Tag Archives: New York

The Rat Queen of Park Slope

For three days last week M and I were responsible for a small, helpless animal named Betty. Even if Betty had been the most self-sufficient of puppies, able to feed and water herself in the wild, she still would not have survived long under our care because we didn’t trust her with keys to our Brooklyn apartment. Thus a few times a day we had to escort her down two flights of stairs and up the street to the local dog park.

Our local dog park resembles nothing if not a prison yard. It’s surrounded by chain-linked fencing and filled with gravel three inches deep. You have to breach two security gates to enter and exit. But the dogs go bonkers for their gravel oasis. In this park they call their own, they can race back and forth with frenetic impunity. They can indulge in impotent orgies while their owners play on smartphones and pretend their pets aren’t indiscriminately humping one another. To a farm dog, the dog park would seem restrictive and dusty and depressing. To a city dog, the dog park is a blissful reservoir of freedom from the 400-square-foot apartment where he spends 99% of his time.

I get the sense that dog people typically bond by talking to each other about their dogs. How much they weigh. How much they like to eat socks. How they’re getting a bath later yes you are aren’t you cutie yes you are. But at our local dog park, nobody was interested in discussing the coddled, yapping creatures lunging at our ankles. Our neighbors wanted to talk about the rats.

Here is the nightmarish gossip that initiated me into dog park society: A few weeks ago the dog park’s rat situation was so bad that a rat emerged in broad daylight to bite a dog on the leg, prompting public health officials to shut down the park temporarily. A subsequent inspection of the park and the neighboring children’s playground yielded the discovery of 125 bordering rat burrows. Sensibly, the rats had dug their vast empire along the perimeter of a promised land brimming with their favorite foods: dog shit, garbage, and the Cheddar Bunny crumbs that frequently get stuck to toddlers’ faces.

One acerbic older woman whom the other dog park regulars barely seemed to tolerate blamed yuppies for the rat infestation. “Park Slope didn’t have a problem with rats until the yuppies arrived and started eating brunch all over the place.” She said she’d gotten in trouble at the playground recently for shrieking about rats and scaring the children. She also said that the authorities had managed to eradicate 100 of the 125 local rat burrows by setting traps and clearing the brush that served as the rats’ cover, but then the city had gone ahead and planted some new shrubs immediately outside the dog park gates, which was just stupid.

While the woman shared these facts, Betty was happily plunging her adorable puppy face into a mound of rat feces. We shooed her away in a panic, but minutes later, while being chased by a horny pug, Betty dove headfirst into the same pile, effectively atomizing the feces so we humans felt an urgent need to step away, shielding our mouths and noses from the hantaviral shitstorm.

On later visits to the dog park, we found that everyone there had something negative to say about the rats. We were encouraged to gaze over the fenceline so we could see into the dark apertures of the remaining burrows. We were encouraged to become students of the city’s anti-rat poster campaign warning against not cleaning up after your dog. We were told that the bubonic plague is alive and well.

Naturally, I was horrified by what I was learning about my idyllic neighborhood. It was like finding out that your long-term boyfriend has an STD that will eventually chew off your privates while you’re unconscious. Rats are gross. Rats are pests. Rats have collapsible rib cages and unplated skulls that allow them to squeeze between the bars of birdcages and devour pet canaries. But something about the unquestioned flood of rat criticism made me want to step in and defend the little monsters. Many of the harsh things that the dog park people were saying about rats could just as easily be applied to humans, or to dogs for that matter. Looking around the park, I saw a whole bunch of stocky, inbred, social, ravenous animals that mindlessly shat and pissed and served as vectors for disease. One could argue that the main difference was that they wore collars. (And used smartphones, haha.)

