(Future) Jersey City Madwoman Writes an Open Letter to Republicans

After looking at about 9 apartments, we found one. close to my train, good deal on parking, good-sized kitchen, cheaper than my rent now. Everybody's happy. And the moving process starts a month from today ... time to start cleaning and packing, find a mover and philosophise some more about furniture!

If you have been paying attention to the news the last couple of days, you heard that all around the country, groups of angry white men protested wasteful government spending and raising the taxes of people much richer than they are by shoving their testicles in the face of the president.

Oh wait, they weren't actually "teabagging" the White House? Maybe irony isn't dead after all.

Dear crazed right-wing reactionaries and their moderate Republican bretheren:
You know this "real America" you love to talk about? We're, on the whole, rational people. We know you're mad as hell and can't take it anymore, but silly publicity stunts do not win over anyone who doesn't already agree with you. Please stop arguing over whether Obama is a socialist or a fascist and offer a reasonable, well thought-out alternative — not a budget with no numbers on it or a fetching graphic representation of what a trillion dollars with it (though we'd advise that you present your catchy new idea in sound-bite form). See: Newt Gingrich's Contract With America. See also: Cindy Sheehan. Need I say more?



I had grand aspirations to go to bed early tonight, but sleep is so not happening right now. Earlier I happened to stumble onto MIT's OpenCourseWare, where you can read lecture notes from classes throughout MIT for free. So if you happen to have a lingering curiosity about, say, urban planning or the principles of pharmacology, that's the place to be.

Nevermind the destination, just sit back and enjoy the ride

There's nothing sexy about turning 24.
I've already turned 21, therefore there's Nothing to Look Forward To in the landmark birthday department, ever again, except being 80 or 90 and not cacking over dead. The only thing turning 24 has going is that it's the last birthday before I turn 25, and then 30, and 40, and 50 ...
But somehow, being halfway to 48 is slightly less scary than being halfway to 46. Maybe that's why god made the ability to see gray areas something that improves with age.
When I was about 9, I conflated the term "adult" with "grown-up." I thought that I would wake up on my 18th birthday a grown-up.
When I was 18, I thought going to college would make me a grown-up. Then I realized that college (at least for the first couple of years) was like summer camp, but with more reading and fewer rules. Around that time, I said screw this grown-up stuff. I figured that I would graduate, enter the world of grown-ups, and become Old and Boring.
And then I came here.
Which was a jarring experience. One day I was eating generic macaroni and cheese, pulling all-nighters, driving a car my dad owned while my mom still made my doctor appointments. A few weeks later I was sitting in MY apartment — just mine, no one else's — working a full-time job and drinking responsibly. And buying my own health insurance.
Maybe I'm biased because I've never been anything resembling a grown-up back at home. But here it just seems a lot easier to be a fully functional adult — as opposed to a post-college student who isn't sure how to proceed — without becoming Old and Boring.
Most of the people I hang out with are older than me. As one of them puts it, I see people out until 4 in the morning who are old enough to be my grandparents. And they're having more fun than I am.
The biggest fear I've ever had is that someday I'll look back and realize that I spent so much time trying to grow up and focus on what I'm supposed to do that I haven't really done anything, and then I'll look forward and realize that, barring random life-changing events that tend to crop up when you least expect them, all the uncertainty is gone. It's not that I don't have any direction, but I've always thought of life more as a series of crazy-ass stories to write — anecdotes, even — than a series of goals to achieve.
Which is the joy of living here — so many random people and places and movements and ideas all in one place, I don't get the urge to dash across the country/world every time I get existentially stir-crazy. I can just go outside.

The tyranny of stuff. And creepy voicemails.

Moving is a process that makes you acutely aware of the sheer amount of stuff you have.

The thing about stuff is that at one point or another, the stuff you have inevitably becomes the stuff you need to get rid of.
Unless you die. Then that stuff becomes someone else's problem. And that's an even bigger problem, because some stuff has a lot of emotional significance, and when you die and leave someone else your stuff, some of that emotional significance gets passed on with it.

Why do we put so much emotional stock in stuff? Specifically, furniture.

The Times ran a piece that did some time on the most e-mailed list about the perils of inheriting furniture. Oftentimes, you're stuck with it, because to a lot of people, the person from whom you got the furniture (or ugly portrait or whatever) lives on in that stuff, and getting rid of it would be like getting rid of *them*.

My herirloom furniture, which is pretty much all of it, was all wanted furniture (of good quality too), and I have so damn much of it that getting rid of a few things isn't cutting any one person's material memory out of my life. Also, it's kind of comforting having such a variety of passed-on stuff here. I've got stuff from both parents, both sets of grandparents, my sister, my house on menomonie street, hell, even my ex-boyfriend.

