04.02.22

for the last few months i've been a big, docile albatross tending a kinder egg instead of an eventual chick: all of the apartment improvements we summoned last year are beginning to arrive at last and i've made more to prepare for their settling, and the nest, she is feathered. i've painted the once-grey bedroom walls blush pink, logged hundreds of manhattan miles collecting and framing new-to-us art, ferried books and clothes to crosby street for donation, found and arranged for drapes' tailoring,* woven a cradle for the tradescantia i propagated and hung in the bathroom we reglazed and are outfitting with a new vanity and sink–and we haven't even had anyone over since the before times! but the cats love draping themselves over the new, fancy sectional's tufted humps, and i fantasize about pitching a home tour to the lifestyle blog i've been not-so-quietly charming with little comment-anecdotes for a year. i want so badly to have strangers tell me my adjectives are winning! and here my poor kidchamp was all along, the cobbler's barefoot child.**

this rejuvenation is absolutely runoff from the umpteen design pieces i've been churning out, and i'm alright with that. a lot of the day-to-day work has been pitched-to-me tours of designers' projects, and interviews aside, the features are rather like the essays i used to write for visual art classes? my mother taught me the rudiments of that analysis when i was in elementary school, and the albatross parts of my brain are very pleased with themselves when they egest bits on perspective and lines of beauty. also, let's be honest, i have excellent taste now. but it is time to swoop at new-to-me outlets, so i spent several hours the other night crafting a pitch based on something i remembered about beethoven from when my best friend and i had to dress up as historical characters in seventh grade. (i was cyrano de bergerac, but that won't come up in the essay, probably.) i'm also working on a really short piece about chopping up mice, so what i'm saying is i guess i could use some gobbet-luck, if you're interested in manifesting on someone else's behalf. this march was my busiest freelance month to date! put that in your crop and regurgitate it.

*i walked uptown with a painted piece of cardboard to see if some velvet curtains i'd seen online would match the bedroom walls' updated color, and when i wandered through the clearance corner en route to fabrics i found four long panels of what i'd planned to eyeball at like 80% off (a return?)! i still haven't repaired the beautiful little sewing machine i don't know how to use, so i took the panels to the great guys at our local dry cleaner and everyone is happy.

**my mom was walking into a store last week and, in hauling the door open with the excessive force that characterizes women of our line, managed to very nearly rip off her big toenail. an urgent-care doctor made an incision to finish the job and stitched her up, and she now has the whole nail, which is a festive pedi-red she'd just painted herself. i can't wait to see what she makes with it! i also wish she would contact the store, as "this little piggy went to ulta" should really have earned her free makeup for life. this was her deep-fried mcdonald's lizard!

05.01.21

my friend lesley is a cherry-blossom junkie who haunts the brooklyn botanic garden each spring, and i met her out there early yesterday afternoon to stroll around the cotton-candy lawns and dodge people taking photos of their children and instagram spouses. she rode her bike out to east river park to walk with me a few months ago, and that was one of like four times i've seen a friend in person since last spring; no one was vaccinated then, so we strolled a responsible distance from one another and talked about how neither of us wanted to fuck around with writing a book. this time we could have played twister if we'd felt like it, and i'd imagined what it would be like to hug her—i haven't hugged anyone other than joe in so long, and i was pretty bad at it pre-pandemic—but i also knew it wouldn't come up if i didn't bring it up. she's not a hugger, though she would certainly have indulged me if i'd asked her (when i met my friend abbe's boyfriend at her birthday picnic i actually said "may i embrace you?" like a total creeper), but i...didn't. it was enough to take our sunglasses on and off and squint against the gusts of grit and blossoms kicking up across the grass and lend her a book about cremation. i wanted the normal things, not hugging for the sake of hugging.

i ran into my ancient neighbor jerry, a long-retired cop whose wife died early in the pandemic, when i was walking across the bridge to east river park a couple of days ago. he looked down at my arm: "how many TA-ttoos you got?" i told him i have eight, but most of them are on my back, and he lit up and gave me a massive high-five. then he apologized, said he'd gotten his two shots and had been swabbed with the thing, but it was fine, fine, i haven't spontaneously high-fived anyone since long before we started haven't-sincing.

after lesley and i parted i wandered around the brooklyn museum gift shop. took the train back up to the union square greenmarket, bought all the ramps the chefs aren't using. wandered downtown to my bookstore, currently a pop-up wedding boutique, and tried on a bunch of tiaras. walked home.

