Sunday morning in the library, they’re cleaning and polishing the marble floors. From inside the Rosencrans Reading Room, I heard the machine start up, whirring. I thought at first it was a giant mechanical octopus sucking its way down the corridor with flailing metal arms, beware bleary students and binders stuffed full.

I haven’t looked in the mirror in a while, but I’m sure I have that singular pasty, haggard look of someone who’s been in the library all day.

(That reminds me that the other evening Sarah came home and I was still sitting in the very same spot she’d left me in hours earlier. In polka dots and plaid, I was hunched over at the table, one foot on the chair, my chin on my knee. There may have been birds making a nest in my hair. “I know I look completely batty,” I said. Because Sarah was brought up in Oslo and London, and has good posture from being a dancer, and is proper and kind, she said, “You look just like someone who’s both sick and studying.” Anyway, it’s fine, these days it doesn't matter what I look like because I am an Intellectual.)

But freedom calls, and freedom tastes like a homemade meal, because I am heading to dinner with Kate B. Maybe a couple of weeks ago, Kate B., whom I hadn’t seen or spoken to in years, e-mailed me to announce her coming to town for the weekend. “FYI,” she wrote, “I got divorced, and ordained, and am now seeing a woman.” Tonight she is cooking at her friend’s place where she’s staying, and I will bring, because I think her story deserves it, a lemon tart from the Silver Moon Bakery.

Meanwhile, it may or may not be a problem that I have just looked outside and discovered that it has started to snow again. Of course, like stubborn and continuing incompatibility with the elements, I am in blue herringbone kneesocks and open-toe heels.

I was sitting here with dictionaries and papers all over the table—no, but, really, all over the table, such that there is not so much space for anything else, and the kettle is hanging out on the floor by my feet—doing a massive panic read on Cambridge Ritualists, and anthropological theory and criticism, and Argonauts of the Western Pacific, when K. called, and it’d been one of those days for her when boys are crap and work is crap and, oh, it’s all just crap crap craaaap; and the thing is, I almost never long to be nineteen again, but tonight on the phone with K. it was all, “And it’d be so great if we lived in the same dorm right now, ’cause that’d mean that we’d be right now standing in the common kitchen making brownies, and then we’d take them out of the oven while they’re still a little gooey, and then you could take half the tray downstairs to the rec room and watch ‘Working Girl,’ and I could go up to my room and read my bloody Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, and then when your movie was done you could come upstairs and say, ‘Okay, two hours up, time for a break,’ and, oh, god, it’d just be great.”

This afternoon I was so lucky as to be in the presence of Miles, who is maybe two years old, and who was wielding a large red pair of scissors awfully close to his eyes. I suppose a normal person might have taken them away from him, but I could only watch and cringe. Lars came and watched and cringed for a while, too. He said, “It’s like watching an Andy Warhol horror film.”

When he tired of the scissors, Miles said, emphatically and quite loudly, “I. Am. Very. Funny.” Then he flung his head back and opened his mouth very wide and said, “Ha! Ha! Ha!” Then he composed himself and said, “That was my evil laugh.”

I looked around for Bill Cosby to walk in the door, and when I turned back to the kid, he had the scissors in his hands again.

It was naps and citrons chauds all day, and then CC phoned and made me laugh so hard I could feel the phlegm vibrating in my throat.

Oh, Jazon, so I mentioned our “Ladyhawke” screening to my sister, and she said, “Oh, Matthew Broderick? Rutger Hauer? Michelle Pfeiffer? And during the day she turns into a hawk and during the night he turns into a wolf?” and when I got done marveling at all the things in her head and asked how she knew so much about the movie, she said, “It is very famous.”

The “Ladyhawke” screening story, for all of you who are not Jazon, is that last night Jazon invited us over for dinner and this nutso movie, which was so utterly one of the best ways ever to end a day spent in the library.

(Meanwhile, the story about being invited to the “Ladyhawke” screening is that Jazon had said, So come over and watch “Ladyhawke,” and, because I have no shame, I’d said, “Yay, and are you making us dinner?”)

I think Maud summed it up in her thank-you e-mail today, which read, in part: “This movie is the kitchiest piece of shit I have ever seen in my life, but it was entertaining.” True on all counts, plus the movie came accompanied by homemade chicken enchiladas and black beans and carrot rice, and a tableful of dessert, featuring such sweet treats as pear tart, dark chocolate ice cream, and almond cream cake. Jazon, where has your house been all my life?

“Ladyhawke,” my god, where did Matthew Broderick find that accent? And do he and Sarah Jessica Parker sit around and watch the movie for laughs? Or is it one of those things that one is banned from speaking of in their cozy West Village home? My friend Lurlene said that Amy Sedaris is good friends with Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, and that sometimes Amy Sedaris leaves prank phone messages on their answering machine; I wonder if sometimes those prank phone messages are the heart-rending cries of a lovelorn bird of prey. Maybe sometimes Amy Sedaris stands outside their cozy West Village home and makes heart-rending cries of a lovelorn bird of prey, then when Matthew Broderick or Sarah Jessica Parker comes to the door, she says, “Ha-ha,” and offers up a platter of cupcakes.

Or maybe I’m just all hepped up on citrons chauds.