And that will still be the case after I downsize a little bit, but it's been kind of a struggle to prepare myself to get rid of a few things I won't have room to take with me when I move on tuesday. I'm still struggling with the economic guilt of essentially giving away some good stuff, but the flip side of that is on Craigslist there are plenty of other people in the same situation, so it *is* possible to get good stuff for cheap here.

And the fact that I'm blathering on about this is proof of my point. It's just stuff. Sentimental value is a social construction. Don't let it imprison you.

And another point: If you're moving here, bring as little as possible.
(That said, I wouldn't trade my living room furniture and big comfy bed for a teeny studio on the upper west side. I'm a midwestern girl and I need my space.)

Now that you've made it through that rant, you need to listen to this. A woman named Olga got hit on by a man named Dmitri. They talked for about two minutes, she gave him her business card (probably to get him to go away). These are the messages he left her.

waiting ...

On Sunday I looked at my first apartment, in hoboken. The place, for $65 a month less than I'm paying now, is roomier than my current place even considering that there's another person living there (who seems quite nice). And the building is super-close to everything I would need (ie, the train to manhattan). So yesterday, not having seen any other ones, I went to the management office, dropped $75 and applied for it.

So now I wait.

Apparently, some management companies actually, like, do background checks.
Note to my current and former bosses and landlords: Please say something nice :o)

On the other hand, do I really *want* to move there?
I love hoboken, it's an adorable town, about 2 miles square, with lots of bars and shops and restaurants and a few lovely organic grocery stores. And it's cheaper than manhattan — and closer to most of it than I am now.

But there's still the nagging, somewhat illogical voice in my head that says why are you moving to JERSEY??? Also, the fact (for those of you not up on this, as I'm keeping it off the record*) that I'm dating someone there. Have been for about two months now. Most definitely not long enough on which to make a geographical decision, even in New York. He doesn't believe me when I say this, but the fact that he lives there is not part of my decision to move there except that had it not been for him I never probably would have seen hoboken in the first place.

Oh, and also, there's the fact that I put in 30 days notice to my current landlords and have to be out by July 1.

I think there needs to be some kind of bureau of housing counseling in the city. I could really use some assistance from someone knowledgeable who doesn't stand to make huge amounts of money off me. Seriously, New Yorkers spend more time, money and energy thinking and talking about housing and neighborhoods and apartments and gentrification and rent than anyone else in the damn country or possibly the world. With the possible exception of people whose houses have been foreclosed on them. And they have an excuse.


*To protect the innocent, and the not-so-innocent, this is NOT a dating blog. All personal details are off the record.

When life gives you lemons, paint that shit gold

Here's a fun time-waster, as a promo for atmosphere's new album, which I recommend.

On an unrelated note, I would just like to say that I hate Times Square with a burning passion. Well, not so much Times Square, but the tourists. Not so much the tourists in and of themselves, but cram a hundred thousand of them together within a few blocks and they all adopt this hive mentality that sucks out all of their common sense. You know, that part of your brain that tells you not to stand in the middle of the sidewalk when you choose to stand and gawk at something or not to stop and take pictures IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BLOODY ROAD. And the part that acknowledges the guys who try to sell you comedy tickets, therefore encouraging them.

Ladies and gentlemen ...

This is an important message from the New York City Police Department. We are aware that our trains smell like all kinds of nasty things, but PLEASE REFRAIN FROM SPRAYING YOUR CHEAP-ASS COLOGNE ON THE TRAIN. In the event that you choose to spray your nasty cologne and other passengers bludgeon you to death with canes, purses and stiletto heels, the MTA will not be held responsible. Thank you for riding New York City Transit, and have a safe day.

mini-updates and coffee. And an emo rant.

The other night I met my first white cabdriver who, incidentally, also lived in central harlem. He said he was Israeli and that he'd gotten into cabdriving two weeks ago because his friend told him he could make a lot of money, but that so far he hadn't found that to be true.

The landlord yelled at my next-door neighbor for playing his damn music so loud into all hours of the night. Finally a little peace and quiet on that side ... but the church partiers across the street are another story.

Currently I'm reading "Mortified! Real Words, Real People, Real Pathetic." Basically it's a bunch of grown-ups who sent in entries from their teenage diaries, and what results is bloody brilliant because it's so true. When you *are* that age, you think that you are a huge dork and that everyone is judging you and that no one could possibly be as emo as you secretly are, until you grow up and realize that everyone, to some degree, was once a huge emo dork. (In my diary I had a running section on the "7th Grade Soap Opera," where I would give the rundown of who was dating whom that week. And of course it changed every week, sometimes multiple times).