I decided to do some research. I was prepared to dazzle the dog park people with a recitation of rat facts that were both positive and fun. I was going to change hearts and minds, and make a real difference in interspecies relations in my neighborhood. But Betty peed on our rug one too many times and our dog-sitting adventure came to an end. And I think loitering in a dog park without a dog is probably the same level of creepy as loitering in a playground without a child. Fortunately I still have you people. Here is what I learned about our rat friends, primarily from Jerry Langton’s Rat: How the World’s Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top:

  1. Rats have friendships with each other and if a member of their clan is disabled, they are just as likely to feed him as eat him.
  2. Rats are neophobics, meaning they’re scared of new things, the exception being new environments. If you give a rat an island to take over, as humans have been doing for many centuries, the rat will explore every inch of that island, and then it will swim for three days so it can reach the next island, and explore that one too.
  3. Rats love scrambled eggs!
  4. Rats can’t belch or vomit. They can actually die from drinking carbonated beverages. Exterminators have attempted to use Pepsi as rat poison but the soda usually goes flat by the time the rats are brave enough to enjoy it.
  5. Rats are omnivores just like us! (With the exception of Pepsi products.)
  6. Rats are shy and they struggle with obesity.
  7. These things exist, and I’d like to be a part of them somehow: American Fancy Rat and Mouse Association, Rodent Control Academy, New York City Rodent Complaint Form.
  8. Rats only bite babies when they’re sleeping because the babies smell like food, which sounds like Mommy’s fault to me.
  9. I once knew a drug dealer who kept two rats as pets and those rats were a lot cleaner than he was.
  10. Rats have superior digestive systems. They can poop up to 200 times a day. Amazing!
  11. In the Middle Ages, rats were cheap and efficient torture devices. A rat would be secured to someone’s abdomen, then a hot object would be brandished over the rodent until it got so frightened that it began to burrow into flesh.
  12. Rats used to provide humans with hours of entertainment by getting violently slaughtered by bloodthirsty dogs in basement arenas.
  13. Rats have figured out an ingenious way to heat their burrows in winter by using their own fermented urine!
  14. The world’s most popular lab rat was named after one of my ancestors.
  15. Rats love to reside in thatched roofs, which is part of the reason that medieval people had such a plague problem, and also why 10% of people in Mozambique can expect to be nibbled by a rat while they’re sleeping.
  16. In 1664 the Lord Mayor of London decided that cats and dogs were causing the plague, so he had them all killed, removing the rat’s only nemeses. The rat population boomed. Dopey mayor!
  17. Rats always build an emergency rear exit into their burrows. If there’s an earthquake, they wisely flee en masse through these “bolt holes” because they fear the roof caving in. But sometimes what they think is an earthquake is actually a jackhammer at a construction site and there are the rats anyway, swarming up from the earth and comically surrounding people in hard hats.
  18. Rats can develop an immunity to rat poison.
  19. Rats can sometimes be so playful with each other that their tails become tangled together. Then they can continue playing as a team without interruption until they all die of starvation. Silly!

If these fun facts don’t win over even the most passionate of rat haters, I don’t know what will.

The alternative to learning to love the rats is continuing to despise and destroy the rats. I also understand that impulse. Personally I would like to see a sky full of hawks. They would dive through the air right and left, taking out the bad rats but leaving the friendly ones. Unfortunately many of the smaller dog species in the dog park could get mixed up in the carnage. But they would be martyrs and we would honor them accordingly.

I could also volunteer to lead the rats away, maybe into New Jersey, using my iPhone playlist. This is the least I can do for my beloved neighborhood. I wouldn’t even ask to be paid! Though I might attempt to lure the cutest children on the playground into our photo studio later. So I can make money they can be safe from the rats.

On building street cred in Brooklyn

At the Brooklyn street fair they buy a pina colada in a magenta cup shaped like a naked lady. For three more dollars the booth attendant will serve their rum in a coconut, but they decide to stick with what they know. The attendant generously ladles clear alcohol from a dirty white bucket at his feet, and they wonder if the pina colada is safe to drink. Will they go blind? “My vision is already starting to blur,” he says, looking up at a cluster of Mylar balloons shaped like animals. “More for me,” she says.

