Three days from around ten years ago

I've mentioned (I think) before that I used to keep a journal online through another website. I don't really readily recall why I stopped writing in there except maybe I had fallen out of the habit after updating it regularly for about seven years. I'm glad I did it. I met so many wonderful people through that community, friends I met and hung out with in real life, people I dated, and those rare and wonderful friendships I maintain virtually only. I have at least five people in my online life whom I have never met in person but who I consider friends for many years. Is that odd? Maybe. But I'm happy they are there and that social media makes it so easy to maintain those virtual relationships right alongside old friends from my past and new ones from my present. Even though it is terrible, social media is wonderful.

Another thing I enjoy is mining the entries from that site. It is like peeking into my brain from 12 years ago. I'll sign into that account sporadically and I hope I'm not being annoying but I love this access to my past. I love reading about what I was doing/thinking about/wanting a decade ago. (Hint: drinking/men/men who drink). It reminds me of those halcyon days of city living and being in my twenties. Or rather, it allows me to look with considerable distance and insight at my twenties during a very unstable period in NYC when I was usually broke and depressed with halcyon colored lenses. And isn't that the same thing?

Anyway, I was digging through there today and thought for today's blog post, I'd share a few gems from various times. Apparently I wrote in almost exclusively lowercase letters back then. Excerpts from various entries are included below:

9/8/04:
saturday evening all my cousins and their SOs and nancy piled into my hot apartment where we ate pizza and drank beer and joked about life and each other and how lucky we are. then we all piled into the hot subway where we sweated and didn't talk at all for fear of sweating more.
we arrived in soho, got our tables and drank and drank and drank until we were so full of drink that going elsewhere to drink seemed like the best idea. and we did. and then we left five minutes after arriving. (mental note: don't return to the iguana club on 55th st.)
so then on the way home at 4am from the diner, i witnessed a couple fighting. he shoved her into a car and drove off. i hope she is ok. she did beat the crap out of him before being shoved into the car so i have high hopes.

I remember this night vividly. And I never did return to the Iguana Club on 55th Street though I cannot for the life of me remember why.

12/16/04:
i am weary of the machinations of female friendship. i am tired, tired sicktodeath of passive aggressive emails, constant introspection and self analysis and deprecation, suppression of urge in favor of even more self deprecation. i just want to ration the emotion and self loathing, save some for later, put a lid on the boiling pot, put it in a storage facility in long island city with a fucking month to month lease.

i want to hang out in a sports bar and talk about genitals and sports and swig whiskey. i want to be flattered and lauded silently through wandering eyes. i want to walk into a room and inhale testosterone.**

now where's my chewin' tobacco?

**not to be confused with body odor.

and though pablo neruda wrote this about being tired of being a man, i shall transform it to my needs as i think it applies well:

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.

I don't want so much misery.
I don't want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.

from walking around

ok?

I don't know for certain but I'm reasonably certain I know which of my former friends this email is about, considering we spent a huge percentage of our friendship arguing over email. Normally it didn't bother me so much but there were moments when I felt I had lost the plot and I truly craved the friendship of males for the sheer balance that creates. One is not better than the other, I don't think I ever thought that...I was just frustrated by passive aggression which is a staple with some people. I'm going to overlook the clear stereotyping I've done here because I'm still in touch with that frustration and sometimes I really do crave more male friendships. I've never really been that good at them for one reason or another.

3/21/05:
things i did on friday:

-displayed waterworks in front of n at benny's burritos. 

-drank $3 margaritas. 
-walked around greenwich village, perused an awesome tucked away, practically fossilized book shop 1/2 the size of my apartment.
-drank some more at the slaughtered lamb just before the roof erupted in a torrent of jacuzzi water from a place above the bar. 
-contemplated what it would feel like to be electrocuted by the still on television being slowly soaked by the torrent of jacuzzi water.
-added to the trillion memories n and i have at the slaughtered lamb that are both odd and wonderful at the same time.
-waited seventeen hours for a goddamned n train to arrive and take me to astoria.
-left a stupid, drunken and emabarassing voice mail for my sister since she pissed me off so much that afternoon (and i'm still feeling bad about it)
-fell asleep, fully clothed, with one shoe on my foot.

Yep. Pretty much.

Violent melting

Summer has decided to melt away violently. I didn't think that melting was a violent action but as I entered the hot wet mouth of outside this afternoon, I felt violated, shaken awake by the burning sensation. And whiny.

