and get things like soap for the dishes, paper towel, extra toilet paper, coffee, bread, eggs, bacon ... you know, the things you fill your fridge with so that it looks like you actually LIVE there, instead of just collapse on the couch and dial for chinese three times a week. "What, that? Oh, is that what an oven looks like?" It's this struggle to make life here in New York seem like other places, when really, it's not.

And so I figured it out, why I always go so berserk with guests. It's because of all the things we've got it better in New York City, housing isn't always one of them. Sure, I can dump my guests on the plane, exhausted and euphoric, lighting that cigarette and going, "thanks, New York City, I'll call ya, baby". Chances are, where they're going back to isn't as exciting, exhilirating, breathtakingly chock-full of everything as New York City is. But their house? It's probably bigger. With better organization. And a newer oven. And less dust. And they probably pay half the price for twice the space.

I've worked like a dog, and Stuart has joined me, to make our apartment a beautiful, cozy place. And it's not small, cramped, or dirty by city standards. But sometimes, I look at it from Elsewhere's eyes, and it must look like a tenement! So out comes the toothbrush to scrub the grouting that's always a little dingy, and the swiffer to valiantly (and uselessly) try to sweep up every last dustbunny, and god, what am I going to DO ABOUT OUR KITCHEN CABINETS?

It's a losing battle. Invariably, Luiz and Ozzie will arrive, be charmed by our sweet flat and comfy beds and nice coffee maker, and that's all they'll notice in between waking up and dashing off to enjoy the city, and collapsing into bed at the end of packed, busy days.

I just hope our ancient radiators don't crap out, and that the sink doesn't back up, and oh, I hope the dust-bunnies don't start reading Marx and forming labor unions. And I hope they see that for all the money, stress, pollution, crime, and taxes we deal with to live in this crazy place, our life is just as fulfilled and - you know - CLEAN as everywhere else's. And, oh, I guess I hope everyone has fun. Duh. It's New York City. How could they not, right?

Let me just get this ONE last corner with the swiffer, just - right - argh.

negative feedback

My second posting at Gothamist, and I've got my first slightly nasty comment. "Twiddle" obviously is a big fan of sarcasm and not a big fan of me. Apparently, I seemed condescending when I called KGB "lesser-known" and I was obviously a total shallow snob when I said, "where to read and be seen".

It's alarming, how quickly I wanted to reply! To defend myself! Witty banter, ahoy! Point out that KGB is lesser-known compared to the National Book Awards, and how you're telling me that Dave Eggers doesn't want to "be seen"? Pfah!

I didn't, and I'm complaining about it here because this is my space alone, because I guess Gothamist is a bigger, more anonymous stage where people feel less hesitation about being rude or nit-picky to the people providing them with information. I was certainly expecting some snide remarks about my first posting, a review. I didn't think a simple roundup could offend anyone. And even though I think it was rude and unfair for the guy to unproductively snark at me about my choice of words, I guess that's his right. They say if people are being rude and abusive about your writing, it means you've hit a nerve, but what nerve could I possibly have hit with an events roundup? I guess I'm not the only thin-skinned one?

Twerp.

chasing the muse

I spent today chasing my writing, somewhat literally. I took the day off from work because we've all been a little frantic with a late closing on our most recent issue, and since our editor in chief took the week off somewhat unexpectedly, everyone decided to take a day or two here and there. I took mine here (today) and there (Tuesday, to go battle bureaucracy). But what I really needed to do today was write, so that was my goal.

I wrote for about an hour in the morning and by all counts, I should probably have stayed there. But I'm the sort of person that needs a perfect house around me, everything neat and in order, to be able to focus, and since ours .. well, isn't ... I packed up the iBook and headed to the New York Public Library for some inspiration and soaring ceilings. Of course, it's Veteran's Day. So the Library was closed. Strike one at 11:45AM.

But I caught about twenty minutes of the parade, in time to see the WWII veterans go by and get a little tearful because my grandfather, who was awarded a Purple Heart for his injuries on D-Day at Normandy, passed away this year. He came home from war sixty years ago, back to Texas and my grandma and they started a family and later came into my life, and I was lucky to have him, lucky he survived the war with his customary braveness and grace. I was pretty sad, standing there, watching the WWII vets surrounded by their families and little granddaughters.

I went to Bryant Park to try and write in the deceptively sunny park, but after about 20 minutes of typing I couldn't feel my fingers. Strike two. Then I decided to nip across the road to the Starbucks. No tables. Strike three. Since I had a late-afternoon hot cocoa date with Chris in SoHo, I figured I'd go find a Starbucks down there and work until 4PM.

I got down to the Spring/Crosby Starbucks a little frazzled and starving, found a table and got a sandwich and a coffee. After an hour writing there, my nerves couldn't take the crowds and the terrible piped-in music and the crowds, oh my god. I'm not someone who can work with headphones on, but I don't mind ambient music. I can't stand chatter, though. Hence, the original library idea. Strike four. So I IM'ed Chris and asked if I could just go to his otherwise-empty office, borrow some Advil, and finish my work. Thank god, I'd found a port in the storm.

The next two hours were spent quietly writing, eating cookies, curing my headache, drinking tea, and trading gossip with Chris. I couldn't have asked for a better spot to pin down a few more pages of the project I'm working on. Too bad I didn't think of that from the beginning.