A man lures them down a side street by promising them free bicycle helmets. Their lack of bicycle helmets has been a source of domestic contention for weeks. She doesn’t object to wearing a helmet, but she doesn’t want to have to shop for one. He likes to spend money on things, and also not get head injuries. Free helmets would end their stalemate once and for all. They join a line that goes halfway around the block. The Department of Transportation staff administering the line contains some of the most amiable people she’s ever met in her life. When it’s finally her turn to be fitted for a helmet, a man in a NYDOT t-shirt rubs sanitizer into his hands, then unspools his measuring tape around her cranium. His touch conveys the same gentle authority as a skilled physician’s. Her head is sized medium.

They return to the main thoroughfare of the festival wearing their helmets, then they put them in the backpack. She also puts the empty naked lady cup in the backpack, so she can wash it out for later use. They pass vast kingdoms of bouncy castles, beer vendors and impromptu beer gardens, arepa stands. They pass a booth that promotes its Biggie Smalls merchandise with a cardboard cutout of a little blond girl. They eat warm slices of pizza. They eat cronuts. They eat turkey drumsticks. They find a fleet of vintage buses that the Transit Museum has wheeled out for the kids. They board a city bus from 1982. So far her favorite part of the street festival is being on the parked bus, just sitting, resting.

Their friends arrive with a small white dog. Suddenly she sees small white dogs everywhere. Half of the Mylar balloons are small white dogs. Every other woman’s purse contains a small white dog. She wonders if the pina colada’s hooch is affecting her too. They pass a band playing classic rock. He’s a little tipsy. “Please don’t yell ‘Free Bird,'” she thinks. “Free Bird!” he yells. She considers getting a small white dog just so she can name it Free Bird and constantly call for it in crowded public spaces.

M and K drop by the festival. K brings her own Tupperware of homemade food, and everyone else feels bad for spending $20+ on street meat when K is so resourceful. They pass a lady with an albino python wrapped around her neck. M gives them a wide berth. “Wouldn’t it be weird,” she says, “if women acted around snakes the way they act around puppies and babies, and sort of threw themselves at them, reflexively cooing and trying to hold their slithery bodies?” “Yes,” they all respond.

Every once in a while a mysterious hole will open up in the street’s teeming river of people. She will suddenly realize that she is no longer being jostled from all directions, and she’ll look around for an explanation. But none of the holes make sense, except for the one around the python.

She arrives at her street fair emotional threshold about forty-five minutes before they’re able to wade through enough humanity to reach their locked bicycles. She puts on her new helmet just as the good DOT doctor instructed. “No part of the helmet should touch your ears,” he said as he fitted her. “This isn’t Virginia.” She was taken aback by his comment because she’d never told him that she was from Virginia. Perhaps he was a phrenologist and had used her scalp to glean geographical data. “If I were from Virginia,” he told her, “I would never leave.” Yes, cities can be overwhelming, and no, one can’t always trust the turkey legs being grilled on the curb, but a person can make an eddy for herself in any urban river, just as long as she keeps her head protected, and her Virginia street smarts (aka Biggie t-shirt) about her.

The Shaman of Broadway

I lie on the sofa in my ruffled bikini, crying. It’s the last weekend of summer 2014. An hour ago my best friend canceled our day trip to Coney Island while I was at the store buying us beach Doritos. Once again my life is in shambles.

I am almost 34 years old. I’ve essentially laid waste to all those years and counting. I’m broke. I miss my dad, who is dead. Cockroaches scale the kitchen cabinets. My boyfriend sometimes wants to kill himself. I sometimes want to kill myself. We take turns hiding each other’s pills. I haven’t slept for two nights because of the fighting. Alcohol is a factor. The only words I’ve produced in six months are sadsack diary entries and advertising copy for septic tank companies. I’ve eaten all the beach Doritos myself. And the beach Cheetos. And the cookies I’d baked for Coney despite knowing they’d inevitably get sand in them. The sky is cloudless but the curtains are drawn and I know my tears are the closest I’ll get to the seashore today.

