lindashen

Meanwhile, I wish they would give everybody moving to New York a list of stuff you should know that would never occur to anybody who'd had the luxury of existing in actual civilization instead of you know, veneered hell. Chief among these things would be the fact that sometimes, in pre-war buildings in New York, your power will randomly shut off if you attempt to run your electric kettle (shut up, don't judge me) and your microwave simultaneously, and you'll end up giving up trying to find a bra to put on in the dark and have to go knock on your super's door all unsupported. And then you'll have to run out in the dark and pouring rain (still braless) to buy something called "a fuse" to replace the "blown fuse" in your apartment's basement. God damn it.

Not that it's keeping my neighbors from taking their pet bird for walks.

(I'm not kidding -- they walk their bird. However, the bird, unlike a dog, likes to scream like Nazi stormtroopers are forcing their attentions upon it while said neighbor screams, "NO! NO! STOP IT!" Yes, this is the same brilliant family that brought you the "PAPITO! PAPITO! YOU STUPIDO!" gloriousness. One day, they'll move, and the world will explode into confetti-sized pieces of awesome.)

It was the first truly hot day all year, with temperatures soaring into the upper 90s and feeling like they hovered in the 100s with the added indignity of the humidity, and I feel like most of Manhattan was in shock after having been in a holding pattern of 55 to 65 degree temperatures for what felt like a short geologic era. It was relentlessly sunny and sticky out today, and by the time I met Vhary and Heather at the greenmarket this morning it was already hot and my khaki capris felt like three layers of petticoats -- yes, I am still reading too many romance novels, stop judging me -- but we toughed it out and I came out of it with beautiful, crisp French radishes and kale and salad and green tomatoes that still smelled like sunshine and good loam and the South.

And then to counteract all those good feelings, I hit the Forever 21 in Union Square. I now own two dresses (only one I'm keeping) and two pairs of shoes, and I feel a good bit dirtier -- and it has nothing to do with sweat from the heat, either. Ugh. Like I told Heather -- I don't think I was 21 enough to shop at that store when I was 21.

And then some dude named Rocky called me.

Does anybody else ever have these moments where they just think, "God, I should have taken that job at the Borders"? because let me just tell you, nothing makes you feel less awesome than finding yourself eating God-knows-what-animal and Twizzlers, drinking diet Coke straight out of a 1 liter bottle and trying to decode the notes you wrote while trying to leave work (and failing) as you're asking someone, "Seriously, is that your real name?"

So my email signature all day on Thursday was "t-minus n hours until Indiana Jones," culminating at around 4 p.m. to "t-minus <3 hours until Indy!" which, naturally, was when I ended up on the phone with someone who said, "...Are you running a countdown to Indiana Jones?" I cannot tell a lie: I was psyched, and I think my psych-ness was totally justified.

( Breaking: Indiana Jones, still awesome. )

In the 12th grade I had this dragon lady of an English teacher who used to strike the fear of God into freaking God, for Christ's sake (1up for being super blasphemy-y!) and she used to lecture our class about the difference between a theme and a thesis.

It took me half a semester to grasp it and since I haven't been it able to shake the knowledge -- like that random fact taking up space in your parietal lobe you need for things like "how do I add?" and "which button unlocks my car and which one sets off the burglar alarm?" and "wait, how do I do this thing that is vital to my job again?" So anyway, if "adolescence," "the end of girlhood," and "body image" are the themes which most YA fiction directed at females touch on, then the thesis I find -- overwhelmingly -- is "If you find a hot boyfriend to substantiate yourself, then all of those problems go away!" and also "Let your vagina remain a mystery to you!"

If I do nothing else in my life, or never manage to write a best-seller, all I really want is to convince at least one female reader between the ages of 10 and 16 that there's no reason every book directed toward them should center around validation through the mirror of another person. And more than that even, learn to love your lady parts. And the associated eccentricities that go along with them -- your "Aunt Dot" is going to be in town for a lot longer than you think.

I say this because today, in the midst of my usual Wednesday evening activity of watching Ghost Hunters and being scared out of my mind, I had some sort of psychotic self-image break and the next thing I knew I woke up clutching a diet Coke and Jack Daniels (kids, don't drink) chattering about how I was fated to die, alone, unloved, in a bilge-water ditch because I wasn't a size zero and nobody could bounce a quarter off of my boobs. (Or is that supposed to be ass? Anyway, no bouncing on either region.) And anybody I can spare a similar fate (or bar tab) is one person rescued from the miasma of Seventeen and Elle Girl magazines.

