Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

I discovered that in the entire universe, it's apparently me and 32 other weirdos who continue to honor November as National Blog Post Month by writing 30 posts in 30 days. Well hurrah for all of us who made it in 2024. This year I was pretty tight with my sandbagging approach. Pluses and minuses there because I think it's pretty clear I wasn't you know brunching on a random Tuesday like some geriatric scarlet. Anyway, in the spirit of celebration, let me leave you with this dance video I've been forcing friends and family to enjoy repeatedly for several months now:  Thanks much to all twelve of you who read this blog. 

I don't get why they park these utility trains right on the tracks in the middle of a subway station sometimes:  These flatbed subway cars with all manner of junk piled up on them Another view. And look, this was after midnight when all you want to do is get home and hop in the beezie. It's frustrating because if you see one of these bad boys, you know that whole track is closed. Whatever time you thought you'd get home, add ten minutes. On the plus side, every time I see these repair carts or whatever the hell they are, I'm reminded of this Cat Power video where one of them rattles by and it's super loud: OK. Now I know exactly how long ten minutes is because I just wasted that exact amount of time re-watching Cat Power videos. Now that we've covered the cons, let me present to you an actual plus. Here's a silver lining that can come from cooling it for ten solid minutes on a subway platform.  You see these two ladies? 2 ladies sitting across from us in the...

 I bought a 3-pack of scissors. They were on sale and I need scissors. I like a 3-pack near the holidays because you can keep two and give away the size you least want. I know, I'm both efficient and generous.  I got me some new scissors One of the reasons why I got the new scissors is because I felt like I needed a new pair to open packages and good news! I hae chosen correctly. These scissors are ready-made for package opening. Except: Conundrum. I needed scissors to open up the scissors package. You see, the scissors were ensconced in that stiff, obnoxious plastic. I had to dig up an old pair of scissors to open up the new pairs of scissors and the whole endeavor felt extremely taxing and ironic. Oh and also, I cut my finger. On the plastic. That shit is dangerous. Good news, it is but a flesh wound. I was lucky. I say this because of that one time, when I broke my wrist skiing and had to go to group hand physical therapy... yeah.  All of us in Group would sit around a...

This morning at 11:30, so still the morning don't give me grief, I went down to Cafe Cluny to meet Anna. I knew I had to get there literally at 11:30 because Swedes are never, ever late. Pro tip - if you're having a party and you tell all the New Yorkers to be there at 6 because you know they'll all show up at 6:30... Tell the Swedes the party starts at 6:30 so you're not still in your underpants when they ring the bell. Cafe Cluny is kind of lovely if you can manage to get a table. The European tourists especially love it there. I made it down to the restaurant literally at eleven three zero, on the nose. My timing was impeccable although I might have jogged a little bit so as to not miss lights. Waiting on corners would have cost me a tragic minute which would not have gone unnoticed. We had a delightful brunch and Anna gave me a bag full of Swedish candy. I will admit I broke open the bag of candy on the walk home because who can walk around with Swedish candy and no...

 Graham crackers are delicious. Call this a PSA, because I forgot all about graham crackers. Only recently, some skilled advertising executive crunched all of my internet data and decided I'm the graham crackers type. And so I was reminded, multiple times, how essential the graham cracker is to a life worth living. Excellent flavor, lightly sweet, geometrically perforated.  Downside is they are not a crumb-free snack.  Graham crackers really are toothsome. This past Saturday, I attempted to cobble together the energy to walk up to the Transit Museum gift shop in Grand Central. This location of the gift shop, according to the website at least, is in fact open on weekends. Unlike the other location in FiDi, see the post from a few days ago about how we found this out the hard way. One reason I had such a nice time sitting around instead of getting my shit together and pursuing gift shopping was because, graham crackers. I'm wondering whether graham crackers have those addic...

  Five soccer balls, one wayward basketball and lots of electrolyte beverage plastic floating in the Hudson River. There's an entire pier covered in astroturf. Kids, crowds of them in soccer uniforms, are always headed in that direction. So I can kinda see how all these soccer balls got in the water: Little kids are not much for ball control, and they're playing on fields literally in the middle of a river.  Or an estuary.    I think it is the Hudson Estuary.  I need to get this right, otherwise I will upset my father. One must not be inaccurate about geographical features such as this. An estuary is a river that flows both ways. Such as the Hudson.  Look at me, knowing things. Now let's discus the basketball. There's two basketball courts nearby, but not on a pier. They are on the other side of a little bit of grass, the walking path and the bike path, ie, kinda far from the water and yeah. What kind of wild ass shot gets your basketball into the drink for...

  That is all.

