If you’ve been reading this site since I went back to school in 2002, you may remember that I used to spend my Thursdays getting sloshed at a bar in the Village with one of my professors and a number of other philosophy majors. And that professor is of course Al, who’s now a good friend and one of the only people I go to clubs and shows with, since we share the exact same taste in music.
During my senior year we sort of disbanded our weekly drinking sessions for reasons of money and sanity - while some of us had Fridays off as college kids often do, the whole thing was murder for everyone who had to work or be somewhere the next day, and we were spending more money on booze than I would have thought possible for a bunch of students who didn’t have a lot of money in the first place. (We ended up all going out at least once a week anyway, just not at that same bar. But we had good intentions, really!) Al mentioned to me a couple of weeks ago that he had decided to resurrect our Thursday nights for his current students, so I stopped by the other day to see if anyone I knew would be there.
It was really strange being in that bar again after something like a year and a half. All the waitresses I knew and loved had left, and even the bartender was new, but everything else was pretty much the same. Except that they had added french fries to their menu of passable pub food after years of adamantly refusing to serve french fries.
The other thing that was strange, of course, was that I’m not an NYU student anymore and I don’t have Fridays off. I have become one of those people who declines to join everyone else when they decide to move to a different bar for cocktails at 10pm. I am now the loser who says “Oh I couldn’t possibly, we have a client meeting tomorrow morning that I need to be alert for.” And even though I stopped at four drinks and was home by 11, I was still mildly hungover on Friday. It just doesn’t seem fair.
So perhaps you’ve noticed that over the past couple of months I’ve pretty much stopped posting on Fridays altogether. One of the reasons for this is that Fridays and Saturdays are pretty much the worst days to be in my apartment - inevitably, the crazy woman who lives in the apartment next door has a party and there’s god-awful music audible in our apartment until about 4 or 5am. Keep in mind that audible music in this case refers to music that is loud enough that even with earplugs and several fans going for extra background noise, I am unable to sleep through it. And as for its effect on my posting - it unfortunately works out that only a single poorly constructed wall separates my little home office from all of this crap next door, so that room is the first one we abandon when the music starts. (When it’s the people in the apartment downstairs that are having a party, our bedroom and living room suffer most.)
Believe me, I would have told you about all this before if it had been going on during all the time I’ve been living here (nearly a year now). But for some reason we can’t explain, it’s gotten exponentially worse over the past couple of months. It used to be that we’d go weeks or months at a time without hearing anything at all, and even then they’d turn it off by eleven or twelve. Now we have three or four nights a week like this, and as you can imagine, we’re not thrilled. It’s considered a good night if we can’t hear anything once the earplugs are in, because then at least we can do everything we normally would except watch tv. But that’s why we’re moving, so it’s just a matter of putting up with everything for another three weeks.
We’re not planning on going quietly, by the way. Right now we never fight back with our own music because we don’t think it’s worth it to antagonize people who have such control over our sleeping habits, crazy and inconsiderate though they may be. But we don’t have a lot to lose once it’s our last couple of days here, so we’re planning on moving Chris’s enormous speakers into my room and playing metal or industrial very, very loudly. It’s perfectly legal to play loud music between 8am and 11pm, so we think we’ll do just that. Especially if it’s 8am on a morning after our neighbors have been up till 5 having a party. (Hee, hee.)
I warned you this was coming.
This morning I knew that fall was pretty much over, because I had to use my winter moisturizer (a plain Vitamin E moisturizer from the Body Shop) instead of my summer moisturizer (which has tea tree oil in it) in order to keep my skin from drying out after my shower. It’s also been cold enough for the past few nights that I’ve had to wear socks in bed until my body heat warms up the sheets - otherwise my feet get very cold and stay cold all night. I don’t think I’m ready for winter yet, but nobody really asked me before deciding to make it cold.