We've gotten through the last three months with barely a drop of sweat but now that it's September, we are all being taken into humidity's not so loving arms. Maybe it is because we have been spoiled all summer long, maybe we are always just humongous babies about either extreme heat or extreme cold but everyone's claws are out today at the library, including mine. Also, everyone decided to strip down to their crazy to show off how hard they've been working on it allllll summer long.

An example: There is a new face has begun to "grace" the library. He listens to his iPod loudly and it is usually speed metal and he talks to himself saying things like "It is such a shame they are all going to die soon. We have a jihad." He wears fatigues and carries what looks like a legit army regulation backpack. A colleague of mine helped him set up his apple ID and he put his birth date as: 6/6/66 but he doesn't look older than 30 or so. He is not rude or anything but there is a vibration around him that communicates wordlessly the following phrase: I am going to fly off the handle any second now. Sooo, that's pleasant.

Another example: There is a woman, let's call her the lady in black, who is a regular library user of the computers for god knows what. I know you think I mean she uses this particular library's computers regularly but no. No, I mean she uses most of the 60 or so libraries in this county on a more or less daily basis. She often asks us for the phone numbers and hours of various libraries as she's leaving here, in her daily uniform of black pants (with large, gaping holes in the thighs), cowboy boots, black t-shirt, cowboy boots and baseball cap. Her phone is constantly ringing. She will walk into the library in a frantic tumble of annoying noise, ask for a computer pass and on her way to the computer area her phone will ring. She will talk loudly at god knows who for 40 seconds, hang up and the phone will immediately ring again. We have tried to overhear her conversations, something we don't really have to reach to do since she is so loud and what we've gathered is that she is in the throes of a lawsuit and is in the process of suing someone over a car. Perhaps it doesn't translate well to text but this woman is pretty much the bane of my existence at this library. She is frantic and insane and she has holes in her pants and I've seen her expansive belly protrude from her shirts like a cracked alabaster globe. She demands phone number after phone number of library after library and in 11 years in this profession, I can firmly say that no one has annoyed me more than the lady in black! I am sincerely sighing aloud with relief that, though there is still some time left to go in my shift, she hasn't yet showed up today.

The crazies have now and always will populate the local public library. It is in the DNA of such an accessible institution, as it is with the NYC subway, bus stations and every gym I've ever visited. It just seems like they are on hyperdrive right at this moment. I don't normally feel unsafe behind the reference desk and honestly that probably has more to do with the physical barrier between me and the rest of the public (even if that "barrier" is waist high and easily breached). But on days like today when the crazy feels amplified and the sweaty masses just drip in those front doors, it just feels ominous. And it literally stinks.

Whenever I get nostalgic about my career, that is, the career as I imagined it would be when I was fresh out of library school, I just remember days like this, when the sweaty masses seem inflated to the point of bursting. I recollect easily that time a woman threw a computer monitor clear across the room, that time I was verbally harassed by a patron for not allowing him a fourth hour on the computer, that (those many) time(s) parents left their children at the library long past closing time and I just the strongest urge to violently melt into a puddle under the desk, forever losing contact with the crazy.

Then again, if this kind of crap didn't happen, what on earth would I have to write about on this, day 2 of Blog Every Day September?

Oh good, the lady in black is here.

LOFTE Syndrome

It is ironic that the acronym for "Blog Every Day September" is BEDS because on this, the first day of September, I have not left my bedroom and in fact have only just now, at 4:45 pm, have I changed out of my pajamas. I am not ashamed of this sequence of non-events; I am in fact in need of a day encased inside my pajamas, doing only a little at a time, like someone recovering from a long illness. The only long illness I've had recently is lack of full time employment (LOFTE Syndrome) and I don't need my pajamas to recover from that. I am, in fact, typing this from my bed...though I did eventually get dressed.

Anyway, I'm attempting to blog every day this month just because it is something to do that isn't in the name of procrastinating doing something else. That's as good a reason as any if you ask me, and because you are reading this blog post, you asked me. So there.

All laziness aside, I woke up this morning with an inexplicable feeling of optimism. It defies normal logic. There really hasn't been any tangible reason for a sudden shift in my normal mostly pessimistic with a dollop of optimism way of thinking. It isn't really a symbolic day for new beginnings (though Labor Day has always been viewed with dread by my mother as the beginning of the cold, dying and dead seasons) and it isn't like everyone is off from work today. We as a country still have the uncanny, greedy ability to force people to work on even Labor Day. I can't really pinpoint why I'm feeling so good. I suppose at some point during my lifetime, I'll learn to not analyze good things; it always spoils them.