Speaking of writing (and tucked here at the bottom of the entry), I've got a new gig! As of this weekend, I'll be the literature contributor for the esteemed and adored Gothamist. Twice-weekly or so, look for my roundups and updates about the goings-on in the New York publishing and literary world, along with little snippets of reviews and profiles of authors. Tips and leads and ideas, for those who know about these things, are always welcome.

son of a SON OF A BITCH*

I'll tell you what's funny. What's funny is that because of my first serious boyfriend, I totally abhor Jimmy Buffet. The guy seriously worshipped Buffet, and it made me hate everything about him. He - the boyfriend, not Jimmy Buffet - named his car after Buffet's daughter. He named his dog JB. He liked to talk about how one day he'd give it all up and sail around the Caribbean like some weird cross between Buffet himself and Tom Cruise in Cocktails. He wore hawaiian shirts like they were ever a good idea.

It made me HATE JIMMY BUFFET by extension. I still think Parrotheads are mentally disturbed, obsessed with a man that's not actually as much of a "free-spirit" as they seem desperately to believe he is. Do we even KNOW if Buffet was ever any kind of sailor, ever? Or did anything but visit Key West that one time and write crappy songs about it, forever to be played in hotel bars anywhere near a beach, but otherwise with no inherent musical VALUE whatsoever? The ex-boyfriend, apparently, is still a Parrothead. And I am still a Jimmy Buffet hater. But that's not what's funny.

What's funny is that I'm going on vacation in a month to the very place that Cheeseburger in Paradise was apparently born.

Bring on the endless renditions of Margaritaville. With tinny drums. And a Parrothead on the mike, living the "dream". If a rash of Buffet is what it takes to get a slice of paradise in Eleuthera, AHOY ME HEARTIES, I'm in.

* ten points and a shaker of salt to anyone who knows what this is referring to.

update

Well, the results are less that perfect, guys. Our interview went okay, we answered all the banal questions about each other and showered her with documents. Except the one she wanted - apparently, we are meant to have a US-approved vaccination report, and Stuart's UK one (that was showed to the doctor for his UK-side medical) isn't good enough.

So we need to make a call, see a USCIS-approved doctor, fork over a wad of cash for him basically to transcribe Stuart's UK vaccination report, and then Fed-Ex it back to our friendly case officer. She said we were basically fine except for that, once she got that in the file she'd approve us and mail the green card.

What that means is very little, really. Stuart can still work, since we'll have resolved this well before February when his current Employment doc runs out. We're otherwise fine on our application, according to today's caseworker, and the address she gave us isn't some scary monolith processing center but her own desk in the very building we were in, which gives me hope.

And call it some sick twisted Stockholm Syndrome, but I got to see our papers flashing past in her thick case file, all the things we'd ever sent over, our handwriting on every page as it flipped past, and I got a little sentimental.

And also, glad that all our disparate applications, supplications, reparations, negotiations ... all of them ... made it into the same brown folder. Minus one, of course. So, one pesky little vaccinaition report, coming right up.

Fries with that?

red letter day

It's god damn thirty in the morning, which is to say, when I usually wake up. I don't usually wake up this anxious to get the day over, but today's our USCIS Initial Interview where, if everything goes well, we'll get stamped and approved for Stuart's Permanent Residence (Conditional Upon Marriage) and we won't have to futz with the USCIS for another couple of years.

See all the unnecessary capital letters in the middle of sentences? That's the USCIS experience for you. I've been on message boards with posts that have titles like "My FOP isn't working with the GRV and I need two extra 563 and a ORP/RGT! Help!" I'm not even kidding. Actually, the real terms are AOS, EAD, 765 and 485, AP and 130, and people, I DIDN'T LOOK AT THE DOCUMENT PILE, I've got that shit memorized.

Prowling the message boards to find out what to expect is sort of like listening to rumors about the French Resistance during World War Two. They WILL look at pictures? They don't? It'll last 20 minutes? It'll last six hours with a follow-up? Affidavit of Support? How many times have I submitted that, wait, you want another one? The song-and-dance segment of today's interview will directly follow the scotch tasting?

At this point, I WOULDN'T be surprised if the presiding officer breaks out into a rudimentary welcome routine involving two penguins, a flying car, and a stack of pancakes. I won't be surprised by anything. I know what to expect except for what they tell you you'll never know to expect. Yeah, see?

Last night Stuart and I sat around quizzing each other on the facts of our lives, just for fun because we certainly KNOW everything about each other including the full range of each other's school names, first kisses, parents' middle names, maiden names and birthdays. It got a little silly, like when I said, "what surgery have I had?"

And Stuart answered, "well, an appendectomy during the blackout, and the... eh... they anally probed you for cysts when you were little."

"... That's COMMONLY REFERRED TO AS A COLONOSCOPY, AND IT WAS FOR POLYPS."
"Whatever."

We also know each other's family secrets, each other's deepest fears and resentments, what turns the other on and how to make the other laugh in the middle of anything, including church, a wedding or a funeral, or a USCIS interview. Only the surface information in our lives will be laid bare for these people today - our lease, our marriage certificate, our photo albums. But if it gets tense in there, I might just do the wiggly hand thing. And that's for the LAUGHING, not the turning-on.

Or I'll refer to my colonoscopy as an anal probing, and see if I can keep a straight face.

Those USCIS guys have NO IDEA what goofballs are about to whirl into their lives. Maybe they'll stamp us just to get us out of there.

red and gold days

I'm still around, just feeling a little quiet these days. I've been:

drinking a lot of tea. a LOT.
making corn chowder for the first time. so good!
planning an unexpectedly awesome vacation with friends.
getting ready for our INS interview.
going to the gym.
feeling cold then hot again in this strange weather.
not enjoying fall enough before it goes (central park duck pond hot chocolate tomorrow after work, anyone?)
watching old movies.
being delighted by couch brunch with the girls, knowing i need more of those.
rejoicing in the return of House, M.D.
listening to a lot of The Beautiful South.
wearing in a new pair of Fryes.
eating a lot of bacon.
apparently, not blogging! I'll be better this week.