Waking up in New York

Laughing quietly to myself

About how at 5:30 am I asked a security guy at the Today Show where the coffee is and he said, "This dirty ass shit?" and held up the cup in his hand. "This shit sucks, I'll be honest. Right this way." AND GOOD MORNING, SIR.

High Line view

Halle took this photo from the High Line and it reminds me of my life list. Not because I love cars, parking, and want to be an alpine mountaineer - I have zip interest in those things - but because of the juxtaposition and intersection of nature and city extremes. My favorite places have some element of extreme to them - New York, Berlin, Iceland, Alaska - and the motivation behind parts of my list is deepening those experiences. I also want to make a quilt out of old clothing so I'm not exactly a full-time adrenaline junkie. Numbers 101 and 102 on my list could be to never, ever have to try to escape from the claws of a grizzly bear or the cold embrace of an icy crevasse. Who knows, though? When I make it to that Alaskan cabin (#14), a curious bear may take it upon himself to sniff it out and I will be forced to hide indoors and sneak photos through the windows. I'm prepared for that.

Flowers taped to utility post

Flowers taped to utility post? Sure, why not.



Long Beach, Long Island

Scene in NYC

Courtesy of Halle Heyman

Felix NYC

Felix spent some quality time over the last few days in New York!
Photo credits: Cathy Hickey

SELF RELIANCE

2nd Ave & 3rd Street, New York
Photo: Halle Heyman

Fame's a Bitch!

East Village, New York
Photo: Halle Heyman

First impressions

I've only been in Oceanside for a week and know that it's probably too soon to make declarations about its character. Anything I write will likely be amended since it's based on only a week's observations but I do have first impressions. Please salt liberally before ingesting.

1. Unpretentious

More than earthquakes, tsunamis, and wildfires, I fear pretentiousness. I was the first to admit those few months that I lived in LA that there are stellar pockets of the city and many magnificent people, some of whom are my friends. The part of the city's culture, however, that emphasizes celebrity, "beauty", and flashy wealth makes me uncomfortable. When people tell me that their BMW is too ordinary and they need to buy a Porsche - because that kind of mid-life crisis isn't a cliche? How ordinary - I start laughing but I feel like punching them in the head and I feel sad.

I spent a total of three days in Oceanside before I signed a lease. I didn't even really get a strong sense of the place in those days because when I wasn't looking for rent signs or stalking Craigslist, I was visiting apartments or I was on my computer and phone for work. I didn't walk around aimlessly and I didn't thoroughly check out the business district or anywhere besides the neighborhood I wanted to live in. I chose Oceanside because it's not too far from LA and I have a friend here, Marisa.

As one drives down the Coast Highway from Oceanside into Carlsbad and from there to Encinitas, there is a definite swing towards the upscale. When I want a wine bar, I'll go to Carlsbad. In Oceanside, there's karaoke at Larry's Beach Club and good cheap tacos. Even the fanciest restaurant we've been to so far, Harney's Sushi, made me feel like I could wear my ripped jeans if I felt like it.

2. Diverse

The first thing Jocardo said to me when I called him in December and said, "Holy shit, I'm moving to a beach community," was "Oh lord, are there any people of color?" Jocardo visited me when I lived in Olympia and Seattle and was not impressed with their white enclave-ness. In Oceanside, I'm finding that there are all kinds of people.

My favorite moment so far has been eating breakfast, watching a Hare Krishna on the corner deep in conversation with a Marine. Camp Pendleton Marine base is here so there is a heavy presence of military supply stores, guys in fatigues on motorcycles, and kids on the phone saying, "I'll call you at twenty-two hundred." In equal balance are the surfers hanging their wet suits out to dry on the front porches and dotting the water, waiting for the next wave to break. There are also skaters and thugs and tourists and hippies, Latinos, Samoans, you name it. Our next door neighbor has a license plate from Jalisco, Mexico.

I've been theorizing that the Marine base has kept a working class element to Oceanside that exists less in neighboring communities.

3. Accessible

My favorite thing about living in New York was walking everywhere. I'd walk the thirty blocks home from work if it was a nice day out and I loved the conversations I had with myself, the conversations I had with strangers on the street, and the music I played to the beat of my feet hitting the sidewalk. The hardest thing for me living in Kentucky was how often I used the car to get anything done and the fact that I even needed a car at all. I didn't live in the suburbs or the country and I could see the downtown Cincinnati skyline from my kitchen window but nothing felt like an inviting walk away. Part of this was definitely my fault, I could have jumped on my bicycle but I just didn't.