Well, I’ve been working, is all. Working and working and working, and now I’m sick and sick and sick. I hate being sick—all I want to do is sit around and whine and be pitied. This morning Sarah looked out the window into the still greyness and said, “It’s bleak.” “Yes,” I said, “bleak like my heart.” “You are bad at being sick,” she said. Everything hurts, and objects feel soft, like my house is made of marshmallows. I just, I need a hug.

In Red Hook, down a grey street with grates down and windows boarded up and dusty storefronts untouched by time, there was a suggestion of love letters delivered by bluebirds, or Jude Law on a Vespa.

We’d tried to get people to come with, you wouldn’t think it’d be so hard to rally a crowd for cake, but who knows with people—and so there were just the two of us, me and India, a little stressed out at the thought of whether we were going to be able to taste-test everything, but ready to rise, like yeast, like a yeasty cake, to the challenge.

Like the cherry on top of a cake of Red Hook hospitality, the shopgirl greeted us by collapsing on the counter with her head in her hands, saying she was having a bad day and just wanted to go home. “But you’re surrounded by cake,” I said. “The cake is the hardest part,” she said, and tried to have us order black coffees to go.

Um.

Anyway.

We looked and we looked, and we admired the blue-dotted Malted Chocolate Cake and the mini tower of Icebox Cake and the Carrot Cake with its promise of orange zest, and then ultimately India proposed we be reasonable, so we settled on the Red Hook Red Hot, which was light and dreamy and just-the-right-amount red velvet chocolatey; and the Lemon Cake, oh, I like lemon desserts, and now I realize I also really like lemon buttercream; and two hot teas, please and thank you.

And then we sat and nattered like girls at teatime, and then, like girls at teatime, we said catty things about the chick in the Dior knee socks.

It’s a good day for a bus ride under a clear blue sky, especially because at the end of the bus ride there will be cake. India’d e-mailed me earlier in the week about Baked, and I was going to write back and say I needed to stay in and study, but then, I mean, come on. And I’ve just gone to the bakery Web site to see where this place is located, exactly, and I see that the body of water right by there is called Buttermilk Channel, I mean, come on.

It was cold, bitter and cold, when the A train finally pulled up, creaky and tired, at 135th Street, but round the corner at Maud’s it was warm and smelled of, oh, so many things, stewed prunes and sweet pears and honey onions and chicken tagine and mostly happiness.



I don’t even remember now what exactly we were laughing so madly about, me and Jazon and Guillaume and Florence and Maud and Philippe, there was la belgitude; miroirs d’encre; Didier Didier; ça pue; tu pues; le surréalisme breton; Rousseau, citoyen de Bruxelles; miroirs d’encre one more time for good measure; at one point there were tears it was such insanity and it just kept getting funnier.



We ate and ate, and then we ate some more, chocolate cake and orange-cinnamon salad and coffee (with whole milk) and tea. And then I had to go ’round midnight, ’cause of being in samurai mode for school, but not before Maud gave me four compilation CDs in a tin that said “Smoking Master” and a chocolate cake of my own, and not before Jazon, unprovoked, said I looked like a a Sixties mod yé-yé girl, Jazon we like you a lot.



This morning it is sun and toasted crumpets and “La Vie en rose,” and maybe even chocolate cake for second breakfast, hot damn life is good.

I was sitting, reading, tranquil, at Le Pain Quot’ on Broome, I had a quiet corner table and a bowl of café au lait, shortly the waiterdude would bring me a tray of open-face avocado-nori sandwiches, and I knew trouble was coming when the girl sat down at the table next to me and ended her cellphone conversation with “Ciao!” I’d seen her come in, alone; I’d seen her sit at another table across the room; I’d seen her switch places and start to walk toward me. And I’d figured it was cool, y’know, she’s on her own, she’ll be quiet. But then—the “ciao” terminating a conversation held in English, which is code for: she worked in Fashion, probably, or Design, in any case one of those fields people like to call “Creative.” In minutes, the friend. Small, with big eyes and big boots. A blue chiffon flower dress over a purple long-sleeved T, and a thick red belt. And then it all came pouring out, the accent part Australian, part German, part Julie Andrews, it all came pouring out—the arsehole brother-in-law, the child born out of wedlock, the genderqueer ex-girlfriend. “I’m too white and skinny for her,” Fashion Creative said. “She likes girls who are mixed, she likes girls from, like, Haiti, Jamaica, Africa, oh, Africa....”

Man, the city sure kicked my butt today. I had two things to do, count ’em, one-two, and I was leaving the house early to get them out of the way, and then I was gonna come home and get back to work.

But first there was the cold, that kind of deceptive cold that looks like a beautiful spring day from your living room, but that you realize, as soon as you step outside, is really just cold. Slicing-through-your-bones cold. Turning-your-insides-blue cold.

Then there was the twenty-minute queue at the frame shop, where the guy behind me in line murmuring sweet nothings into his cellphone had halitosis enough that for twenty minutes I smelled every word he was saying. Shuddeyr. (That’s French.) (Well, no, I know, it’s not, really.)

Then there was getting to the front of the line, and telling the dude behind the desk what I needed done, and having him say: “No.”

