04.20.10: the dirty dozen, part II {watching it}

04



it's just as well that i didn't buy one of the high-concept bird feeders i eyed before we moved; in the six months we've been in the new apartment, not a single bird has ventured up to the eighteenth floor.* happily, tugboats continue to chortle by with satisfying regularity; new york was the tugboat capital of the world until the 1930s, you know. last week's especially substantial new yorker, the one with the story of the doomed aeronauts, also profiled a tugboating family and their business; apparently the action's in louisiana and the gulf now.

"This place was no different than the Wild West or a gold strike in the Yukon," one tugboat captain told me. "It was a boomtown without any morals. You'd get friendly with someone in a bar and wake up the next morning on a boat heading into the Gulf. Shanghaiing was a reliable trade."

Things have calmed down since then, but only intermittently, and the Cajuns still try to keep their business in the family. One local phone book lists numbers by nickname as well as by given name--Jimmy (White Bean) Sonier, Michael (Possum) St. Tierre--as if it were still a sleepy fishing community and not a global hub.

[...]

To change course or speed [on an early tug], the captain had to send his orders down to the engineer via a system of gongs and bells threaded through the boat, as if phoning a foreign country. The busiest tugs...averaged more than five hundred bell commands in an eight-hour shift. On trickier maneuvers, the rate could rise to six per minute.

it goes without saying that i'd like to rig a system of gongs and bells in our apartment immediately, even though most of the messages will be about fritos.

05 celebrities v. giant inflatable rats: slippery-as-an-eel** edition

i passed jerry seinfeld and a colin-quinn-looking guy (probably colin quinn, now that i think about it) en route to the office this morning; seinfeld was wearing villainous teeny tiny round black glasses and cultivating an i-imprisoned-sydney-bristow vibe.

rats: 4.5
star: 14

06 we're going to a tribeca film festival screening next monday, huzzah! though joe's soccer and drugs documentary was sold out, we secured tickets for a slasher movie about hong kong real estate; i am well pleased. the slasher screening overlaps with feathered cocaine, the icelandic documentary about falcon smuggling, but i feel confident that feathered cocaine and i will cross paths again. now there's a phrase one doesn't use every day.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 what should one call a group of tugboats? don't say fleet. fleet is boring.

02 what would a system of gongs and bells in a modest private residence communicate?

03 how do you feel about seinfeld?

04 should seeing jerry seinfeld on the street automatically make you a new yorker?

05 have you ever been to a film festival? what'd you see?

*o, to have a hummingbird family like my mum's! then again, i shudder to think of how steve would feel about hummingbirds.

**seinfeld is all over the place in my affections, but i have a consistently soft spot for "hello! i got beaned with a giant ball of oil! i'm slippery as an eel!"

03.18.10

there are two sorts of shoe in my life: the loud, complicated ones i buy on sale or impulse and wear a handful of times season after season, and the little black flats i wear almost every day until they fall apart (magical things, those little flats: they make almost any outfit juuust businesslike enough for the office). it takes me four to six months to destroy said flats; as i walk two miles a day just scooting to and from work, i feel like i'm getting a pretty square deal. i was getting a square deal, that is, until - somewhere early in month two -



this happened. what the hell? do i pirouette on my left foot unconsciously? is there some sort of twelve dancing princesses thing going down after i fall asleep? does steve madden booby trap his flats?* then i realized i'd seen that shape before. oh, yes.



my shoe has sprouted a kraken's eye. when i said a few days ago that the end was nigh, i thought i was talking about kitten pictures - but as tennyson wrote,

There hath he lain for ages, and will stew
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and fuck up Lauren's shoe.

prepare for the last battle, internets.

on sightings, i can also report that mentioning pretty in pink last week actually summoned james spader.

celebrities v. giant inflatable rats:** steff edition

he swept past me on fifty-seventh street wearing an indiana jones fedora and walking a fluffy white dog, so it wasn't exactly a brat pack moment, but in a six-degrees-of-kevin-bacon way it brought me closer to both molly ringwald and william shatner than i have any right to be.

rats: 4.5
star: 13

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 what the hell happened to my shoe?

02 were you aware of canada's postal excellence? (check out the whole cryptozoological quartet. where's our ogopogo stamp?)

03 on a totally unrelated note, paul auster readers, is the book of illusions acceptable as an entry point? a copy materialized, kraken-like, at my office, and i'm thinking of auditioning it as a subway book.

*a designer willing to knock off the balenciaga lego heels is capable of anything.

