heaven

When my friend Doug's dad died, I thought "maybe his dad and my dad can hang out in the . . . wherever dead people are."

Last week I had to have my cat put to sleep. I'm wondering if she's going to get to know the cats we had growing up and I'm wondering if she'll stop being such a scaredy cat.

It isn't that I believe in an afterlife, but it would be so nice if the dads and the cats could all hang out together - they had such painful ends.

No News is Good News

Oof.

Today is one of those days when looking at the news just plain frightens me.

My first click at www.nytimes.com was on a story about how fashion designers want to make it illegal for people to copy their designs and sell them for less. Is this because Calvin Klein and Diane Von Furstenburg are having trouble making ends meet? Somehow I don't think so. It seems selfish and unfair to want to keep style and fashion only for the rich. Then again, as they continue to get richer while the rest of us get poorer, fashion isn't likely to be the only thing reserved for them. I just hope I don't live to see the day that only the rich get dentists and doctors - it's heading there now, but hopefully not at too great a speed.

My second click was on a story about how brains in highly intelligent children develop differently than the brains of their average-intelligence counterparts. I had the frightening brave-new-world-esque thought of parents paying to have their kids brain-growth scientifically altered in an attempt to have the smartest kid on the block (1600?! feh! MY kid got 3200 on her SAT's!). Quickly, an even more horrible thought came: the opportunity for the government and educators to give up on kids who aren't doing so well in school as a lost-cause. "Those inner-city public school kids won't benefit from that funding anyway, let's give it to those super-smart kids." Yikes.

Rouding it out we've got "Doubt Cast on a Stockpile of a Vaccine for Bird Flu," 'As Life Returns to New Orleans So Does Crime," and "The Batchelor Pad Still Lives."

Oof.

tidbits

It's been so long since I've posted anything . . . today, to get the ball rolling again, I have two small items.

First item
Here is the quote of the day, straight from my boyfriend's lips to this blog: "At least I get an A for effort . . . from myself."

Second item
I love Oprah! More specifically, I love that Oprah had a whole show about James Frey and how he made things up in his book. I haven't read the book. I don't care about it at all, actually. What I do care about is that Oprah didn't need to stick to her original show or even the call she made to the Larry King show in support of Frey. I love that she's willing to change, clarify, refine her position and that she doesn't see it and isn't allowing it to be positioned as any kind of losing face.

Bonus third item
Ironic: when I just spell-checked the above, spell-checker tried to correct my use of the word "blog," suggesting "bloc." Talk about lack of self-awareness . . .

It's Electric!

Okay. So here's the sad fact: the tourists are coming.

It happens every year. November comes and so come the non-residents to shop and eat and see Christmas spectacular and the like.

As a New Yorker, both living and working in Midtown (where the tourists are most dense) this time of year always leaves me feeling as though strangers have set up camp in my back yard, traipsing through my flowerbeds and tracking in dirt when they need to use the toilet or the phone. It's disquieting.

So here's my big idea. The best idea to come along since the personal sherpa several blog entries ago: The Tourist Zone.

Here's how it works:
Tourists, upon entering, are fitted with a wrist band. Tourists are permitted to travel between 34th and 57th Streets North and South and between Third and Ninth Avenues East and West. If they leave the zone, their wrist band will shock them. Zap!

Honestly, they don't need more room than that, most of what they want to see is in that area, and confining them would give the rest of us - who LIVE here - places to go to get away from them. Also, this would just be from Nov. 1 through January 1 which means that touristy areas NOT in the tourist zone - SoHo, the Met, Whitney and Guggenheim Museums could all thrive those other 10 months of the year. This would ALSO mean that, during those holiday months, New Yorkers would fillt he cultural institutions because we'd know it was SAFE. And that would be very cozy and community-building for us.

I think Bloomberg would like it.

Weekend Adventures

One.

On Saturday, I was shopping in a hardware store on Ninth Ave. for elements of my Halloween costume - Danger Girl. I was buying "Danger" and "Beware of Dog" signs to stick to me and I was looking for some of that yellow Caution tape to use as some kind of sash or something. The nice hardware store guy went all around the store looking for me and finally he came back and said, "we only have this 'Danger' tape is that okay?"
"THAT'S EVEN BETTER!!!" I screamed.
"So you're in theater, huh?" he asked.
I was so caught.


Two.

Today I was having brunch outside with my boyfriend and friend of mine from college. We were having a great time. Eggs. Beautiful day. Great people. What could be better? An old woman came walking along and stopped and leaned in from outside the sidewalk-dining partition and, we all later agreed, for a split second we were all affraid of what would happen. Would she say something crazy? Would she ask for money? Would she spit on our food? And she looked at me and smiled and said "someone's happy."
I said, "That's me." And she was gone.
Thing is: she was right. And I like to think that the whole world CAN see how happy I am even though that's probably an overly romantic take on it. :)

internet writer

Hey.

Check me out at:
www.reallysmalltalk.com

woo!

out for a drink

last night my brother came into the city to have dinner with me - he's home from college for october break - and after dinner we met up with my boyfriend for a drink at the irish pub type place near his apartment.

since i'd started with red wine at dinner, i thought it made sense to stick with that. however, the bar was one of those places where you're probably better off with a beer.

so i asked the waitress.

me: which of the red wines do you reccomend?
waitress: well i don't really know, i don't drink them.
me: well, which one do people make happy faces about?
waitress: well, it's alcohol so usually they just drink it.

gotcha.
i'll have the merlot.