And then of course there were the SoHo tourists doing that thing where they cross the street and then, once they’ve stepped onto the curb on the other side, stop abruptly while they decide whether to go straight, or left, or right, or, wait, left, or straight, or straight, or right, wait— aaaaaa

There was a seat on the train home, hooray, but actually not really hooray, in fact not hooray at all, because as soon as I’d nudged myself past the woman in the outer seat and sat on the warm plastic and shoved my bags into the corner, an aura of moist sweatiness rose up around me, the foul phantom of whoever’d been sitting there before, caressing my cheeks with its invisible sticky fingers.

Is this what’s been going on in the city while I’ve been sequestering myself in my bedroom with my books the past week? Because, fine, World, you can have your stinky dudes and your waffling out-of-towners. I’m taking a nap.

Unexpected Perk of Having a Roommate #17: Sneaking a spoonful of roommate’s peanut butter, which, hey, she left open, like an invitation, on the kitchen counter. (Crunchy.) (Mmm.)

I was taking out my contact lenses, a perfectly normal operation, I do it all the time, but maybe today the city was extra grimy or something, I had to peel the thing off my eyeball, and the accompanying sound effect was: schlooock.

I was on the phone with CC, and I said, “So I need to use up this pesto I opened the other day, so I’m making pasta, and with, um, Brussels sprouts?, yeah?, you think?”—

(Like the Spanish Inquisition, the Brussels sprouts were unexpected. I’d gone into Steve’s C-Town the Supermarket for Savings with broccolini in mind, but then—faced with the squat paper tub announcing the jaunty Mr. Sprout—I’d needed to reevaluate my priorities.)

—and she said, “Yes, roasted,” and I said, “Yes, totally,” and she said, “And with bacon,” and I said, “I have no bacon,” and she said, “In your freezer,” and there it was. Hey, Andrea, remember when you were here? And we got that massive packet of bacon for the scallops? And I said, “But I will never eat the rest of that bacon!”? Well. Tossed with some fancy penne, and Brussels sprouts and whole cloves of garlic roasted in olive oil and pepper and salt, mm-mm-mm that bacon was eaten.

In the evening Tom sent me a text that read: “Une bouteille de vin rouge et un homme mouille te esperent,” and then, two minutes later, a text that read: “I mean attendent,” both of which make up the kind of invitation a girl just doesn’t turn down.

He was fresh from his ride-along with the C-O-P-S in the South Bronx, you know you want to sing it: Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do, whatchoo gonna do when they come for you. I wanted to hear stories of him hanging on tight as they wailed down dark streets in pursuit of a drug kingpin, of him shouting “Officer down, I repeat, officer down, over!” into the police radio, but all he’d done was put on the body armor to sit in the back seat while they talked about girls and pulled over three dudes to hand out traffic tickets. Still, I like the image of the boy wandering the streets of the South Bronx with his reporter’s notebook and his press hat low over his eyes; one of these days he is going to meet a hooker with a heart of gold.

At the Film Forum the queue for “Masculin Féminin” was all mussed-up hair and dark-rimmed glasses down the block. Inside, beyond silhouetted heads like mushrooms, Paris in the Sixties, Chantal Goya’s dark eyes, teasing, evasive.

Me, Europe calls. I am moving to a house with bare walls, upon which I am going to project movies large. I am going to be a yéyé girl, yé-yé you heard it here first.

Almost midnight, I was on Houston heading east, splashing through every puddle I came across, that’s what rainboots are made for. When I crossed Thompson all I could see from under my umbrella pulled down low was the bottom half of a yellow rubber man squelching into the street. On Broadway the cars idling at the light were black beasts with wicked electric eyes, reflected in a swamp of shiny tar.

It is exactly that kind of rainy night when wisps of smoke and vapor escaping from manhole covers write secret curling messages in the damp air, when robot girls huddle under curved streetlamps for warmth.

The word that comes to mind is glauque, because I have been reading French all day, and because glauque is the sound of the raindrops dripping (the raindrips dropping) glauque-lauque-auque into the drainpipe in the courtyard outside.

It was grey this morning, and it is grey now, and wet. I opened the cylinder of Paris tea to the scent of blackcurrant and vanilla, which made me smile; Leiris’s essay “Perséphone” will smell like this for a while also.



It’s a good feeling getting back to work after taking the weekend off. Yesterday evening, off Bedford, on the street with the purple girl, there were wines and salads and cheeses at Schmio’s. She sure treats us good, that Schmio, what with even the tea at the end to prevent grey hairs. Cozy, comfy, just the way we like it, and samba in the air, thanks, Maud, for the compile.



Everyone who is a girl likes a girls’ night, even if (or ’specially since) Jason says it sounded like a Hillary Duff movie. Like girls, we dropped forks, we dropped knives, we tried to translate obscure poetic discursive French texts. Like girls, we laughed and laughed, and then we laughed some more.

I have a new roommate, my cousin Sarah, who’s been living in the guest room since maybe a week and a half ago. The guest room: also known as the basement, the laundry room, the home cinema, the potential skating rink, the modern baroque dining room. Said modern baroque dining room has deep red flocked wallpaper, a long wood dining table so I no longer have to keep the guest list to six, and a row of Nicolette Brunklaus chandeliers—but so far it exists only in my head. But anyway. The roommate sitch has been going A-OK, it’s lovely having her around, but this morning I wonder if she’s dead. Tok-tok, that was the sound of me knocking on wood. No, but, really, is she asleep? is she awake but very, very quiet? is she even here? Certainly she seemed unfazed by Ren phoning four times within fifteen minutes earlier today. Thing is, she’s usually up and at ’em by nine or so, and it’s now almost noon and still not a peep. Meanwhile I’ve been creeping around being studious and considerate since a quarter to eight, and I want to know if I should keep creeping or if I can put on some Rilo Kiley loud-like.