  It's a 22 min walk from the 33rd Street PATH stop to the Consulate General of Brazil Mark and my nephew are going to the Brazilian Consulate tomorrow to take care of some business and I helped them figure out how to get there on the train.   This reminded me of the time I too, went to the Brazilian Consulate to take care of some business. It all started when my cousin, who was really young at the time, maybe she was a freshman in college, pulled an extremely "freshman in college" move. She mailed her passport to the Brazilian Consulate in New York City. She was trying to get a Visa to be an exchange student over the summer or something, I can't remember. This was a big mistake on about three levels. First of all, my cousin lives in Virginia, therefore outside the NY Metro area which is served by the Consulate General of NY. Also, you have to get a Visa at an embassy, not a consulate, turns out. Lastly, if you mail your passport to the Brazilian Consulate, they won...

It's really pretty :-)   I may have just realized I am a repository for the plants of people no longer with us, between my grandma's cactuses and Tom's mom's partner's brother's jade plants . My grandma also had a whole bunch of dumb canes.  spoiler alert: dumb cane usually don't look this nice. They have a penchant to grow one big leaf on a long stem. We were over at Jamie and Scott's in Brooklyn on Saturday night and Jamie had a dumb cane in a cute pot on the coffee table. I said, "is that a dumb cane?" and she looked at me like I had insulted her plant. It's not a great name, tbh so I get it. Luckily I have the Picture This plant identifier app on my phone (that I got for my fern life list ) and was shown to be correct: Jamie's plant did in fact identify as a dumb cane. I handed her my phone and she was suitably impressed because yeah. It was impressive.  But it was a trip down memory lane for me. My grandma, my mom's mom, had do...

Tom and I set out at the crack of like 2pm with a mission to urban hike to the NY Transit Museum gift shop in FiDi (otherwise known as the Financial District). FiDi is way down at the bottom of Manhattan where there are many many tourists right about now and many many people in safety vests who work for the Statue of Liberty ferries trying to sell tickets to said tourists. While it slowed us down some, this factoid is completely irrelevant to the point of this post, so let's move on. Tom and I set out and almost immediately, I made a mental note which I subsequently announced to my hiking companion. I was totally starving because turns out, I forgot about lunch. Also it was really hot out and people were running by in spaghetti strap tops and the more I thought about a glass of water the more imperative it became to not get a heatstroke and pass out.  So we swooped into the Wintergarden and had a great lunch on the second floor in the food hall. After that, we resumed our hike beca...

 Maybe this post is more, I'm captivated by some of these dancers as much as the dance.  I have been trying to get the above video to begin at the relevant timestamp, 2:18, but have not been successful. Therefore, pls manually advance to 2:18. I'm trying to spotlight one dancer I find particularly fascinating:  Don't get me wrong, you should watch  the whole damn dance video , taking it from the top (if you dare because it's addicting) and then after that you should watch the  live version of the same dance  - Actually, watch the live version first and then watch the other one. I feel like this is the proper order.  And after that, don't blame me for spending two hours watching dance videos and welcome to my world.  OK back to this one particular fascinating dancer, the one from the pics above. That dancer is also THIS DANCER: From this video: It took me a long time to realize this. You're welcome.

 I went to the salon up the street to have my hair colored. I've been going there for idk five years? And I have this running passive aggressive battle with them.   Tbh I think I am the only one aware there is a fight ongoing, so not sure what you call it when you are the only combatant. Probably something like "punching yourself in the face" but who am I to speculate. The non-actual-fight is about the salon policy that if you don't pay for it separately, they won't blow dry your hair for you at the end. I guess at some point, they realized they were giving what amounts to a free blow-out and other people charge a lot of money for blow outs, so, three points for capitalism? Upon reflection, I'm not sure why this bothers me as much as it bothers me. It might be because if you do decide to pay to have someone blow dry your hair, it's always going to be one of the assistants, and frankly, they're still assistants for a reason. I feel like I'm part of ...

It is a taxidermy deer bedecked in crystals The artist, Kohei Nawa calls it a "PixCell" When Darcey and Kent were in the city we popped into the Met and whipped through "Asia." And Woah!!! There he was!  Another angle of the deer which is so sparkly I could barely take a picture! I had seen this same PixCell deer marvel at the Met maybe ten years ago. That time it was upstairs in one of those crazy rooms on top of "Egypt" with a huge skylight and sunshine flooding in. The deer was lit up like a celebration.  I was so taken by the whole sight of it I went back again a week later, but the exhibit had already changed. I couldn't remember the name of the artist and was therefore totally S.O.L.  I mean, what the f* do you google if you want to find a crystal taxidermy deer?  oh. well. I just googled "crystal taxidermy deer" and found a very relevant video: I'd swear it was a new video but it's 11 years old... probably they made it the...

