I'm a Neurotic 90 Year Old Jewish Man

I try not to be crotchety old lady about the loud music my neighbors play. Hey it's New York! We love music! At 2 am! On a Tuesday night! As much as I hem and haw about having to hear it, it takes kind of a lot for me to get it up to say something to the offender. And of course by that time, I'm fit to cause serious injury (emotionally, with my laser eyes). Since I've moved into my new place, it's mostly been the girl across the hall. She was entertaining a gentleman friend one weeknight evening, and by evening I mean late at night. They were watching a movie in what sounded like surround sound. It was an action movie! I could tell from all the explosions n' stuff. So midnight rolls around, as I'm trying to get some studying done, and of course, the volume diminishes not. Soooooo I go and knock. She must be expecting this, right? She takes a moment to come to the door (they were probably making out, as I heard the throes of love-makings not long after). She calls through the door "Who is it?" Seriously? "Your neighbor across the hall" I says. She opens the door. "Hey uh, can you turn that down? It's pretty loud and I'm trying to sleep." Her mouth says "Really? Oh sorry." Her face says "I'm not going to turn it down, because I am a bitch." As it turns out, it's her face that's telling the truth.

My upstairs neighbor plays music often, but not ragingly loud. Until tonight. The sound seems to come from the area furthest from where my bed is, so as long as it's not really interfering with that whole sleep thing, I suck it up. What's weird about this guy (I assumed it was a guy, and it is - maybe it was the heavy step) is that it always seems to be the same album. The same song even? Over and over. And he'll play it late, yet be getting up in the morning, when I'm getting ready for work.

Tonight this fella comes home around 11:45ish. Puts the music on right away, but real loud like, not like he usually does. I didn't wanna go up there. I hate confrontation. I have a violent bodily response to the faintest idea of confrontation. I get so pumped full of adrenaline I can hardly speak, and I probably look and sound like an idiot to the person I'm trying to all coolly ask to turn the music/movie/sex down. But I didn't want to let it go on, let him think it was acceptable, and then start doing it all the time, because then I would have to unleash the kraken. So up I went. Knocked. He turned off the music right away and came to the door - took him a bit too long to unlock it. It seemed like he must have a dozen deadbolts to unlatch in there. Finally he pulled the door open. Some blonde hipster boy. He had a look on his face, some sad look, and reeked of booze - can you get contact drunk from sharing air space? His look drained him of any power I might have awarded him, so I wasn't so nervous when I told him I live below him and it's pretty loud, can he turn it down please. "Really?" he said in this shaky voice - drunk voice or sad voice? Or maybe even drugged up voice? "Really??" I thought, I mean c'mon, it is OBVIOUSLY too loud, too late. "Thanks" I said and walked back downstairs.

He waited a few minutes before turning it back on, much, much lower. But he has some of my sympathies now. That music he plays over and over, it's sadtown. Music a broken heart might listen to. Poor drunk hipster boy.

A Story I Think You'll Enjoy

So I get to my psychoanalysis class tonight, sit in my usual seat up front, the better to admire my sensei. I sit off to the side, not right in the middle, so as not to be blinded by the brilliance. You know what "they" say: look ye not into the eyes of God, etc. I have all my shit (purse, laptop bag, grocery bag full of rutabagas and five varieties of apples and cardamom and plastic wrap) leaned up against the chair next to me that no one is sitting in, that no one ever sits in, because few are brave enough to be in such close proximity to the sun - my forty or so classmates are dispersed throughout the large-ish room all the way to the back, though they could easily sit closer (if they had the balls to do so). 


We started Derrida's "To Speculate on Freud" tonight - I'm sure I need not remind you of the density of that one (if you know Derrida, you know that much and if you don't know Derrida - don't it just sound real hard?). I only read a few pages, and that was enough for me to know that it's par for the course Derrida (as in, purposefully unintelligible), and I'm gonna need to pay close attention to the crumbs of knowledge tumbling from my liege's mouth into my earballs, and flowing out through my fingers onto my mystic writing pad. There I am tippity typing away, it's about ten minutes in and I already have a full page of notes. Then this girl comes in. I don't recognize her - but I don't really recognize anyone in the class that I didn't know already when the school year started. They're all newbies, and annoying ones at that. Anyway, she comes in ten minutes late. My deft master is easily distracted by late arrivals, early departures, trips to the bathroom, slight coughs, running of one's hands through one's hair, irregular blinking, etc. He stopped the lecture to make sure she signed the attendance sheet. She took it from him, and then sat down next to me, in the chair at the foot of which my shit was piled. I mean like, whatever, but goddammit there's a lot of empty seats in that big room, why you gotta pick that one?