They inhaled the pineapple spiral tarts, really they did, and it’s not because I hung out by the food table saying, “Can I not be shy and say that I made these?”

Okay. Fine. I did. But only once, and only to Colin Goh and his wife. And he correctly identified the cloves in the pineapple jam, which confirms for all that Colin Goh is a win, even though we already knew it from that day we were in Singapore reading 8 Days and we came across: “If Harry Potter went to school in Singapore he’d learn in potions class that there are two kinds of potions: heaty and cooling.” I am sorry to keep bringing up this heaty and cooling thing, but I think it bears repeating. In fact, when I mentioned it at the party last night (after Colin Goh had left, natch, ’cause a girl’s got to keep her cool), Cheryl, who had heard it before, not only laughed but slapped her knee, that is how funny it still is.

Like the embodiment of Chinese New Year Past, Present, and Future, I showed up last night at Cheryl and Mike’s in red and gold, dong dong qiang! Daphne said, “Wah, kiasu ah?” which heralded a night of screaming, and eating Sugus sweets and haw flakes and dan dats and char siew baos and prawn crackers, and talking loudly and gesturing like samsui women, because we are (a) Chinese (b) IJ (c) girls (d) from Singapore.

It is quite possible the phrase “Eh, auntie,” has never been uttered quite as much in one night in the West Village. Daphne even has the auntie pointing thing down, the trick where with your index finger you get the attention of the person you’re speaking to by poking at them, and then with the same finger you seamlessly segue into pointing at whatever you’re talking about. Sometimes the thing you’re talking about isn’t a thing so much as a concept, or, better yet, a person not in attendance, then you just point, firmly and repetitively, with said index finger, accompanied by an insistent up and down movement from the wrist, at the general empty space in front of you.

Not that there was so much empty space. “Mike,” I said, when I arrived to the packed room, “there are like six thousand people here.” “Yes,” he said, “and I know three of them.”

About three hours in, I looked at this guy and said, “I know you.” “Yes,” he said. And I said, “But how—” And he said, “We met earlier tonight.” OH. UM. I think that’s actually what I said, exactly: “Oh. Um.” I might even have said: “Shit,” call me Maria-full-of-grace. But then it was okay, I remembered his name, and then he told me about an ivy-covered house in Harlem, and cycling round the city, and reading Proust in Taiwan.

Also at Cheryl and Mike’s:

Roxanne, whom I hadn’t seen or spoken to in maybe four years, who is, holy crap, married, with cats, and living in the greater White Plains area. The things that can happen in maybe-four-years. Roxanne said there was something Faye Wongish about my new haircut, which is why, number (a), we like Roxanne, and, number (b), Wong Kar-Wai needs to give me a call illico presto;

Cheryl L. (not Cheryl who was hosting the party), who had just moved to 110th and Lenox, where I used to live. “My roommates say it used to be that they’d look out the window and think the sidewalk was moving,” she said, “but it was the rats.” I’d never had that experience, but I told her about when Kate and I looked out our window into the airshaft one drizzly morning and saw a gun lying, grim and grey, in the corner. Cheryl L.’s boyfriend lives in San Francisco, because he is a tech guy, but our new plan for him is that he is going to become a fashion guy and move to New York. Maybe he will become Marc Jacobs’s tech guy, maybe he will introduce us to Marc Jacobs, and maybe Marc Jacobs will give us clothes and put us in his ads, I will louche it up for Juergen Teller anytime;

Yao, who is in his first year at NYU, studying finance like a good Chinese boy. But he spent winter break backpacking through Venezuela and has hair down to his shoulders, so if we give him enough time he may well transfer to Art History or Performance Studies;

Caroline, who said, “I thought I smelled pot, but then I turned around and someone had just unwrapped a durian sweet, so I guess that’s what the smell was, ha-ha-ha.” The thing is, sometimes that smell of pot is just that smell of pot; I didn’t want to tell her Rox had just come in from an illicit smoke break.

At one point, I turned around and Daphne, Minna, and Caroline were looking at me. “Are you talking about me?” I said. “Yes,” they said. “Well,” I said, “carry on.”

And then Cheryl was handing us large Ziploc bags, telling us to take food home, and then there were couples of oranges handed out, and wishes for prosperity and years full of fish, and hugs goodbye.

On the way home, I was looking out the window of my yellow cab into the night when the Indian cabbie said, “Are you okay?” We’d just come off Flatbush and were heading down Fourth Avenue, past the twenty-four-hour laundry joint, past the Hess petrol station lit up green and white in the early hours of the morning. At Ninth Street he’d hang a left just before the big billboard at the subway station. And I said, “Thank you, yes,” because, well, yes.

