Dang, some mornings (not this one) you get up and you’re all gettin shit done—emptying the dishwasher, making coffee, reading the news online, even booking it up to campus early enough to go get Kat’s bar-application affidavit notarized before class. . . . And then some mornings (this one) you get up and you’re all bleary and having to wrestle your slice of dark chocolate cranberry toast from the Hello Kitty toaster and suddenly you realize that even though you got up at seven, somehow two hours have been sucked into some sort of black hole, and now you have just enough time to slip on your White Stripes T-shirt, throw your bizniss in your school bag, and motor.

These diabolical spring days where you wake up in the morning and your living room’s filled with sunny sun and you’re one big grin, and then you go outside and discover it’s not as warm as it looks, it’s rather chilly actually, and then you have walk around all day with your thumbs tucked into your fists for heat.

Urban nature: I see the planes flying overhead on Ninth Street and I have a sensation that I am walking on the ocean floor and they are giant stingray gracefully making their way through the water. I see two yellow cabs rushing through the park, and I understand they are little foxes chasing each other in celebration of spring. Which is the real?

but also


What kind of cheese are you?

I must be in an alternate universe ’cause it’s only half-past-two in the afternoon, the sun’s still up, and I’m already done with preparing my class presentation for tomorrah. And my house is clean. In this universe that means it’s time for a celebratory slice of sourdough toast with four-yellow-fruits jam and gruyère.

I think it was in black and white. There were narrow streets, wet cobblestones. I was following my sister down these alleys, but I don’t know where we were going. At one point, I understood that I’d just gotten off the phone with our grandmother. “It’s nuts,” I said. “She said they arrive Monday and then I’ll have to drive them to London. And I said, I have school, I have finals, and she was like, But you have to drive us to London.” Later, my sister said, “Do you hear that?” but I heard nothing. She raced around a corner and I could hardly keep up. I saw a steel door swinging closed, and followed her through there into a dim stairwell. Through another doorway, and then up and up, and then through another doorway, and then we were in some sort of dank waiting room. There were doors leading off to various cinema screening rooms. An employee excused herself as she brushed past me to refill the napkin dispensers. “Ssh,” my sister said. “There.” I looked up at a television suspended from the ceiling, on which an old-timey cartoon was playing on a loop, the plinky-plonky fairground music starting over and over again.

I woke, uncomfortable.

Walking home from the gym, stopped in Steve’s C-Town, the Supermarket for Savings, to get some black grapes, a thing of strawberries, a carton of milk, three tomatoes on the vine, and—today’s impulse buy—a can of La Siquista artichoke hearts. On to Uprising, where the cutest of the cute hippie boys, all dark hair and light eyes, was behind the counter. I’ll take a loaf of the country French, but would I also like a second loaf for a dollar? Ummnnnyes—and clearly, it’ll be the dark chocolate cranberry.

Along Ninth Street, the setting sun cuts a swatch of light across the tops of the brownstones.

Have to run; the Saturday night party circuit begins shortly.

Saturday morning: It sounds like waves when cars drive by on the post-rain road. My kitchen smells of butter and thyme and freshly brewed coffee.

“Hey, everybody! It’s Richard Simmons—let’s drop our bags and rock to the ’50s!”

I have a class presentation scheduled Monday, which is why I am suddenly doing everything else but work on said presentation this afternoon. Here is a nice way to procrastinate:

Get a very, very good haircut with my very, very good SoHo hairdresser, Norman. It is beautiful out today, which means I can wear my red skirt and no socks. Because it is beautiful out, people are walking about happy, even if they are stuck behind tourists on the sidewalk. Because it is beautiful out, I can try on spring dresses at J. Crew and feel like I might actually be able to wear them out soon. (Except that no dresses were actually bought, because—beautiful day or no—J. Crew continues to make clothes for a body several inches taller than mine.)