I recently collaborated on a young adult novel about five teenagers with problems that far eclipse my own. After putting them through the wringer for a bit, I took pity on these disordered kids and in my infinite mercy endowed them with spiritual cores that could withstand every calamity by reshaping pain into gratitude. I felt this was the right thing to do. Helping the youth is its own reward. But I have to make a confession: I’m a phony. I never dreamt of internalizing the abundant life lessons I showered upon my characters. I wrote the book with blinders on, caring for those 16-year-old psyches while neglecting real life’s rampant dysfunction. I gave the kids souls when I was in despair about having lost my own.

On the last day of summer, after I’ve cried all the tears and put on some underwear not made out of Spandex, I have a vague notion of turning my life around. But a concrete strategy eludes me, so for the next two hours I devour inspirational quotes on the Internet. Three or four hundred inspirational quotes later, I’m finally ready to leave the apartment. “It is never too late to be what we might have been” (George Eliot). I intend to wander around, look at things, maybe buy some cheap fruit from Mr. Kiwi.

The Brooklyn sidewalks are riddled with people whose beachy dreams seem equally crushed, but I am staunchly determined to get over myself and fall madly in love with life because “Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have” (Hyman Schachtel). And when an ambulance driver gives me the middle finger because I’m teetering like a drunk astronaut on the curb, I remind myself that “Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling” (Margaret Runbeck). And by the way, who are these enlightened people on the Internet, and have they ever sleep walked down Broadway in the sweltering heat with a death wish and nacho cheese indigestion?

In my aforementioned novel, a spiritual healer materializes out of the New Mexico desert and sets my tormented teens on their path to enlightenment. “This is ridiculous,” I’d muttered to my computer as I brought the shaman into being. “This is so YA. This would never happen in real life, to a real grown-up.”

This intersection looks like a good one to flop myself into. Perhaps I can get run over by something official, like a police car or a fire engine. But no, that’s stinkin’ thinkin’, because “If your compassion does not include you, it’s incomplete” (Jack Kornfield). And I must recognize the beauty in every moment, because “Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them” (Leo Tolstoy). And I need to force myself to “Enjoy the little things, for one day [I] may look back and realize they were the big things” (Robert Brault). The J train screeches on the tracks above me as if its cars are dragging the chains of hell. I take a deep breath and vow to wake up to the wonders of the world.

An elderly lady stands beside me on the curb, patiently waiting to cross the street. She’s loaded down with so many plastic shopping bags I wonder if the cement is going to fracture beneath her. I don’t want to offend her by asking if she needs help because her back is straight and she can’t have more than 70 years on her. I say something plaintive about the traffic light. The preternaturally-preserved woman studies my face for a full count of five before agreeing that yes, this intersection could use a pedestrian signal. I self-consciously overtake her when we cross, but I’m still drawn into her orbit. She walks a few paces behind me, on the same sidewalk, past the same vendors of tube socks and cell phone cases. I want to turn around and confess to her how black my heart is. I sense that she’d be down for this discussion. Maybe we could have it telepathically. The air between us is just that charged.

In my YA novel the shaman makes his grand entrance with a pet coyote. On Broadway I see nothing of the kind. Maybe a mangy dog slipping under a barbed wire fence as if he’s just been kicked.

At the next intersection the elderly woman sidles up to me. “Would you mind doing me a favor?” I’m relieved that she’s making the first move. She lacks a free hand to adjust a strap on her shoulder, but won’t permit me to carry her bags, saying that even though she has three great-grandchildren, she still plays basketball and can run a mile without breaking a sweat. She has no need for my strength. I desperately need hers.

