you end up realizing that
1. a twenty three ounce margarita that’s the size of your head only SEEMS like a good idea and
2. what, seriously WHAT, is a holla-back girl? and why is that shit bananas?
Archives for the month of: September, 2005
I could just babble myself to oblivion with overwhelming bowled-overness and kindness. My office phone just rang, the receptionist said I had a package. “For the magazine?” I asked. “No, for you.”
So I go there and there’s this book, wrapped in paper. With just my name and address on it, in neat block handwriting. And I’m more than a little freaked out that it’s a dirty bomb because hello, I’m paranoid sometimes, until I stare at the spine through the wrapping paper hard enough to see it says MAGNOLIA on it. I let out a whoop of joy right there all alone in my office, total involuntary joy.
Last night at Magnolia’s, I’d said to Min that I’d been dropping hints at Stuart every time we came into the bakery that I wanted the cookbook. No dice, so far.
She bought me the book, wrapped it, dropped it off at my office with an inscription: “Dear Krissa, thanks for the book recommendations and divine cupcakes. Hope to see you down under soon. Love, Minjarrah.”
Man, Australia, you have got one serious diamond of a woman there. Aside from winning sweetheart of the year award, I desperately wish she had a cell phone on her right now, so I could call her, rush out and give her a hug, link arms and drag her off to another coffee and three-hour chat. And more cupcakes.
1. I voted today. I really like voting mainly because of the lever. KA-CHUNK. vote. KA-CHUNK. It’s so cool. I also like saying the word lever, making that first E a long one. Leever. It always makes me think of Eddie Izzard. So do most things.
2. I saw the world’s cutest chihuahua at a pet store the other day. (Take a moment with me and pronounce the word with all three syllables. Chee-hoowah-hoowah. It’s fun for your mouth.) I was at the pet store for reasons that will be explained in #3, and this obnoxious little prep school brat was dragging her mother around the store comparing the shit-zhu in her hands to all the other dogs, to determine which one was “THE ABSOLUTE CUTEST, I NEED THE CUTEST”, so when she got around to my feisty little chee-hoowah-hoowah, I couldn’t handle it anymore and faked interest in buying the dog and got to hold him for a little while, long enough for the brat to lose interest and thus I saved the chee-hoowah-hoowah from a fate worse than death.
3. The reason I was on 85th and Lexington, a neighborhood I usually abhor for its utter lack of originality (chain stores NOTHING BUT CHAIN STORES CHRIST) was that I was trying to find the second-to-last vestige of great old shops, the Game Show. It was there a few years ago when I walked by with Jason. We were on our way to the subway from the now-last vestige, the Lexington Luncheonette. I went there last week because I wanted to buy some lovely games from Rio Grande Games, a company that makes games you won’t find at Toys R Us. Alas, Game Show had closed down and I stopped to look at the puppies as consolation.
4. I met Minjarrah last night for cupcakes and coffee at Magnolia’s. She was exactly as beautiful and charming as I thought she’d be, and I was a little wary since it’s been possibly a whole year since I’ve met a fellow blogger blind. But she was funny and down-to-earth and in that way, like every Aussie I’ve ever met. I have half-baked plans to go around the world with Stuart some day soon and stop in Australia to meet her adorable little girls and hang out in the bush with her. That’s just how cool she is.
5. I thought the B&N gift certificate my brother gave me for my birthday would last me at least a month, considering I’d set myself the rule of only buying one book at a time to encourage active and constant reading of whatever I want to read right at that moment. I find if I buy three or more books at a time, when it comes around to reading the last two, I’ve sometimes lost interest in them, which is a waste. Last night, though, I basically cashed the last of it in, having bought The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith, The Constant Gardener by John Le Carre, Letters to a Young Poet for Stuart by Rainer Marie Rilke, and Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, last night. There’s just enough left on the card for a coffee, though.
