You can still buy something for under a dollar... a box of conversation hearts is only fifty cents at the midtown candy store around the corner from my office. Then again, it's more entertaining to make your own...

I'll admit it: I saw the Mandy Moore movie last night, and what's more, I enjoyed myself. Hurray for bad movies! This plot has it all: the cruel group of popular kids, an initiation prank gone horribly awry, a girl who's beautiful underneath her dowdy appearance, an eleventh-hour fatal illness, and a stern preacher father a la John Lithgow in Footloose. The only slightly unsettling part was the three creepy lone older guys who sat, far apart from one another, in the front rows of the theater, ALL of them with their jackets spread across their laps.

Monday was just a terrible day- I couldn't decide what to wear, ended up leaving a half hour late, only to discover upon arriving at Halcycon, the cafe that is the one brief bright spot in my otherwise harried mornings, that the knit-hat-wearing rave girl who works there mornings had only just arrived and hadn't even turned on the lights yet. She apologized and I turned and rushed out the door, muttering irritatedly to myself. I then proceeded to skip work the next day (of course, the rest of my Monday had gone steadily downhill from there) and when I went in this morning, rave girl said she'd worried I was boycotting the place because I didn't show up yesterday; she also gave me a coffee on the house. How heartwarming; I may have to curtail my occasional Starbucks detours (see below) and give her my undying loyalty, even if the coffee is a little weak.

There's a music store on Court Street that I walk past every day. In the window they've taped up a little handwritten memorial that says '"While my guitars gently weeps"- George Harrison.' Every day I plan to go in and ask them if they meant to put that 's' on guitars. It has to be a mistake, doesn't it? And yet, who would make such a glaring mistake- let alone someone who works in a guitar shop? Is it a reference to the fact that in the store window, along with the quote, are multiple guitars? I don't know why I can't just accept the fact that it's a typo.

I have to confess to something ugly: I like Starbucks better. I know they're the enemy, I know they're the domineering corporate monolith that steamrollers little family-owned businesses, but the fact of the matter is that New York coffee sucks and nobody seems to be doing anything about it. I mean, you'd think of all places, this high-energy, fast-paced, often irritable population would demand the srongest coffee you've ever seen.... but no matter where you go, it's always watery and they never let you put in your own milk and sugar. (A corollary to this is the behavior of New Yorkers in movies: I had so hoped they would be vigilant about telling uncultured movie-talkers to shut the hell up, but the problem seems to be worse here than anywhere and I'm mystified by it.) So at the risk of sounding old, or conservative, or mainstream, I'm just going to out myself as a Starbucks drinker and have done with it. I still try not to shop at Wal-Mart, though...

How nice, I've been given a shout-out from
Jackie-O for my birthday... The party this year was a great one... I worried as usual that nobody would show up, but they did, in record numbers, and came bearing really fantastic gifts. I am now in possession of- among other things- classic porn, a replacement for my good luck charm that was stolen in the mugging, the world's tiniest lipstick, a rare stand-up performance by comedian Bill Hicks, and a new umbrella with blue skies on the underside (which will surely bring the losing-things streak to an end, yes?). Played house with an old friend, who came into town for three days, cooked me dinners, held my hand, and made me feel, fleetingly, that I had a perfectly normal relationship; also a great birthday present, but one that ultimately had to be returned. Well, on with the business of being 29. What do I do now?

Here's what I love: that little sign in most elevators that says "Help is on the way." It just always seems so quasi-religiously comforting, somehow.

So I'm listening to NPR this morning, as I usually do, and they're running a new series, the unfortunately titled "Radio Rookies," which every day this week features a somewhat lengthy segment by a young aspiring radio journalist. Today's was from a girl named Sunny, a moniker which turned out to be comically ironic given the fact that her entire broadcast was done in a dull, flat monotone and that it began with "I wish my life was just a dream." She then went on to detail, in broken English accentuated by her total lack of nuance, the death of her father from cancer (this spoken over a homemade recording of dad singing "Amazing Grace" in happier times) and then the subsequent death of her mother from cancer, too and her being shipped off to Korea against her wishes. This at 7:30 in the morning was just too much. It also, I fear, really gives some ammunition to people who mock NPR's subject matter and delivery thereof.

What's hot (in swear words I frequently use):
-"for fuck's sake"
-"jesus f'ing christ"
-"fuck me!"

What's not:
-"shit"
-"motherfucker"
-"jesus h. christ"
-"H-E-double hockey sticks"
-"@$#%&!"

I've been doing a lot of thinking. Mostly because that's about all I can afford to do these days. And I think that I need to come up with a new approach to this starving-writer business. A budget, if you will. I think the key to starting a budget is to figure out where you can cut out the major expenditures. Let's take the biggest one, rent. If I just stopped paying rent, that would pretty much take care of the budget right there. And seriously, have you ever really heard of anyone getting evicted? The law is always on the side of the tenant, and furthermore, by the time my landlady ever gets around to taking action, I will have either a) sold many high-paying articles or b) found a sugar daddy. That way, I can just pay the back rent in one lump sum, which in my opinion is always a classier way to do things anyway. Problem solved.

Headline of the day (thanks, Yahoo! Health):

Lower-Status Monkeys More Likely to Take Cocaine

What is with the New York women fetishizing certain types of shopping bags? I haven't seen this phenomenon anywhere else in the world, but apparently here it is simply not done to bring your lunch, or gym stuff or whatever, to work in a plain old plastic bag. What you do is, you go out and buy something really expensive, at Tiffany's ideally, or maybe Saks Fifth Avenue would be OK, or Barney's, and then as a result of your expenditure you have that little paper shopping bag with the string handles and you carry that bag around with you until the poor thing is completely battered, and this crumpled but fairly well-constructed container says to the world: I may have to bring my lunch from home, but at least I own something from [very expensive store].

