Bike messenger, riding up to me:

"you're so pretty! I know you don't date black guys, but... you just have a nice day."

Me:

"thank you. You too."

I think I've mastered it. I don't know why this has gotten personal lately.

Usually I don't write anything here unless I want to call up my friend in Los Angeles and announce, "guess what happened to me!"

This has been a point of contention between us. She says that things don't happen to me. She claims that I am an active pursuer of these strange occurrances. I beg to differ.

Anyway, nothing strange happened to me today. Oh wait, yes. This one strange thing did happen to me. I went to meet some friends for dinner, but I didn't have the address. I got out of the train, reached for my phone to call the guy whose house we were meeting at, and realised I didn't have my mobile phone on me. The horror!

Luckily I had a bunch of quarters in my pocket, so I went to the payphone and started calling people who might know H's phone number. It took about 10 minutes and a trip to the bodega to break my last dollar but I finally got the number I needed, including many others. They were scrawled on my hand in ballpoint. I dialled H, and as soon as I said hello, I saw another friend, G, randomly walking down the street towards me. Not that H knows G or vice versa, but that whole payphone thing could have been avoided.

Oh well. When I was about 17, I worked for this firm. The people were all right but most were what we might now refer to as "adults". It was pretty fun for me, though, and then there was Jen. She was what we might now refer to as "someone who hasn't grown up yet".

(Yes, kind of like most of us.)

That was okay, though, because Jen was 26. I remember thinking how old that seemed.

Jen one day told me that she started dating this guy. I forget his name right now. She told me, "we're going to get married."

"How can you be so sure?"

(It seems that even then I was hopeless.)

She told me that she just knew, that they complimented each other, that being with him was effortless. I lost touch with Jen a year later. I wonder if they got married. If not, I'd rather not know about it, because I don't think my fragile heart can take it. This evening has been so weird that all I can do is sit in front of the computer and eat ice cream. What does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Since the ladder is missing, it takes, in order, from floor to ceiling:

an ikea chair
a pastic milk crate
a typewriter

It also takes a lot of balance. I was terrified of toilets. It must have stemmed from having to use an outhouse on the dacha we rented. The fear was so prevalent that I encountered it in my dreams, or more accurately, my nightmares. It wasn't just toilets. It was bathrooms in general. They appeared to me as dark, dank, neglected spaces, an inch of murky water covering the slimy floor tiles and a permanently overflowing sink.

(As a sidenote: I also used to have fantastical dream about exploring crumbling tunnels located forty floors beneath ground level, excavating skeletons and treasure.)

My most horrifying experience was walking into an institution-like bathroom, going into a stall, and finding a hole where the toilet once was. Never mind that it was cemented over; I shakily walked out... backwards.

I thought I was over it. I even acquiesced to use a portable toilet at a concert this summer. Obviously I was very wrong.

They're fixing a water leak in the building. They turn the water on and off. After each time, it takes a number of seconds for the water to travel up to my floor, and while the air is hissing through the pipes, it makes a sputtery, hollow noise. I was in my water closet and flushed the toilet, forgetting all about the water, except instead of sputtering, it made the scariest, most horrid I'm-going-to-EAT-YOU-NOW noise! I tried to get away, but my w.c. is too small.

I ran into the door. I used to live in the borough of Brooklyn. Every day, I would ride over the Williamsburgh Bridge. It was such a pain, literally... my poor aching knees and soul.

Then I moved to the other side of the river. How excited was I about the prospect of not going over that damn bridge every day, twice a day? Rhetorical question. I was overjoyed.

But I moved to a six floor walkup. Now, instead of going over the bridge, I walk up and down the stairs. Sometimes I carry my bike, sometimes my groceries. Sometimes I run up the stairs and other times I take a little break on the fourth floor because... well, maybe just because I want to. The other day I brought in a coffee table and stopped every five steps to breathe and get a better grip. That was an unwieldly challenege.

I've escaped the mile-long bridge but now I've got 80 steps. My poor aching knees. And soul.

Necessity.
Idiocy and other virtues.

ennui without order

• bike snob NYC
• ultraclay
• a tam in australia
• new york hack
• mikebot
• eurotrash
• this fish needs a bicycle
• on the face
• spicy children
• myasorubka
• massive red-eye
• jewschool
• malapoesia
• patently silly
• waiter rant

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