6. We didn’t leave Astoria this weekend, which was nice considering how insanely busy we’ve been for months. We ran errands on Saturday and relaxed, then prepared for a cast party reunion from this summer’s show. Then on Sunday we had breakfast with our awesome houseguest, matthieu, and lounged around playing with computers and listening to music until he left for the airport. Then Stuart and I read, and cooked dinner, and watched Family Guy. It was one of the most relaxing weekends we’ve had in ages. More of these, please.
7. My mom’s best friend is visiting her from Angola this week, and is coming down from Rhode Island with her this afternoon for my (ex)sister(in-law)’s courthouse wedding. My (ex)sister(in-law) is this awesome woman who’s marrying her longtime boyfriend and even longertime family friend, and I’ve known both of them since I was old enough to walk. They’re hitching it up at the office of a justice-of-the-peace and then we’re all going out to celebrate with dinner. Then mom and her best friend are spending the night with us in Astoria. This familyness is really exciting to me because it feels like the fabric I never had when I was young, that familiar interconnectedness of people who celebrate life together at things like weddings. In a weird way, this is my first family wedding. I’m very excited.
8. Speaking of mom’s best friend, whose name is Lucia, I’m also absurdly excited to see her again, although disappointed her husband won’t be there as well. My parents met Lucia and Arlindo in Houston, when we lived in the same soulless suburbian neighborhood. Lucia and Arlindo didn’t have kids but that was okay with me because they were enough fun as adults, and it’s one of the few times I remember my parents really whooping it up with friends. Because of all the constant moving we did, my parents didn’t really have friends. They had a social circle, they had gatherings and cocktail parties, but even at 13 I saw the difference, I saw that Lucia and Arlindo came over for dinners and card games and mom laughed in a way she only laughs with close friends. Mom and Lucia took up biking together, Mom taught Lucia how to sew, and Arlindo and my dad would make fun of each other for hours. This memory is very dear to me, and it’s still dear every time our families get together and now, I get to be one of the grown-ups.
9. So, obvs, I’m looking forward to tonight and seeing Lucia again, and going home to Rhode Island this weekend and spending more time with her. Minjarrah and I talked a lot about family last night because as a mother, she’s curious about other people’s parents and their relations to them. Talking about my parents always makes me want to see them immediately, even though I see them at least once a month, because hanging out with them gives me this warm fuzzy glow that I know exactly how blessed I am to have.
10. So, to sum up, this past week has been about puppies, new friends, old stores that are gone, levers, books, family, and a wedding.
Of all the walks I take in New York, my least favourite is the walk from our apartment to the subway. Of the two stops I regularly walk to, this one is the less pleasant. Always the merciless sun in summer, the stinging wind in winter. The shops are strange and nondescript on this side of Astoria, and the only reason I use this station on work mornings is because I always get a seat on the train. All of which goes to explain why I usually detest my four minute walk to the station, and why the old greek lady made it exponentially better.
I always smile at the various greek ladies who stand outside their houses in the mornings and just stare at whatever is walking by. I smile at them because I think, maybe they’re living with their sons and their daughters-in-law, maybe they don’t like the daughter-in-law, and maybe they’re the natural babysitter but they’re sick to their lost back teeth of taking care of kids. Maybe they live with their husbands in that companionable emnity that seems to happen to old couples where they growl at each other over coffee but help each other up the stairs.
Maybe some of these ladies live like that, with the son or the kids or the husband, and for whatever reason, what really gets them going in the morning is standing outside their houses with a faint scowl on their face and watching the world go by. Maybe they’re thinking that they’ve been chefs and maids and mothers and wives for a pretty long time, now that they’re old they just want to stand outside and do nothing.
I really have no idea why so many of the elderly greek women in our neighborhood do this thing where they stand outside and stare at everyone. But it has a faded romantic glory to my impressionable mind so I always smile at them. They rarely smile back. Maybe smiling is just another thing these old ladies are tired of doing and with the wisdom and grumpiness of age, they just don’t. So I smile at them and they scowl back at me, and even this little interaction brings me joy. So when the little old lady three houses down inexplicably handed me a bunch of flowers from her yard this morning, you can imagine how pleased I was.