I cannot shake the feeling that this woman is extraordinary. Being enclosed in her energy’s orb is like entering a messianic tent revival. She’s the human embodiment of an inspirational quote. And not one by Donald Trump or Tony Robbins; I mean one by Confucius or Martin Luther King. So I trot along beside her, savoring bits and pieces of her life. As a girl she wanted to be a Freudian psychoanalyst. She became a teacher.

We arrive at her destination: Fat Albert’s, a discount home goods store I know all too well. My new friend gathers that I’m loath to leave her so we continue talking on the sidewalk. We grew up in the same small town 200 miles away, 40 years apart. She wants to know my birthday. “You’re a Libra,” she says, peering into my diminished, flickering soul. “You need to meditate in order to hold your center, and you need to live near the water.” I haven’t felt my center in years and the only water I’ve known lately has been boiling.

And now I am a sniveling child, inexplicably undone by this woman and the spiritual medicine dispensed by her gaze. She’s not sentimental about the dumb heartache writ large on my face. She tells me that I’m smart and strong, like her. In front of Fat Albert’s, she matter-of-factly reveals the secret to a happy life, and I promptly forget it. Something to do with love. Though I don’t retain a word, I cling to everything she says, everything she is. Before we part I hold her hand in mine. I haven’t felt anything so soft in skin and so formidable in presence since my grandmother’s hand when she was dying. The woman gives me her number and says one of these days I should come over for pie.

Walking home, my heart wells up with the world and its magic. The second I resolved to see beauty again, I was sent this emissary from heaven who’d transformed a filthy square of Broadway sidewalk into a dropped pin on a rainbow. You can’t make this stuff up in Yeah books. I smile at everyone I pass, and they smile back. I’m having the best beach day ever. I glide across the sand dunes in front of Fat Albert’s, breathing in the sky’s salty mist. I pause next to an overflowing trashcan near Mr. Kiwi’s watermelons and feel the ocean’s ecstatic power. My eyes fill with grateful tears. I am alive I am alive I am alive. God bless America.

But no, that is not my eureka moment. That moment comes the next morning after I wake up feeling sad and dyspeptic again and am dismayed to find that yesterday’s blessed burst of enlightenment hadn’t carried over to Day 2 of the rest of my life. “WTF?” (Wistar Murray). I realize that I’ll need to restart the process from scratch, perhaps with a quiet sit or 500 more inspirational quotes. Because it’s hit me that happiness is something you must fight to inhale every second your airways are open. It’s a book you must keep writing and reading on a continuous loop, so the kids inside it won’t lose heart. Naturally the book will never be finished. It will always be in the midst of happening. In fact it’s happening right now, at this urban intersection, while we stand together in our bathing suits and wait for the light to change.

A word on public toilets

I once stood in a bathroom line for 25 minutes at a Starbucks near Central Park, only to have a European woman barge in front of me holding her child’s hand when I was next to go. “My little girl she has to tinkle,” the woman said. “She will wet her pants. Please can we go first?” I gave them my coveted spot, and I’m pretty sure they both used the toilet while they were in there. Or perhaps just the woman used the toilet because the kid had no bladder urgency whatsoever and had only been classically trained in the peepee dance.

Imagine giving a $5 bill to a homeless woman on the street because she’s holding a baby in her lap and the baby’s face is all grubby and sad, and you assume that your $5 will buy the baby some medicine for her drippy nose, then you find out later that the homeless woman actually lives in a penthouse apartment in Tribeca and earlier that day she’d smudged expensive chocolate into her baby’s cheeks right before bundling them both into rags for the sole purpose of extorting $5 of sympathy money out of you. Well, I would think better of that woman than someone who cuts in front of me in the bathroom line of a Manhattan Starbucks falsely using her child’s bladder as an excuse. She might as well flush all my good will down the toilet with her five lunchtime martinis.