She asks to borrow one of my pens - I have a blue one and a black one to satisfy my moderately anal underlining needs - I pause a split-end too long - she says "just for a second" and gestures toward the attendance sheet. "Sure" I whisper-grunt. (Translation: my pen! you've got my pen!). 

She pulls out her laptop. She let's it sit there for a moment. She leans back in her chair, all cozily. She opens the laptop. She types a text message on her phone - on a low setting, not silent - which is on the desk next to her laptop. She starts typing aggressively. Occasionally she stops, shuts her laptop, sits back comfortably. I assume she's low on juice, as I burn rubber on my plugged up machine. A couple of times her phone rings, she looks at it, doesn't stop it. About ten minutes before the end of class, she stops typing and makes a sound - shock, dismay, annoyance, some such sound. It's hot n' heavy at this point - my wrist is hurting from typing so much so hard so fast - after a full day of typing at work. She tries to get my attention, she's trying to tell me something, what is it? What is it girl? Is there a fire at the old barn? Oh your laptop died? You didn't bring your plug, and also didn't bring a notebook or a pen to your graduate philosophy class? Oh wait a second, I don't give a fuck! And I just fucking missed the last seven words spilled from the mouthbox of mine guru goddamn you! Never mind, she said, closed her laptop, and sat back again. Would that that were the end. WOULD! 82 or so seconds later, and I swear she does this just to piss me off, she digs around in her bag for what will eventually come to smell like a eucalyptus cough drop. She moves it around in her mouth, slurps on it loudly, clacks it against her teeth. An eternity goes by in those last few minutes - I envision epic intergalactic wars, natural disasters, the dying of the sun - all the while she is sucking and clacking. And then it's 9:50. Fin.

This is Your Brain On...the Third Floor of the Natural History Museum

                                            Brain: The Inside Story

Memory Tapes Christmas Tour

Lullabies at Bedsides

OUT OF LIGHT / CASES

I went to this place tonight, and saw these photographs, and it was lovely. You didn't have to meet the artist (I did - she was wearing a strapless red sequined dress and a heavy [HEAVY] Roman soldier-y helmet) to get an idea of the absurd kind of life she leads - these are for real suitcases from her travels. 1 hot pair of shoes (heels, sparkly ones), 1 hot dress, 1 bottle of Veuve Clicquot (presumably not hot), and a souvenir mug from wherever she's traveled. This lady I admire. And the bathrooms at the Gawker office are pretty ok, if you're looking for a place to make out (I didn't).

Grooming Habits of the Young and in Love

The best things seem to happen on the subway. I have frequent internal debates with myself - listen to my ipod, or eavesdrop on whatever totally banal or insane conversation might be happening within earshot. I didn't need my ears tonight - there was this young-ish couple, see? Maybe 20 or so. They seemed to be grooming each other, a la monkey grooming. Maybe not quite picking for lice/gnats/what have you (bed bugs, perhaps?) but somehow... cleaning each other, picking/wiping dirt off, in such a beastly way, in a way I've never seen humans engage with one another. Is this where we're headed?

Johnny, don't point that gun at me

This morning I listened to an old Fresh Air podcast that featured John Mellencamp. When I'm choosing what to listen to on my commute I don't pay much attention to detail - just that it's the latest episode that I haven't listened to yet. When I heard Terry Gross introduce John Mellencamp, I almost turned it off. I figured, having no real interest (read: admiration for/respect) in his music, why would I be interested in his personal life? But that's exactly the argument I used to convince myself to keep listening, and I'm glad I did. I mean, I never hated John Mellencamp, but his music was always just kind of not entirely unpleasant background filler.