I did get a few things accomplished without having to leave my bedroom. I filled two large garbage bags with clothes and shoes to give away. I've lightened my load. Maybe that's contributed to my metaphysical lightness, who can say? I've recently realized that I will soon have to move, for one reason or another. Either I'll get another job, requiring me to relocate or my lease will finish by February and as such, I need to not have a bunch of crap I don't use/need on hand. I prefer doing the activity of moving a little at a time than to wait until the night before and stuff things into boxes at random in exhaustion. Nothing good has ever come of that. Just ask the me of my college years when it was de rigueur to get blitzed the night before summer break, having not packed a single item in preparation of leaving the dorms at 8am. Basically what I learned from cleaning out these two bedroom closets is that I have a lot of crap that I don't need or use. You learn something new every day.

That is pretty much all I have to say about today which frankly, is kind of impressive since I didn't leave my bedroom. Expect thrilling adventures for the rest of September. Well, expect me to leave my bedroom. Maybe.

Schedules

I don't really know why I even notice it anymore, but each month there is a day when I'll open my mailbox to discover that I have received yet another magazine belonging to a subscription for which I have never, ever paid. My surprise is always doubled: surprise for the receipt of the magazine again and surprise at my surprise. How else could I be expected to react? I am the owner of a phantom magazine subscription rife with glossy pages and glossy models who look nothing like me, wearing clothes I don't just want, I covet.
Every month the issue arrives, unbidden and loosely wrapped in unnecessary plastic in my mailbox for me to give a cursory glance and then leave at various points along my daily route. I'd call to cancel it but I always forget about them until the day the magazine arrives, after which I immediately forget again. I also enjoy that I'm getting something for nothing. I'm only human.

That's not why I started this blog entry. And I started it two days ago. I can't focus in even the slightest ways. Just now, I started this sentence and got distracted by a meme on Facebook, a couple dozen chats on Gmail and on my neverending quest to see how tightly I can squeeze my cat. Don't get me wrong, being unemployed full time has been a great boon to the amount of time I get to be home in the middle of the day (and that has never been a bad thing) but I am in desperate need to enact some kind of structure in the absence of a 9-9 workday. In an effort to jumpstart my productivity, I actually wrote down a schedule for myself.

Dramatic recreation.

And I kept to it. I feel somewhat accomplished, despite the fact that "Finish blog entry" was the most important thing to get done and it is one of the last things I'm accomplishing. But as I once heard on the television in the 90s "It's not the the thing you fling, it's the fling itself." And I'm flinging all over the place. Honestly that philosophy just gives me a free pass regarding the quality and substance of this entry. But I digress.

A couple of random thoughts:

• I'm reading a book by Gary Shteyngart and it is making super maxi ultra aware of what a crappy writer I am. Seriously. I'd advise you to pick up one of his books and take a bite out of just one chapter and then let the prose dissolve in your mouth, slowly. Treat the words just like a piece of your favorite hard candy and make out with it for a little while so it leaves an aftertaste. You won't be sorry.
• Last Friday I went to the first of two Arcade Fire shows and for two straight hours I danced and laughed and sang along and everything was exactly in its right place. I fucking love that band with an unabashed, unapologetic open heart. I don't ever do that so it felt really, really good. When Buster Poindexter joined the band as a surprise guest to sing "Hot Hot Hot", bouffant hairdo intact, I felt just like the doughy, bespectacled kid I used to be. Do you know that feeling? That almost impossible to get back to happiness? Ironically, Arcade Fire's entire oeuvre is about that very thing in one form or another.Well it happened right then and since that show I've felt a buzz inside my head, my heart, my lungs, my stomach...all the feeling organs. What on earth do I do with it?
• The show ended with this song. And it looked just like this:

        Only I was under all that confetti. I looked up to the ceiling as it fell on all of us, blissfully unaware that a          large percentage was falling down my dress, sticking to my damp skin, burrowing inside my hair.

• I just don't know if the rest of everyday life can compare to moments like that. I've noticed so far this week that the colors have been muted and it gets dark a lot earlier than it did last week. I've got no one event coming down the pike so I have to invent ways to keep the confetti pouring (down my dress?). I suspect that life is clearing my calendar for some reason. Good thing I've only just learned to write schedules for myself.

A few things I'm doing...

