quit yer bitchin

continuing what's suddenly become "robert's amazing summer full of plans, parties, and visitors," alyson was in town this weekend promoting her new book. oh wait, no. forgive me. we saw the devil wears prada (or, as my mother calls it, "this wonderful movie called the devil wore prada.") yesterday, so i suddenly thought that all of our lives were fabulous and event-filled. alyson was merely in town visiting us, but it was a fantastic visit.

when i was younger and my mom would have her out-of-town friends visit--and i mean much younger, like 9 or 10--i never understood how they could just sit around and talk. sit around on the living room sofa, sipping sweet instant coffee; sit around on the sofa in the formal room, sipping sweet instant coffee. they'd just sit. and talk. with alyson's visit, i realized that this is what we do now. we sit around on the living room sofa and talk. but without the instant coffee because it's 203948239 degrees in new york.

don't get me wrong, we didn't just sit. we went to the met (opera and museum), had burgers at this ridiculous place in "le" parker "meridien," ate popsicles (mine: the "big stick," and you better believe i had a good time ordering it) on the upper east side. we went to dinner in the east village and had drinks at some straight bar before i dragged a whole group of people to the phoenix.

speaking of the "whole group of people," it was like a fucking depauw university reunion at this east village gay bar. it's me, scott, amanda, alyson, and our friend clark, whom we hadn't seen since graduation. he apparently lives here now. he also apparently used to bartend at a gay bar in phoenix (the city, not the bar), but was bellyaching the whole time we were at the gay bar about how uncomfortable he was. ya see, clark is straight. conspicuously straight. still, though, if you've bartended at a gay bar you can quit yer bitchin', as they say in the old west. or is that the trailer park? whatever.

last night, part 102,938,102,989,753,983

so i did something last night after work that heretofore i'd only seen on sex and the city, something that always seemed so ridiculously new york-y and impossible and oh-my-god-how-chic: i went to a party where your name had to be on a list to get in. well, ok, i went to a party where someone else's name was on a list but they took me as their plus-one. did i feel extremely fancy? yes, sir, i did.

the party was something that out magazine apparently throws every month to celebrate the release of their new issue. it was at some absurd multi-level club in chelsea called, um, guest house. or something. it didn't really look like a guest house, unless your guest house has a padded-leather ceiling with red chandeliers and 400 homos in sleeveless d&g shirts. i know mine does. oh, and the bathrooms at this guest house place were a model for all clubs: individual stalls with doors that go all the way down to the floor. now, i know that none of you out there are crohn's sufferers, but let's just say you notice things like this. and appreciate them.

i was absolutely convinced, standing in line with sam, that we'd get to the door and the man at the velvet rope (who, by the way, was wearing a black see-thru tee-shirt and had the perkiest yet largest nipples i've seen on a man) would be like, "hmm...nope, i don't see you on the list. NEXT!" but he wasn't. sam gave him his name and, miracle of miracles, he opened up that clicky thing on the rope. sam said, "me plus guest." i said, "i'd be guest." nipples didn't laugh.

basically, fancy party. the bar was open as long as you drank some sort of bacardi limon drink. now, i haven't really drank bacardi since the disastrous "let's see what happens when three people drink a handle of bacardi while nads-ing robert's chest" night my senior year of college. (remember that one, emily?) but when it's free, um, i'm gonna choke it down. and by choke i mean guzzle.

i met the editors of out magazine and was able to honestly tell them that i have a subscription. i talked to them about the new editor-in-chief and the direction of the magazine. then i met the man who apparently owns the whole damn thing: the advocate, out, all of it. he was very nice and his husband was extremely tan and wore shockingly white pants. best of all? when you start drinking at 7 and you're going home at 10:30, a little drunk, you get an awesome night's sleep.

my prediction

ok, so i don't know how many of you are watching project runway this season, but it's already off to a fucking saucy start. i was a little concerned, after last year sucked us in, that this year would, um, blow. but i'm into it. the show, i mean, not blowing.

so, if you're watching PR, as you know you should be if you're reading this blog, you know that next week's episode is going to feature the "shocking elimination that shakes the very foundation that is bravo television" or something like that. whatever it is, they've been teasing us with it since june.

i'd like to put in my bid for what the big secret is, just so that if i'm right i'll have the, well, knowledge of knowing that i was right.

has anyone else noticed how much time that adorable gay redhead from oklahoma (we'll call him, let's see, hmm, what could we call him...john artz) is spending with robert the ex-barbie-clothes designer? well, i have. ever since last week's challenge, when they were partners, they've been all cutsie-pie we-get-along-so-well. little jokes. little eyes.

what does all this mean, combined with the fact that they're the two best-looking homos (i'm not counting keith because he's a total asshole)? it could mean but one thing. say it with me:

they're doing it.

so here's my prediction for wednesday: tim gunn gets word from the producers of the show that robert and kayan/kaye/kate were bumpin' pussies when they thought the cameras were off. little did they know, project runway sees all! well, clearly, this is against the bullshit code of conduct they signed before they started taping. one--or, gasp, both--are going to be kicked off because of having gay sex. ironic, seeing as every person on the show is gay and it's on bravo. i will also be devestated because i'm rooting for kayan/kaye/kate because he's an oklahomo.

the only question is, did they flip a coin to see who gets to be the bottom?

two weeks!

