New York City, Stan the Man and Loss of Internet, Damn!

April 10, 2006 - 4:15 p.m.

Do you know who Flat Stanley is? He’s a bit famous, really, because he’s the lead character of a popular children’s book. The story goes that this poor boy was flattened by a fallen bulletin board, so his family folded him up and mailed him to visit friends in California. And for the last decade or so, elementary school children all over the world have participated in the Flat Stanley project, where a kid will mail Flatstan to a friend or family member and then that person is supposed to take Flatstan along on their daily business, photograph him, and send him back the school with a write up of Flatstan’s adventures.

There is a cute little boy who just happens to have an uncle who is a pilot. Who better to show Flatstan the world than a pilot? Who else could take him across the country in less than a week?

So my boyfriend has his nephew’s Flatstan and carried him to work with him. He was going to be gone for nine days, 5 days of training and then he came home and I saw him for a few minutes before he turned around and left again for a 4 day trip. We had one hour together and we looked at each other like we didn’t know what to do. Should we talk? Snuggle? Make out? We did a little of each and then he walked me to the subway to send me off to work.

I was all up in his grill but he was turning his face away because sometimes he gets shy when I grope him in front of a million people milling by. I said, “C’mon! Kiss me like you mean it!” and he said, “I’d rather kiss you in New York.”

And the next morning, at 5am, I got a text from him that said, “Tell your boss you’re going to be in NYC Saturday. 7am flight.”

Hellll yeah! Not only do I have an excuse to get out of that lame-azz suburban WORK PARTY, my excuse is that I’ll be in New York!

That gave me 19 hours to get ready. I love these last minute trips, all frantic and shit. I went straight to work, worked until 7 pm, ran out and took a cab to a Neko Case concert at the Vic, took a cab home, quickly packed and tried to go to bed so I could get up at 4am, take the train to O’Hare and fly my ass to NYC to meet up with the boy at 10 am. Phew! Love it! I work well under pressure.

We were both deliriously tired, having been up since 4 on no sleep, and he just flew in from Kansas. The hotel was in the Broadway/Times Square neighborhood but that’s rather touristy so we jumped on the subway and headed to Greenwich Village, Soho and Noho. Those areas are named as such because they are SOuth of HOuston St, or NOrth of HOuston St. And Houston St. is pronounced ‘house-ton’, not like the ‘hue-stin’ that is in Texas. I never knew that. There’s a lot of things I don’t know. We pretty much just walked around all day and he showed me all of his old apartments when he used to live there.

We went to the photography museum, we ate at the lucky strike, and we took Stanley all over hell, through Chinatown and beyond, to the Brooklyn Bridge and back to the Empire State Building. Stanley has led a better life than most and he’s only 2 weeks old.

We were so tired, we got a bottle of wine, took a bath, and hit the hay by 9pm in order to be up at 4am again, him to work and me to get back to Chicago before the TORNADO and HAILSTORM came in, which it did that evening.

I found that some twat (no doubt a drunk hipster girl like I said before) had tried to steal my Dorothy basket on my bike, which had been locked up at the train over the weekend, and I just knew that shit was going to happen. Anyway, there are three leather straps with buckles holding the basket to the bike, and the twat unbuckled them all, yanked, and then oh shit, too bad bitch, cuz she didn’t see that there was a thin strand of wire woven in and out of the basket and wrapped a thousand times around the bike frame. She’d need to sit down with wire cutters and *snip-snip-snip* a zillion strands. That’s theft prevention for you. But the twat did steal one of the leather straps, as a souvenir of her FAILURE I presume.

But to make up for it, the next day I found a love note in my basket for the second time. The first note was just like “Your bike is cool” but the second was more enthusiastic: “Your bike is awesome! I love it! GOOD JOB!”

Good job? Good lord. Like I invented and built it myself.

And PS…the bike is not cool, or awesome, at all. It’s a rusted out piece of shit valued at one dollar, with a clanging loose fender and dry-rotted tires. But you know hipsters, or the people who collect vintage and second-hand shit mainly because they can’t afford anything new so they’ve convinced themselves that old things have more character and therefore are superior to new things. So they look at my bike, the rotted corpse of a 1960s Free Spirit, wannabe Schwinn, one gear, painful to ride, and it charms the pants off of them. (No judgment here…since I’m one of those poor people who buys ceramic frogs at the Salvation Army because the ones at Crate n Barrel are just like, MASS PRODUCED CRAAAAAP! *cough*)

What else? I have to cram 2 weeks of my life into this bitch cuz I ain’t had INNERNET for what feels like a month. How painful it is to have no internet at home. It took me a few days to figure out what was wrong when it wasn’t working. I followed the cable from my computer, to the router, down the wall and up the ceiling, through a hole into the basement, to the whatsit box, outside, up the side of the building and at the end I found a Mehicano. I asked him if he messed with my internet and he vehemently screamed “Jamás!” Seems they are putting a new roof on my building and when they saw my satellite dish they yanked it from the roof top and tossed it aside like a dandelion from a garden. Fuggers. And they wonder why I don’t date their people anymore.

Also…I’m training to run in a breast cancer race on Mother’s Day. Don’t get your panties in a ruffle now, it’s no marathon. It’s only 5k but I’m teaching my ankles and knees to run on asphalt cuz they’d be more suited to holding up the body of an 8 year-old girl. You would think that with all this running, on top of my biking, walking, lifting weights and tap dancing that I’d have a smoking hot body. And yet this fails to be true. STILL I look like a marshmallow skewered on a stick. So white….so soft…so round. My boyfriend calls me “Salamander Belly”. Sure, this is cute, if you dig on snugglin up with amphibian vertebrates. But a freezing cold lady, clammy, cracked lips, moist nose, and a smooth, non-scaleous lizard torso…yuck. Thanx God, yer the best.

And…I am turning 30 on April 22. Hooooo-Weeee! Did you know that no woman has ever lived to see the age of 29½? ‘Tis true. Cuz like 5 minutes after she turns 29, everyone will start calling her “30” and she’ll say, “I’m not 30 YET!” and they’ll say, “Well you might as well be! THIRTY THIRTY THIRTY!” So I’ve already been 30 for like 11 months and all the world is having a fuggin nuclear meltdown about my age and they’re coming THISCLOSE to FREAKING ME OUT. I am just fine without all you talkers of the 30, thanks! Jeeezus. I will be JUST FINE at 30, no really, I don’t need your eggs, but thanks for offering.

You are, however, very welcome to donate cash money, just ask for my Paypal account.

I gotta write and post this shit while I’m at work, shizza.

Oh, and PSS – New York is the shit, I heart New York, love it, love it, it’s like Chicago’s big brother (maybe sister) and I could totally live there.

But it ain’t no San Francisco. I *heart* San Francisco, it was no fleeting love affair. Still my #1 contender in places to live. Nobody beats it.

THAT’S what I want for my birthday. SAN FRAN.

See you as soon as the Mehicans replant my dandelion dish.

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