During the interview, he played bits from some songs off his latest album, which came out in 2008, as well as some of his old stuff, the popular (pop) stuff, but note, not poppy stuff. At least not now. He kept insistently reiterating to Terry, who was harping on the old John Mellencamp, that he is now, and has always been, a folk musician. The "old" John, he of "Pink Houses" and "Small Town," he was made, puppet-like, to craft his songs for the general public. He made his folk songs with an anthemic twist, because that's what the people (and the record labels) wanted. When he played them in the studio on his acoustic guitar, they sounded vastly different - the entire mood changed. He refers to Bob Dylan as the greatest songwriter, ever, citing him as one of his biggest influences - and you can hear it on the 2008 album. The first song he learned to play on guitar was the ollllld folk song "Railroad Bill." So there's a little street cred, if you needed it.

After all this talk about Mellencamp, it's not so much he the person, the musician, the interviewee that, ahem, struck a chord, if you will. It's what he said about anthems - the way he seemed, well, almost revolted by them, as if they're a sub-par musical form. This sentiment resounded so deeply with me because we, the generation that had John Mellencamp and like tunes fed into our earballs at knee-high to a grasshopper type ages, seem to love us some anthems. But also it seems like Mellencamp's revulsion is justified - those anthems, back then, were cookie cutter stadium rock anthems, one hit wonder types (with a few worthy exceptions, notably U2). Our primal musical inspiration comes from those catchy, danceable, sing-along-able anthems, but we've done something to the form - we took that tired old cookie cutter and molded into a a thing of beauty - sweeping, orchestral, uplifting songs - thoughtful and well-crafted but equally (or more?) catchy, danceable, and sing-along-able as the old anthems, the ones John Mellencamp finds so unbearable. Of Montreal, Arcade Fire, Muse, Temper Trap, to name a few obvious one. How about this new Deerhunter one (a particularly epic performance of), or this  Hot Chip cut? Bangers count, by the way (think summer 2k7, when MGMT, MSTRKRFT, Peter Bjorn and John, and J.U.S.T.I.C.E. were blowing the fug up). So, somehow, predictable, and yet complex enough to satisfy the aural cravings of even the most cynical music critic. Actually I guess that's a kind of redundant statement. DId ever there live a remotely un-cynical muisc critic?

To call it primal musical inspiration brings to bear two instances of primality - ontogenetic and phylogenetic. There's the individual's relationship with music - I grew up listening to Beastie Boys, Rick Astley, and Depeche Mode. That's me, in a nutshell. Then there's the species - humans are musical creatures. There's something about the anthem, something visceral that communicates with the collective unconscious - the anthem is not about being alone in your room chillaxing at the end of a long day - it's about being-with, it's about experiencing musicality, with others, in a pre-verbal way; sure, songs have lyrics, and sure lyrics matter (for me, they matter a lot), but it's not really about the lyrics - it's about the feeling of singing them together - even when you're singing alone.

Morning Surprise

I have one of those little Bialetti stove top coffee makers. It supposedly serves three, i.e., it makes three shots of "espresso," but it's not really espresso, and it's not really enough for me (and it's not even the smallest one they have!). So sometimes in the morning when I'm making my iced coffee, if my room-mate has left coffee in the French press from the day before, I pilfer a tad to round out my cup. I justify my pilfering of day old counter top coffee by saying, that's MY French press she's using, and she never even cleans it! That's the Jewish half of me, being guilty for taking day old coffee, and making ridiculous excuses to lessen the guilt, and then feeling ridiculous for making ridiculous excuses.

I haven't done this in a while, because my room-mate will often come home at night and finish the coffee - but last night, she did not, and that half full pot was staring me in the eyeballs this morning. To my delightful surprise, upon my first sip I tasted a hint of cinnamoniness; when I returned the ice cube tray to the freezer I noticed the can of Trader Joe's gingerbread coffee. Off season: maybe. Magically delicious: a thousand times yes.

9 Out of 10 Dentists Agree

Two of my lady pals are dating younger mans. The hot Spanish girl I used to work with, 34 year old Maria del Mar, just married a 27 year old. Not like any of us are very old so it's not a robbing of cradle, but also because none of us are very old, the younger mans are kind of quite young. I seem to keep meeting/dating young ones too. This is the (kiddie) pool we've been thrown into, in the city of New York, in the year of our lord 2010 - a pool of young mans who are neither too (old and) jaded with (bad) relationships, nor too (young and) slutty and in need of wild oats sowing. A pool of twenty-five-ish year olds who seem legitimately interested in, or at least not terrified of/fetishizingly fascinated with older women. Not just the whole "older women are so grateful" thing (and by the way I thought that whole "grateful" bit was a new-ish thing - but I just saw this old French comedy at MoMA, The Story of a Cheat, released in 1937, wherein the young protagonist referred to his "grateful" countess lover).