In the continuing campaign to make Americans as fat as possible, the pizza industry has come up with a brilliant new side dish: cinnamon bread with frosting to dip it in. So now when you order your cheesy bread, double cheese pizza with pepperoni and sausage, and Big Gulp of Mountain Dew, you can really satisfy your delicate palate by finishing things off with, basically, a bunch of frosted donuts. I mean- gross!

That said.....mmmmmm, frosting.

Grocery stores are weird places. I mean, in a way they're the great common denominator- everyone has to buy Cheerios and toilet paper and stuff- but there is just always something kind of bizarre going on. My old grocery store, in Chicago, really had it right out in the open: they had this policy of hiring people to work the cash register who wouldn't be employable in ANY other job in the world. It was sort of heartwarming and tragic at the same time... you'd get up to the front with a cart full of stuff and scope out the registers and discover that, sure enough, there was the Asian boy with some horrible debilitating disease that made him not able to grasp anything firmly and also made him kind of drool all the time, and there was the eighty-year-old senile woman who couldn't see very well and once mistook your white onion for garlic and was wildly cranky, and you'd get in the third line with someone who seemed normal but then the Asian boy wouldn't have ANYONE in his line and he'd be calling out that he was open and you'd feel too guilty not to go get in his line, and then it would take a half an hour for him to ring up all your stuff.

But my Cobble Hill grocery store seemed comparatively sane... except that when I was perusing the yogurt section today, a very intense middle-aged stockboy was right at my heels, arranging and re-arranging the yogurts like one of those little pocket games with the tiles that you move around. And he says to me, "It's like a big puzzle." Which so confounded me that I just had to give up on yogurt altogether and move on.

Actual conversation with cable company:
Me: Hi, I haven't had cable for five weeks and you're still billing me.
Cable lady: I see. Did they say anything when they picked up the box?
Me: They didn't pick up the box. They didn't say anything about the box.
Cable lady: Well they're still billing you because you have the box.
Me: Well, then can they come pick it up?
Cable lady: Are you still at [old address]?
Me: No, that's my old address.
Cable lady: They'll only pick it up at the address where it was disconnected.
Me: But I HAVE the box, and I don't live there anymore.
Cable lady: They'll only pick it up at the address where it was disconnected.
Me: Do you realize how ridiculous that is?
Cable lady: They'll only pick it up at the address where it was disconnected.

Quote that convinced me John Updike wasn't all bad:

"Bech had the true New Yorker's secret belief that people being anywhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding."

Here is the definition of stupid: there is an old mail slot on our floor (17) made of glass, where you can ostensibly throw your letters, which are then supposed to effortlessly flutter down 17 floors into the mail bin in the lobby. A woman in our office (caked-on makeup, fur coat, afraid of minorities, you know the type) continues to insert envelopes into this slot every day even know she sees full well that they just get stuck about two inches down. I've seen her poking a hanger into the slot trying to get them to move. There is a mailbox in the office, closer to her than the slot, for god's sake. What could possibly explain this behavior? A wad of them is sitting in the chute right now, going nowhere. Fascinating.

A good friend just sent me an early Valentine's day present: a vibrating pen. It makes me truly happy to think that I am the sort of person that one would spy an object like that and think, She is the target audience for this product.

Yes! I did it again, I lost something else. Left my cell phone in the back of a cab. Fortunately, it was retrieved by a very polite British man who lived at Battery Park and left it for me with his doorman (and a note with a message from a call he'd answered for me, interestingly). What can I do to put a stop to this trend? Chain my belongings to my person? I even caught my phone trying to sneak out of my bag in the car tonight, and shoved it back in. Something is obviously off with my own personal gravitational pull. Am attracting all sorts of wrong boys while repulsing material objects, including money.

Good god. How is one supposed to get any actual writing done when there is so much stuff in the world? Not only do I have to pay my bills make my bed do the dishes figure out tonight's plans and call three people back, I am also online, so in addition to not writing because of other life requirements, I am also distracted by checking email and reading news about Afghanistan news about Winona Ryder's shoplifting spree news about the homosexual undertones in Lord of the Rings and looking in vain for jobs on Mediabistro and checking my email again. Oh and then there's this little distraction too.

So it would appear that once you start losing things you just can't stop. It all started with the damn umbrella- which I did manage to call about, finally, and was not surprised to discover it was not there. Then the bag and the wallet, which I suppose "lose" isn't exactly the right word for, but in any case they're gone. Now I've discovered I've left my organizer somewhere, and can only hope it is at work and not thrown out in one of the huge piles of papers I jettisoned at the end of the day in a fit of neatness. What's next, I say? My sense of humor?

My Spanish phrase of the day, and quite appropriately so: No me gusta el invierno. (I don't like the winter.) I also don't like that my tan is fading fast, or that I forgot my big umbrella with the blue sky on the underside in a bar three weeks ago and haven't remembered to call them and ask, in vain, if it happens to be sitting around in their lost and found box.

[this entry- wherein I drink too much whiskey, have a tearful breakup conversation and then get mugged- has been deleted due to its overly personal content. If you didn't read it back in the day...well, you missed out. It was a good one.]