Yesterday afternoon Spencer and I had planned to get dinner and check out the new Apple store that opened in Soho on Thursday, but of course as it happened we picked the day when lower Manhattan had the largest blackout it’s had since last September. South of 14th st and West of Broadway everything was out - including the Apple store and the restaurant we’d planned to eat at. Thinking the outage couldn’t span more than a couple blocks, we walked up to the Angelika Film Center thinking we’d catch a movie and try again in a couple of hours - but that was closed too, being just inside the affected area. We eventually trekked over to Swift’s - on the East side of Broadway - and had a bite and a couple of drinks, then wandered around the blacked out streets. It’s a very strange thing to see in Manhattan - every single store closed, all the lights off, people sitting around on their front steps eating all the ice cream from their freezers before everyting melted. Some restaurants kept their bars and outside tables open, so you’d see these dim unlit interiors full of people sweltering without air conditioning and drinking lukewarm beer. Of course even the traffic lights were out, which made crossing any street (especially West Houston) a particular adventure. We didn’t see any accidents, but everyone seemed to be driving more or less as they pleased so I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few. Supermarkets were rushing the contents of their fridges and freezers down to basements and packing everything in dry ice, but as the power didn’t come back on for over eight hours I’m not sure how successful that could have been.

So I haven’t seen the new Apple store yet, alas, but I’m thinking I’ll head in sometime this week. It looks pretty amazing, and I’d love a chance to molest some iBooks. The SoHo store is the biggest one that’s been built yet, and from the glimpse I caught of it yesterday it looks more like a gallery or a museum than a store; it’s really stunning.

I had a chance to sample Skyy Blue last night, and I think it’s claimed its place as my favorite “Premium Malt Beverage.” Better than Smirnoff Ice, better than Bacardi Silver. Now if only one of the stores on my street sold it.

1. Transparent keyboards and monitors and mice are absolutely gorgeous, yes - until they’re badly in need of a good cleaning. Dust and other crap show up even more when they’re accumulating on your shiny Studio Display or Apple Pro Keyboard, as pretty as they are, and when it’s almost six months’ worth of dust and other crap - look out.

2. After a pot of doublestrength coffee, it seems entirely reasonable for dusting my monitor to turn into an hour on the floor with my keyboard, popping out each key one by one and going at the whole thing with a handful of q-tips and an old Sephora makeup brush.

3. If you have the patience to actually sit and pop out every key on an Apple Pro Keyboard and go at it with a handful of q-tips and an old Sephora makeup brush, you will not be able to take your eyes off it when you’re done. It will gleam like you wouldn’t believe, and you’ll sit there admiring it for a good twenty minutes before you’re driven to scrub down your entire desk, to match the newfound cleanliness of your hardware.

4. Seriously, this is the sexiest keyboard on the god damned planet.

5. The monitor isn’t bad either.

6. After sitting on the floor with a keyboard for an hour, it doesn’t seem all that tiresome when a fuse blows and I end up going out in a thunderstorm to find a hardware store still open that sells fuses. It gets maybe a little tiresome when it gets to the part where I’m standing on a chair in my kitchen in the dark, trying to figure out which fuse blew and then change it by the light of an orange-scented candle.

7. Yes, rp, I realize that the rest of the planet has heard of a thing called a “circuit breaker.”

I don’t do all that much shopping at Amazon, but it’s not all that uncommon, either. They tend to be pretty clever with their recommendations, which is why it’s surprising to me how unhelpful they are when it comes to electronics. As some of you remember, I bought a new digital camera a few months ago, and I bought it through Amazon. It seems fairly obvious to me that if nothing else, the information that I just purchased a digital camera should indicate that the one thing I’m not looking at right now is more digital cameras. Recommending similar items to past purchases works for books or music, but not for big electronics purchases. You’d think that based on the information of my camera purchase, they’d be trying to sell me camera accessories - memory cards, cases, ac adapters, whatever - not more cameras. It’s not just cameras - if I just purchased a DVD player (which I didn’t, but that’s another story), sell me DVDs related to past book or VHS purchases, not DVD players similar to the one I’ve already bought.

And speaking of DVD players, yes, I’m looking. This whole process is reminiscient of the months just before I finally bought a CD player just shy of ten years ago; I’m reluctant to buy anything else on VHS because I know I’m going to make the switch in the near future, but it’s irritating because I haven’t done it quite yet. With the freelance job I just finished, however, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that I’ll end up with something in the near future - perhaps a sexy little 4.9 pound something with a combo drive, even. That’s not to say I’m displeased with my existing sexy something, but really - can you have too much sexiness?