one of the small blessings of my new(ish) job is that i get pretty generous time off. they combine sick days and vacation days for a grand total of 2.5 days a month, no matter how you wanna spend 'em. since i'm literally never out sick (except for, you know, those pesky times that i'm in the hospital), that means that i get 2.5 days a month all to myself. this adds up to one magical, wonderful, unbelievable thing. i'll say it loud and in bold:

i get to take a week off in august to go to the jersey shore.

that's right, dear readers, i get to take a week off from work to go to the beach and then help my sister move into her new apartment in philly. i don't think that i've had a week off from work since...well, ever. that is, ever in the long and difficult two years that i've actually been a paid member of the workforce. we're not going to count those 24 wonderful summers that i spent either a) lounging around my parents' house; b) lounging around scott's apartment; or c) drinking my way through various summer opera festivals.

so i'll go to the shore, hitching a ride with frank in either his new volvo or his new mercedes (i'm secretly hoping it's a mercedes so that i can put on my big sunglasses and ride in the back seat, pretending that i'm someone very, very important.), and then i'll swing through philly, tan as the day is long and probably a little hungover, to meet robin and the girls. when i say girls i mean the entourage of people that go around the country helping each other move. seriously. robin has been to las vegas and louisville to help friends move. now apparently they're all driving out with her to philly to move her in there. when i moved to baltimore i drove out with my honda, my computer, and my television. then again, i moved to new york with the biggest truck you've ever seen plus hilary. so i can't complain too much.

TRASH!

ok, so there's this smell outside my apartment. i know exactly what it is. the greek restaurant downstairs (one of a hundred thousand greek diners in astoria, none of which have a specialty but serve gyros, kabobs, hamburgers, pizzas, and cheap cuts of steak with equal aplomb) leaves its garbage, a horrible, stinking, rotting mess, at the foot of its basement stairs. now, if this basement were only reachable through the building, they wouldn't do it, i'm sure. even the crazy greeks that run the place would be run out of their own space by the hulking stink-bomb. however, this is new york, which means that basements open up not into the houses, but onto the sidewalk. so our dear greek restaurant flings open its metal trap doors every morning, letting the smell of rotting lettuce and onion and cast-off meat and cast-off food waft into the muggy new york summer.

waft, specifically, into our front hallway, the door to which is always open since we share the building with a greek realtor, a woman i affectionately call constantina constantinopolis, even though her name is something else. not something less greek, just different. the smell then reaches our apartment in two ways: it goes up our stairs and sneaks into the apartment when we open the door; it also snakes up the building into my windows, which are right above the offending trap-door.

i asked amanda last night if the smell bothered her like it does me. i've gotten to the point, dear readers, where i have to hold my breath all the way from the corner until i've shut the apartment door behind me. just a whiff of the garbage smell is enough to turn my stomach. scratch that. just thinking about the garbage smell is enough to turn my stomach. "well," she said, "i think it's gross. but i definitely don't think it's that awful. and i really can barely smell it inside the apartment."

i, on the other hand, can smell it all the time. it's possible that it's because of my new medicine, one of the side effects of which is loss of appetite and nausea. i mean, sure, it makes sense that if you're on a medicine that makes you nauseous and then you smell horrible rotting trash all the time, you're going to be a lil' sensitive to it.

i've been given bougie little room sprays by my coworkers, after having complained to them of the smell, and use them when i get home and before i go to bed. granted, it then reminds me of that commercial that says "what's worse than the smell of fish? the smell of fish and flowers." what's worse than the smell of rotting greektrash? the smell of rotting greektrash and "moonlight garden."

so, you new yorkers, come by sometime and give me your opinion. i'll make you dinner: gyros, kabobs, hamburgers, or pizza. your pick.

feel the illinoise

well, dear readers, it has been such a crazy day that i'm just now getting around to blogging about our trip to chicago this weekend. mind you, i apparently had three hours earlier to put up all of the pictures onto my sister site, but hey. what's more important: wordsy words words or pictures of me, brian, and terry shirtless? i think we all know the answer to that question. and it ain't words.

to make a long story short, i have completely fallen in love with chicago. ok, so maybe i should make that short story a little longer. chicago's a little smaller than new york, which makes it feel more manageable; terry's neighborhood, specifically, is really beautiful. it's got fantastic, chicago-y architecture and not once did we have to drive around looking for parking for 45 minutes. sure, you have to walk through kind of a scary ghetto to get there from the train, but if you walk in the other direction for ten minutes you're on the gay beach. on gorgeous lake michigan. which, if there aren't warnings about dangerous bacteria levels, is clean and beautiful.

there seems to have been themes to this weekend's visit: "wow, i cannot get over how clean it is here;" "wow, it totally doesn't smell like rotting garbage, piss, and feces in your front yard!" or "wow, this hamburger doesn't cost $17 with an extra $4.50 for french fries." seriously, folks, it's a damned good thing that i visited chicago after i moved to new york, because if i had seen how terry was living when i was still stuck in baltimore (no offense, my dear baltimore friends, but you know what i mean), it would've been like the knife twisting in my side.

all in all, it was a wonderful visit. i only get to see terry twice a year these days, if i'm lucky, so that was good. his apartment is adorable and inspired me to, you know, go ahead and hang the pictures that have been sitting around my own apartment since april. on top of that, we got to see some touristy things, meet terry's friends, see lyday a ton, meet her wonderful boyfriend (i won't say fiancee...YET), and hang out with newly-brick-shithouse brian. the only person i missed (besides, you know, that branch of my family that i didn't call...oops.) was ben. and, dammit, i'll make that happen sometime soon.

i've decided that i need to go back to chicago in the dead of winter. or i needed something like a rape or mugging to happen to me. you know, just something to really make me despise the place. because right now i'm ready to pack up and move, no matter how much i love new york.

phaotaos

if you like this picture, you'll love the rest of them. let's just say we took chicago by storm.

from chicago!

hot off the press (or, you know, terry's computer in chicago)!