I really must stop getting involved in deals and bets that result in me, baking. Tonight, with the Scissor Sisters, and Otis Redding, and The Cure, I have been baking spiral tarts and cooking up a very large batch of pineapple jam for Cheryl’s Chinese New Year party tomorrow. If Colin Goh doesn’t show, I am packing up my tarts and heading home. I will pick up a copy of Us magazine on the way back to Brooklyn, and then I will sit down and read it four times from beginning to end while eating every single last buttery tart-cookie, each topped with a dollop of golden pineapple jam. And it will feel goo-oo-ood.

(The Us magazine story isn’t an Us magazine story so much as it is a Hollywood story, and the Hollywood story is this: Last night Kat and I were talking about something, which led to our talking about something, which led to our talking about Angelina Jolie, whereupon I said I didn’t think Angelina Jolie was so incredibly beautiful, and Kat said that (a) in fact Angelina Jolie is so incredibly beautiful and (2) if she were a Hollywood person, she would want to be Angelina Jolie. Of course this led to Top Ten lists of which Hollywood women we might want to be, but my Top Ten list only numbers six, of which two are Scarlett Johansson. Said Top Ten list goes like this, in order of nothing: Gwyneth Paltrow, Selma Blair, Claire Danes, Scarlett Johansson, Scarlett Johansson, Cate Blanchett.)



I’m beat. This week’s work included reading and reading and reading, and then staying up till three one morning working on my thesis proposal before handing it in to my advisors the next day. Still, it’s not like it’s been all work and no play; Jill is not a dull girl. Thursday afternoon Tom and I sat on the Low Library steps in the sun. In the middle of a sentence, Tom interrupted himself to say, “That guy just got attacked by a piece of trash.” In front of us, a hapless Chinese dude was trying to shake off some crumpled newsprint clinging to his khakis. A white pigeon came and looked at us, then a rainbow-sheened pigeon came and looked at us. It was kind of perfect, actually.

The way you know a friend is a friend is, you have a nutso haircut and she sees you and she says, “Ohh...you got your hair cut.” And you say, “Uhhyeah.” And then there’s a silence as you both blow down East Second with the wind, so you say, “Yeah, it’s awful,” and then she cuts right to the chase and says, “Well, it’s not awful, but I don’t know if you’re ready for the newscaster phase of your life yet.” Ding-ding-ding, there’s the magic word of the day. I’d been thinking Courtney Thorne-Smith on the billboards shilling whatever TV show she’s on these days, but newscaster is good, too. If we were on the Ellen DeGeneres Show (is that the one where there’s a secret word of the day, and if you say it you win prizes?) balloons and streamers would have descended from the sky, and Kat’d be the proud owner of, I dunno, a deeeluxe shower radio system from The Sharper Image.

Oh, but I just learned today from Jason that on PeeWee’s Playhouse used to be they had a secret word of the day, and if someone said the secret word, then everybody had to scream!!!!, which is quite possibly more fun than balloons and streamers and a deluxe shower radio system.

Anyway, so what happened was, I went for a haircut Tuesday, and I told Norman not much more than that I wanted it short, and then I read the Conor Oberst story in Rolling Stone, and then the Gwen Stefani story, and then I looked up and thought, I wonder where this is going, but then I figured I’d wait for the reveal. And so at the end, Norman was fluffing it out with his fingers, and the shape of my head was getting bigger and bigger and squarer and squarer, it was a little bit butch, a little bit Eighties, and none of it a wink to anything. I said, “Oh...it’s...nice.” I thought maybe it just needed a little time, maybe a few sparkly hairclips. Yeah but no.

By Wednesday evening, I was on the phone with the hair place, desperately, awkwardly, kind of grovelly-ly, making an appointment to fix it. Because you know how in all the women’s magazines, they’re all, If you don’t like your haircut, go back and have them fix it? And I don’t actually know anyone who’s done it, but I figured, if it’s in Glamour.... When I mentioned to Dave that I’d made the call, he said, “Whoa, that’s ballsy, that’s kind of a Seinfeld moment,” and Dave rocks a ’stache and sometimes wears white loafers and sometimes pink ones, so I think he knows from ballsy. Anyway, so I called, and they were very nice, and I said, “And will you tell Norman that I’m very sorry about this?” and the receptionist girl said, “Oh, sure, in fact I will tell him right now,” which of course made me say, in my head, Oh shit he’s right there hang up hang up hang up.

So this afternoon I went by the salon, and damn if Norman wasn’t perfectly lovely about the whole thing, and damn if he didn’t snip up a storm with maybe three different pairs of scissors, and damn if by the time I looked up from the Johnny Depp story in Rolling Stone I wasn’t just bleedin gorgeous. He gave me a kiss on the cheek and said, “Thank you for coming back to fix it,” and sent me out into the day.

Down the block at the Sullivan Street Bakery, there was a seat on an old tin chair, a zucchini slice, and a linzer cookie to celebrate.

The sun was out Sunday, which meant it was time for walks and treats. Around the Slope, weekend bustle and feelings of spring. My canvas grocery tote held three kinds of cheese, two cupped handfuls of red radishes, a box of grape tomatoes, a bunch of asparagus, and a small sack of pastry flour, this last item signifying tarts to come.

I stood in the sun glugging an iced chocolate drink and talking on the phone with Tom till I felt I should get back to work, at which point I went home and took a nap.