Lately Starbucks has gotten a lot of publicity for their new plan to make coffee that, like, tastes good. which only serves to highlight the point that plain old starbucks coffee is, in fact, absolutely terrible. There are rumors in some circles that it's bad on purpose so customers opt for expensive girly latte drinks instead. I mean, seriously — you have to dump at least three sugars into it just to curb the bitter taste, and the utter futility of adding skim milk to it gives me an excuse to put whole milk in my coffee.

Mind you, the fact that it's terrible doesn't stop me from drinking it. Hell, Starbucks coffee got me through many, many morning college classes and post-obscenely-late-deadline Spectator workdays. I think the bitterness and rocket-fuel consistency give it a kind of placebo effect where it makes me feel a little extra buzzed.

I miss Holiday coffee. On that note, I miss my Holiday gas station and the man who was always behind the counter when I came in at 6:47 a.m. before every single Leader-Telegram shift, without fail, except for the ones where I overslept. (I don't miss working at 7 a.m.) Every time I fry eggs I miss my kitchen on Menomonie Street where the floor was so slanted that both eggs would slide to one side of the pan. I miss making pancakes the morning after a crazy night. I miss dancing in front of the mirror that was in Nikki's room that makes you look skinny. (I don't miss my 7x12 bedroom.) I miss the ho box and redundant water street bars and kicking it with whoever happened to be in our living room at the time. (I do not miss the living room furniture). And I miss Jeff and Jim's. No slice of pizza in this city will ever be Jeff and Jim's.

Update: Spitz Quits!

I'm glad Eliot Spitzer decided to be a grown-up, admit his mistake and get out of office so as not to totally disrupt the state government when he most likely goes to trial for transporting a prostitute across state lines and/or money laundering.

I think a decent number of Democrats will forgive him in the end, after they get over their disappointment. Even if he gets convicted and disbarred, he'll end up writing a book or getting some plush consulting or lobbying job down the line. Also, his lieutenant governor David Paterson is pretty well-respected on all sides, not to mention that he'll become New York's first black governor and the first legally blind governor anywhere. Ultimately, it will all be OK. Except, probably, for Mrs. Spitzer.

That being said, I would enjoy nothing more than to see Bush get busted in a sting on a prostitution ring, preferably a sting that involved wiretapping (oh the irony). Sure, he may be able to reinvent executive privilege, openly support torture and oppose health care for poor children, tell the American people 935 flat-out lies on the subject of the Iraq war alone (none of them under oath, sadly), but you'd best believe that if he got busted Spitzer-style, his ass would be impeached faster than you could say "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

She's a slave (to her own psychosis)

Because my mail gets forwarded, I'm probably a little slow on the uptake. But I just read this month's Rolling Stone cover story, The Tragedy of Britney Spears. After chasing the Britney circus around for six weeks, the closest the reporter can get to an interview with Ms. Spears is duping her inner circle into thinking she's going to pay them $2 million until the very last possible second. What results is basically a summary of Britney's lurid downward spiral. With pictures.

Now back in the day I had much less tolerance for Britney Spears then most people. But that doesn't make the unfolding craziness any easier to watch. It's disturbing on a level that's hard to articulate. Even moreso than the Michael Jackson craziness.

I think there is a certain generation that grew up with Britney Spears, and to watch her become such a freakshow is to watch something in our collective psyche get kicked and corrupted and broken. In large part, I think it goes hand in hand with the Bush administration and the toxicity of American culture in general. I think the reason that Britney became so adored — and so hated — is that all her life she was micromanaged and molded into what other people wanted her to be:

"These middle-aged guys were so intense about her not being sexual that they pushed her the other way," says the friend. "They'd tell her to put on a bra or that her lip gloss was too dark. They were literally picking out her panties for her."

I would continue this rant, but I would probably start to sound like a crazy person. Someday maybe I'll write a book about how Britney Spears is the embodiment of all that is wrong with America. But in the meantime, just read the article (if you have time on your hands; it's a long one). Really it's no wonder the woman is having a breakdown:

If Britney was really who we believed her to be — a puppet, a grinning blonde without a cool thought in her head, a teasing coquette clueless to her own sexual power — none of this would have happened. She is not book-smart, granted. But she is intelligent enough to understand what the world wanted of her: that she was created as a virgin to be deflowered before us, for our amusement and titillation. She is not ashamed of her new persona — she wants us to know what we did to her.

Ugh.

If you are ever at a New York deli, never, ever eat anything containing breaded chicken or (especially) slices thereof. Because I promise you it is not chicken. More like greasy chicken-flavored rubber that will fill you with loathing upon consumption. I have had this experience in at least 3 or 4 delis that were otherwise at least tolerable.