Lesson Learned

“I just don’t like feeling like this lovesick homo that’s chasing you all over New York City,” I said to Charles one day. I shifted my gaze downward, studying my new skull and crossbones Converse, not wanting to see his reaction. I picked at the molded rubber, bits of it already falling off even though I’d only bought them a few months earlier. This was one of the expenses you don’t think about when you move to New York: going through a pair of shoes every three months.

“Why do you say that, Robert?” he asked me, clearly a little bewildered. In the months he’d known me he thought he’d learned what to expect. This, I could tell, had caught him off guard, as if he’d just seen a new side of me. As if a new door, one he hadn’t noticed before, had just opened. “You know we’re friends, right?” he said. “You know that I care about you, and that I want to be around you. That’s why I ask you to hang out all the time. Why would you say you feel like you’re chasing me around?”

I did, in fact, know that we were friends. I also knew that I’d been attracted to him since the day we met: attracted to how wild he was, loving way I felt like I was on a roller coaster every time we went out in the city, flapping along in his wake. For weeks I’d wanted nothing but to know what it’d be like to kiss him, even just once. To feel the fire, the spark, that I knew would pass between us.

But it wouldn’t happen; none of the late-night conversations or lingering hugs would lead to anything, I knew. Not because there wasn’t a connection between us, but because he had a girlfriend.

See, I’d been down this road before, being infatuated with a straight guy. Having spent most of high school in some unrequited love affair or other, I’d sworn off it completely, knowing full well that it was a waste of everyone’s time and energy, most of all mine. In high school, where there were no other options, no other gay people who’d admit to being gay, I went from one crush to another, always with my best friends. They always ended the same way: with a statement that I was really great, man, and if they wanted to be with another dude then I definitely would be at the top of their list. But you know, bro, that’s just not how they felt about me.

The last one, the most intense, taught me once and for all that it was better to be single than heartbroken. I’d sit for hours on this boy’s back porch, smoking cigarettes in the cold Oklahoma night while his mother was at her boyfriend’s house. Under the glare of the unshaded light, I tried to make my cigarette last a little longer, tried to prolong my time with him. Inevitably I’d sidle right up next to him, making sure that at least our legs would touch, and complain about the cold. And inevitably he’d put his arm around me, pulling me close to him. This, giving me the touch I so desperately wanted, might have been worse than freaking out, pushing me away. It gave me unending hope for the future, hope that someday his brotherly affection would change, hope that he’d turn his face to meet mine.

And so, eight years older and wiser, when I found myself in a very similar situation, one in which feelings that shouldn’t have been there in the first place started taking over, I wasn’t exactly sure what to do. I’d chase him around New York for a while, I thought, knowing that I’d sometimes I’d be nothing more than an accessory, the funny gay guy he and his girlfriend hung out with.

This time, I thought, I’d shift my focus, look for what I needed from someone who could give it to me. I was too old to beg for scraps; I’d been freely given too much affection to ask for it from someone who didn’t want to. I’d keep the line drawn between friend and lover. And I’d be more careful.

oh shit

it's been quite a while since i've shared with you all a morning goods link.

so, once again, you're welcome.

big apple to the windy city

let's just say it's been an easy work week. yes, i had to come into work on saturday because i was on call. (you heard me right. on call. i don't know when or how i got myself into a place in my life where i'd ever be important enough at a job to be on call, but there you have it. then again, it's not like i was delivering babies myself, so i guess i might not be so important after all. if they could hire a chimp to push the right buttons, he could be on call here, too.) but i'm taking a half-day today because i worked saturday. so that means that i really only worked three and a half days this week.

i woke up this morning and the first thought in my head was, in these words, "mmmmmmmm, you get a half-day today. and you go to chicago tomorrow." that's right, dearest readers, hilary and i get to have a little mini summer vacation (or, as they'd call it in england, a mini-break) in chicago this weekend. it's going to be a whirlwind: we get into chicago at 9am tomorrow (which means that we ohmygod have to fly out of lga at 8.) and from there we have a whole week's worth of activities that terry's planned for us. not to mention, um, the gay games are going on this week in chicago, so there are more queers packed into that town than a chelsea gay bar where they're giving away free cosmos wrapped up in signed liza minnelli t-shirts.

as a side-note, when hilary heard about the gay games she asked me, "the gay games? do we have to, like, compete in them? like is it some kind of bar thing?" "no, hilary, it's like the gay olympics." "oh, i thought that it was like potato sack races and stuff."

anyway, i'll be seeing, in the course of two and a half days, terry, emily, ben, and brian, four people who i'm very close with, who all live in chicago, who all read this blog, and who basically don't know each other. like, they know of each other. so again, whirlwind.

wish me luck on the flight; i've got my drugs handy!

how to be a waiter, lesson 1

i know that none of you are going to believe this, because i hardly believe it myself. but prepare thyselves, dear readers, for a startling revelation.

ahem.

i can be a little bratty in restaurants. i know, i know. if you've been following this blog from the beginning you're probably saying to yourself, but robert. it's clear that you're a kind, caring, giving individual, the kind that helps old ladies across the street without even trying to get them to pay you or even stealing their pocketbooks. we know that you treat a waitperson with the same dignity and respect with which you treat all the rest of god's creatures. and usually, dear reader, you'd be right.

