August 2003 Archives

Despite outside opinions that our love and installation of bead-boarding around our house is well out of control, we set off to destroy the ugliest fucking girly tile ever made or put up in a kitchen. Disguised by the premise of changing out the old stainless steel sink in the kitchen, I managed to get Jeff to agree to change the countertop and in doing so made a reasonable request that if the counter was being changed, why not just get rid of that ugly back-splash tile. I got my way of course, and the tile came off this weekend as well as the whole counter while the bead-board wainscoting went up in preparation for the new counter being delivered this Friday. Though there aren't any pictures of me using it, my new love for our Craftsman® table-saw borders on pornographic. So by the end of the afternoon Saturday, we'd ripped out the tile and the counter, hung the new bead-boarding, and had several coats of paint on it. The look is so perfect even without the new counter in yet, I don't even know why we waited this long.

Literally, putting a square peg in a round hole. "Put the card in the center of your computer CD player" so says EW of their promotional credit-card shaped-carnival ticket stub CD for HBO's upcoming Carnivale. I took me 14 times before I got it in the player the right way for it to get scanned and read. That's a whole lotta work for a TV show. It better be worth it.

When the hotel asked me if I minded not facing the court-yard when I booked my room in Albany, they never mentioned that my option was to then face the Albany airport which, by the way, was SO next door I could see the faces of the flying public as they were getting ready to land. In and of itself, that's not too upsetting except that they have the outer wall of that side of the rooms so insulated against sound, I didn't know there was a plane landing until I threw back the curtains to find it just about ready to touch down. Now that freaked me out.

On the plus side, had you been standing outside in the side parking lot of this hotel late yesterday afternoon, you'd have had a great view of me walking out of the bathroom with my pants unzipped, showing my curly happy trail or treasure trail (or as one of my favorite guys told me when I asked what that hair under your belly button leading to your pubes is called, "I call it 'Shirley') heading southward, sucking my gut in and pretending like I was a sexy bitch of a beast. I literally stood there for a minute being embarrassingly vain before I realized the first floor window that looked right out on the parking lot only had curtains which were wide open and not an obstructive, opaque sheer in sight. Basically, it was like soft-core hotel porn in Albany. I think I actually exclaimed "Holy CRAP" as I yanked my hand out of my pants, pulled my shirt down and almost ripped the curtains down getting them closed.

Don't be jealous just because my glamorous New York City Career Girl job whisks me to far away places to wine and dine with the rich, powerful, and connected. I'm serious, don't. I'm in Albany for two whole days starting tomorrow. The only perk of this whole trip was upgrading my hotel room to one with high-speed internet access and finding out I have a free dial-up service for traveling as part of my home DSL plan. Sometimes the glass is half full.

On a quickie jaunt through the office this morning before heading off to Access training, I made my usual pot of coffee then opened the refrigerator to find the cream. Of course it occurred to me not having been in the office Friday and not having spoken to anyone in the office since I left on Thursday afternoon, fifteen minutes before the grid went down, that I have no way of knowing if the hospital's back up generators came on and if they did, whether our floor, a distinctly non-patient floor is even on the backup generator system. If there was no power, then of course everything in the fridge is spoiled and should be thrown out. But I need my half-n-half so I sniffed the container. There wasn't any obvious odor so being who and what I am (lazy and inflexible enough to not drink my coffee without cream), I just took my chances and used it anyway. I'll give you the post-hoc report tomorrow about how I puked my way through Access training from idiot food poisoning.

So I wasn't being sarcastic at all. The blackout was fun or at least, it would have been more fun had we still lived in the city. Back in the day when we were freshly shacked up in his UWS studio with an open loft bedroom, we had a tiny college fridge that fit under the stove top so not anywhere close to being big enough to store anything perishable for any amount of time. Fuck, a pint of Haggan-Daaz® wouldn't even fit in the little pseudo-freezer part up top. So with those good old days gone (which, while bohemianalisticly romantic in that poor post-college student way, really weren't fun), we were left to watch as the city came alive and vibrant and fun in the helpful New Yorker in the face of adversity way. It helped that we weren't being bombed or exploited by terrorists in which case, I very surely believe all those nice people letting one another cross in front of each other would have in fact been trampling one another to get out of the way. Not that someone wouldn't have stopped to help eventually, but I'm just saying mad, panicky pandemonium rules the day.