 My hydroponic game is for sure leveling up.  Some of the harvest

 Look, fountain pens are the bomb.  First you have the pens themselves which are gold or silver. They're heavy and they look cool. I sometimes trek down to the Fountain Pen Hospital in TriBeCa just to get my mitts on them. (Even though Fountain Pen Hospital hours are extremely inconvenient and you have to use your outside voice to get someone to help you in that joint.) We nerds love our fountain pens so much that there's a metric assload of entire blogs and instagram feeds about them. There's major sub-reddits. There are huge arguments about nibs and these arguments are not ironic. Then there's ink. I have bottles and bottles of ink in really cool looking glass vessels and in all these nifty colors. Here' a few of them: https://fountainpenlove.com/ Ok someone else, the gentleman behind "Fountain Pen Love," took the above photo, but I think I have three of the same inks in my own hoard as well. You see, I'm very attuned to what is tres cool amongst in...

  Lookin' good! I was thinking about how much elbow grease is required by like Marines or folks who wear tuxedos to get a mirror-shine going. But yeah, I'm styling right now, at least until my first mud puddle. Considering it's the driest it's been in 100 years around here though... my shoe shine might last a little longer than frankly I'd like it to.

Renya and I have been taking annual adventures. We pick a destination to hike to (always on the island of Manhattan) and make a lot of ado about footwear and packing snacks and planning the route. It is mostly all for show because, you know, we're in Manhattan. If we forget to pack a snack we can just stop at a deli and if we get lost, well, I'm sure an Uber driver could geolocate us. But I digress. Mostly the hard part is finding a day where both of us are free to galavant. Last year we hiked up to the Little Red Lighthouse right under the GWB. It was definitely a thing so our adventure this year had a high bar.   Little Red Lighthouse under the George Washington Bridge Thankfully, one of us stumbled across: "Hike the Heights promotes the use of the  Giraffe Path , an urban trail that connects the Cloisters to Central Park through the escarpment parks of northern Manhattan. This giraffe-shaped trail takes its shape from existing trails and streets that connect Fort Tryon...

So the Rangers game Tom went to with Matt didn't last very long. In T minus 10 minutes, the Rangers were losing by like 6 points and Matt couldn't stand it anymore. He told Tom he wanted to leave and so they wound up at McManus , a very old dive bar 4 blocks from our apartment. Meanwhile, Helen was at an event at Chelsea Piers, so she decided to meet them after it ended. Tom texted me at 9:30 and asked if I wanted to come over too. Yes? No? I was lounging around on the couch reading a book. It felt very arduous to put on shoes. But then I thought, you know, after the traumatic week with the election and all, maybe I should go out and be with friends. So I got my life together and walked up to 19th street. hmm, this is a particularly flattering angle of McManus. That bar is literally worn down in elbow zone and permanently just a little sticky. It is truly a relic. Slightly more realistic camera angle: The linoleum floor is. Linoleum. Or maybe it's tile. That looks like lino...

 Tom is at a Rangers game with Matt: Bruce is in Ecuador. He's very enamored with these little frogs with transparent skin and I can see why. You can see their little hearts beating!!!

 https://www.oleaakjaer.com/ Probably ten+ years ago, I was cruising around the Javitz Center for I think the Frieze art show and I stumbled across a booth filled with Ole Aakjaer watercolors. I loved them. It was the very first time Ole Aakjaer's stuff had been shown in the USA and the paintings were... not cheap for sure but also. Half what they cost right now. And I hemmed and hawed and didn't get one, even thought I loved the shit out of the whole idea of them. But I did get to meet the artist at least, he was in the booth grinning from ear to ear because Americans, turns out, love his work. Fast forward to today and every time Ole Aakjaer has an opening in the city, I go. I usually drag Tom. I've seen probably four maybe five openings. And every time we go, the prices go up.  Damn, could have gotten in on the ground floor on this one. Regrets.

I was there with bells on at the crack of 9   Originally, I had decided it would be most convenient to vote around 3:30 on election day, but when I woke up, I was way too whipped up to do anything but immediately head to the community center to cast my ballot.  The community center is pretty big and four districts vote there.  Tom was behind me in the line for our district (15). When I was done voting, I saw him just going into the voting booth. So I stood off to the side with my coffee and my brand new "I voted" sticker prominently displayed on my shirt and waited for him to come out. A guy came in off the street and said, "Where do I vote for district 17?"  I did some mental process of elimination work for about four seconds, and then pointed to a line off to the left. "I think it's that one," I said without a lot of conviction. Honestly I had no idea what I was talking about. The guy thanks me and, without any hesitation, marches over and stands in ...