So for various reasons, I have access to a lot of review copies of books, and this morning I found a copies of Evernight curled up next to The Lady and the Hound, which was clearly a sign from the book gods that I was supposed to suck it up and start reading the backlog of YA novels that I've been hoarding and been putting off reading in favor of devouring the entire Bedwyn series from Mary Balogh and Embrace of the Emporer, which is about animal fatherhood and thusly makes me cry like a weenie. (Of which, because I'm sure you're dying to know, my favorites were Slightly Dangerous and Slightly Married, which makes for an interesting bookend, no?)

So I went to the library and picked up The Luxe (which I am told is "like a trainwreck") and then uh, put it off to read Embrace of the Emperor first, mostly because in a competition between the bastard love child of a Georgette Heyer novel and Gossip Girls and penguin daddies, that's not even really a competition. You guys all saw March of the Penguins right? That's something else at which I wept like a whore.

Anyway, with all this reading I should be doing, obviously, what I ended up doing was go see Iron Man -- also known as "one of those movies I watched through all the credits because oh my God, I loved it so much and the feeble promise of something fabulous at the end of it was worth the agony of putting off going to the bathroom after Twizzlers and diet Coke had rendered me near-incontinent." It's the first movie that Marvel produced on its own, and frankly, I think one of the best comic book adaptations I've seen (and I've seen an embarrassing number of them.) Robert Downey Jr. was a dreamy, ridiculous playboy, the type of guy you love and want and know would only lead to trouble and you feeling dirty the next day.

Also, apparently, I'm painting again:

Endorsements. I'm sitting on my living room floor watching my ex-sort-of senator endorse Barack Obama on NY1 live coverage. (I say sort of because despite high hopes when we voted him in, he served for approximately 12.4 seconds before beginning to run for president, leaving us to fend for ourselves with our only senate representation being Elizabeth Dole. Yeah, the Elizabeth Dole married to Bob Dole.) The crowd is shimmering with Obama signs and the word CHANGE is in all capital letters everywhere in a sea of people looking for it in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

PACs. So NARAL endorsed Barack Obama today. I know this because as I am uh, signed up for their text messaging service. And then EMILY'S list totally loses its shit. Yeah, I like NARAL more than I like EMILY's list (SORRY JULIA). (JUST TO CHECK, EVERYBODY KNOWS WHAT THOSE THINGS ARE, RIGHT? RIGHT?)

Polar bears. Yay! Polar bears got put on the endangered species list! And then this douche wrote about it like the giant douchey-douche he is! I'm not against big business -- trust me, if you knew me, you'd know I'm not against big business -- but fuck it, everybody should ride in public transport fueled by rainbows and hope anyway. And it's not like taking the polar bears off the list would help anybody -- Exxon made more money in a quarter than any company in the history of business in America and we're still paying $3.45 a gallon for gas. (Soon to be $4!)

Some people drink alone, other people are a tad too fond of their sleeping pills, and still others shoot heroin between their toes -- I watch hours on hours of Ghost Hunters on SciFi despite the fact that it keeps me up half the night and second guessing every creak and groan in my pre-war apartment building. (Right now, I'm watching a rerun where Brian is making up words like "zero-ize" and I'm already terrified. They're in an old building. And wearing t-shirts. Oh God. We'll all be killed by ghosts.)

Movies/Shows/Books Of Which I Am Terrified But That I Watch With Deep Commitment

• Ghost Hunters
• World's Scariest Places
• UFO Hunters
• Alien Abduction (Fox, think late 90s)
• Outbreak
• Every Single Freaking Plague Documentary Ever
• Every Single Freaking Alien Abduction Slash Cattle Mutilation Documentary Ever

AND I WILL PROBABLY END UP WATCHING THIS HORRIBLE "CHILDREN OF THE DEAD" DOCUMENTARY THAT SCIFI KEEPS ADVERTISING. ARE YOU HAPPY SCIFI? ARE YOU HAPPY? I AM BILLING YOU FOR THE AMBIEN AND PSYCHOTHERAPY I WILL NEED AS A RESULT OF WATCHING SPECULATIVE CRAP ABOUT DEAD CHILDREN.