That is a lengthy preamble to my point: anyone familiar with New York City knows how precious a commodity a commode can be when you’re walking around, which is most of the time. I have bought unnecessary cups of coffee, bottles of water, and once even a cheeseburger to earn the exalted privilege of using a Manhattan business’s restroom. There are no public johns anywhere. It really sucks. And if you do manage to find one, it’s probably disgusting because Lavatory Grinches steal the toilet paper, soap, and toilet seats. If they could steal the water out of the bowl, they’d probably do that, too. The real reason that native New Yorkers don’t watch the ball drop on New Year’s Eve in Time’s Square isn’t because it’s cold outside and the whole thing is kind of dumb, but because they know that if they have to pee at any point during the evening, they will never be able to thanks to Manhattan’s egregious restroom deficit.

Which brings me to Miami. [OMG a white sailboat is passing by right now OMG] I took a jog along a beach trail this morning and counted no less than seven public restrooms. And I don’t tend to jog very far. In Miami, toilets are everywhere for the taking. They’re so prolific that not once in my first week here have I ever felt the need to urinate. It’s as if the bathrooms come to ME, saying, “In five minutes you might have to pee, so why don’t you take a load off now as a preemptive measure?” and I’m like, “Thanks, I think I’ll take you up on that,” and then it turns out I DID have to pee, but it just wasn’t urgent yet because the nerve pathways between my bladder and my brain are so retarded (until they’re not), but that’s okay because the bathrooms here totally bypass those nerve pathways and sense my body’s yearnings before cognition. And they’re really nice bathrooms! Only once have I gotten the sense that I was interrupting gay beach sex when I arrived to do my business. The hand dryers are modern, the TP is fully stocked, you look tan and beautiful in the mirror, and after you pee you kind of want to hang out until you have to pee again. But you don’t because you know that the next sunlit bathroom will be even better. I’ve never seen so many doors marked WOMEN in my entire life.

I can’t get over how different this is from New York. The palm trees and the blue-green ocean and the short pants are all wonderful, of course, but I could also see them on a Jumbotron in Times Square. If I looked hard enough, I might find an authentic Cuban sandwich in Manhattan. But the wealth of public restrooms is what distinguishes this city from its northern rivals. That and Gloria Estefan. But she has no need for brick and mortar facilities. She just uses the ocean, like a starfish.

Beforehand

I want to write about the hand I saw in the subway car, how I was sitting in the corner of the train and the five fingers crept around the mirrored surface of the car in an odd, backward way. I remember that the nails were wide and the fingers themselves were thick and sturdy and pale brown. The fingertips were almost near enough to touch my hair, which was still wet from an evening shower. I was drinking white wine out of a travel mug because I was on my way to my bereavement group at the university. I used to drink wine at a neighborhood bar before bereavement group, but lately I have started commuting with wine so I’ll be ready to talk about my dead relative the moment I arrive on campus.

When I boarded the train that evening with my mug of wine I had a feeling that I smelled like an actual wino, perhaps a homeless woman. I had done nothing to convince the other people on the train that I was not a homeless woman because I was sitting very still and sad in the corner and probably appeared spaced out to them. There was also a half-smoked cigarette in the pocket of my coat, which can tend to smell worse than any other thing, even if the cigarette is only five minutes stale.

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The art of navigating the New York City street corner

It is a delicate dance. The glowing crosswalk man says, “It is okay to proceed across the street, my child,” and suddenly your brain is calculating faster than your feet can shimmy across the pavement. Because, ahoy, the young mother must push the stroller down the sidewalk ramp opposite you with a child on a Power Wheels on one side and a child with a rolling backpack on the other, and lo, the tourists ahead of you are trying to make the street signs conform to their outdated map while carefully walking backwards like athletes preserving their knee joints, and jeebus, the drug hustler who thinks you’re pretty is illegally crossing the street perpendicular to this one so you have to dodge two opposing lanes of pedestrian traffic, and damnitall some hipster is flagrantly smoking a cigarette (it’s totally not you) while you’re trying to edge by him and you’re wearing an expensive shirt that you just bought in SoHo and in a second you have to make a choice whether to sacrifice your new clothes to the fire or the innocent child peddling precociously in order to cross the street before the blinking red man starts chastising him from the opposite corner. You weave, you skip, you feel like Magic Johnson. You’re suddenly on the other side of the sidewalk corner melee and you haven’t stepped on anyone’s foot or burned an infant or cursed a single mother or wished that you were all alone in the city because you know better, having seen that Will Smith movie. Lots of people are better than none, even when you’re blowing past them like an Olympian, proud of your majestic street corner maneuverings, the envy of all your drug dealing and prostitute friends.