Nobody blinks when a twenty-five year old woman says she's dating a thirty-year old man. Or a twenty-three year old woman dates a thirty-three year old man (as another [young] friend of mine is doing). Blah blah blah, right? The other way around, you're a cougar. A desperate woman. A Demi. Or so it's been. The more I come across this with my friends, and the more I come across it in my own experiences, the less blinking my eyes seem to do. Maybe my eyeballs just don't need as much moistening anymore.

Subway Etiquette, or, Stop Blocking the Fucking Door You Asshole

If you're someone who reads this, then you probably already know I got me a shiny new job. I'm happy I have this job. I can pay my rent, and my bills, and buy food and pretty dresses and cheap Forever 21 costume jewels and the fancy burritos from Papacito's (not just Taco Bell [even though I do love Taco Bell and still eat there all the time - ALL THE TIME]). Probably my favorite part of my new 9-5er is the commute. The G to the L to Union Square in no time flat. I drink my coffee, catch up on my podcasts, maybe have a tiny cat nap on the way home, and PRACTICE MY FINELY HONED RAGE skills.

These people on the subway, you'd think they never rode the subway. You'd think that they think New Yorkers aren't typically poised to go postal. You'd think that they, being human, might have a sliver of humanity. No, indeed. Their favorite thing, I've noticed, is to get onto a not-necessarily-very-crowded subway car, from a crowded rush hour Union Square platform (you know, a hypothetical kind of commuting situation) and stop as soon as they step into it. Like, "Phew! I made it on. My work here is done." It's funny because even the people behind them who have to push their way on, they do the same thing. "Yes! I got on! Right here at the door seems cozy."

Sometimes, it's a crowded car emptying out onto a crowded platform. You hear the announcer say "Let them off let them off!" And yet there the platformers are, standing directly in front of the doors when the train pulls into the station, as if this is the last train that will ever come, EVER, and it's going to the promised land, and if you don't get on it now you'll be stuck at the Metropolitan L station FOREVER! I, embodying a charming combination of politeness, knowledge of basic physical laws, and non-cutthroatness, stand aside enough to let people off first. Of course, that then leaves a vast swath of empty platform area (the area where those disembarking should disembark onto) for the less polite, less wise to physics, more, shall we say, savage of our species to step in, and fuck shit up. Clearly we need some kind of regulation beyond the "Let them off" communique and the scolding that follows thereafter - and by regulation, I mean regulator.

I also really like it when people treat that one pole in the middle, that ONE that pretty much EVERYONE in the middle of the car needs to hold onto, like it was placed in that position for them to lean their nasty ass crack on, or to hug their arm around while they fuck with their phone/iPod/New Yorker. Hey DUDES - that pole is for the thirty-seven of us to wrap our outstretched pinkies around so we don't stumble at every start, stop and turn, thereby stabbing unsuspecting strangers in the feet with our stilettos (I have a scar on each foot).

Who ARE these people? Do they have ANY sense of the world that exists beyond a millimeter outside of them? It makes me dream of a time when I might be brave enough to ride a bike over the bridge. But then again, who ever will I silently rage over? I guess I'll always have sidewalk-blockers for that.

Bebe Cooper

According to the man who held the door open for me on my way out of 7-11, the man who caught up to me on his bike about fifteen minutes later, the bus driver was hitting on me. To be clear, I wasn't on the bus, nor was I waiting for the bus - I was walking on the side of the street with traffic heading the opposite of my direction. I thought it was a little odd for the bus to be stopping where it was, just after Huron rather than just before India, but I didn't think much about its oddness - until this man on the bike, passing me just as I was walking past this oddly stopped bus, slowed down to say "That bus driver is hitting on you," in a sort of haha tone. Close to home, and just wanting to get there to have my egg salad sandwich, I replied in an equally haha tone "Really? I'm just trying to get home!" I didn't even look to see if the bus driver was watching.