“Here, take,” she said, and just handed me this tall bunch of green stalks, some of the buds blooming with lavender flowers. The flowers themselves looked a bit anemic, and most of the stalks were almost two feet long, but she was smiling so who am I to refuse strange purple flowers from old greek ladies? So I took them, and smiled back, and said I’d put them in water at my office. She smiled again, it must be her morning or something because she’s never smiled at me in the three years I’ve lived on our street, and said, “yes!”
So I walked the rest of my block, holding these awkward stalks aloft and wondering what got into my surly litle greek lady. Was I really going to take these flowers all the way to work? I certainly couldn’t throw them away, nor did I want to. They’re repaving the main street that leads to the station so when I turned the corner, I was suddenly confronted with about ten thousand metric decibels of tar-laying machine noise. Still holding the bundle, I picked my way across an intersection strewn with little bits of melting tar.
“Those for me?” said one of the construction workers standing around, and he looked nice enough, so I said, “I’ll give you one!” and pulled a stalk from the bunch and handed it to him. It only had one flower blooming, so it seemed a strange gift, but his buddies all laughed and he said I’d made his day. I wanted to stop and explain about the surly lady, and how odd it all was, but he had tar to lay or something. I kept walking.
That’s when I decided to give the bundle to my bakery lady. I hadn’t stopped in there for a while because truth be told, their italian bread is delicious but their morning pastries leave something to be desired in the deliciousness department. But she’s so nice, the woman who works there, with big springy curls and bright eyes and red lipstick and that boisterous italian-american accent that’s not from anywhere but Queens. So I popped in and sure enough, she said, “hey, long time no see!”
“Here, I’m giving you these!” I tell her as I put the flowers down on the countertop. She said, “really?” and I said, yeah, why not! Some lady on my street gave them to me and I can’t take them all the way to the office, I said. And to be nice because I believe in neighborhoods even if their bakeries don’t have the best morning pastries, I asked about the lemon drop dougnut-type things.
“Oh, those are delicious,” she said and I said I’d take one. And she gave it to me, free of charge she said, because I’d given her flowers.
As I walked up the stairs of the station, I wondered what would happen if I gave the lemon-drop doughnut roll away. Would someone give me a million bucks? I ate most of it, though, standing on the train platform, even though it wasn’t really that great. Then I went in to work.
Last night we watched the documentary Grizzly Man, you know, just to give my nightmares that extra fanged, drooling-with-hunger oomph they really needed. Nothing says “camping trip!” like carniverous, desperate Grizzlies. Except maybe carniverous, desperate Grizzlies that are holding signs pointing into their lairs that say in childish handwriting, “camping trip!”
Luckily, though, I seem to have hit upon the solution to all my bear woes. No, it’s not endless bear puns like “it might make me lose my bearing!” or “can you just grin and bear it?” It’s better than that. It’s this:
That’s Bow Bear, people. Thus named back in the year 1983 for the enormous yellow bow around his neck and because I was three. The bear may have a somewhat girly name and I may have clothed him strictly in dresses for the first six years of his life, but I’m quite sure he can hold his own against a black bear foraging for my tender human flesh.
The way it’ll go is this. We’ll put Bow Bear outside the tent each night, to stare dilligently and ferociously into the dark woods. A black bear will undoubtedly come crashing through the brush to eat me whole. It will see Bow Bear sitting calmly at our tent door.
Wild bear: “Oh! I’m sorry, I thought this one was… oh, well, have you made reservations?”
Bow Bear: “….”
Wild bear: “Really. WELL. Citysearch assured me, well, honestly, I just don’t know, is there any way..?”
Bow Bear: “….”
Wild bear: “This is certainly awkward. I would think, perhaps… no?”
Bow Bear: “….!”
Wild bear: “Fair enough, old chap. I’ll just be… I’m.. no harm done, just, going to…”
Wild bear runs off, embarassed and a little confused.