So I have a love/hate relationship with New York City that usually tilts more closely to hate -- in part because I'm so stressed out from my job that I think I'm grinding my molars away to nothing, in part because I spend at least half an hour in the grocery store ever week boggling over the price of yogurt. But today, after thinking I was going to be spending a perfectly awful day after dragging myself over to a lab to let the phlebotomist vampires suck approximately 76 gallons of blood (WHICH BTW I NEED FOR LIVING AND SUCH) I went to the Starbucks on the corner of 57th and Lexington and it was like God said, "Okay, today, I'm gonna give you a pass on this city."

Item the first: Starbucks finally stopped burning all their coffee, which, praise Allah. Even though I strongly suspect that their so-called "Pike Place Blend" is basically coffee they stole from the original Pike Place Starbucks' neighbor, Seattle's Best, that is still better coffee than they usually serve. I'm not enough of a punk not to be grateful for that at least; Midtown is as much of a wasteland for good coffee as it is for good lunches.

Item the second: While I was in the Starbucks, waiting for my $2.11 grande drip with some room for cream, an angry European man started a fight with -- and admittedly mouthy -- Starbucks employee over some amount that was voided from his gift card in error. I was under the impression this was a lot of money, at least $10, because five minutes of angry talking later, 10 minutes of angry shouting started and then the f-word started flying in weirdly-accented English.

Item the third: It was actually over $2.

Item the fourth: No, seriously, $2.

Item the fifth: And after watching the guy nearly pick a fistfight with some nice, Upper East side matron who was clearly out to spend her morning monetary-amount-equal-to-two-months-paychecks, I walked to the six train going downtown to Union Square and ended up sitting directly across from a guy dressed up exactly like Indiana Jones -- he had the beat up leather jacket and cargo pants and shirt and safari bag and everything. He also had the latest Indiana Jones 3 action figures, still vacuum sealed. I told my writing group about it, after brunch at the Best Brunch Place In New York (Old Devil Moon, on 12th between Avenue A and B), but they said it was best that I didn't say, "Hey, you guys -- when is the new Indy movie coming out?"

Item the sixth: I still think we would have been best friends, though. Seriously.

The rest of the day was pretty quiet -- I read a Mary Balogh book of collected Christmas romances on the train home and then staggered around New York in the high winds muttering under my breath about how it's FREAKING MAY and WHY IS IT STILL SO COLD and WTF NYC, WTF? but all in all, I was surprised by what a good day it was. And thats not even including the $1 book on fatherhood in the animal kingdom I got at Strand today, either.

Outside, trees turning green and frothy overnight, tulips blooming in giant...concrete jugs on the sidewalks of the Upper West Side -- allergies, coming from both mold and pollen now. And the rancid smell of hobos on the sides of streets and in subway stations, a whisper of the glories of pee-smell to come all summer long.

My neighbors, bursting out into tremendous, screaming, weeping, drunken fights, during which it is difficult to pick which side to root for when the man is belligerent and the woman is clearly raging drunk and slightly insane -- ah, springtime in the city.

Of course, being wretched, I clung to my windowsill in my dark apartment and watched every minute of it on tenterhooks and then somehow became even more emotionally involved when the NYPD showed up. It's always a little humbling to realize what a whore you are for dramarama, but honestly, I don't particularly mind in this case. I mean, it happened right outside my apartment. If God didn't want me to gawk then he wouldn't have set the domestic disturbance in perfect viewing from my bedroom window.

In other news, and in perfect complement to the shrieking fight outside my bedroom window, I finished Slightly Dangerous sitting on the outdoor deck at my office building which helped to establish two things: (1) Mary Balogh may be spared the death of a thousand cuts, because thought the heroine in Slightly Dangerous was also frustrating beyond words, the hero was charming as hell. Also, unironically-named Wulfric. Also, he took off his clothes and jumped into a lake -- which, adorable; (2) I have absolutely no shame, because I have to work with these people and the last thing I need to be letting them know is that I have a helpless addiction to totally non-feminist regency romance novels. They already gave me a stuffed animal that quacks when you squeeze it. -- they are totally on to me.

So I'm currently working my through Mary Balogh's library of frustrating heroines and wondering how in God's name anybody gets a gig writing utterly, mortifyingly stupid stories like the one in Simply Unforgettable, which is aptly named because from now until the end of time, I will carry the memory of having read this "book" and cheered for the lead female to be crushed to death by a curricle. And it speaks poorly of how many regency romances I've read that I know what a curricle is, too.

Next up? Slightly Dangerous, because I just don't know when to stop going back for punishment.