Chris and I are really looking forward to moving. I mentioned the move last week, but I didn’t mention why we’re leaving our current place - it’s mainly because of our neighbors. Since he moved in here (and since I moved in with him last winter), we’ve had to deal with occasional music from either the apartment directly below us or the one next to us on our floor. But over the past few months the music (from next door especially) has gotten more and more frequent, to the point that on weekends we pretty much take it for granted that we’re going to have to sleep with earplugs if we don’t want to listen to salsa all night. Calling the cops doesn’t do anything; believe me, we’ve tried. So we came to a decision a few weeks ago that we needed to break our lease several months early and move - after that, it was only about a week before we found the apartment we ended up taking.
We were reluctant to give up on our current apartment, because it’s absolutely gorgeous and the rent is almost criminally low, especially for a three-bedroom. If we thought we had any hope of the neighbor situation improving, we’d probably stay - but given that we don’t, we’re really happy to be leaving. In the evenings we look at furniture catalogs and play with floor plans of our new place in Photoshop and on graph paper. And we think about how quiet Roosevelt Island is, and what it will be like to drink our coffee in the morning while staring at our fantastic view of Manhattan. We’re pretty much counting the days till the move itself.
Other than that, life is pretty good. I haven’t been keeping in touch with my friends from NYU as well as I’d like to, so I’m going to go have drinks with some of them tonight after work. After high school I pretty much lost contact with everyone, and I don’t want to do that again, especially since I’m not likely to meet other philosophy majors in my industry.
I still miss being a college student very much, even though my job is as close to perfect as you can get and I like not having to pinch pennies and survive on ramen. If you’re still in high school, here’s some unsolicited advice: believe everyone when they tell you that “the college experience” will be one of the best times of your life - it sounds unbelievably dorky when you’re eighteen, but you’ll understand how great it was when it’s over.
A recent megnut post hit close to home: reading through my older archives, I’m struck by how different my weblog was a few years ago. I didn’t really worry about whether or not everyone I’d ever met might be reading it (mostly because few people I knew actually did), and I felt pretty comfortable just yammering on about all the little things that went on in a given day - doing the dishes, going to a bar, having lunch, etc. It was probably boring as hell for all you people who were reading it back then, but for me it’s nice because I can really remember now what my life was like during any given month of it.
Reading through my archives for the past couple of years, though, it’s very different. I started to become more conscious of the fact that anything I said would probably be read by family members, employers and coworkers (past and present), boyfriends (same), and acquaintances. It probably makes sense that a real journal should be a private thing, but I’m much better at remembering to write for my weblog than I am at carrying around a paper journal with me, at least these days.
So you’ll have to excuse me if I start treating this site like a journal again, at least occasionally. There are huge portions of my life that I still don’t think it’s a good idea to talk about in public, but five years from now it would be nice to remember what I was up to in the last months of 2004.
As a kid I had quite a taste for trashy sci-fi and fantasy books, and I must have devoured hundreds of them before I moved to New York at the ripe old age of eighteen. Unfortunately, I sold them all before the move, along with most of my other sellable possessions, because I had some idea about it being cool not to own very many things, and also because I wanted the money.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been in the mood to reread some of the books I got rid of, mostly for nostalgic reasons. I’ve been picking up used and discounted paperback copies (which will probably still end up costing me more than I made by selling them in the first place), and it’s pretty satisfying to revisit some of these series. Fantasy especially is still something I consider a guilty pleasure (with a few exceptions), but then again I can’t read Kierkegaard all the time.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to enjoy Anne Rice again, though. I tried rereading Interview a while back and was immediately put off, and that’s hardly the worst of her stuff. I couldn’t get more than a few pages into it, so I don’t think I’ll even attempt any of the others.
Is there anything better than coming home after a long day at the offfice to turkey on whole wheat with a side of hooker killing? I didn’t think so.