But as I was saying, Jeff and I, all things considered (that being the eight hour session in our "hey these seats are comfortable...I'm glad we spent the extra cheddar on them" SUV) were having an OK time. We bought a $0.79 bottle of water from some nice goth chick for $2 who was wondering 11th street with a big,dripping bag of them. I gave her $3 just for being such a kitten in the face of pre-dusk adversity. Hot shirtless guys were roaming the sidewalks drinking open cans of beer, hooting at the tube-topped, big-boobs chicks and Jeff and I were playing "Fatty or Hottie" without much heart because on 11th Avenue and 45th Street, the guys tend to be a little more FedEx than UPS. We had our radio tuned to listen for all the cool bars throwing their doors open to the wandering public and I cooed in a subtle shade of envy when they interviewed some guy who'd emptied his cupboard and brought all this froi gras down to the bar to share with his neighborhood lushies before it spoiled. I thought to myself, if we still lived in the city, that's exactly where I'd want to be: drinking the last of the cold beer, eating froi gras, and hanging out with the other people who don't have enough sense to be raiding the groceries and pharmacies for water and batteries. This shouldn't be too surprising since I was a full participant back in the late 90's when a big ass hurricane came roaring up and over Cape Cod during our Labor Day vacation in P-Town. The tiny stores were packed with crazy people who were buying bread, peanut butter and water while our homosexual contingent was buying L'Oriel® Frosting kits, vodka, and cranberry juice. It wouldn't have surprised me to posthumously read the front page of the Boston Herald the next day regarding our deaths: "Naaa...'twasn't that bad a staam 'cept fer those bleached-hair ‘mos what got crushed by the house collapsing. Damn kids had the music on drinking Cape Cods instead of trying to find some safer shelter. F***ing tourists." That being said, I did score those two bananas right after I got out of the subway tunnel yesterday while I heard the Con Ed workmen heckling some guy riding his bike through the intersection screaming about the whole Easter Seaboard was blacked out. I realize two bananas, a cell phone, and a copy of "The End of Alice" hardly qualifies as any kind of reasonable disaster plan, though. Yesterday did get us thinking about our transistor radio back at home in the closet that didn't have any batteries so if nothing else, the Worst US Blackout EVER can be regarded as a gentle teacher. Go buy BATTERIES, Mister Man. Of course, that wouldn't have helped yesterday, but I can't legitimately, or with any sense of self, carry around a Goddamn transistor radio. I could have one at work, I conceded to myself, though even though, again, that wouldn't have helped me yesterday. It's those thoughts I pondered as I trudged up 3rd Avenue before cutting across 59th Street in front of the Plaza. Man, talk about some unhappy people. The Rich seemed to think the Blackout was just for us working poor. I mean, I don't know why they thought yelling at their limo drivers, shacking their Gucci and YL bags in a threatening way might get them out of the city any faster than the rest of us unless being rich carries with it a flying car or some such thing. The more I saw that kind of thing going on, the more I felt pretty good...almost blessed if I can say that without too much embarrassment. I wasn't stuck on the subway shedding significant amounts of water weight, I had a place to go if Jeff couldn't find me or we couldn't get out of the city, and everyone was being pretty nice except those rich Plaza people. Even today, watching the news reporting on vacationing tourists who found themselves being escorted to Bryant Park to sleep for the night, I thought I was pretty damn lucky and that carried the weight of yesterday instead of my impending sense of doom and dread. Even the cool chicks who obviously make butt-loads of money in publishing or advertising who had set down their Burberry purses to help the ice-slushy guy sell iced gelato out of his cart at the corner of Central Park made me smile. I thought it was a perfect way to sort of join in the whole atmosphere of the day. We're all in this together and it was that that kept any creeping anxieties about "what if..." at bay. I could fully understand why people were partying it up. When you're handed lemons, blah, blah, blah. I hate when pithy cliches are right, but you can't fight it. Bend like the willow, grasshopper.

Would I have skipped the long drive home? Sure, but you know, after that wasn't an option, you just settle back into it and take it as it comes. Jeff and I learned that we could NEVER be in The Amazing Race as his horrific sense of direction but highly-hones sense of righteous entitlement clashes pretty significantly with my general sense of knowing what direction we should be traveling and my laizé-faire attitude about whether we really get there or not. I'd never been to Fort Lee, New Jersey before so it was all new and shiny and exciting. Boy there sure were a lot of people who didn't know they have a major thoroughfare running about 50-feet off to the east of the town though. In a town called Palisades Park, you'd think by the time you asked where the Palisades ParkWAY was, you'd get someone who didn't look right then left then shrug their shoulders and walk away. But we found our way out of that pleasant hamlet, passing row house after row house with parties all over the front steps, candles lit, guitars strumming, grills cooking up all the meat before it goes bad and just the general sense of wonderment of being able to see the calm lull of living without electricity and all that industrialization entails, at least for a few hours.