Mosey on over to my ex-job to hang out with the crowd, which is extra chill today because (a) it is mid-afternoon Friday and (b) no one over the age of thirty is in the house. Today, everyone from Omaha is wearing plaid. Today, there is even a dog, Puddles. Puddles is a Pomeranian, so she is small and darts about, which is especially funny to watch when Lars lunges for her.

Walk to Bazzini with Tom for ice creams. They will make you a malted at Bazzini, so I get a strawberry malted and Tom a chocolate one. Then we sit in the window and flip through an issue of Us that someone’s left on the table. Score! This week it is an Oscar fashion special, and the regular “Stars—They’re Just Like Us” layout is called “Oscar winners—They’re Just Like Us.”And they really are, because there’s a picture of some Oscar winner struggling with her luggage. Later, we head back up Greenwich to redeposit Tom at work, and it’s sweet to have this friend, and to walk arm-in-arm and chat this breezy afternoon.

Now I will go make a salad for dinner, and I think it will be a bunch of mixed leaves and asparagus and a tomato and maybe a soft-boiled egg and why not some gruyère on the top and a Maud-concocted dressing that is olive oil and Chinese rice vinegar and balsamic vinegar. Oh, and I think I have some gouda left over from when Cole came to dinner the other night. Yum, yum, lucky. Following which, I really believe I will get some writing done tonight.

Ninety-nine cents well-spent is today’s iTunes Music Store purchase: “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” by The Darkness. It’s in tribute to my mind-warping visit to the immense Topshop and Miss Selfridge on London’s Oxford Street a couple of weeks ago, where, lost in the carnage of the massive candy-colored pleather shoe department, I stood, mouth agape, transfixed by the flat-screen TVs showing this music video—intergalactic lights, space fights, giant squid attacks. Of course, also, big hair and screaming. “Ooh! Guitar!”

Argh. I did that thing this morning where I turned off the alarm when it rang at 7:30 and then said, Ten more minutes, ten more minutes; and then I heard the kid in the hallway screaming as he does every morning, and his mum saying, “Be quiet, people are sleeping,” to which I muttered, “Got that right”; and then I finally sat up and blearily looked at the clock and discovered that the ten more minutes had turned into forty-five. Then I went to the kitchen and saw that the mess from having Cole over to dinner Sunday was still hanging out ’cause I still hadn’t done the dishes that didn’t fit into the dishwasher the first time around.

When mornings start like that, you sure want to turn around and go back to bed, ’cause didn’t some wise man once say, “Sleep—that’s where I’m a Viking.” ? Instead, you just have to put on a Strokes CD, dunk your hands into sudsy water, and do the goddamn thing. And then you can make some walnut-and-sage toast with Vegemite, and a cup of milky English Breakfast tea, and then you’ll feel much better.

The pre-end-of-term panic is setting in. Still—apparently it’s not setting in quite as firmly as it could, ’cause after my having been out and about or in and up late all weekend, I went out and dinner-and-movied with Maud and Johnny Depp last night, and then have plays and parties and haircuts and museum trips planned all week this week. Amidst all of that, somehow I’m going to prepare a presentation on les années folles in Aragon’s Aurélien. I think I need to log in some library time today. Urgh. I just wanna go back to London and sit in the front seat upstairs on a double-decker bus.

Just past one or so on a Saturday night at Schiller’s Liquor Bar, you can point out the boys who will buy you diamonds and the boys who will buy you cocaine.

“I’m building a birdhouse!”

“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is good,
crazy good. It's snow-on-your-face good, beach-in-the-winter good, yellow-lighting-’cause-you-turned-the-flash-off good.

After, traipsing around the Lower East Side in this blasted drizzle, looking for dinner. At Schiller’s, a two-hour wait for a table. Also at inoteca. Oh, how we laughed, bitterly. Then we fell into the Pink Pony, where there’s always a table free, and where the waitstaff always seems stoned out of their minds. An artichoke salad, a plate of salmon tartare, and a tarte tatin later, back out into the wet, but not before one cute indie-rock boy and I looked at each other, and then looked at each other again, and then, once Kat and I were outside, turned around and looked at each other again. What’s a girl to do? Go back in? Too obvious. It’s okay, move on, the Lower East Side is the natural habitat of the cute indie-rock boy.