For the past few days, Chris and I have been playing a lot of both Pikmin 2 and GTA: San Andreas. Both games are great, but they’re obviously doing their respective things in very different ways, and it always strikes me as bizarre that we’re able to switch so easily between killing hookers and planting armies of little carrot creatures. And incidentally, I love how talkative the Pikmin are now. We sometimes spend the last thirty seconds before sunset standing Olimar under the onion so that we can hear the little Pikmin sleep noises. And their little cave marching song might be the cutest thing I’ve ever heard.
The good: I caught the Skinny Puppy show at Webster Hall last night. It wasn’t sold out, I guess because they just did two shows here back in June and the fall tour hasn’t been well publicized. But that turned out well for those of us who were there, since there wasn’t really a pit to speak of and I don’t think there was a single crowdsurfer there all night. Instead, there were just a lot of fans who like Skinny Puppy enough to see them twice or three times in a year. I managed to be first in line before the show, so I was front and center against the barricade, and I have the bruises and aching feet to show for it. I also spent most of this morning getting mud and fake blood out of my hair, but I figure it was worth it.
As for the show itself, it was just as good as the one I saw in June. Here’s the setlist, if you’re interested:
- Downsizer
- I’mmortal
- Pro-Test
- Empte
- Curcible
- God’s Gift (Maggot)
- VX Gas Attack
- Worlock
- Deep Down Trauma Hounds
- Hexonxonx
- Tin Omen
- Inquisition
- Hardset Head
- Human Disease (S.K.U.M.M.)
- Harsh Stone White
- Reclamation
- The Choke
- Smothered Hope
Highlights were probably Human Disease and Deep Down Trauma Hounds. I’m not sure why they translate so well to a live format, but they do. Smothered Hope seemed to be the only thing that everyone knew the lyrics to, but that’s probably for the best.
As for the bad: Chris and I went to see Saw today. If you haven’t seen it, don’t bother. It’s bad enough to be funny, but not bad enough to spend $10.50 on. Wait for the DVD, but be prepared for a couple of hours of stunningly bad acting, painful dialog, and a complete absence of that much-anticipated gore.
So Chris and I are moving into a new apartment at the beginning of December. This of course has a number of implications: for one, those of you who have contact information for me should contact me (get it) to find out my new number and address.
It also means that we’re taking this opportunity to sell off a bunch of our stuff and buy new stuff to replace it. If you live in New York and are in the market for a (fully functional) PS2, original bondi iMac, futon/couch (with or without mattress), 19″ TV/VCR with FM tuner, or possibly a full-sized IKEA bed frame (with or without mattress), please do let me know. There’s also a microwave and two air conditioners that I’ll have to find specs for. Keep in mind that you’d be responsible for getting this stuff from our place to yours. The bed isn’t a sure thing yet - if I can find somewhere to store it I may hang onto it.
Where are we moving, and why? Well, we’re moving from way uptown Manhattan to Roosevelt Island (which itself is part of the borough of Manhattan). Whenever we tell someone we’re moving to Roosevelt Island, they usually say “Where is that?” or “That’s so cool, I don’t know anyone else who lives there.” I’m not sure why more people don’t know more about it - it’s a little more money than we’re paying now, but we’re getting a 2br with a balcony and a living room with enormous windows overlooking Manhattan. We’ll also be getting a doorman, plus use of a gym, pool, tennis court, and parking garage. And while the 59th St Tramway is cool, it isn’t the only way to get onto the island (which is in the East river). The F stops there, and it’s accessible by car as well.
So let me know if you want to buy any of the stuff I mentioned above. I’m not really interested in trading, by the way, but if you have a spectacular offer I’d probably consider it.
As you’ve probably heard, it’s not a good morning for the rebel alliance. The one thing I keep coming back to as I drown my sorrows in toast and coffee is how much I miss Clinton. In 1992 I was only eleven, and in 1996 I was only fifteen, but I campaigned for him anyway. I wonder if he would have won had he been running this year instead of then.