Wanting: To have a regular schedule with a regular paycheck and regular regularity. I have a sneaking suspicion that I gently placed my regular brain into the cardboard box alongside my office detritus on the day I was let go. I have been feeling a steady stream of locationless ennui, peppered with the quasi-existential panic of not being able to pay rent in a month. I realize that there is a segment of the population that is okay with this type of non-schedule schedule. They are the types that generally freelance, own their own business and do assorted other awesome things. I am not of that ilk. My life has thus far unraveled accidentally and I always just assumed that whenever I ended up doing something, it was by mere chance. At the very least, when I think about my major life decisions, I made them without much torturous debate or real consideration of the consequences. I've been lucky (?) so far. But this lifelong pattern has just turned into me cooling my heels while waiting for something to accidentally happen or a choice to present itself rather than me going to actively look for it. What a maroon.

Watching: Pretty much nothing consistent. I realized that last year I painstakingly chronicled every film I watched. I can't offhand remember the number I landed on by year's end but if I'm going to compare last year's list with this year, I'm going to cringe at the dearth of film in my year. I have seen some great things this year but I miss the quantity. Isn't that the old adage about everything worthwhile? "It's not the quality but the quantity." No wait, I might be getting it confused with capitalism.

Excited about: Arcade Fire. In two weeks I'm spending the weekend with my favorite band by going to two (possibly three) of their live shows here in New York. The tickets for the first show were bought nine months ago in the middle of the night when Lauren texted me to say that American Express had put them on pre-sale. That half asleep euphoria of buying something I really want, in a way that felt (and likely was not even a little bit) exclusive, coupled with the wait of so many long, long, Win Butler-less days has reached a fever pitch. These shows will mark my sixth and seventh time seeing them live so it isn't as though this is a new experience. I am just a superfan. An old ass superfan.

Sorting through: Page after page after page of tiny scrap papers with dollar amounts written haphazardly. This is not an exaggeration. Over the last week or so, I have found so many different slips of paper embedded with my frantic handwriting as I try to figure out my current budget and project some sense of calm onto my future budget, a task that is becoming more and more difficult as the weeks melt away. Here's evidence:

I just found those in the back pocket of my purse.

What makes me laugh about this is that the numbers are totally useless approximately one minute after I write them down. My bank account is like a moving river...that flows downstream. Also, if this ephemera is what will comprise my estate after I've passed away, I think posterity might consider me a crazy person.

Dreaming of:  Traveling. It has become a frequent habit of mine to look up travel deals, price out tickets and Airbnb rentals despite my dwindling bank account. It is an exercise in both masochism and futility but it is also temporary. I keep checking for flights to Stockholm, Peru, and Iceland. I asked the Magic Eight Ball if my visiting any of these locations in the next year seemed likely. It said "Not Bloody Likely" and I swear I heard faint, yet mocking laughter somewhere in the distance.

Retro

There are so few days in my life where I know exactly what I need and want. I'm usually only certain of one thing and that is that I will generally wake up feeling that I am lacking something. It is probably a first world problem curse: the luxury to introspect, the gall to declare "not enough". However, as one hearty seaman once told the world, "I yam what I yam."

Anyway, today is not one of those days. I know exactly what I need and want. In no particular order:

• A really long, confusion inducing nap
• A flavored seltzer
• Exactly eight more pairs of Advil or Alleve
• Some sort of food item wrapped in a tortilla 
• The removal of any library patron complaining about any arbitrary thing, especially when what they are really complaining about is not being able to get what they want, when they want it
• A brief respite from the faded sort of general unease that accompanies every good feeling
• An ice cold sidecar

(ETA: I wrote that introductory paragraph on Saturday morning and not a goddamned thing has changed today, a Monday afternoon.)

In pursuit of that penultimate bulleted point, let me relive some good feelings and tell you about what a wonderful birthday gift I got from my sister and friend this year. They took me to see the Cabaret revival currently on Broadway. To say it was wonderful would sound incredibly trite, but I have never mastered the art of writing about music. (Sincerely, how do people do that? How can you write about music without succumbing to a litany of comparisons to the things that came before it? I digress.) The set design and the audience design is so evocative that, had it not been for the proliferation of tourists in their "dress up" khakis, it would have been easy to believe we were having drinks at the Kit Kat Club. And as we all know, in there "life is beautiful." At least during Act One.