Oceanside is larger than it feels; it sprawls inland towards the mountains but in my seaside neighborhood near the old downtown streets, most everything is walkable. In the last week I've walked to the movie theater, the coffeeshop, the farmer's market, the library, the beach, the harbor, the liquor store, the bank, and out to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner because we haven't gone grocery shopping yet. A large grocery seems to be only thing that isn't close to walk to.

People on bicycles are in abundance and I've seen signs for a bike path that rides north and east. And as soon as we get our motorcycle licenses and plates for the mopeds, I'm firing up the Cobra and re-watching Top Gun so I can re-enact some of Tom Cruise's motorcycle scenes that were filmed here. I'll just be going a lot slower, like 25 mph.

4. Friendly

It startled me at first, how friendly everyone is. I think I'd gotten used to being in my own head, minding my own business, and in Oceanside just about everyone I've encountered has been open and chatty. The weather must contribute to this attitude. Something about being out at night with just a hoodie and beanie to keep you warm and not scurrying like a hamster to get from point a to b, slipping on ice, and freezing your fucking ass off makes people nicer.

6. Palm trees

Shortly before I left Cincinnati, I went to Mandy's house. After we put her kids to bed, we filled our glasses with rum and coke and retired to the basement with a bag of tortilla chips to talk. I confessed two things to Mandy that were worrying me about moving close to the beach. I don't like shells and I don't like palm trees. I like rocky beaches and I even collect rocks and have been toting them around the country for a decade now but shells give me the creeps. And I distinctly remember a good number of palm trees up and down the Oceanside stretch of the Coast Highway. What to do?

Once we got here, my anti-palm feelings intensified. Last Saturday, I spent hours walking around with Elise and I couldn't help myself, I critiqued each street out loud, "Now this is okay, these trees are amazing, look at those..." I don't know the names but I'm calling them banyan, eucalyptus, and pine. Then we'd get to a stretch of palms, especially the ones that are super tall and skinny that go up for miles with just a tuft of fronds at the top and I was disgusted, "Ugh, they're so ugly. I don't think they're real trees. They're so trashy."

Blah blah blah. Basically I'm a tree racist. I'm working on it.

Waking up in New York

It rained a lot that weekend

Walking at the High Line in between rains.
New York NY

Waking up in hotels

Elliott Bay, Seattle



Hudson River, New York



Pool, West Hollywood

Monica, Cathy, Sara

I miss these girls so much. Ever since I got back from New York, I can't stop thinking that if we lived by each other, I'd be smarter, cooler, and funnier.

ps What I like about the photo of me and Sara is how serious we look when five minutes after this photo was taken we resumed salsa dancing around the pool table.

SHOOT THE FREAK

Coney Island, NY

unless I want to puke on her kid's dollhouse again

I probably don't need to go back to the local Tarrytown bar, Set Back Inn, with Sara anytime soon.

New York x 4

SPOTLIGHT: Cathy Hickey

Excuse me while I brag for a minute.

Not about me! About Cathy.

Hi Cathy, what's up, could you be cuter?

I just want to carry you around with me and prop you up and make you say funny stuff that makes us giggle. And then I'll get a perm so I can have hair like you.

But seriously, Cathy needs to be like a mayor or something. Of somewhere. I don't know where. Not in Alaska. Maybe New York or San Francisco. This article just came out in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle about Cathy and the work she does and I'm so dang proud of her.

When I met Cathy, she worked at a credit union on the corner of my street in the East Village. We first said hello to each other on a subway platform where we agreed to meet after Jane told us to be friends and then we went to an art museum. At the museum we developed girl-crushes and sat and jabbered endlessly in the middle of the galleries because we liked each other too much to look at art.

I didn't really understand Cathy's job, all I knew was that her credit union did taxes free for neighborhood residents and I was cashing in on that. One of her colleagues did my paperwork and then looked up to ask, "You really only made a total of THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS last year in Seattle?"

"I worked a lot under the table," I bit my lip and mumbled.

Since then Cathy has worked for different business improvement districts and neighborhood development organizations, moving up and becoming more and more influential and basically kicking a serious amount of ass. Plus she honestly cares. And finished an entire arm of tattoos last week.