And on an unrelated note, I’m going to chime in with everyone else who’s already noted how much better Wired has gotten in the past year or so. I used to pick up the occasional copy for shuttle flights or train rides and thumb through it, but since a reader sent me a subscription I’ve read every issue cover to cover. The writing is much more engaging and relevant and it’s nice that there aren’t a couple hundred pages of ads padding everything out anymore. Along with Granta and The New Yorker, that brings the grand total of print magazines I bother reading to a whopping and impressive three.

<emma> CAOINE
<emma> Entries: 666     Comments: 0     Authors: 1
<emma> New Entry | Manage Blog | Delete Blog
<justin> emma, yours is truly the blog of darkness
<emma> say it ain’t so!
<justin> i summoned it last night at midnight with an elaborate ritual involving mice and a lot of drawing on my floor in chalk
<emma> i’m seriously gasping in alarm and shock, here
<justin> there was a lot of cleanup afterwards but the long and short of it is that i sold my soul to your blog for a box of cheez-its
<emma> no
<justin> i couldn’t help myself
<emma> IT CAN’T BE
<justin> their crunch is so enticing and that light cheese flavor is just to die for
<emma> THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE
<justin> they were the white cheddar kind
<emma> I DON’T BELIEVE IT
<justin> join me and we will rule brooklyn as father and son
<justin> wait were you doing empire or the matrix

My landlord doesn’t actually live in my building, at least not during most of the year. When I first moved in here with Spencer, he’d spend his summers in the downstairs apartment and his winters in Florida. The landlord, that is, not Spencer. Michael would show up in late May and stay through early September, spending most of the intervening weeks parked on our front porch with a newspaper and a glass of something, leaving the windows open so he could listen to opera playing inside.

He took a sort of fatherly interest in me the first few months I was here; I was only nineteen at the time and states away from my actual father (whose birthday it is today!) and it was nice to go downstairs once in a while and have a glass of wine, even if it was this not-terribly-good white he makes himself. The hallway smells like grapes for a few months out of the year, but that’s not so bad either.

Michael spends less time here now; he doesn’t like the city very much and there’s not a whole lot he needs to be around for as there’s only three of us living in the building and we can all pretty much take care of ourselves. He kept a fairly close eye on me last year; he disliked (rather sensibly as it turned out) both my haircut and my boyfriend at the time. Upon his arrival for this year’s visit, though, I reclaimed my place as his favorite - he (like many others) is a big fan of me being blonde and back at NYU.

He left for Florida again today and while I won’t miss the careful scrutiny of my hair, I do miss the opera and the wine just a little bit.

Apparently when writing my Saturday HowTo, I forgot to include the part about “Find yourself completely unable to refuse the abundance of free alcohol available at the club you end up going to and come home so completely wasted that you’re pretty much useless until Sunday’s more or less over.” So yeah, that.

The truly impressive hangover is a thing of beauty, to be treasured like the delicate blossom it is before it fades all too soon. Learn to appreciate the headache that creeps up with the sun, like a morning glory unfurling its petals except maybe with more Advil. Express awe and wonderment at the fact that you can’t so much as roll over in bed without needing to lie very, very still for quite a while afterward. Of course you couldn’t remember to drink a lot of water before you finally went to bed last night (or this morning, really) - from the looks of things you couldn’t remember how to unlace your boots, either, although you must have tried very hard. The Brita pitcher will be your best friend for most of the day as water is pretty much the only thing you feel is safe to consume. Eventually, though, your stomach makes its presence known through what seems to be honest-to-goodness hunger rather than the nausea you loved so much. This calls for a breakfast sandwich - never mind that it’s closer, temporally, to what most people would call “supper” than it is to breakfast. When the hangover is inevitably gone, don’t worry - it will be back next Sunday, no doubt, and you can entertain yourself in the meantime counting bruises that you don’t remember acquiring.

Today is definitely about eating some real food, finally, and attempting to go to bed before four am because seriously the time is going to come when I have to rejoin the rest of the diurnal population - summer does not, after all, last forever.

Realize for the umpteenth time that while, yes, using Britney as your alarm will in fact make you leap from your cozy nest of blankets with admirable swiftness, you still have to deal with having that song stuck in your head all day. Wonder if rising promptly at ten am on a Saturday morning is worth asking everyone you know to give you a sign or even to hit you, baby, one more time.

While brushing your teeth, notice that it looks as though someone has hit you, baby, one more time: your right eye is mysteriously and inexplicably swollen. A midnight foxy boxing match with your bedpost, perhaps? Your pillow teaching you a lesson about getting back in the kitchen (to make it some pie)? In addition to looking rather battered, you’re going to feel sort of hungover despite the fact that you didn’t drink last night. Swear that if you’re getting sick again you’re going to go at your tonsils with an X-acto knife.

Drown your sorrows in a pot of doublestrength hazelnut with the last of the soy milk that’s teetering precariously on the edge of its expiration date. There is nothing in this world worse than expired soy milk, you know from experience, but the coffee seems okay.