I reminded him of Bebe Cooper, a girl he went to school with in the 70s. Me, in my white romper and gold chains and 4-inch heels. "I wasn't even born in the 70s" I said. He didn't look as old as he was, he replied, then told me to get home safe and rode off.

The Latest Trends

Spotted on the streets and subways cars of NYC: Girls who are NOT under 18, are NOT superfit, are NOT at all tan, wearing no-joke midriff baring shirts. Hello. This is reserved for supermodels.

Also of note, a man at the Apple store on 14th looking very Less Than Zero in a blazer over a t-shirt, jeans, and bright yellow loafers. And of course, wearing a visage of privilege under his blonde 'do. On second thought, maybe he was more Spencer Pratt than Less Than Zero.

And to further tickle your fancy, a totally normal looking guy who I would never have noticed if I hadn't caught a glimpse of his t-shirt that said "Keep looking, I might do a trick." As if he's the kind of freak people stare at. This is the kind of shirt that oversized 14 year olds with badly dyed pink hair buy at Hot Topic - you know, like Perez Hilton back in the 90s. I only say that because I used to have beautifully dyed pink hair, and worked at Hot Topic.

Dear People Who Can't Hold It In: Stop Peeing on Strangers' Cars!

Twice in as many days I've had the pleasure of having my eyes alight upon a fellow publicly urinating near/on a parked car. Not tucked away in an alley or a corner, not on a tree in a secluded area, and not off any kind of beaten path, ho no, not for these cocky fellows, both of whom undertook this act of what can only be called civil disobedience at ungodly hours and in ungodly places - that is to say, not quite broad daylight, but not far off, given these long, nearly summer days; hours during which children still abound in the streets, during which the respectable young men and women of Williamsburg are taking their visiting parents to dinner. 9 pm-ish, the both of them; N. 7th near Bedford the one, N. 6th near Wythe the other - directly in front of the Lovin' Cup, he was. 9 pm! Have you really been drinking so excessively in a restroom-less venue that you're forced to the streets, nay, to the cars parked on the streets, the cars of unwitting strangers?? For shame!

Whyyyyyyyyy?????

I was just having a nice bowl of oatmeal and reading my emails, when all of the sudden Clumso-Carina took over - I reached for the bowl, perched precariously atop a book with a pen inside of it, and basically just shoved the bowl right off. Inside of the one second it took for the bowl to fall off the ottoman and onto the floor, I made a sad attempt to grab at it, sad because my neck is sore so when I made the lightning fast gesture to save the bowl, I just hurt myself more. In the end, the bowl landed right side up on the floor, half filled with oatmeal. The other half of the oatmeal had spilled neatly onto a napkin directly next to the bowl. The spoon landed on the book, with no oatmeal spillage onto said book. So I picked up the bowl and finished eating my oatmeal.

The lesson I am taking is this: when watching a catastrophe unfold, do not interfere, because it will probably turn out just fine, and you will get your oatmeal, and if you do try to interfere you will probably just pull a muscle.

If I'm Going To Continue to Consume Garbage, I Should Probably Stop Reading the Ingredients

If you know me, you know my love for the finer things: Olive Garden, Little Debbies, Mister Softee (with orange magic shell). This love, surely, was cultivated by my mother, father, and grandmother since, I'd wager, my birth (more likely starting while in utero). Included in my grandma-packed lunch every day in grade school was a Little Debbie snack - most often the Swiss Cake Roll, but also of course Zebra Cakes and the standard chocolate and vanilla cakes; occasionally the Oatmeal Creme Pie and that rare treat, the Strawberry Shortcake roll. Mr. B's was a soft-serve joint a few blocks from my childhood home where we would frequently go with my father on "dad visit" days. I'd always get the BLT, and of course vanilla soft serve with rainbow sprinkles for dessert. Olive Garden was where we'd go for post-Church dinner when I was a bit older - middle and high school. Some great reward for sitting through Church, maybe a bribe, I don't know, but I do know it was and is so-delicious.