Notes from the margins of the NYC literary world

This August I have been traipsing all over Manhattan with the intention of touching famous writers in person. Here is a quick summary:

1) Richard Russo and Pat Conroy at Barnes & Noble. I didn’t have a seat which made me nervous about fainting from excitement and having to sweat it out on the floor like a sensitive Victorian lady. I was stationed behind the velvet Barnes & Noble rope and I knew that my swoon would distract the audience from the authors so I held it together as best I could. Russo sat in the chair meant for Conroy and vice versa, throwing me into a brief confusion because neither one of them looked like they did in my mind or, more importantly, on their book jackets. Also I discovered that famous authors really do wear khakis and loafers and blazers just like they’re supposed to.

2) Nick McDonell at McNally Jackson on Prince Street. I had to see this guy as a way of proving to myself that I’m not a jealous person, that all my ego deflating work has been successful. I got to the bookstore early, hungry, thirsty, nervous, sweaty, and thankfully all the chairs were empty so I could sit down and read a magazine. Ten minutes later I took an inventory of the room and saw 100 new arrivals, all young and attractive and fashionably clothed. I pretended not to see them and instead focused on the elderly man next to me because his neglected breath and raggedy plastic bag felt more my style. I hung out with him after the show, and it turns out he’s writing a book about who really killed the Lindbergh baby. He brought some newspaper clippings to show McDonell.

McDonell seemed just as nice and smart and self-deprecating as described in the recent New York Times article. He had artfully floppy hair with blonde highlights probably acquired naturally in the African sun. He used delightfully unexpected verbs like “leaven.” He dog-eared his own book. He admitted to planting friends in the audience. He wore khakis like the other guys but he tucked them into haphazardly laced boots that have probably been on safari. I didn’t once think about him with his shirt off even though I could have because he reminded me of a Holister model. At Barnes & Noble Richard Russo had joked about losing his train of thought while trying to make effective eye contact with the audience “like Obama,” but McDonell was a born public speaker who could read from An Expensive Education and stare into your soul at the same time. I wasn’t one bit jealous of his success but I think if he had been a female version of himself I would’ve been because my ego is sexist. Also, some people in New York City are so far out of your league that it wouldn’t cross your mind to compete with them. You’re happy enough just sitting in their proximity while you discuss Lindbergh baby conspiracies with someone more relatable.

3) Literary Death Match at Bowery Poetry Club. Todd Zuniga of Opium Magazine created the Literary Death Match because I gather he enjoys both literature and boxing and the LDM is the nearest he could get to making writers fight each other. At these events celebrities from the bookish world judge four contestants over the course of two rounds on literary merit, performance, and intangibles. Some of the authors at Bowery read from published work, some told stories, and some did stand-up. I thought the assembled talent – judges included – was phenomenal. I actually touched some people at this one, but not with their permission.

4) Mid-Manhattan Branch of New York Public Library. This doesn’t mean that I will stop buying books, but it does mean that I will start paying overdue fines. The trouble is you have to walk through Midtown Manhattan to get to the library so by the time you reach the stacks you’re so pooped from the visual and bodily assault of crossing streets in a pack that you just want to sit in the quiet stairwell and practice deep breathing exercises. But I’m thrilled to have my NYPL card at last even though I can’t believe they just give these things to anybody. But the joke’s on them! I’m not going to use the card to educate myself in order to be a better citizen of this democracy. I’m going to use the card to gain access to the bathrooms whenever I’m in Midtown.

