Celebrations

I'm not the kind of person that normally attaches a great deal of weight to new years, but I have to admit that I was worried that 26 was going to suck. My plans to take advantage of a rare work-free weekend with a celebratory trip to the coolest destination for hipsters in their twenties (Colonial Williamsburg, of course) fell through at the last minute and I lost all motivation and ability to plan for my birthday. I had visions of dressing my cronies in fancy attire and taking over the Campbell Apartment in Grand Central Station, and then I remembered that it was in Grand Central Station, and we'd have to compete with a bunch of commuters getting drunk with their office mates. And then I remembered Monte's, the crazy Mafioso restaurant whose red carpets, big old fashioned bar, valet parking and deserted interior always simultaneously lures and repels me when I pass by it on walks down the empty sidewalks of Third Street by the Gowanus, and my heart swelled with hope and then was deflated by its 11pm closing time.

Long story short I held several friends captive for several moany hours of brainstorming and worrying, convinced myself that I would do nothing fun for my birthday or for any day of my entire 26th year, and then went and had a great time. There is hope for life after the quarter century after all.

Friday, my official day of birth, was commemorated with a lovely evening of best friends, good food and bad tv. Dinner was at Long Tan in honor of my newly matured palate that has finally developed a taste for Thai. After a trek back to our house, Mark and I got to pontificate on the Chinese and Japanese languages and make lots of gestures and references to the two giant character stretched across Sabine’s chest and felt very spoiled. We followed that up with a few good lashings of the Newlyweds with Nick and Jessica and then it was time to turn the lights out on a very good day and rest up for celebration part deux the next night.

The dashing and generous Kurt, a fellow Aquarian just 367 days younger than I, hosted our joint celebration at his house, and cleaned his house for 9 hours in preparation and the masses descended to destroy it. There were lots of bodies, many of them strangers to me, squeezed into a tiny apartment, a birthday cake almost as big as the bathroom and plenty of bottle social lubrication. And then there was the karaoke machine.

Did I forget to mention that my dad and K gave me an early birthday present? If I told you already, I probably also said that it was a welcome but funny surprise, since I’ve never been a major karaoke fan. And if I told you already and then you were at the party, you saw me turned into a big fat liar, a very sweaty, out-of-tune, big fat liar, who felt perfectly justified to rule the machine with an iron Michael Jackson glove, because it was MY party and MY karaoke machine, and that’s what beer will do to a birthday girl.

So thanks to the birthday boy, thanks to the now deaf guests, thanks to my sweet friends and Mark, and thanks to my dad and K for shaking the birthday blues right out of me, and providing me with these most excellent digital memories.

Sing 

Dance

Duet

Fun

Bandwagons

I still have a few hours left as a foolish 25 year old that follows trends. So, until I'm a year older and wiser..............

What is the total amount of music files on your computer?
I use Mark’s computer so I don’t really know the answer or care to. But tomorrow is my birthday and I plan to by myself an Ipod, so soon I will be being lots of attention to music files!

The CD you last bought?
The last CDs I bought were stolen and are probably swirling on a CD player somewhere in Mexico right now. They were a Rachmaninoff CD, a Mendhelson CD, and two Shostakovtich CDs supposed to be Christmas gifts for Mark and help us peel ourselves away from our everyday listening habits. We remain glued to them.

What was the last song you listened to before reading this message?

I’m going to cheat and answer this question with the song I was listening to when I read it. It’s a song on a luxuriously long and good mix I got for my birthday last year. I don’t know the name of the song and who sings it, and if anyone recognizes it from the following poorly written, inadequate description, they will earn my eternal admiration and thanks.

The singer sounds kind of Euro and kind of Emo (Eurmo?), like he speaks another language but comes from a country that likes its pop in English. He says “juiced to” for “used to”. The chorus is: “As long as you’re here there’s something to die for, my love. As long as you’re near, there something to cry for, my love,” and a droney keyboard plays long, elegiac organ-style notes in a few alternating octaves.

Any bells ringing for ya? If not, believe me that despite what you have just read it is actually a pretty good song.