05.03.20

i thought for a week or so that i was accumulating soot as i ran errands and walked up to the rubber track ten blocks north of houston, but i appear to be developing...a tan? the speckled filth on my forehead and cheeks is definitely freckles, and joe says the back of my neck has lost its customary translucence. i was decent about getting out of the house in the before times — though i worked out indoors, i made it into the neighborhood at least once a day, and i walked to soho for my weekly bookstore shifts and to and from chinatown to catch the subway up to the bird hospital — but i guess, surprise surprise, taking a daily late-afternoon walk with joe and, now, spending an hour a day up at the track is, despite the mostly-grey-and-rainy weather we've been having, the sort of thing that toasts a gal. i wish i could report that this stirred something in me, but it's just a thing, like the acne i've been getting from my masks and the welts i get under my breasts when i run several days in a row.

i run all the days in a row, now; it's about a mile up to the track, which is just enough time to make respectable progress on my pokémon situation (david bowie, my gyarados, is such a powerful boy) before lurching through a minimum of 13 jogged laps and a lot of strolling. the track surface mimics the spring of my beloved treadmills, i have the lanes more or less to myself when it's windy and/or raining, and the strip of grass between me and the east river promenade teems with fledgling robins and juvenile squirrels (who have yet to learn, a month in, that there's no angle in dashing across the track to forage for food on the astroturf at its center). when i'm facing north i can see the power station that blew during hurricane sandy and denied us electricity for a week; when i loop around south the williamsburg bridge eats the horizon. i couldn't tell you why ferry traffic has been up for the past two months, but i swear that it has, and racing the boats up- and downriver is delightful, even though i always, always lose. on the best days they carry salt air up from the harbor. i am wearing a neon fanny pack without irony. send help.

04.05.20

CONSUMED: A PARTIAL LIST.

bored to death (series). it's entirely possible that i would have been immune to bored to death's charms if i'd seen it when it first aired on hbo a decade ago; it's very wes-anderson-meets-michael-chabon brooklyn-precious, and with the exception of kristen wiig, its female cast doesn't get much in the way of open road. because we're seeing it after i saw ted danson through four seasons of the good place—i really loved the good place—and while the good, the bad, and the brooklyn of this city is largely off-limits to us, i find myself getting misty over, like, scenes at veselka and old town.* creator/writer/nude-cameo jonathan ames distills something very specific about book and magazine publishing at the beginning of this decade, and while i didn't actually live in greenpoint or park slope in those years, i spent rather a lot of time there; i'd say he's gotten them right, too. also, why haven't we been to brighton beach? why haven't we gone to spa castle? mistakes were made in The Time Before. also also, i think i might be putting together some sort of ted danson retrospective over here. anyway, bored to death: the stoner-noir rejoinder to sex and the city i didn't know i needed, even though that ubiquitous pop-fictional-character personality quiz told me i was an 80% match with carrie motherfucking bradshaw.

game night (film). i see movies at weird film festivals, on international flights, and at, like, dine-in theaters in brooklyn, so i was ignorant of game night's existence until my cousin dan recommended it in our neverending twitter direct-message thread; he said it was one of the best comedies of the decade and as he is a comedian, i decided to listen to him. readers, it is an extremely enjoyable movie! from where i'm sitting it's superior to knives out (another quirky-mysterious semi-thriller i considered pretty cheesy, as daniel craig did not work at all for me; please don't tell the dine-in theaters that or they might not let us come back), in fact. casting directors, please hire rachel mcadams and jesse plemons (especially jesse plemons) for all the comic things.

temporary (book). i'm tempted to call temporary the best book i've read this year so far, but i've had the good fortune to read several boss books over the past few months; let's say it's top three for sure. the very last emily books title and hilary leichter's first novel (expanded from a short story published in n+1 in 2012), temporary follows an unnamed female narrator ostensibly in search of "the steadiness," or an end to the increasingly-absurd fill-in work she's been doing since she was a little girl (when she was hired to open and close each of the doors in an empty house at fixed intervals). she is a human barnacle, and a pirate, and a sort-of-host for the cremains of a captain of industry; she sounds a bit like a lewis carroll character, a kelly link character, a helen oyeyemi character (link and oyeyemi both praised the book, unsurprisingly). it's bone-dry, poignant, and very, very funny, and i think about it a lot as i run errands for my shut-in neighbors for free, shoulder to shoulder with the gig workers running errands for a different set of shut-ins, for lousy pay. C told me today that she drove up to tompkins square park and bought some pastries at the farmers' market "because it was outside;" she also told me that she sings a short song to daffodils blooming in the park across the street from our apartments each morning. i have mostly lost the ability to judge anyone for anything, though i remain dead certain that the adults biking recreationally on city sidewalks are domestic terrorists.