That also makes us laugh: I do this potentially punk rock job but have a really nerdy approach and she does this potentially nerdy job but has a really punk rock approach. Yin and yang, baby. Muah. x

People who live in glass houses

My mom sent me an article in August from The Wall Street Journal. Attached to the article was a note she wrote on the back of a raffle ticket, "I thought you'd like this article about the poor people with glass walls + great views + their problems with too much sun! xxoo"

I love it when my mom is sarcastic. And I smiled because if there is one thing my mom likes to do, it's cut out an article and send it to me. She always cuts out the name and date of the newspaper and staples that little rectangle of information to the top of the page. I tried to read this article with an open mind. I wanted to read without scorn or derision but a few minutes in, I didn't care anymore and arched my eyebrows.

People Who Live in Glass Houses: It's Not All Sunshine; Faded Furniture, Nosy Neighbors and Baking Heat Among Gripes proclaimed the headline. A photo of a young woman sitting on a sectional sofa. A wall of windows through which the Hudson River twinkles. She stares, unsmiling, at her laptop screen. It's a sob story!

The sun faded Sara Antani's sofas and made it tough to read her laptop until she installed shades in her Manhattan high-rise.

Poor Sara Antani paid 1.5 million dollars for a glass-walled condo and $20,000 for a sofa and then suffered the indignity of having to wear sunglasses INSIDE. Psst, Sara Antani? That is, like, the epitome of cool.

So she's pissed at having to wear sunglasses in her home, the same home that she might have noticed was lined with glass when she first looked at it. That much glass calls for blinds or roman shades or curtains. Unless you're not into that in which case I'd think you'd understand both the properties of glass and the consequences of such properties. (Flashing your neighbors, fading your furniture, shading your eyes)

Listen, newspaper editor who I'm mad at right now, I know The Wall Street Journal isn't exactly Streetvibes but a millionaire realizing she needs curtains isn't exactly oppressive or newsworthy either. By paragraph three, Sara Antani, who is a 23-year-old grad student, gives in and buys $12,000 motorized shades. Aren't grad students supposed to be donating plasma or taking out crippling loans to get by? Damn!

The article left Sara Antani operating her shades over on the west side and made some more general points about heat transfer and energy costs and how people don't consider these things when going for glass. I hoped, when I read the words "energy costs" that the article would go green and become somehow environmentally aware and not just a really lame human interest story for rich people. I wondered if I would understand such things one day when I eventually bought a piece of new furniture.

Now I do own some new furniture AND I've been too lazy to put up blinds in my living room. And every day the morning and early afternoon sun blasts my red ottoman through two windows. I sit on the couch and type and read and I watch the triangles of light shift across the ottoman and I think about Sara Antani. I still don't feel sorry for her.

Change in scenery

August, 2003
Thoughts upon returning to New York from Juneau, AK


A HAIKU

Coworkers bicker (5)
I want to seal my ears with (7)
tape and crazy glue (5)

A CONVERSATION

In the city my brain won't settle
restless distraction
late to work, late home, nothing to show
I have to tell you about my trip to Massachusetts, she said
the light in the trees
I sat and I sang.

I live in the concrete
with nothing concrete
Only words that disappear.
No, I haven't seen that movie.
Yes, I read that book.
What was the plot?

A RELATIONSHIP

You can have my love for breakfast, my soul for lunch, and what is left of my imagination for a midnight snack.

Possible solutions:

1. Chiropractor
2. Colonic
3. Take up boxing
4. Keep my distance

Bad karma shirt

Today I woke up and mentally recapped the night before in New York: Wine, more wine, enchiladas, Guinness, more Guinness, Times Square chicken-on-a-stick, minibar M&Ms, minibar Kit Kat, not enough water, not enough sleep.

So I'm not feeling all that well this morning. I should have immediately pounded water, swallowed a handful of vitamins, and jumped in the shower when I woke up. Instead I skipped the shower, pulled my hair into a ponytail and sprayed on perfume. I cut the neck out of the Cincinnati, Ohio shirt that our promoters offered me from a charity donation box and went to work.

I walked into the promoters' office and they said, "Look what she did to the shirt we gave her! She destroyed our present to her!"

"Your present!" I said. "You stole this from an orphan!"

"They aren't orphans," they said. "Just poor."

"You are not helping," I said, guilt setting in.

So, yeah, I'm an asshole but at least I get to look like Flashdance's Jennifer Beals, minus the flawless skin and ability to weld steel.