I have somehow become, against all odds, something of a healthy-eater kind of person. Whole grains, raw or barely steamed veggies, organic tofu, beans and rice. My favorite snack is hummus and pita. Gone are the days of fake meat products for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Gone are the days of Banana Nut Crunch or Quaker Oats oatmeal squares (packed full of vitamins and protein, but also packed full of sugar and corn starch - you could lay bricks with that stuff) for breakfast (or, let's face it, and lunch and dinner). Gone are the days of V8 Splash - a delicious and sugary vehicle for "vitamins." BUT, I still engage in trashy foodery. I know they are disgusting, literally one step above garbage, occasionally tantamount to flavored plastic food items, but I allow myself these guilty pleasures on not entirely rare occasions.

I always loved those individual serving Hostess pies; not in the shape of a little pie, but like a Hot Pocket, but not hot. They had various fruit fillings, but also chocolate pudding. Mmmmm that was my favorite. Whenever I see these pocket pies, I look for chocolate pudding; alas they are never found. I recently re-ignited my love affair with pocket pies, by way of Entenmann's lemon pie. There's a 24-hour bodega a block away from my apartment, with a very limited selection of snacks, this being one of them. So I picked one up last night, needing a pick-me-up whilst working on this seemingly never-ending paper. It's so delicious on the way into my belly, but I always detect a strange aftertaste that I can't put my finger on. After a chips/lard fiasco a few weeks ago (I would tell you about it but the thought makes me wretch), I decided to check the lemon pie ingredients, certain I would not find any animal by-products therein. And indeed, no (obvious) animal by-products jumped off the loooong ingredients list into my eyeballs, but here's what did : PARABENS. Inside of food! This is the stuff that I refuse to even let touch my skin, scouring skin-care product ingredients lists to make sure they are not included, and here it is GOING INSIDE OF MY BODY. Parabens which, among other ghastly things, in their estrogen-mimicking has been linked to BREAST CANCER. Thanks, Entenmann's!

Bear Market

I may know nothing, and I mean nothing, about how the economy "works" (or rather, doesn't - zing!), but it seems to me like Beanie Babies are a good example of the artificiality of the market. Like, cheaply constructed by baby hands in China, tiny stuffed animals functioning as some kind of high-value commodity? Wha?

I know this is like, ten years after the fact, but I was just thinking about how the local ice cream shop that I worked at in high school was sold by the Beanie-obsessed owner about a year after I left, because the business was foundering. This was an ice cream shop STEPS from a heavily trafficked beach, with no nearby ice cream shops with which to compete. In other words, that business shoulda pretty much run itself. But George and his Beanie Babies, meeting in the shop with his Beanie friends, paying top dollar for the prized and rare (scarcity of commodity!) Libearty, always on the lookout for that unique Beanie that, perhaps, one of the sweatshop children had sewn inside out, or with an extra nipple on its forehead, George ran that self-running business into the ground.

What Will Be, Will Be

When I'm working under a deadline to get a paper in, I tend to regress to something like my early college days - but in what feels like a more controlled manner. I was famous for all nighters back then, drinking coffee into the wee hours, taking an hour nap around 4 or 5 am, which always lasted longer than an hour and then I really had to scramble to finish whatever paper or lab assignment in the morning before class. I was fueled not just by caffeine, but by the most repulsive junk food - what I consider now to be guilty pleasures, not oft indulged in. Maybe not infrequently indulged in either, but not as oft as the good ol' school days. Hostess cupcakes, donuts, Soft Batch cookies, sour cream n' onion chips, bottled, sugary iced tea. It's all here, right in front of me. The thing is, now I do it on purpose. I have found the intense sugar high to be inspirational - it doesn't just keep me awake, it SPEAKS through my FINGERS. Pre-cupcake/chips/iced tea cocktail, I had nothin'. And now voila! Pure philosophy GOLD.

Conversations Kill

Do you ever get the feeling that things are like, choreographed? Like, you walk down into the subway at 2 am, and right away this guy starts playing the ukelele and whistling “Dream a Little Dream” and then he finishes and the train pulls in and these two men usher/drag in a third, very drunk man, is it their friend or just some guy that passed out in the station that they’re helping out because the train only comes once a millennium at that hour?, and this guy and girl sit across from you and the girl, with this pretty smile and a long stemmed electric orange sunflower in her hand just lifts her feet on up and sets them on top of the front wheel of the boy’s bike and then the girl sitting directly across from you sneezes and then it breaks.