In which I finally leave the apartment

Like a sea cucumber leaving her burrow, today I ventured out of the New York City apartment I’ve been holed up in for a week. I walked to SoHo under the auspices of a lunch date, but I really wanted to check out Hollister, the Broadway shopping mecca staffed almost entirely by Chippendale dancers. My cousin Alice sent me the Hollister siren call this morning in the form of a glorious Times shopping article by Mike Albo, “A Long, Lusty Walk on a Short Pier.” I know that some journalists win the Pulitzer Prize for risking their lives in war zones or for investigating child welfare or for saving Amazon rainforests or whatever, but Albo deserves something for getting me out of the apartment and into a dimly lit maze of hoodies.  I was only in there for a minute, then I stood on the sidewalk furiously texting Alice about my experience, then I moved along when I realized I was bringing down Hollister stock by posing in front of the store in something other than a bikini.

Another cousin sent me this ESPN article about last week’s Mexico-USA soccer game at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City. Bill Simmons made me happy that I had secretly rooted for Mexico during the game even though the native fans chucked cups of urine at all our players for two hours.

Other links I have enjoyed lately include this one, featuring bathing suits for boners (NSFW), and this one about my imaginary friends on TV.

It feels good to be back in my apartment again where all of New York is at my fingertips. It’s a little known fact that the real New York resides in my laptop on sites like this, this, and this.  But don’t tell the tourists or they will start knocking on my door and I will be forced to throw pee on them.

The new, gregarious me

It has recently come to my attention that I am no longer shy. I say this because in the past week I have made friends with a cable guy from Algeria, a chocolate shop owner from Iran, a grad student in business at Vanderbilt, a couple chefs, a painter from Croatia, a West Side boy in suspenders, and two older Jewish men who deal in reliquaries. I am not saying that I am wildly popular with these people, but I have definitely accosted them on street corners or at bars and struck up conversations from which they had difficulty extracting themselves due to my infinite charm and vigor. Sometimes I think they’re hesitant to let me wander off alone again because I’m so obviously unfit for city life, like a unicorn that has only known wild mountain pastures, but other times I imagine they’re saying to themselves, “How refreshing this young lady is with her flawless manners and Southern amiability!” The point is lately I’ve had no problem flinging myself at people and asking for their life stories like I’m a vacuum saleswoman or Miss USA, so I must conclude that I’m no longer shy. Or maybe I never was! And this makes me question all the other beliefs I hold about myself. Maybe I don’t have a love/hate relationship with alcohol! Maybe no one’s listening to my thoughts and judging me for them! Maybe ethereal mountain unicorns can also be street savvy! Maybe I won’t fail out of school! Maybe models are all ugly on the inside! Maybe James Franco really will come to my birthday pary, even though his manager already RSVP’d no. Maybe I can only sustain my gregariousness for one week, and then I will go back to being shunned and humbled by humanity! Anyway I don’t want to lose sight of where I have my real interactions with people, here on this blog, where I never have to stop talking so I can listen to someone talk so I can start talking again.

I’m so relieved that I’m not on drugs!

Just imagine how exhausting it would be to be addicted all the time! If you were reading a book in a coffee shop, you’d have to keep getting up to do your drugs in the bathroom and the book would take you twice as long to read! And just thinking about shopping for the drugs wears me out! I hate shopping! Yesterday I was sitting with a friend here in New York, discussing her graduate school thesis, and it just hit me that neither of us are on drugs, and isn’t that wonderful? Granted, sometimes I enter a dark, graffiti’d restroom in a trendy bar in New York and I imagine all the cool people who have giddily done drugs off the toilet and I ask myself if I’m making a big mistake, but I snap out of it when I recollect the time and effort and money that drugs demand from the average user. Phew! I will stick to coffee and books, thank you very much! If only these meth-addicted prostitutes could be more like me!