Settle in at your desk with your coffee and spend the better part of the day unwashed and in your pajamas, toying with design projects and painting your nails with the remnants of the sexiest red polish in the world (you want to use up the bottle before it goes completely gloopy and unusable). As equally lazy east coast or bright-and-early west coast friends awaken, debate with them the following:

- Why, exactly, you’re unable to remember that you must pee before starting on your nails, despite knowing perfectly well that struggling with pajama bottoms while the polish is at all damp or tacky will result in everything getting smudged all to fuck.

- Why it is that we can get away with quoting the Simpsons at every opportune moment despite the fact that it’s not quite de rigeur anymore (it’s because we’re just that cool).

- Why IE 6 seems to be much more of a whiny little bitchass with regard to xhtml than was IE 5. Don’t forget to pepper dirty words and slander throughout this discussion.

- How it is that every single one of us has giggled through an episode of American Idol, whether or not we’re prepared to admit it.

- Whether or not pantsal (as in “feel funny in the pantsal region”) is actually a word. Decide that it isn’t, but it should be.

Having come to a consensus on each of these points, take your leave of these likeminded wholesome web personalities and enjoy a well-deserved nap, assuming the caffeine from that pot of hazelnut is out of your system and your nails are completely dry (and you’ve finally had a chance to pee). You have more work to do later, after all, and we all know how strenuous using a text editor can be.

A selection of search queries that have brought people to this site recently:

Tobey Maguire AND naked
chewing on ice
powerpuff AND fetish AND blossom
smack
child fuck
nutrition information
Spider Pictures
hangovers AND ants
peeking
mike’s hard iced tea

And a few of my favorite searches within caoine itself:

penis archive
wrist type porn
officer kasper
batjew pics
ty
tyco
tycho (these were sequential)
baseball archives
other web sites

(Plus many of you who, apparently, enjoy searching for your own nicks. Did you find what you were looking for?)

<justin> emma darling
<justin> seriously what kind of twentysomething are you
<justin> do you even WATCH the friends reruns shown constantly on network television specifically for your edification
<justin> you’re YOUNG and HIP and you live in NEW YORK CITY, chica
<justin> you’re supposed to spend all of your time every day in the same coffee shop
<justin> and like
<justin> go on implausibly mismatched blind dates, with hilarious results
<justin> and biscotti
<justin> you need to start eating biscotti
<justin> you should have one and only one gay friend who should be cuddly and flamboyant, and take you shopping
<justin> wait i think we’re in a different sitcom now
<justin> but it still applies!
<justin> and i bet you haven’t even started planning your wedding yet
<justin> i bet you’ve never read a single issue of the martha stewart bridal magazine
<justin> what are you going to WAIT until you MEET SOMEONE you WISH TO MARRY?
<justin> i’m sighing, and making a gesture
<justin> it’s a gesture of despair, hopelessness
<justin> I GIVE UP, EMMA
<justin> I GIVE UP
<justin> I WASH MY HANDS OF YOU AND YOUR UNACCEPTABLE TWENTIES

The (in)famous Chrissy and I have decided: the time has come for us to go out. Back in the day - in the ancient misty prehistoric era of three years ago, even - we used to take advantage of living walking distance from Mother and were out several nights a week, but those days are thankfully gone. When I informed the veteran and venerable Spencer of our nefarious plot, he commented: “I’m not sure I want to party like it’s 1999.” He’s not alone in this sentiment; I certainly don’t miss being eighteen and owning more than one London After Midnight album. I’m a god damned blonde now, fer chrissakes, and I haven’t the faintest idea if my apartment currently contains a pair of wearable fishnets.

Don’t get me wrong. Riding around in someone else’s Jetta and inquiring of terrified passerby where we might acquire such a thing as a gyro at four thirty in the morning: these are good times. So, too, the end-of-the-night camaraderie that strikes as that one Wolfsheim song gets played and the line at the coat check counter rapidly accrues. (Or the priceless reaction when the fiercest rivethead you know discovers that it is a Wolfsheim song: “You mean I just danced to synthpop?”) We had fun, I can’t deny it, but even poking through drawers of period clothing - skirts with their cigarette burns and safety pins - I can’t see myself once again getting my groove on amongst the sweaty despair of New York’s dedicated goths with any degree of frequency.

But every once in a (great) while, the urge nonetheless strikes: out comes the eyeliner and on come the boots, and away Chrissy and I shall go. Beware, Manhattan: your prodigal clubkids are returning. We intend to drink red devils and do the goth dance (including such variants as I Dropped My Contact Lens and Help Me, I’m Tangled In Sea Kelp or the ever-popular I’m The Mopiest Giant Squid You Ever Did See). We’ll lean tragically against walls and bars alike, and pretend for one clove-smokey evening that we aren’t an entirely different flavor of jaded in this Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Fucking Two.