In the evening, the kids came by, first Jazon, then Jeff, then Maud and Hector, then Martin. Like he’d timed it, Martin arrived just as we were taking the spinach–goat cheese tart out of the oven, he’s smart, that one.

The Martin story is, at some point over dinner, Martin said he was from Limerick, which made people say, “Do you get a lot of jokes about that?” which made me say:

“There once was a man from Saint Bees
“Who was stung in the arm by a wasp.
“When asked, ‘Does it hurt?’
“He replied, ‘No, it doesn’t,
“‘But I thought at first it was a hornet.’”

This is the limerick that I was so lucky as to find while flipping through some linguistics book in the Galleries Victoria Kinokuniya in Sydney last summer. I read it once, then I read it again, then I was compelled to ring CC and read it to her over the phone. I was trying to be very quiet in a very quiet corner of the bookshop, but it was difficult because I was laughing so hard. It was that same kind of painful stomach-tightening silent laughing that overcomes you when you are, for example, in Chinese class in convent school, and Mrs. Keok has her back turned because she’s writing on the blackboard, and your friend has just passed you a very silly note. You would like to laugh out loud, but you cannot, because then Mrs. Keok will turn around and fix her beady eyes on you and say, “Eh, zhen me le?” and then what will you say? Meanwhile, of course, the not being able to laugh out loud makes the whole desperate scene even funnier, and quite possibly by this time you are bent over clutching your stomach and your head is on your desk and you are shaking, uncontrollably and so very silently, and you just want to crawl under the desk and die laughing on the dusty concrete floor, but truly, you cannot, because Mrs. Keok is kind of frightening.

(I suppose perhaps Mrs. Keok had reason to be frightening; ourselves we were sometimes a frightening class. When we were distributed weekly calendars one Children’s Day, Mrs. Keok came upon Tricia filling in her week with various permutations and combinations of eat eat eat sleep sleep sleep sex sex sex.)

When I recited this limerick, with some kind of pride, at the dinner table Sunday, it was followed by a silence, and it wasn’t because Mrs. Keok was in attendance.

“People,” I said, “that was very funny. If any of you cared even a little bit about linguistics, you would have found that funny.” At which point some smartass peeped: “We don’t care even a little bit about linguistics.”

It is just as well, then, that it was not a linguistics party but rather a tart party; and tarts there were, first the spinach–goat cheese in a flaky crust, then the lemon in a sugar crust. The flaky crust was a bitch to make, because it involved putting the ingredients in the freezer for ten minutes, then taking them out and having your way with them, then putting them back in the cold for thirty minutes, then taking them out again, then putting them back in for at least forty-five minutes or preferably overnight, on and on and on while people observed quizzically—and I think, actually, that Maud was able to make the entire lemon tart in the time it took me to make that one crust—but it was a fine crust. “Hector,” I said, because it was true, “quand tu gagnes, tout le monde gagne.”

There’s this sketch from back in the day on (I think) Sesame Street, where this kid is going to the grocery store to pick up something for his mum, and he repeats to himself as he makes his way to the shop: “A loaf a’ bread, a loaf a’ bread, I gotta remember, a loaf a’ bread.” As he’s walking through the neighborhood, he sees his friends playing basketball, he sees a cat in a tree, I don’t know, whatever. And his inward chant changes each time: “A basketball, a basketball, I gotta remember, a basketball,” you get the idea. When he gets to the store, he’s totally forgotten what he came for. Working backward in his mind, he runs through all the stuff he saw on the way over, and arrives at the loaf of bread he started out with. Nice job, kid.

Me, this afternoon I was mantra-ing my way over to the store when I ran into this guy I know. “Hi,” he said. “I have to buy toilet paper,” I said.

Ethan, are you reading this? I meant to say hi.

Hello, blue skies. Slowly but surely it seems as if spring is here, and I only had to wear jeans like maybe seven times this winter. I’ve already done away with the scarves; soon it will be time to do away with the heavy coat; Tuesday I go for a haircut, during which I might well have Norman just take it all off already.

CC sent me an e-mail that read

Stranger With Cupcakes
If you’re too old for trick-or-treating and too wise to plunge into the mosh pit that is the line at Magnolia Bakery, try one of Amy Sedaris’s Halloween cupcakes, available at Joe, the new West Village coffee bar. The actress, writer, and sometime Mary’s Fish Camp waitress bakes, decorates, and delivers these little gems herself—but only when the spirit moves her. When she negotiated the cupcake gig with Joe owner Jonathan Rubinstein, “it was funny because it was all negatives,” Sedaris says. “I was like, ‘I don’t know when I’ll bring them in, never call me at home, I only take cash,’ and Jonathan was like, ‘Great!’”
141 Waverly Place
212-924-6750

which made me remember that when Laureen was visiting a couple of weeks ago, we were scheming over how to make it so Amy Sedaris becomes friends with us. Not knowing anything about her except that she likes to make cupcakes, I think Amy Sedaris and I would really get along. The thing is, what else do you need to know about someone? You either like to make cupcakes or you don’t. You either are a serial killer or you are not. If you like to make cupcakes, chances are good you are not also a serial killer. I recognize that this statement has no scientific basis. I am not a scientist, I am a maker of cakes. There is cake logic at work here.