In a now-calmer Schiller’s for a sit-down with Bellinis, Kat in new green puff-sleeve shirt and grey sweater, jeans, pointy shoes, me in grey pinstripe bias-cut dress with little red cardigan, pink socks, black round-toe Marc Jacobs knock-offs. We are cute girls, and we have lots to talk about, and we make each other laugh, and, yes, okay, we’ll take some of those crisp, salty fries.

I was on the phone with Jeff, and I said, “One of the biggest je regrettes in my life is that I was never part of Marching Band.” And he said, “I was in a marching band.” He said, “The first year, I played bells—I didn’t want to do gym—and the second year I played cymbals.” I told him he must cherish those memories every day because that is lucky right there.

Some mornings I have a really good gym workout, sweaty and muscley and good, and then when I get out it’s snowing and I walk home with my face toward the sky, all the better to catch snow with, especially if mouth is open singing The Sounds’s exquisitely catchy, drum-a-licious “Seven Days a Week.” Seven days a week, every minute of the day, oh-whoa-oh-ho-oh, whoa-oh-ho-oh, I’ve been thinkin about you, whatcha been up to. . .

You heard it here first: London is a win. Henny and John’s cozy Schomberg House flat in Westminster was the perfect place to house a girl for just shy of five days, what with the view of red brick and chimneys through the window before falling asleep, and the Regency Café on the corner for breakfasts.

It’s funny how you can go away for just a few days and then you come back and it’s like you’ve just had some grand two-week vacation. London was grey and rainy and rainy and grey, although now and again the sky taunted us with blue; still, with the unhurried days of walking around taking in the city with my trusty £1.95 London tourist map, sometimes stopping to talk to the geese in Saint James Park, it was good.

In London: Henny of the smiling eyes, who will always be remembered for having led the Yellow team to victory in 1992, who whipped up a beef bourgignon for us while I sat about eating German chocolates, who is a swimming fiend, who saw a girl at the Portobello market with a giant chocolate donut and immediately understood that we needed to find ourselves our own giant chocolate donuts. Between the two of us (Henny and me, not, like, me and the donut), all sorts of new phrases were created this vacation—“Can’t spend all day at the Royal Mews!”; “If you find someone who doesn’t make you feel crazy, then go for it.”; “Simslike democracy.”; “Eh, house clothes! we can put on house clothes!” John, who puts up with our constant chortling and giggling, even when his bemused “It’s really not that funny” makes us laugh even harder. He has made an amazing book with drawings so beautiful and gorgeously clever they make your head hurt: birds and houses and flowers and gnomes and pumpkins. Swirls and whirls and vines and leaves. He makes architect jokes, which he admits “aren’t laugh-out-loud funny,” but they make us laugh out loud anyway. Thushala, still mad as ever, with stories of unco-operative kids in her dentist’s chair, camisoles in five-degree weather, big eyes, wide smile, laugh free. Gen, newly moved to Paris, enjoying a London weekend with her affable husband, Eric. We admired Eric’s natty striped and checked button-downs—the Paris influence? No, he’d gone shopping in Brunei. Christián, from Barcelona, the gayest straight man around, whose birthday we celebrated at an unfortunately Jude Law-less pub in Primrose Hill. Christián got more and more Rik Mayall-esque throughout the night as he drank, perfecting the amused lip-curl just before he’d throw his head back in laughter. Regina, from Bavaria, whose spiky hair I admired from across the room. Next time I’m in London we’re going to go see the greyhound races together. Eight dogs and a metal rabbit! Josh, from Minnesota via Paris. He was funny, that one, what with the American-in-France affect. He had good shoes, maybe Campers, brown, with a very rounded toe. He was a storyteller: “So they were in Belize, a small country in Central America. . .,” “Well, I saw this girl, who was way too good a dancer to be French. . .,” “Oh, he was awful, he was so greedy, I can’t tell you how many times he stole from me. . . .” Hao, who looked like a Hong Kong pop star, who’d just proposed to his girlfriend, on bended knee, in Paris, at the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Also in London: Hakkasan, where the waitresses are snooty like crimped poodles, where they serve a tasty mango-mint cocktail, and where they’ll bring a large wooden bowl of prawn crackers if you ask—the largeness of which we marveled at, before we three girls tucked it all away. Gig’s Fish Shop and Kebab House, where I was accosted, upon entry, by (a) the salty, meaty, salivatory kebab smell, and (b) the take-away line winding round the room. Happily, there was one free table for me in the back to sit and read The Face while noshing on rock salmon and chips, and a Ribena. Belgo Centraal, where, because it was Friday night, we had to wait forty-five minutes, and then ten minutes, and then five minutes, for a table; where, when we finally got a seat, I was told they were out of rocket—but who runs out of rocket? even if it’s 9:45 on Friday night? really, especially because it’s 9:45 on a Friday night? Caffe Carluccio’s in Saint Christopher’s Place off Oxford Street, where we ordered Bicerins, which are espresso in the bottom of a coffee cup, a small thing of thick melted chocolate, and a small thing of full-cream milk, all presented on a silver tray, for you to mix as you will.