see, i was a waiter once. i worked at a restaurant called the mount vernon stable (and saloon). for those of you who don't live in baltimore, let me paint you a picture. it's basically, like, if TGIFriday's and Applebees and Harrigan's were all rolled into one, and were individually owned. and then you plop it down in the middle of baltimore's gay neighborhood, giving it a nearly exclusively gay clientele, none of whom know that the owner is a horrible armenian bastard who hates gay people. so this is the restaurant i worked at. here's what each shift was like:

1. lunch: get to the restaurant at 10:30 to prep, aka do half the cooks' jobs for them. run around like a madwoman for four hours, fetching asshole business people, all of whom expect to be treated like the queen of sheba, their nasty $7 sandwiches. walk away, exhausted and a little less human but $21 richer. i shit you not, dear reader, that's the most i ever made on a lunch shift.
2. dinner, or, gay hour: have ass pinched at least 5 times a night, without fail by older homosexual gentleman with a gray beard and leather vest. pride rings/bracelet/necklace optional. be the butt of more nasty gay jokes and come-ons than you could imagine (unless, say, you're brian and worked at the gay bar in baltimore, in which case you can totally imagine). walk away with 5 times what you made at lunch, completely stripped of your dignity.
3. late dinner: and i mean late. like, the kind of people who roll in for dinner at 11:30 because the kitchen, due to the incredible greed of the bastard armenian owner, is open until midnight. fetch countless people, people that you have spent the last two years avoiding talking to on the street, plates and plates and plates of ribs. ribs slathered in barbecue sauce. ribs that come with a side of horrible homemade cole slaw that you have to glop out of the huge cole slaw container yourself. with their ribs, inevitably, they will order a mug of hot water (no tea). when you bring them the hot water they will first complain that it's not hot enough and then they will demand lemons from you. if you're left a tip, it will be less than 10%. after the last patron has been cleared from the restaurant (usually around 1:30am), vaccuum the entire place. walk away, broken.

so, see, i did that. i did that for a whole, um, five weeks. so i can be nice to wait staff. seriously. i can be nice until i'm confronted with a situation like at lunch today, in which my waiter didn't acknowledge my presence for 20 minutes. in an empty restaurant. and then i forget all about numbers 1, 2, and 3. and it ain't pretty.

the blair witch

listen, everyone. do yourselves a favor and spend the rest of your workday reading this. (via queerty)

brrr it's cold in here

i almost hate to devote a whole blog entry to this, because i know that every new yorker's blog in, um, new york is going to be about what gawker called this MOTHERCHRISTING HEAT WAVE. that's right, motherchristing. it's really fucking insane, people. like ok. oklahoma, god love 'er, is really hot. it's so hot, in fact, that i would often refuse to go outside during the day. i remember a summer spent with mandy (my friend, not the barry manilow song) during which we did nothing during the day but sit in her dark room in the air conditioning. we'd only venture out after the sun went down, and even then it was just to go to the air conditioned perkins and smoke cigarettes.

what's different down there is that even though it's a (literally) scorching 112 degrees with 80% humidity, everything is air conditioned. everything. you go from your air conditioned house to your air conditioned car. and then when you park it, you walk the 10 yards to whatever restaurant or store you're going to, and you're met with a rush of cold air when you open the door. this, dear friends, is part of the reason we're all experiencing an inconvenient truth. it is also absolutely wonderful in the middle of the summer.

in new york things aren't air conditioned like this. i suppose it's because if everyone blew out their a/c's like i'd like them to we'd face permanent brown-outs (that sounded really gross in my head when i typed it. ew, brown-outs.). no one has central a/c, for instance. we all have these useless room air conditioners. they'll cool down a room the size of a closet until it's 90 degrees outside. then they'll do nothing but blow hot air at you while you're baking your vegetable lasagne in the next room. it was probably 85 degrees inside our apartment last night. and that's with two room a/c's.

so, yeah. let's just say that this heat wave might just kill us all. hilary informed me last night that a "cold front" is supposed to come through tomorrow. what does a cold front mean at this point?

that it's going to be a scant 86 degrees tomorrow instead of 95. oooh, hand me a sweater!

daily show rox

(via queerty)

i think i have sunstroke

so it was a full weekend. it was a full weekend that went all the way to bedtime last night, and feels like it's kinda bled into this week, which is only a three-and-a-half day week because i'm taking a half-day thursday and friday we GO TO CHICAGO! that's right. at the end of the week we'll be out of hot, sticky, smelly (and wonderful) new york and in hot, sticky not-so smelly chicago. we're staying with terry, even though i'm not sure where or how, unless terry, hilary, sasha (the cat), and i all sleep in a big pile on his bed. wouldn't be the first time.

ok, so the weekend. friday was pretty normal: drank way too many beers in the east village with sam after meeting up with scott and chris. now, what wasn't normal about all that was falling asleep on the train going the WRONG DIRECTION and ending up where i started at 3.45 in the morning. that sucked. saturday, after i rolled out of my beer-haze, i came into work (i know, lame) and then went to the siren festival at coney island. now, let me say two things about coney island:

1. it's farther away than you can possibly imagine. i'm sorry but if that's still considered new york city, i don't understand how. it takes like an hour to get there from manhattan. riiiiight.
2. it's really, um, gross and trashy. with lots (and i mean LOTS) of gross and trashy people.