So. Here is why we would really get along:

She likes to make cupcakes. I like to make cupcakes. Well, I like to make cakes, I haven’t actually made a cupcake in a long time, if ever, but isn’t a cupcake just a small cake? Really, a cake in a cup? And I have small hands, so I would probably be good at small, cup-sized cakes.

She sometimes works at Mary’s Fish Camp. I have tried to go to Mary’s Fish Camp. Twice. Both times I couldn’t make myself wait an hour for a table. But I would like to finally make it into the dining room one day, I hear it is very tasty in there.

She is funny. I mean, hello, truly, I have been known to be funny. It is hard in French, but in English I do okay. Once I even made a joke in Chinese. Maybe this will be funny to just two of you, but here it is: “They put the nan in nan ren.” Wait a second, just today I was funny in French. Hector was talking about keeping all his tarts to himself, so I said, “C’est Hector qui ne veut pas partager ses tartes. En fait, il ne veut pas tartager.” At which point he looked kind of pained, but let me tell you that Maud and I beat the table and snorted and laughed.

If Amy Sedaris and I were friends, we would just sit around all day and laugh and make cupcakes, and then we would go to Mary’s Fish Camp for dinner, or at least I would go and wait in line and she might go to work. But if we were friends, she might put me at the head of the queue.

(I know this—except for the Mary’s Fish Camp part—is already what I seem to do all day with my non–Amy Sedaris friends. It is a good life. So but you also see how well she would fit.)

There is an interview with Amy Sedaris and Todd Oldham in an old issue of Bust magazine, and they say that sometimes Amy Sedaris gets sketchy fan mail, and then Todd Oldham deals with it for her, because they are BFF. I am starting to think that if Amy Sedaris read this, she might turn me over to Todd Oldham rather swiftly. Well, I guess it would be okay to be friends with Todd Oldham, too.

I was told to go to this café on Eleventh Street, just off Fifth. Go for the chocolate croissants, I was told, go for the coffee.

So.

Café Regular has a pressed tin ceiling and pressed tin walls painted paprika. There are two silver carafes on the counter, for milk and half-and-half. There is a small creamy-white porcelain vase of silver teaspoons. There is also a wire pyramid of spiral egg cups. At half past six in the evening, only one egg spiral is left filled. The pyramid is topped with a salt shaker, which leans. There is chocolate to be had, in an old tin cigarette display, and there is a selection of smiling teas. The menu is painted in white on the mirror behind the bar. It includes: Iced chocolate. Fresh orange juice. Egg. (The egg is fifty cents.) Also behind the bar, except when he is outside changing a lightbulb, or inside sitting and reading the paper, is Martin with the sad eyes and the Irish “r”s.

And.

There is a bell on the door, a real bell, not a buzzer, not an electronic bing-bong. The first time the bell rang, a large woman came in, puffing. She ordered a coffee to go, she was on her way to work, at the end of her sentences she laughed at nothing funny. The second time the bell rang, it was Marcos, who called Teresa on his cellphone: “Are you at home?” (The “h” was pronounced like it was being collected, with a small scraper, from the back of his throat. Marcos is not from around here.) “Are you at home?” he said, and then he said again, “Are you at home?” “Come join me,” he said, “I’m at Martin’s. I will buy you a coffee. Or even a cappuccino.” Later, we were talking about the Y. “The cockroaches race with you in the pool,” he said. “I think you’re exaggerating,” Martin said. “Cockroaches can’t swim.” “These ones can,” Marcos said. “They’ve adapted.” The third time the bell rang, it was two women, who asked for a chocolate muffin. “It’s not chocolate,” Martin said, “it’s bran.” So one of the women said to the other, “Do you like bran?” I mean, come on, what kind of question—and especially if your original destination was chocolate.... But then the other woman said, “Yes.” Wha—? “Yes,” she said, “but let’s not get it, because I have a protein bar at home.” Who are you people?

I drank my orange juice, sweet and pulpy in a giant Coca-Cola ice-cream-sundae glass, while misty condensation crept up the window panes outside.

It’s like Chinese Day or something around here, and not just ’cause, um, I’m, well, yes. This morning the nice Chinese mailman dropped off a Chinese New Year biscuit delivery from my grandmother, six plastic boxes of butter- and sugar-tinged childhood memories. The goods all seem to have traveled fine, except for the love letters, which I imagine entered the bargain as a whole container of lovely love letters, and are exiting as a container with a hole cracked through it and love letter flakes spilling out all over the package. No matter, I will eat them with a spoon, that is how much we appreciate love letters around here. The other kinds are: those cashew biscuits with the lacy perimeter, eh; peanut biscuits, yeah, alright, Grams; pineapple hedgehog tarts, filled with sweet, dry pineapple; cherry cheese squares, oh my god I am going to go eat one right now, before dinner; kueh bangkit, mmmm, I loooove kueh bangkit like no ones loves kueh bangkit, so chalky and dubious and not tasting of anything identifiable and making your tongue stick to the roof of your mouth.

In the afternoon, Maud phoned and said, “Where are you, what are you doing?” “I’m at home,” I said, “I’m putting on a sock.” “We are too,” she said, “which means we’ll be late.”