Used to be in London, now in Brooklyn: very luxe Prestat chocolates, discovered in the very luxe Carnaby Street store, Liberty; jar of Christmas champagne and strawberry conserves from Marks and Spencer, the price reduced twice to 49p; massive tube of Smarties; 1870s porcelain pot that used to contain Atkinson’s Rose Cold Cream, the happy gain of a Saturday morning at the Portobello markets; Alain de Botton’s new book, with pretty printed endpapers; skirt with a red-and-pink-flower print from Selfridges (if only it weren’t bloody snowing right now).

The desire, simmering over the last couple of years, to move to London heats up by the day. Plus, I got home midnight on Monday to a mailbox of magazine subscriptions, including one ElleGirl April 2004, in which my horoscope says I am considering a big move. Holy bloody moley.

In thirty-six hours I will be on a plane to London. Brill. According to weather.com, this is the weather forecast for my vacation: Day one, a.m. rain/snow showers. Day two, showers. Day three, showers. Day four, showers. Day five, showers. Alrighty, then.

If only the forecast called for flowers instead. . .

After a week of perfect spring weather calling for pink skirts and red socks, and blue skirts and pink socks, and the heavy wool coat relegated to the closet, today it is grey and raining and snowing. That’s wack, yo.

Crap, I kept meaning to blog today, but other stuff kept coming up, and now it’s midnight and I want to go to bed. But. So:

Sometimes an awesome day is: waking up without the alarm but having it still be a fairly respectable 10:20 the morning after a super fun dinner party, then walking into a sunny living room; having Nutella toast and a milky coffee for breakfast, accompanied by the sweet, sweet sounds of the dishwasher and washing machine at work; turning down all social invitations, even though one of them was to go watch “Starsky and Hutch”; listening to the The Sounds album on repeat two-and-a-third times at the gym; reading several pages of a French book without once looking at the goddamn dictionary.

So my super fun dinner party with Jeff and Nikki and Kat and Matthew last night was super fun. This is what we drank: rum and lime juice, vodka and lime juice, sparkling water and lime juice. This is what we ate: pappadums; an avocado and mango salad; raita; a green curry with eggplant, ladies’ fingers, cauliflower, and boiled eggs; a red curry with chicken, broken straw mushrooms, and chickpeas; pratas, plain and onion; (oh, ha ha, that made me think of Sarah, plain and tall); an orange salad; mango and lemon sorbets; candied almonds; sweet dates. Mmmm. This is what we played: A 1978 “Family Feud” board game Jeff got off eBay. These are some things we said:

“Yes, yes, if you met him on Friendster, that was a date.”

“I mean, poo pie is a kind of pie that doesn’t contain fruit either, but that doesn’t make it one of the top seven pies America voted for.”