Cabaret is one of my favorite musicals of all time and I have seen the film version countless times. I feel a little like Sally Bowles whenever I paint my nails green ("I think it's pretty!") and the story never fails to surprise and move me. I hadn't known that no one else in my group knew anything about the show and I'm glad I didn't give away the ending beforehand. What I noticed, however, is that there were certain members of the audience who might have benefited from knowing the ending beforehand, considering that they were unable to pick up on pretty obvious cues that story changes dramatically from Act One to Act Two. There were still people catcalling Alan Cumming as he makes his final, heartbreaking appearance. Did I ever mention how terrible and stupid most people are?

Anyway, it was another fantastic birthday gift by the fantastic people I have in my life. I'll hold on to the memory during tomorrow, my actual birthday, when I'm not doing anything apart from applying to more jobs and working in the evening while simultaneously getting older and saggier.

Like clockwork, the balance of the universe makes itself a major plot point in the everyday things I observe throughout the day. This afternoon, on the eve of me getting older, I am at work in the young adult room. I witnessed a group of 16 year olds (that would mean they were born in the same year I graduated college) interacting with each other. One of the girls was wearing a Nine Inch Nails tshirt, waxing rhapsodic about the concert she attended recently. One of the boys said "I've been spending some time with 1984." He meant Orwell's dystopian novel. He said that today's dystopian novels paled in comparison. When his friend approached the group he said "Do you know 1984?" to which his friend replied, "The Van Halen album?" Another kid, on not being able to remember the name of a song said "I better get my AARP application ready." And yet another kid, later on, imitated Beavis' Cornholio routine. I felt a bit dizzy and displaced, as though I were watching a scene from a teenage movie about the 90s. I felt dizzier still in the realization that enough time has passed to make my youth and everything in it retro to these teenagers. The world of my early years is so old that it is idolized and referenced by a new generation. While it made me so happy that some of the best things are the things that seem to have staying power (pleated, tapered pants notwithstanding), such a realization (and on the eve of my birthday!!) must needs be the catalyst for feeling like...well maybe it is better if I express how I feel in the language of today, photographs:

Happy birthday to me!

Pleasant, detached

As per usual during my more unfocused, grappling times, I've clocked an inordinate amount of time scouring the dusty corners of the internet, a few of those anvil heavy reference sources that I never think about unless I've completely  run out of things to look at. I've been searching for things like population densities of different areas of New England (in case I ever wanted to move to Littleton, New Hampshire), the Occupational Outlook Handbook (for median salaries of people who type out captions for television networks...not much, in case you were wondering), crimelibrary.com (for my weekly dose of existential dread) and, of course, cat videos on YouTube ( I am only human, after all.) I'll let you work out which of those is most amusing, but what what most consumes my time: apartment listings.

I'm not ready to move by any means; I usually never am. But even when I'm freshly moved into a place, I still rummage through apartment listings during down times. It might qualify as a hobby at this point. I do this for many reasons. As I've discussed at length in this blog, I am perpetually restless. I'm coded that way and I like the possibility that there is a vacant apartment available to me, in my price range, just a phone call away. Aside from the thrill I get from seeing inside living spaces of strangers, (I especially enjoy photos of places where the previous tenant has not yet moved out and it looks like a Saturday morning after a true Friday night with scattered shoes and and crumpled clothing everywhere, a half empty bottle of Pepsi on the nightstand, a palpable image of regret and unshowered living), I imagine that the descriptions are rife with hidden meanings and metaphors. I like to project the apartment descriptions onto the landlord or to the previous tenant or to who I'd be after a few months of living there.

Affordable, bright and spacious!
Clean clean clean!
Includes all!
Separate Dwelling!
Sunny and Large!
Brand New!
Excellent!

The saddest one is:

No pets.

The best one is:

Pleasant, detached

I would be interested in starting a business that wrote apartment ads for a nominal fee. I'd employ thesauri and foreign languages. I'd consult the great American songbook for lyrics to describe basement apartments.

How does this apartment make you feel?
Well sir, all I can say is if I were a bell
I'd be ringing!!

There's gotta be an untapped market there. I mean, particularly for places like this from The Worst Room:

Newark, NJ $440.00

"No windows or door I will cover the doorway with a curtain of your choice"
"Width 5 1/2 feet, Length 7 1/2 feet"

 could instead read:

"Smooth, creamy walls adorn this hushed, arcadian paradise. Have open access in your life with this unobstructed dwelling. Dynamic amenities include brand name, special edition appliances for all meals of the day. I have not said all! You will have more choices in fabrics for your singular curtain than Jay Gatsby had pastel shirts.

 Good things come in small packages!

Where do I sign?!