*neither of which is in brooklyn, ironically.

05.01.12



this year's edition of the manhattan challenge (in which joe and i take the subway up to 220th street and the henry hudson bridge and walk the island, north to south) was more leisurely than our previous walks; we got started hours later than we usually do, and our pit stops (at earl's beer & cheese, sakagura, and a sunglasses stand on st. mark's) were splashier. we passed three sidewalk domino games instead of our customary two. we discovered the greatest fountain in all of manhattan. we learned that the guys who fish down at battery park all day do not go home empty handed, as we always assumed - they catch sea monsters.

we moved to manhattan nine years ago today. i have no doubt we'll be here nine years from now.

04.16.09: again with the treacle and the cherry blossoms



on a double-time errand run over my lunch break this afternoon, a patch of excellence! as they assembled a construction site in front of an urban outfitters,* someone wove the nearby trees through their scaffolding.** the fixtures plus the flora reminded me of the park (a chelsea bar that looks like architectural digest guest edited by miss havisham - so-so drinks, but a wonderful place to explore). can one build an apartment around a tree? i'd quite like that.

*yeah, i went to urban outfitters. i wanted to celebrate our apartment's long-awaited unpacking with new pillowcases (his and hers), but i neglected to notice that they were online only. alas!

**trees are this spring's big medium, i think: a few weeks ago someone was adding false foliage to the ones in front of the time warner center.

04.15.09



favorite things: spicy inglehoffer mustard (and the excellent little potbellied jars it leaves behind), my great-grandfather's silver cigarette case (now a clutch), and cherry blossoms. happy spring, internets: you've been awfully nice about my umpteen tales of bed bug woe, and i dig you for that.

04.09.09: the dirty dozen, part II {bless us every one}

05 my camera's moodier settings are having, i will admit, an unduly dramatic effect on the tone of my photos. i was going to post a gaily colored picture of the trees blossoming in front of my apartment, but it's so much more fun to caption the ones i take in pinhole mode.



the orphans rejoiced when spring put her arms around the tenement building.

06 according to this morning's newsletter, gwyneth paltrow is selling her goop online ("i thought maybe i would ebay some of my favorite and most treasured things to raise some money for the robin hood foundation, who do a lot of amazing work in new york city."). this is a bold move: as any voodoo priest can tell you, it's a lot easier to practice black magic on someone when you have some of their personal effects. don't anger anyone who wears chicken bones as accessories, gwyneth! of course, there is the distinct possibility that they aren't her personal effects at all; it's a likelihood, really, for the idea that she and i wear the same size is more than a little silly (and, well, the items are listed as new).

07 via popbitch, the charles mingus cat toilet training program ("it took me about three or four weeks to toilet train my cat, nightlife."), c. 1972. no, seriously.

08 we've tiptoed into the time of year when i have jonathan richman's "springtime in new york" in my head in a near-constant loop. here's hoping a full version pops up on youtube one of these days; live, it's one of his loveliest songs.

on canal street in april when it's 60
and the snow is melting fast
it's still shady in the morning
when you're laughing in your t-shirt running past

in tompkins square park, a couple is meeting
say what you want but i feel my heart beating
cause i love springtime in new york,
springtime in new york i do

03.20.09: chez us*



the first day of spring, and new york serves up snow: internets, this is why i left california. what's the new season looking like where you are?

*a cookie for you if you can guess which windows (two of 'em) are ours.

04.05.06

it's wing, or springer, or something like that. the plaza this morning was a far cry from the drifty blizzard zone of a few months back; our view from the third floor (this is from our stoop) was a sea of blossoms. hours later it was pummeled in a freak snowstorm; snakes on a plane, man. snakes on a plane.

mischa barton quote of the day:

"There's something about not being the quintessential Hollywood person who has to drive to every meeting themselves. You're in your own little area more. Somebody drives me to work - either my mom or an assistant. Or my boyfriend."

(jane, october '04)