See? I’m sure it’ll work just as well as those bells you’re all talking about.
Stuart’s birthday and mine share the similarly awesome attribute of falling around two classic American holidays – mine around Labor Day and his around Columbus Day. To celebrate his birthday actually being on Columbus Day this year, we decided to plan our first American camping trip together.
After grappling with the monster that is the New York state parks department website and information (why, Catskills? why do you have no listed campgrounds? huh?), we settled on camping in Massachusetts’ beautiful Berkshires. All the campgrounds we had in mind were only two hours and change from my parent’s house in Rhode Island, and they all looked beautiful.
I can now say that after wrestling with reserveamerica.com for the better part of the afternoon and pestering rangers’ offices with questions, we’ve settled on Savoy Mountain State Forest. We’ve reserved a campsite which the ranger assures me is mostly secluded and with a beautiful hillside view, ringed with old apple trees.
We’ve got a borrowed tent promise, we’ve ordered the extra-long sleeping bag for Stuart, we’ve ascertained what kind of firepit is on site, and whether we can get a three-day fishing license, and now basically all that’s left for me to do is WORRY ABOUT BEARS. I will accomplish this by dividing the task into three parts.
1. Worrying about bears mauling us to death in our tent.
2. Worrying about bears swimming out into the pond and mauling us to death in our canoe.
3. Worrying about bears mauling us to death on a forest pathway.
Basically, the constants are Mauling, Bears, and Death. Any tips?
This is a unique way to help out down South if you’re casting about for what you can do beyond donations. Lifelist is a service connecting evacuees with their loved ones, indirectly, using messengers. Basically there are people that only have a few minutes to make a call and perhaps no money with which to do so. Lifelist is a toll-free number that the evacuees can call, give a voicemail with the names and phone numbers and messages for their families, like where they are or simply that they’re alive.
Lifelist then sends an email to the volunteers, who use their night and weekend minutes or any other phone they have access to, and calls a certain number of friends and families to pass on the messages.
I’m doing it. Those with the time and cell phone minutes should consider doing so as well. Hope this helps.
In totally unrelated and trivial observation news, I think the textbook definition (oh, I’m so clever) of an absent-minded professor is when he replies to your email query and ends it with “Sincerely,” but then doesn’t type in his name.
Ah, the glorious pearls of knowledge. And all the cliches thereof.
What do you say that isn’t cliche? When something like a hurricane happens, who would think the worst of it keeps getting worse, days after the fact?
I just read that there are bodies in the Superdome, that people are just walking around with dead bodies in their midst, that people who would otherwise be horrified or scared or thinking about what to do with the dead simply cannot think about that, have had the natural human reaction desensitized out of themselves. It’s the worst thing to think of, of course, but it reminds me of all the stories we read about the black death in Europe. Which only makes it more dramatic but you know what I mean.
I hunger for, look for, stories of people reaching out to each other during this, like UTLaw taking in students from Tulane Law and cities all over Texas accepting tens of thousands of refugees and maybe even individual people, opening their homes for other people.
But my mind strays back to the escalating terror of the situation. Reporters have stopped even trying to be fair about terminology, calling the gun-wielding citizens “thugs”. Hearing the mayor’s despair, seeing the OEM director railing against FEMA and asking if they’ve never “been to a hurricane before” – people can no longer watch their words and for some reason, it tells me even more about the crisis than the pictures.
I was in Houston for the floods, in the summer of 2001 and I won’t kid when I say it was literally like a pleasant walk in the rain compared to this. No one lost their lives. A woman gave birth on top of her car. The news stations stayed online, without commercials, until they flooded. And it felt, in the midst of all that water and destruction, nothing compared to Katrina but still, it felt like people were banding together.
I keep searching for people banding together during Katrina because after looking at the worst of the stories I turned to Stuart and said, “I can’t believe this. Not of this country,” and yet, it is. So I’m looking for the best. We’re giving what money we can. I’m praying, agnostic that I am, for relief.
And that the worst will finally pass, days after the eye of the storm has.