but here's the deal: scissor sisters were headlining the siren festival. i was afraid that it would be super crowded and i wouldn't even be able to see them, but those fears were unfounded. we fought our way through the crowd, stood about halfway back, and i could see all i needed to if i stood on my tip-toes. i could hear all of it, and they sounded great. i danced my face off for their entire hour-and-a-half set, which i'm sure made the non-dancing hipsters around me hate me. but who cares? they're hipsters.

yesterday was another big day: the beach at sandy hook. now, you new yorkers who haven't been to sandy hook should all take note (at least you gay new yorkers, that is). it's a less-than-30-minute ferry ride (on a very fancy ferry with an fully-stocked bar) from east 34th street. that's right, a beach that takes less than an hour from subway to towel. here's the thing, though. it's a, um, nude beach. yeah, nude beach. like "oh look, that obese gentleman doesn't have any clothes on!" nude beach. what was most bizarre about the nude beach, once you got over the fact that all these people were -completely, horrifyingly- naked, is how quickly you forget that you're naked. now, there's a joke that all gay people have seen their friends naked already. and it's pretty true. so being naked with my friends on the beach was like, "oh look, you're naked. whatever."

i've just never had to worry about sunburn in certain areas, however, and will probably never recover from having to sunscreen those places. safety first!

west 140th st.

unlike my last job in baltimore, where i had to meet with ghetto (and i'm not saying that in a classist, asshole way. i'm saying that in a very literal way, as in, these people are from the ghetto.) moms and kids in the clinic, i have a much more hands-off job here in new york. it's a related study, mind you, but i just don't have as much patient contact. this is both a good and a bad thing. it's good in that i get to wear jeans and a t-shirt to work every day, even though i've decided to try to look, um, a little more "professional." as soon as i can make myself get out of bed ten minutes earlier so that i can iron my shirt.

what's bad is that it means a lot more desk time than my old job. and it's also a shame because even though our demographic here is the same as it was in baltimore, the poverty in new york city is a little different than the poverty in baltimore. i've already written about this, so i won't blab on too much about it. long story short: in new york, even the people who live in projects and haven't had a job for ten years are still a little bit more put together than the people in baltimore. in baltimore it's like a scrabbling-in-the-dirt kind of poverty. it's poverty where people just walk around dirty because they can't afford to wash their clothes, or because their parents are too high on drugs to wash their extra-long white t-shirts. in new york, it seems, at least with our asthmatic moms, they might be poor but you can bet they still have their hair and nails done before we see 'em.

i write this because i'm getting ready to go back out on a home visit, one of the few bits of patient conact i have. we go into these peoples' homes, observe them, and then suck up dust samples. none of this struck me as odd until the other day, when i was riding the train with amanda to connecticut. we came up out of the tunnel at 125th street, and i looked over at some project that i'd just been inside last month. if you'd told me five years ago that i'd be going into projects at 140th street in harlem, new york city, i'd have said that you were crazy.

of course, five years ago i thought that after i got done with grad school i'd just go on to a young artist program. as it turns out, there isn't exactly a spot in a young artist program for every person that graduates with a masters degree. there's more like one spot for every two hundred people that graduate with a masters degree. and, as of yet anyway, i haven't been the one picked out of those two hundred. and so i go into the projects, armed with a special little vaccuum cleaner, and suck up dust samples from inevitably dirty bedsheets and chairs and rugs.

don't worry, though, i'm totally using my degrees: i'm singing "o sole mio" while doing it.

yes, there's a park.

i love manhattan. seriously. i love that things here (in lower manhattan, at least) are cleaner and fancier. i love that you can walk 10 minutes in any direction and find a pretty good place to eat. i love that they do things like movies and shows in the park, that you can go to the biggest apple store in the world, and have your pick from fifteen different gay bars in any given neighborhood. and, in an ideal world, i'd be able to live here--on the whole third floor of a building, with a huge living area, sizable kitchen and bathroom--for six hundred dollars a month. alas, the apartment i now live in in queens would cost three times what it does if it were across the east river. and so we live in astoria.

all of that being said, though, i will never cease to be amazed by how little people who live in astoria know about, um, astoria. these displaced manhattanites--myself and my roommates included--are different than the rest of the long islanders. there are people, i'm sure, who live their lives in astoria and never really go to manhattan. you can find them on wednesday nights doing open mic night at the 'tross. trust me, it's not a pretty sight.

though i admittedly spend most of my time in manhattan--choosing to go out mainly in manhattan, i mean, since i obviously work most of the time in manhattan--i have also taken time to explore some cool things in my own neighborhood. now, most of my options are greek restaurants and coffee houses. trust me, if you've been to one greek coffee house you've been to 'em all, no matter what they're called. the other night, though, i went with sam to a cool place called cafe/bar. or cafebar. i don't know. it's a place that amanda said was too hipster for her boyfriend. it's not all that hipster-y (i don't think anyone would bat an eye in the city), but for astoria it's really, really scene. and it's a pretty cool place. and it's, um, a whole lot cheaper than going out to dinner in manhattan.

when talking once to a friend who used to live in queens, she literally didn't know where she used to live. she spent so little time in the 'hood that she couldn't even remember her intersection. like her time in queens was nothing but a bad memory to be sloughed off and forgotten once she could escape to manhattan. my manhattan friends really do view it with such disdain that i've started to think it's funny.

one of our other friends (who, um, reads this blog and is totally gonna know it's her so she'll remain nameless. hey girl!) who still lives in astoria ran into hilary the other day when she was on her way to the astoria pool. here's the conversation they had:

anonymous friend: where are you headed to, hilary?
hilary: to the pool!
af: what pool? huh?
hilary: the pool at astoria park. it's free and totally gorgeous.
af: wait, there's a park?