“Betty Ford comes in through the window!!!”

“Spaghetti comes in through the window!!!”

“A pony comes in through the window!!!”

“Law school, law school. What won’t you miss if you’re stuck on a desert island? Law school. What kind of pie doesn’t contain fruit? Law school pie. What comes in through the window? Law school. No, your rejection from Yale law school.”

“What d’you mean you sensed he had to pee, too? Was he saying, ‘Don’t make me laugh! Don’t make me laugh!’?”

“I didn’t know if I was supposed to hug him goodbye or kiss him or what—“ “So you just punched him in the stomach and ran away?”

“What the fuck kind of name is Captain Bee Fart?”

“Yay, we’re against the immigrant! We’re totally going to win!”

“Wait, he looked Midwestern, and was that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“I’m wearing the same clothes as the pig!!!”

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you telling me the answers over the sound of your farting.”

Boys on the mind.

There’s a cheesecake in my fridge, browned just so on the top, sitting next to a large pot of sweet, sweet lime juice syrup, and the best part of the story is that I made it all, last night, after coming home from watching “Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights” with Jason and Andrew. DD:HN is a work of majesty. Having half-heartedly watched the original Dirty Dancing fairly recently in my life, I was concerned I’d miss out on any intertext. But all worries amounted to naught, because once the lights go down, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights grabs you by the hips and spins and twirls and dips you across the dance floor like you’re about to win the 1959 Latin Ballroom Dancing Contest. After the movie got done, I said: “Hey, let’s stay for the 9:45 showing!” in response to which Jason laughed, quite loudly, actually, but he didn’t say no. Still, I guess it was just as well we did leave, ’cause otherwise I wouldn’t now have a cheesecake in my fridge, browned just so on the top, sitting next to a large pot of sweet, sweet lime juice syrup.

Some things that are incredible are:

1. Taking a long, hot shower at the end of a long, tiring day, and then—bonus—coming out of the bathroom and finding that the dishes in the dishwasher are clean, too.

2. Making dinner of lemon fettucine and sardines and gruyere, and then burping a sardiney burp.

3. Peeing when you really need to pee.

After the great spurting coffee-pot-explosion sound followed by coffee all over my kitchen walls, after not one but two instances of smoke filling my apartment, after the drilling and the reverberations of metal on metal at four in the morning, today I watched the sun set in a blue sky over Park Slope’s low, blushing brownstones.

I’m not exactly sure when the madness began, really. Maybe it was last Friday, when Maud and Vio and I went to dinner at a lovely little joint in the East Village. Post–eggplant rolls, post-risotto, post-capuccino, post–piling into a yellow cab back to Brooklyn and a visit to the twenty-four-hour Korean grocery to feed Maud’s Chunky Monkey desires, all of a sudden it was three in the morning and everyone was staying over. We roused around noon Saturday and headed out for food, which seems simple enough, really, but when you have a Maud and a Vio and a me, somehow a little brunch plan turns into an hour-long stroll in almost-springlike weather through several Brooklyn neighborhoods before we sit down in front of the best salad niçoise ever (anchovies, marinated raw tuna) at Bar Tabac on Smith. Somehow it was decided we’d go watch a movie, but after twenty minutes with Mr. Moviefone, we were still undecided. And it seemed so clear to me what needed to be done, so I said: If y’alls come buy a television with me, we can rent DVDs. So: P. C. Richard on Flatbush (“I’ll take that Sony Wega and a cab, please!”); followed by some tough French-girl TV-carrying; followed by putting the yellow plug in the yellow hole, the white plug in the white hole, and the red plug in the red hole; followed by a visit to the local video place; and then we were watching Minis zooming all over the place in “The Italian Job.” After a candle-lit dinner break, the very excellent “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” That Almódovar, he’s good.

Finally, in the early hours of Sunday morning, after playing Charles Trenet serenading us with “La Mer” several times on repeat, we fell to sleepy sleep.