**an ongoing tally of the famous people and union-displeasure-indicating balloons i see in the city.

03.06.09: bed bugs, XOXO

i am back at the office! i forgot to replace my possibly-bug-tainted brush after tossing it the other night and had to comb my hair with a fork this morning, but: back at the office. i feel infinitely more human, and like falling asleep at my desk.

to make up for having confused you in my last post with a paper suit picture from days and days ago, let me tell you something more recent: the exterminators finally arrived late yesterday afternoon, and we were kicked out of the apartment and into hell's kitchen for the rest of the evening. then the dry cleaners called to say that they needed our vacuum to suck the air from the space bags we gave them;* alors, we took big gulps of air, dashed back into our place to dump our last load of laundered clothes and grab the vac, and took off down the street (we'd already been banished for three hours at that point and really needed to pee, so we were running to finish the errand and get to a restaurant).

celebrities v. giant inflatable rats:** little j edition

when we turned up ninth avenue, joe almost clotheslined taylor momsen and her posse with the vacuum as they came out of a restaurant. that would actually have been horrible, of course, and i can certainly differentiate between actors and their roles, but jenny humphrey might be the gossip girl character most in need of a good clocking with a major appliance. the world is a mysterious place, no?

rats: 4.5
star: 12

*debugging the apartment and killing a 101 in 1001 {II} list item (085 buy and start using vacuum storage bags) at the same time: an eerie coincidence (i ordered the bags a few weeks ago and they arrived just before our sanguivorous little friends did), but convenient.

**an ongoing tally of the famous people and union-displeasure-indicating balloons i see in the city.

10.06.06

the dirty dozen: october doldrums edition* [part 3]:

009 my cold-weather thing is, apparently, buying a frivolous stuffed beast; i am a ten-year-old. last year it was yul; this year, it's - shame! - a starbucks halloween creature.** i'd post a picture (as it's quite cute, naturally), but i promised myself that i wouldn't pull the trigger unless i successfully pitched a lifestyle story at work; since i failed there, i decided that it shall be hidden until said successful pitch.

010 at the other end of the spectrum, there's absolutely nothing wrong with buying swag to pay for a dog's cancer treatments, especially when the swag says I [HEART] TRIPODS. behold the 'i heart tripods' blog, and the story of lulu the three-legged dog. give her all of your money. go on.

011 the ladymag had a four-way surprise party yesterday morning for me, a fellow newlywed, and two very pregnant coworkers. the format pleased me, as my card-and-massage-certificate-opening shared stage time with baby swag praise and another bride's stories. i still choked when it was my turn to talk, though, which is fucking frustrating: i've made peace with the fact that i'm no longer the full-of-herself teenager who could speak in front of a thousand people and wear 8" platforms to class without batting an eye, but it would be nice to talk to a few dozen benevolent colleagues without losing my voice. i think of situations like those whenever someone argues that medication alters one's authentic personality: what if the other me is the one i'm supposed to be? i'm not unhappy now, not at all, but i know that if i decide to pharm it up again someday, i won't flinch. suck it, tom cruise.

012 celebrities v. giant inflatable rats, the worldwide fug edition.
woo woo, haylie duff! semi-famous siblings shouldn't count, you say? i spend enough time over at go fug yourself that passing miz duff on the way home from work (wearing black leggings, no less) is, honestly, up there with the q&a with james carville a few weeks ago.***

rats: 3.5
star: 8

*i shouldn't be bored, since october is easily my favorite month. we have a remedy (we have?): henceforth it's rocktober.

**i don't actually hate starbucks; i quite like clean bathrooms, and the word on the street is that they treat their employees quite well. i simply prefer to purchase beasts from people who make them by hand (like beth, whose critters are gorgeous).

***however, i do not consider haylie duff my boyfriend.

04.12.06

101 in 1001: 045 earn (and get) a raise at work [completed mid-march '06]
in a literal sense, this item was in the bag unless i got fired before 22 march (pay tweaks happen on anniversaries at The Company). figuratively, it's still exciting; i have in fact been working my ass off, and my evaluation read like one of jan wenner's rolling stone reviews. moreover, joe and the cats and you lovely people are perennial, but i don't count on a lot of other things hanging in there from year to year. congratulations to The Company, then, for sticking it out with me! and congratulations to me for...having the funds to rent an extra movie each month.

celebrities v. giant inflatable rats: the six degrees of That Guy edition.
it was a long, hard winter for both star- and uniongazing; it's much more difficult to spot the famous when their fleshless little bodies are bundled up against the cold, and i think that if the MTA strikers' rallies featured huge rubber animals, frustrated commuters would have used them as bludgeons. things cleared up recently when i was trundling home from work with a huge box full of wedding dress. visibility was poor: i lurched off the curb at one point, nearly flattening myself and kyra sedgwick. woo, now our wedding's only one person away from kevin bacon! i give the encounter 1.5 points. i also ran into That Guy, in this case a character actor with a recurring role as a serial killer on csi: miami. one could argue that he shouldn't be any points because i can't remember his name; i'm calling 0.5 because, bacon-style, he's attached to the fantastically weird david caruso. if you haven't seen david caruso as csi: miami's horatio kane, friends, you are denying yourselves a rare pleasure.

rats: 3.5
star: 7