yes, dear af, there's a park. it's about a third of the size of central park, which means it's gargantuan. and it's down the street from you. i like manhattan as much as the next guy, but c'mon. there are times you don't wanna take a train to go for a run. oh wait i don't run.

so get out there--explore your 'hood. it'll make going into manhattan feel that much fancier.

peachy

first of all, i have to write a post telling you all to run, not walk, out and buy the new peaches cd. it's called impeach my bush and it came out yesterday. i'm listening to it right now. it includes gem lyrics such as

i'd rather fuck who i want
than kill who i am told to.
let's face it, we all want tush.
if i'm wrong, impeach my bush.
impeach/bush.

and

the tent's so big in your pants, baby,
if there's a housing crisis
there ain't anymore
need a place to go,
you better open the door.

oh, and there's an entire song devoted to the hanky code. if you don't know what this is and you're a gay man, you better go look it up.

if that weren't enough to make you all want this cd on your ipods, it has some of the hottest electronic beats since the new goldfrapp cd. granted, that was only about six months ago. but still. when we're faced with a summer full of crappy new beyonce and justin timberlake songs, we need some hot electronic sex music. and i'm voting for peaches.

what's great about this new cd is that, like the new gossip (standing in the way of control. buy it.) and the new-ish sleater-kinney (the woods. their final album. buy it.), it's the first time her sound is really polished, but it's an example of the best thing a polished studio sound can do for an artist. it's like she took her bigger budget and her fancy producer and made the best peaches cd she could, unlike other people--like, um, say, paris hilton or liz phair--who take their fancy producers and make the most boring-sounding radio-friendly shit you've ever heard.

anyway, more later. but for now, i got some rocking out to do.

thanks.

since i had two negative responses to my blog yesterday (one in jest, from brian, and one totally creepy and hateful), both of which said basically the same thing, and because i have really nothing to blog about today since it's a pretty blah day here at the medical center, i thought i might address them.

the one that said the most to me was one of brian's comments, and it can really be said of all my writing: that i take a seemingly unimportant event and blow it completely out of proportion, write a whole blog entry or column about it. i suppose, though, that this is how i see life. life really is just a whole lot of little events that are all stitched together. it's not every day that somebody wins a competition or has a baby or breaks up with their boyfriend. but every day i ride the n train. every day i get coffee and then sit at my desk. when you look at it on a grand scale, my life would seem interminably boring. taken the way i write about it, though, where a look on the subway or the kindness of my duane reade pharmacist is worth writing a whole entry about, it fills up your day.

and i've always been someone like that, someone who notices (and yes, probably blows out of proportion) the small stuff. that book? that one called don't sweat the small stuff? yeah. i say, if i didn't sweat the small stuff, what would i sweat? not that i have to sweat anything, but you get what i'm saying. if you overlook the small things in life, you're likely to miss the small blessings you get, too.

ok so i don't want this to turn into some oprah fucking winfrey diatribe on why we should all remember our spirits, but bear with me.

in a life that's lately been a little hard--a new job, a new city, trying to forge new friendships, being in and out of the hospital and being in and out of stomach pain and trying new doctors and new drugs--it's easy to feel pretty isolated and beaten down. but then, the same part of me that makes me obsess over a conversation or an idea is the part of me that lets me notice certain things: how good the air can feel early in the morning; the way the people at my pharmacy know me by name; the fact that i don't have to ask for a hug from my roommate when she can tell i'm discouraged about my new medicine.

and so, yeah. i'm self-aggrandizing and overly-sensitive and probably a whole lot of other things that might not be so great. but throwing it all onto this blog, knowing that it's my friends all over the country who are reading it, helps me.

so thanks. and thanks, anonymous asshole from yesterday, for making me think about all of this.

seriously.

we all know i love attention, but c'mon. seriously.

teefeses!

let's all welcome phong to our little world, shall we?

ouch

i thought that you'd all like to see this. it's a comment that was just left on the post below this one, anonymously, of course.

"The following comment is directed to you and your blogs as a whole, not just this specific entry.

You are quite possibly the biggest, most narcissistic, self-obsessed, 20-something loser I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot of them in my life.

Get over yourself!!!

You are nothing special -- just as with any other of these stupid 20-something bloggers, I ask myself: why would anyone want to read what you have to say? The answer: nobody does. Certainly I didn't -- and that's 5 minutes of my life I'm never getting back...

Again: get over yourself! If not for yourself, then for the sake of all your so-called "friends", all the people around you who are too afraid to tell you the truth, that you're just a conceited, self-absorbed, total jackass."

sheesh. it's just the interweb, people.

pushy

i just had a conversation with laura about train etiquette because of a riotous (but extremely long) article from new york magazine that hilary posted on her blog. we were sharing our personal pet peeves when it comes to the subway (hers: when someone won't move out of the way and allow you to hold onto something. mine: when someone's blocking the door of an empty train so that they can be sure to be the first ones off at the next stop.), and i discovered that my solution to both of them (to all of them, really) was just, "well i'd just shove them out of the way." someone's blocking the door? shove 'em. someone won't let you grab onto something? shove 'em. that pesky baby is taking up the last seat on the train with its stupid baby-carrier? shove 'em. i don't know when this all started, me being a pushy bastard, but it's pretty much limited to train travel. i don't walk down the sidewalk pushing over old ladies, but get us moving 35 miles per hour underground and it's every grandma for herself.