And we made it home, eventually. To our unfinished driveway and grass that needed to be mowed and our kitties waiting for us to go turn on the bathroom sink so they could have a drink and keep ignoring the very expensive automatic pet watering fountain we bought for them. It all works out in the end, just as promised. And that’s a pretty good thought to fall asleep too when all is said and done.

We're fine, we're fine. Yes I was on the subway yesterday afternoon at 4:10 but by some strange twist of luck (which I NEVER get) we had just pulled into the 33rd Street station so the conductor keyed us all out the doors without having to walk the dark, rat-infested, trash-strewn subway tunnels of Manhattan. Of course all the cell-phone grids were completely overloaded and since I had just gotten my very first cell-phone and didn't yet know how to work it, I was pretty much shit out of luck. So I started walking to the pickup rendezvous spot up at 125th street (do the math, it's like 92 blocks in 93-degree, 86% humidity). Being the survivalist I am, I bought two bananas from a street vender and got $2 worth of quarters for the payphone. Eventually I got a hold of Jeff, he came to pick me up and we got in the queue at 50th Street for the Lincoln tunnel at 6pm. At 9pm, we'd made it down to 37th Street (13 blocks in only 3 hours) and thru the tunnel and on our way home. By midnight, we were walking in the door, disheveled, sweaty but generally feeling lucky to have even gotten out of the city so it's all ok. I only wish I would have had my camera to take pictures of how crazy and how fun it all was.

Damn. You'd think I had just started back to school and had a class full of kids to start teaching. As it is, work just seems to be piling up and over me. Even hiring a right hand man, or woman in this case, hasn't eased things up much. August is suppose to be the month of vacation for social workers and paradoxically, one of the slowest times for medical research yet, umm...not so much.

Anywho, the carwash is almost a definite though it was pretty inspiring to see Jeff stand up and give such a logical, persuasive oration that it elicited congratulatory remarks from the planning board, the town attorney, and the attorney for the guy building the damn thing. There was even a later suggestion that he apply for a planning board member position when one becomes available. Would that make me a First Lady of Barryville? I sort of like that.

Arnold for the Recalled California Governors post? Weapons of Mass Destruction still missing? Pesky Liberian Dictators super-glued to their power thrones? I say "FEH" to it all. Let me tell you what the REAL political brouhaha is for August, 2003: Does Barryville, NY, population about 78, need a three-bay, unmanned, 24-hour drive-thru carwash in the dead-center of town?

Questions about adequate ingress and egress of an already congested small country road? You bet! Afraid of the environmental impact from detergents and contaminated water leaching into the water supply ("Someone's poisoned the waterhole!")? Un-HUH! Worried that the defining landmark of "Downtown Barryville" will become The Carwash thus significantly and negatively impacting the property values of surrounding land and homes (of which ours sits, well, right across the dang road)? Oh but YES! Luckily a rash of posters and letters to the residents seemingly from nowhere have sprung up to help protect the peace of our pretty little corner of Heaven. This isn't to say a nasty little retort of a flyer inciting the 'life-long residents' to put down the 'weekenders and newcomers' and support this Very Beautiful Carwash didn't appear today at the local post office and deli. That being said, the first time a 'life-long resident' uses the word fag or queer at the meeting on Wednesday, it will be known henceforth as the Barryville Redneck Rumble. Jets and Sharks, kittens, Jets and Sharks.

I haven't been mentioning it because I mean, really, how many times can you retell the same story over and over again but really, it got to such a thing yesterday and this morning on the walk into work that I couldn't help not mentioning it: I'm missing my Mom pretty significantly. It's to be expected, of course, but the twinges that make me draw up short and gasp for breath and then think I'm going to have to scream just to get it out come at such weird, unrelated times. Of course being who I am, I don't scream, but I do put my hand to my chest (the undisputed universal sign for having a heart attack) and quietly recite my own personal litany, "Oh...oh my...oh my goodness" which isn't very hardcore, I know, but sometimes it's the subtle that counts. It's enough for me to recognize myself and what's happening. Then the day moves on and I go find one of the bajillion pictures I have hidden away of her just to see her one more time. Wish You Were Here.