Grossery Store

Oh thank heaven! A 7-Eleven recently opened on 14th Street west of 6th Ave (too new even for google maps, it seems), and boy do they have a wretched selection of food-products - and by wretched I mean, inducing of wretching. I went in the other day, in need of some doritos, and took in the prepared foods cases on my way to the pre-packaged gut bomb section. Two slices of (slightly warmed over, gelatinously cheesy) pizza for $3.33! Two heart-stopping breakfast taquitos for $2! Nachos, with free chili and cheese (From a machine! That was broken! Even though they just opened?). They even do a waffle sandwich, a la the back-by-popular-demand-for-a-limited-time-only Dunkin D Waffle Breakfast Sandwich. If you know me at all, you know I'm a girl who likes gross things. But wow 7-Eleven. Wow. You have been the cause of a feeling of repulsion arising in me. Thank you for making me feel alive.

Moonshine in Mine Eyes

Have you ever been so cold that your eyeballs froze? That's how cold out it is, right now. I mean technically your eyes can't freeze, solid, in your head (while you're alive), but they do like, y'know, freeze. It affects my vision!

Meanwhile, as the liquid inside of my eyes grows sluggish, the night sky with the wolf moon is so bright it looks like summer twilight. I missed the moonrise, so I guess I missed the biggest and bestest part.

Guess Who's Coming To Stab You In Your Sleep

I get so offended/put off by the strangest of things. Target has this new ad campaign for a line of cookware, bakeware and yes even FOOD by this TV "chef" lady, moon-faced Giada de Laurentiis. I was disturbed when I saw the subject of the marketing email from Target, and I had the most visceral reaction to the content once I opened it and was slapped in the face/punched in the gut with the visual of Giada grimacingly smiling over a spoon of something or other (paste made to look like something delicious, I imagine), and the campaign catchphrase floating beside her mug: "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" Come on, Target! Appropriating the title of an important Civil Rights era race relations romantic dramedy? Said email delivered to my inbox ONE DAY prior to the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday?!? So so wrong! Granted, it's a phrase that's come into common enough usage, but using it in a marketing campaign for a line of (low-quality) Target cookware reallllly grinds my gears. I'm tempted to write Target a strongly worded letter to this effect. Sidney Poitier, where are you!

Uncle Fester Comes for a Visit

For the last couple of weeks I've been talking about my festering ankle wound to anyone and everyone who would listen. About a month ago I took a little stumble on some subway stairs and got home to discover a bit of a bloody mess. Poured some hydrogen peroxide on that bad boy, slapped a band-aid on, and assumed it would fix itself, like all those scrapes I got back in the day when I roller skated outside with indoor skates. Alas, how wrong have I turned out to be! The festering wound has, as I mentioned, festered. I'm not exactly helping the recovery along, what with my no antibiotic ointment applying and my stuffy boots wearing. But I think this wound would fester regardless, considering the probably high likelihood of necrotizing fasciitis living on subway stairs.

Sometimes I go without a band-aid, thinking the contact with air will do it some good. It gets scabby in the middle when left uncovered (though still slightly gooey 'round the edges), so I've been known to throw some socks or tights on over it and go about my day with an unband-aided, scabbily festering wound. Today, the wound took its vengeance for this most unhealthy and unwise practice of mine. As I slowly removed my tights, I had a flashback to the moment of tights-removal on that cruel night, the one where I tried to rush past that bum on the steps and was rewarded by fate with a tumble and a scrape. I felt this slight pain on my ankle, this shiny freshness that I hadn't felt since that woeful beginning. I looked down in a crystal clear fog - there was no scab resting atop the goo. THERE WAS JUST GOO. Some demon possessed me to search inside my tights for the missing scab - I turned them inside out, and there it was, dried scab side stuck the the tights, GOO side laughing in my face (and there it sits, for I haven't managed to bring myself to remove it). I sat down and breathed deeply. I rested my head in between my legs, like I was taught in grade school so as to ward off nausea. I looked at the wound again. So festeringly gooey. It has a lip like a crater. No, a volcano. Yesss, a volcano. With an oozing lake of slimey goo instead of lava.

Rawr!

Thinking about transferring to Syracuse based purely on what is surely the most incredible CFP I have ever and will ever see(n).

A Visual Caress

This is a thing of beauty.