Once, a boy that I was in love with and who knew me very, very well gave me a gift of a tape of obscure songs by obscure bands that he was sure I wouldn’t stumble upon unless I spent a great deal more time bumping into things in record stores. He called it the “Torture Tape” and accompanied it with a note describing my two options: I could listen to it, enjoy it, and be tortured by it, or I could not listen to it, not enjoy it, and not be tortured by knowing that he knew something that I didn’t. It was condescending, intimate, knowing, sweet and mean, like a material version of our relationship, and of course I listened to it and suffered with pleasure. Over time our friendship deteriorated and then detonated, and I derived great satisfaction whenever a snatch of song drifted through a car radio or a dorm stereo and I pinned a name and a band to something from the tape.

Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you.
Why do I hate this question?

I don’t listen to these songs that often (almost never for number 2) but they still do all those things that certain songs can do.

--Bull in the Heather (Sonic Youth)
--Life by the Drop (Stevie Ray Vaughan)
--I’m on Fire (Bruce Springsteen)
--Marquee Moon (Television)
--Car (Built to Spill)

Who are you going to pass this to (3 people) and why?
I second Amy. I’ll send it by request.

Love Thy Neighbor

While I'm a little loathe to confess it in writing, I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that I have, from time to time, modeled certain life fantasies of mine on the series Friends. Let's admit it - who hasn't daydreamed about sharing an apartment building with their own friendset, a neighborhood haunt whose chairs are exclusive to their crew, plenty of free time and income enough to dispose on daily coffee purchases? The Friends fantasy is what insidiously replaces longings for a return to communal college houses once life fills up with work and the trappings of adulthood - when you like your space and your time in it, and you don't need your bestfriends to share a bathroom with you, but you would die with joy if you didn't need two subway lines and advance scheduling to get to them and could just go sit in their kitchen on a lazy Saturday morning or watch bad tv together in your pyjamas for two hours on a Thursday night.

Until I can afford to buy an apartment building and convince my real life friends to make like a sitcom with me, I have the next best thing in my friend Sam. Just 2 blocks and 3 avenues away from one another, we've been neigbors for more than a year, and I love it to so much that I've been dreading her moving away ever since she unpacked. For a couple months we've been going on Sunday night movie dates. They've done wonders for the Sunday night blues. Unfortunately, do to my complete and utter inability to enjoy a trip to the movies without popcorn, I can't say the same for my waistline.

Purchasing my popcorn and soda combo for tonight's movie (Million Dollar Baby) I had a funny interaction with the guy at the concession stand during which I mistook the question "diet?" for "a-ight?"* and would have wasted 2 bucks on a diet Pepsi had Sam, who knows my tastes well, not mimicked the actual question and made me realize the mix-up. When I cracked up and told the dude that I thought he had said "aight" I felt this huge age chasm open up between us. It was like I was trying to convince him that Hammer pants were still cool, or something. Good think I didn't need to impress my date.

*How do you spell that? Is there a way to do it without the hyphen?

Alright, it's time for bed. I'm going to pretend to have to kick-out Joey and Chandler and I'm going to close my curtains on Ross. Good night.

The Blooms Before the Gloom

New York was springlike this weekend and I clocked 20,000 steps, or 6 miles, according to my very snazzy, electronic Christmas gift on Saturday alone, just enjoying the sun, the gloveless weather, and the open windows in apartments and brownstones everywhere. I was worried that the effects of Friday night's Estrogen Potluck, so named for its all-girl attendees, might put a haze over the morning, but the sun burned right through my hangover.

(As an aside: votes were cast and it was decided that I was the woman with the highest estrogen levels. These were mostly women that I've only met a couple of times - what should this say to me about my first impression on people? I decided it was because I can reach the highest octaves in an ordinary conversation and like to gossip. No one offered up any other explanations.)

Sunday, Mark and I did some more strolling and found ourselves in a plant frenzy. Watching us juggle our plant purchases on the blocks towards home seemed to make passerby smile. When we put them in their new places of residence in our little house, they definitely made me feel pleased and full of a pre-spring springtime glee.

Things took a terrible twist at 2pm on Sunday night when I was attacked by the ferocious flu that's going around. If you read this entry, well, consider my a liar. No one in our house got much sleep, and I was thankful that I'd just cleaned the toilet a couple hours earlier so that I could curl up against it with abandon. I make this reccomendation from experience: if you have pre-cognition, ESP, or someone around you has the flu and you think you are soon to succumb - if you for any reason whatsoever suspect that you may have to vomit - do not, I repeat, DO NOT, eat popcorn.