We met at Kam Man in an hour, truly a golden door to wonderment and Cantonese women yelling in my ear, where today’s treasure product discovery was a box of Crab Spawn Biscuits. I will say it again, because I want to make sure we all understand. Crab. Spawn. Biscuits. Do you have a fuzzy-tongued sensation? But then, printed on the back of the box, the list of ingredients included, like, green bean powder and sugar and peanut oil and no crabs, so who knows. The other thing that was printed on the box was: Directions: Open package and eating.

Hanging a right then hanging a left meant we were at Great N.Y. Noodletown for lunch. Of course there was fish porridge, of course there was siew yoke, of course there was Mixed Seafood in a Taro Bird’s Nest. I had a lengthy conversation with the lao ban wherein, breaking it down Mandarin-style, I tried to order some kang kong, but he seemed to not know what it was. I even mumbled, “The ang mohs call it ‘hollow vegetables,’” but that didn’t help. We settled on dou miao, finally, and then he brought us a plate of kang kong. Wait, what? I just, I, well, whatever. Open package and eating.

Afterward, on the way to the train, on the side of Canal where it appears the white people don’t go, I came upon a hole-in-the-wall bah kwa place. Inside there was a woman turning over shiny slices of barbecued yum on the grill, and outside the sign (like, 100-pt Times New Roman) read: PORK JERKY BEEF JERKY CHICKEN JERKY. Okay! Eight dollars later (it is a lucky number, you know) I was holding a crinkly wax-paper bag of (classic pork) bah kwa, happy new year to me! I forgot to get some old-school cottonwool-consistency white bread to go with, but a preliminary taste has proved that the bah kwa straight up will be just fine.

And, P.S., you know I licked that sweet barbecued sweetness off my fingers.

I stopped by the Gap on the way home yesterday ’cause I needed gym gear—

Tangent: my friend Kat keeps trying to direct me to, like, Nike Dri-Fit bizzo, but really, there is no way I am gonna spend fifty dollars on some special shirt for running, jeez, I don’t even tend to spend fifty dollars on a normal shirt shirt, are people mad??? And what’s the deal with the special fabric that “wicks away” sweat? I never get uncomfortably sweaty anyway—I mean, sure, I sweat, but hello, it’s called working out, I likes it. And I don’t like the idea of “wicking,” it makes me think of bony little goblin fingers attached to bony little goblins as they cackle and run about on my skin, wicking.

—anyway, so I stopped by the Gap yesterday ’cause I needed gym gear—oh, how I hate shopping with a goal in mind—and then, oh, look, J. Crew was right across the street, so I had to go in, just to see, and then, oh, look, there was this pink shirt, so I had to try it on, just to see, and when I came out of the fitting room to look in the big mirror, Howard the sales guy said, “Uh-oh!” I thought he meant, Uh-oh, like, Damn, girl, you look fine, so I laughed, but then I realized maybe he meant Damn, girl, you shouldn’t be wearing that, get back in your room, so I did.

Yesterday around seven I’d been sitting, reading, thinking that if Maud didn’t show up soon with her French boy and her DVD that I was going to just grab a fork and dig into the golden-brown-and-creamy-cream cheesecake just out of the oven earlier that afternoon. Like we share a quarter of a brain, she called right then to say they were downing piña coladas and would be over in a bit. In a bit, then, the night unrolled, first the fettuccine tossed with pancetta and chestnuts and sage, then the green salad in a figgy vinaigrette. We watched “Blade Runner”—too good the neon visions of a Los Angeles future; too good the crashing-through-windows death scene of the snake dancer replicant girl; too good Daryl Hannah’s violent, twitchy end; too good when Rutger Hauer’s time comes, and he bows his head, and the dove flies free; now that is a movie a girl can only love, even with the insane Vengalis musical accompaniment. We watched “Blade Runner,” then we watched it again. Well, we started to watch it again, ’cause Hector said something about Harrison Ford dreaming about a unicorn, and we were like, Hello, you were dreaming, there was so no unicorn in this movie, so then bets were made, hands were shaken, the video was cued up, and goddamit, there was the unicorn running through the trees in all its slow-mo white-maned glory. According to the terms of the bet, Maud and I will be making tarts this weekend, fine—and anyway there are worse ways to spend a weekend. Then we popped “La vie est un long fleuve tranquille” in the VCR, who knows what time it was by then, but I was sprawled out on the floor with a cushion, and we were attacking the entire cheesecake with our forks. “La vie est un long fleuve tranquille,” brilliant, hilarity, run-do-not-walk, do it for the riz du lait (“Chouette!”), do it for the “Happy Families” card-game scene, do it for “Jésus, reviens!”, do it for the polka-dot dresses and the kid who dances on the pier. And all of a sudden it was a quarter to four in the morning, I don’t know how we do it, and all of a sudden I was rolling over in bed waking up at half past noon.

Nous étions sûres qu’il n’y avait pas de licorne dans “Blade Runner,” et well well well quand on se trompe on se trompe mais royalement. Il faut maintenant qu’on fasse des tartes pour le french-boy, j’imagine qu’on en ferai une salée et une sucrée, mais lesquelles ?

Plus de détails plus tard ; il m’attend, mon french-boy à moi pour toujours et pour toujours, Michel ah-je-t’adore Leiris.

(Eh, close enough.)