i write this because amanda and i went to her house in fairfield yesterday to celebrate hers and her aunt judy's birthdays. her aunt judy has a dog named kayla, a shih tzu with bows in its hair (bows that, judy tells me, come from a nice lady in oklahoma.) and its own room. it sits at the table with us during dinner and responds to commands like "go show auntie barbara your birthday bow." the dog is pushed around in a pram specifically designed for dogs. this isn't the point of this story, but you get the idea.

to get to amanda's house you have to ride an extremely crowded metro north train. i don't know why it's always so crowded, but by the time we get onto the train we inevitably have to fight for seats together. and they're usually those horrible seats where four people have to face each other, trying desperately not to bump knees, looking apologetic the whole time. as we were boarding the train yesterday, i moved out of the aisle into a seat, just momentarily, mind you, to let a man pass me. i hear a voice from behind me say, rudely, "someone is already sitting there." i turn on my heel, just like my mother, and say "i'm not sitting there. i'm moving out of the way to let this man past me." i said it very matter-of-factly, as if to say this is not a topic that is open for discussion. of course, the words were out of my mouth before i noticed that the little bitch giving me attitude was an 11-year-old black girl. oops.

and so, pushing my way onto the intensely crowded subway car this morning, i thought to myself, new york is making me pushy. it's making me be one of those people who shoves their way into places just because i feel like i have to. for the first three months i lived here, moving around the city was a very zen thing (like the old question, how many babies fit in the tire?). i just went where i had to go, listening to my ipod, letting the people swarm around me. lately, though, i find myself getting caught up in the flood. i gotta slow down.

right on

i don't read the times a whole lot, but when they had a review of the madonna concert i missed, i gave it a click. and i found this little gem:

"No matter: by the time she sang "Hung Up," the ecstatic, Abba-sampling hit from "Confessions," the draggy middle was all but forgotten. When pop stars sing about clubs, they're often singing about leaving them: the whole reason they go is to find someone to leave with. But there's not much that's flirtatious or suggestive about "Hung Up." It sounds, on the contrary, like the work of someone who has realized that there is no after-party: the party is all there is, and what happens on the dance floor isn't a means to an end, it is the end.

You don't go there to leave, or to somehow transcend it; you go there to stay as long as you can. Maybe it takes a 47-year-old pop star to figure that out."

stop waiting for the after party; party while we're here. yeah, right on, nytimes.

Displaced

"I just feel so alone even though there are all these people constantly around me," I told my friend Perri recently. I know that it’s a cliché, like when people say "Having a child changes you" or "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger," but I can’t think of a better way to put it. I don’t care if it’s clichéd, it’s the truth.

"I know what you mean," he said. "But I've been here since I was 11 so I guess I'm just used to it." There are all these people—on the street, in restaurants, in bars, at my gym--all fighting for a place, all trying to claim a space as theirs. Walking down the train platform I always think that they look like rats escaping a fire.

And here I am, amongst them, never really alone, yet feeling more alone than I ever have in my life. Rationally, I know that it's just part of moving, that everyone goes through it at some point. I know that I need to find my place and that it takes time. When I moved to Baltimore I went through the same thing. It took a couple of years, but it became home; it was me and my adopted family against the world. But people moved on, because Baltimore always seems like a place for transition, a stepping stone on the way to somewhere else. I hated doing it, but I decided to leave, too. I moved somewhere that makes people say, without fail, "Oh, I'm so jealous!"

And yet every time someone tells me how much they wish they could move to New York, how much they wish they could get out of Columbus or Dallas or Phoenix or whatever second-tier city they're in, I think to myself, be careful what you wish for. I watch programs about rural life and imagine myself leaving the city, packing up my computer and books and going somewhere easier, somewhere smaller.

But then I wonder, would I be any happier? Is it actually New York that's making me feel lonely, or something else? Do I feel like a stranger because everything is new, because everything here is so intense, or because I'll feel a little displaced no matter where I am? It's possible that I could be anywhere and still feel that hint of disappointment, that feeling that I'm not quite sure what I'm doing there.

I'd like to think that it's maybe just my age. When my friends and I turned 25 we threw something called the "quarter-life crisis party." The quarter-life crisis is something you would've heard about on Oprah, where mid-20-somethings hock the books they’ve written complaining about how hard it is to find their way in post-modern America.

We 20-somethings come to New York or L.A. chasing dreams, only to find out that there are millions of other people already here who are also 26 and from the middle of nowhere, and who have dreams just like ours that they're hell-bent on making come true. And so I lose sight of why I'm here; I get bogged down by the way the sea of people in front of me look like rats. I find myself joining them in the fight for space and getting so caught up in it that I forget why I bother: for the adventure, the excitement, the chance to make it.

And someday, whether I've made it or not, I’ll get out. I’ll move away, maybe, and raise a family. It might be station wagons and soccer practice or ballet lessons, but at least I will have done this first. So that someday, on my way home from the grocery store, I can think about the time I was 26, walking through St. Mark's Place on a windy night, the sky orange and spitting rain. When I'd just moved to New York and thought that anything could happen.

cosmo girl

here's yet another blog post about how, as i creep towards thirty (yes, bitches, CREEP), i become more and more like my mother. it's not just the marta-isms that i find escaping my lips, it's her mannerisms.

i feel like complete and utter shit today, but not because i was out at a rager party last night, high on ecstasy (we were just talking about ecstasy in my office, actually, and decided that the opposite to ecstasy would be a pill called "misery." "would anyone actually take that?" i asked. "yes, i think some poor moron out there would actually be stupid enough," laura said.). i'm exhausted today for two reasons:

1. i'm on a new drug for my crohn's disease, an immunosuppressant. now, my fancy-pants doctor tries to tell me that he would call it, if he got to choose, an "immuno-modifier," because it doesn't so much suppress your immune system as it does change how it behaves. call it what you want, dude, but i can literally barely dredge up enough energy to sit at my desk and then drag myself to the train at the end of the day. not to mention things like singing and weight training, which we all know are more important than work. oh, and there's that little thing about the new medicine making me extremely nauseous. like, ew just looking at that bagel makes me wanna ralf nauseous. let's not even talk about what the restaurant next door's stench of rotting garbage does to me. immunomodifier my white ass.
2. after dinner last night i went out for coffee and dessert (baklava, of course, since i live in greekville) and am 100% convinced that the waitress slipped me caffeinnated coffee. this is how i'm like my mother: because of one cup of coffee at 9pm i rolled around in bed until three o'clock this morning. and of course, i'm like cursing the skinny, pretty greek waitress, wishing i knew some sort of voodoo hex that would never let her sleep again. "it makes sense," i thought to myself at 2:30 this morning, "that she'd fuck up my order. she was a terrible waitress. what if i'd had some heart problem? what if i couldn't have caffeine or i'd go into toxic shock? wait, isn't toxic shock what you get when you leave a tampon in for too long? how do i know that? because i used to read cosmopolitan on the bus with my friends on the way to orchestra competitions before they knew i was gay?" this is what happens when i have a cup of coffee at night.

and so today i'm sitting at my desk, glad to be inside because (SHOCK) it's raining again in new york. do you think anyone would notice if i took a nap?

a lot of americans are gay people

one of the great things about living with hilary is that she's an avid reader. which means she buys a lot of books. which means that when she finishes those books they go right onto her shelf, where i pluck them up like it's my own personal lending library. granted, a lot of the books have pink covers and are called things like girl power: being strong enough to find a boyfriend and i'm me and you're you so let's have a baby (just kidding, hilster. she's a hardass and reads things like american psycho, which is next on my list.).

anyhoo, what i've most recently picked up is nick hornby's new novel, a long way down. it's written from the perspective of four different people; they all pick up where the other left off. it's a cool way to write a book and it's good so far. i won't give away too much, but it starts when the four of them run into each other as they're all trying to jump off the same roof. ok so that's actually all i can give away because i've only read forty pages. but i ran across this quote (on page 37) that i wanted to share with you.

"My own feeling about JJ, without knowing anything about him, was that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren't they? I know they didn't invent gayness, because they say that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion. Being gay was a bit like the Olympics: It disappeared in ancient times, and then they brought it back in the twentieth century. Anyway, I didn't know anything about gays, so I just presumed they were all unhappy and wanted to kill themselves."

watch this. now.

he takes a whisky drink, he takes a vodka drink.

if you ever want to be confronted by exactly how much you drink, just put together your recycling for the week. this is what happened to me last night. for the last few weeks i've been gone during recyclingzeit, so it's been amanda and hilary that have had to rinse out all the bottles and milk cartons and fold up all of the boxes and tape them together. the only time i've recycled is during a month-long period in sixth grade when my gradeschool made a big deal out of "earth day" (remember that?) and a recycling plant had just opened up in ponca city.

since then, though, i haven't been a huge recycler. i've pretty much chucked anything and everything into the garbage. what you discover about new york city, though, is that they force you to recycle. if you have bottles or boxes in your trash they just won't take it. apparently new york has a population of 8.1 million people. i didn't know this until lunch with ryan and vicki and hilary yesterday. i thought it was a really big city. you know, like maybe a million and a half. it certainly doesn't feel all that much bigger than baltimore to me, i suppose because i spend all my time in like three neighborhoods. EIGHT POINT ONE MILLION PEOPLE. all of oklahoma, just for an example, has 3.4 million people. that means that the number of people in new york divided by the number of people in oklahoma equals a grand total of i don't do math. (thanks for the gag, brian.)

anyway, 8.1 million people's garbage has to go somewhere, and so they make us recycle, and last night i had a very augusten burroughs-ish moment: putting bottle after bottle after bottle into the clear blue plastic bag (absolut mandarin, check; magic hat summer ale, check; multiple 40's of bud light, check; multiple 22's of bud, check; bombay sapphire, check; it's like that chumbawumba song.) and thinking, oh my god, all of the booze that was in these bottles went through my body. mind you, it was a few weeks' worth of bottles. but still. it looked like we'd had some rager of a party the night before. but no, they were all mine. and though i joke that i drink so that i can sleep because my room is so hot (not anymore; ryan put in my a/c yesterday because he's a big, strong man), i wonder if i've just been drinking because, well, i'm bored and lonely and i can.

people give me a worried look sometimes because i say things like, "yeah, but you know, i'd spend a lot of time in baltimore drinking 40's by myself at my apartment." because that fall when terry left and i was suddenly faced with all of this time by myself in my smelly, decrepit apartment, i didn't mind being by myself so much if i was a little drunk. sitting by yourself watching tv? lame. sitting by yourself watching tv drunk? much better.

when i was 18 and got drunk on wine with my mother in england, she sat me down the next day and said, very seriously, that i should only have one drink a week until i was in my 40's. because alcoholism runs in my family and it's a slippery slope. at the time i was a binge-drinking college student. now, though, i can see what she meant. and so i'll be a little more careful.

what happens when roommates are left to their own devices (and have a new hat)?

this happens. (and the hat's hers.)