I spent yesterday moaning and sleeping and sweating and shivering. I think the new Prayer Plant was praying for me because today I went back to work, snacked on applesauce and graham crackers then went whole-hog with a dinner of a veggie hotdog and tatertots (nothing like tatertots for replenishing lost nutrients.)

The little pink one is the newest member. 

This plant has miraculous powers. 

A worthwhile splurge. 

Imposter

I'm having flashbacks. I'm currently hanging out in the library of Columbia University's Teachers College trying not to reveal myself as an imposter student. This is not as hard as I would have thought since I'm dressed in my work clothes and apparently this school either attracts a very different crowd than my alma matter or the college fashion world has dramatically altered in less than five years - there are no threadbare sweaters, teeny skirts, hippie sandals or band t-shirts to be seen. Maybe cause it's grad school?

It feels really weird to be back in a college library, which surprises me. I spent like 93% of my time at school sleeping, snacking, spying, reading, highlighting, emailing, gossiping, thinking, writing and occasionally even kissing in the library. I loved our ugly, comfy Mudd with its seventies kitchen colors and its dubious cushions and its hidden corners. If there's one regret that I have about not pursuing honors it's that I never got my private study.

The only libraries I've been in the last four years are the of the Brooklyn Public variety. And while I love the urban majesty of Brooklyn Central, it's a bit of a walk and it depresses me that the video rental section is the most popular. The closer library had its hours cut and is barely ever open at a time when I can get there. I like to peruse its two rows of fiction and it always offers up amusing, surprisingly small-town style episodes like the hubbub caused by a trapped squirel. But it is by no means a bastion of learning and does not fill me with a passion for knowledge.

This library seeps knowledge and learning and scholarliness from its polished table tops and orderly shelves and I should love it but I don't, not as much as I want to. Maybe I'll go find a place to nap.

Fruit for Thought

A funny phenomenon of a studying a foreign language is the "foreign native" word: that word that you only learn how to say in your native tongue after you learn the word in the new language and translate it. My favorite word like this is the word for one of the things I loved most about life in China: "pomelo". Or, as I first learned it, "youzi".

Oh, the lovely youzi. Tastes like a grapefruit that's in a good mood. Huge and yellow with almost an inch of thick, spongy peel, it takes a little muscle but it's well worth the work. I've been thinking of it as a cross between an orange and a grapefruit, and god's gift to a fruit-phobic vegans. I can't tell you how much I loved this fruit. On a couple hot Beijing nights it was my whole dinner. And I am NOT a person typically known to substitute fruit for an opportunity to ingest carbohydrates, things fried, or really, any other edible. But, ladies and gentleman, this is a fruit that can transform genetic code.

So, me and the youzi fell in love and had a passionate year-long affair, and then I moved home. And I was lonely. I missed it bad. But where to find pomelos on U.S. turf? I had never even heard of the delicious things before I ingested one in China. And noone I talked to knew what they were either. I walked through the aisles of Key Foods and Associated and even D'agostinos, and there were cactus fruits and yucca and the occasional starfruit, but no pomelos.

Then, on a happy day in Chinatown, I spotted some pomelos smiling at me from a fruit and veg stand. I bought two right away and brought them in to the Thai restaurant next door where I planned to share the wonder with friends over dessert.

What a bitter dissapointment. These pomelos were strangers to me - pink inside intead of white, with the overwhelming, mouth-drying sharpness of grapefruit and none of the familiar sweetness. I tossed them in the garbage.

After a couple more failed encounters, I determined that these imposter pomelos where coming to the U.S. from Israel. I accosted amused Chinese vendors about the color of the inside of their pomelos, I wasted dollars when I believed their sneaky sales lies, and, slowly, I lost hope in any reunion.

Then, two days ago, on Canal Street, just blocks away from where I work, lured by chestnuts selling at .50 a pound, I took a risk. The pomelo I purchased was a different shape than any I consumed in China - smaller, and a little pear-shaped, but this meant that it looked different than all its Israeli imitators, which I took as a good sign. And a good thing I did (and that Mark had 4 dollars to lend me after I bought a month's worth of chestnuts) because this pomelo was the real deal! I had a youzi fest at my kitchen table this morning, and I left for work a very happy, very satisfied woman.

And now I'm a more educated one. Here's a link to a photograph of a beautiful, healthy pomelo; apparently, a hollow pomelo center brings good luck and its leaves and skins can be boiled for a ceremonial bath that repels evil and ritually cleanses. As if it's taste weren't enough....

Also: shaddock.