Moving on ... I love how Wisconsin is, yet again, a battleground state. It trips the hell out of me to see Appleton and Oshkosh and Madison datelined in the New York Times, and even more so, to see my alma mater get a mention. (On that note, this fine publication is also doggedly following the campaign season in Blugold country).

I know that the primary system is designed for the maximium benefit of special-interest groups, and it does drag on for an excruciatingly long period of time. But it does have the side effect of forcing politicians to go to electoral pip-squeak states like Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada and at least pretend to listen to their concerns. And since there was no coronation after Super Tuesday, the pandering continues. As Lauren Fox of Shorewood, Wis., puts it, "having zoomed from ignored to adored in one day, we might as well put on tons of sparkly eye shadow and enjoy ourselves, because no one will remember our name in the morning."

Of course, being that it's Wisconsin they'll be back to pander some more before the general election. I already miss living in a purple state, at least for now. But I've always had a love-hate attitude toward politics. It's the ultimate reality show, in that it has pretty much the same ratio of reality to utter ridiculousness as most reality shows. But follow it too closely and you'll start to lose brain cells and possibly your lunch.

But to end on a positive note, I the best story I edited today (well, besides the Wisconsin one, which was from the same series) was about the caucuses in small-town Maine. I think Jennifer Finney Boylan has a brilliant take on the Democratic race:

Toward the end of the event, though, someone asked, So what was it like, to grow up as the daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton?

Well, she said, one day, when she was 6 and living in the governor’s mansion in Arkansas, Chelsea decided she’d like to have a coconut. So the Clintons went out and got one. When they got it home, though, the first family faced the traditional problem when it comes to coconuts: how do you open one up?

Chelsea allowed as how her father and she had gone outside, and thrown the coconut again and again onto the hard asphalt of the governor’s mansion’s driveway, hoping to make a dent. But the coconut, alas, refused to yield.

Finally, Hillary came outside with a hammer.

The point being, Chelsea said, that her mother knows how to solve problems.

In the 2004 election, voters repeatedly said that they’d rather have a beer with George W. Bush than with John Kerry. This election, it seems as if the question for Democrats is this: Whom would you call if you really, really needed to open a coconut? Hillary Clinton, with the Hammer of Experience? Or Barack Obama, with the Machetes of Bipartisanship and Change?

in which a lily-white harlem resident waxes philosophical on diversity and gentrification

At UW-Eau Claire, there is a lot of verbal wankery on the subject of diversity — why there isn't any, how they can get more of it, how they can change around their educational requirements to get students to think about it. But even so, the student body is still 93 percent white.

Well, now I live in central Harlem, in a neighborhood that 85 percent black, 14 percent Latino and 1 percent white. I *am* the diversity. It's a wee bit of culture shock.

When I came here, one of the movers asked me why I had decided to move to *this* part of town. (Well, because it's probably the only place in the city I can afford a nice 1-bedroom apartment in a well-maintained building and still make it to work in about 30 minutes door-to-door).

"Well ... usually certain groups of people live in certain areas of the city," the mover said.

Not being part of said "certain group" of people is definitely a new experience for me. Say you are a white person, living in a typical midsize, mostly white Midwestern town. You probably deny this to yourself, but when you walk down the street and you pass someone from a minority group, your eyes glance that way for a fraction of a second and a voice in the back of your head says, 'look, a black/Latino/Native American/whatever person.' Now imagine living on a major city street, going to the store, walking to the train, whatever, and getting that not-really-looking look from practically everybody that you pass. It's an adjustment if you've never been a minority. Actually, it's a lot like being in Spain was — minus the catcalls every five seconds.

It's not so much a question of safety, other than the obvious reservations I have about walking at late hours of the night through the neighborhood where "American Gangster" was filmed. I've been assured that all things considered it's a safe enough neighborhood. According to police precinct reports, it's more on par with the bulk of downtown Manhattan than with the Bronx, which is just across the Harlem River. And the super says in the eight years he's been in my building there's never been a break-in.

But there is a certain amount of racial tension involved, and that is compounded by the fact that people who are priced out of richer neighborhoods tend to equate "ungentrified" with "undiscovered," see the neighborhood as dangerous and rundown and in need of being fixed, and slowly push out the locals as if they were just in the way. (See the Village Voice piece The Second Battle for Bushwick if you really want to understand how this plays out.) Adding to that, in Harlem at least, Columbia University is buying up a bunch of real estate. From what I've gathered in my short time here thus far, the gentrification battlefront has effectively been pushed up from 96th street to 125th street.

Truly it's a double-edged sword — popularity of a neighborhood equals investment equals better facilities and often lower crime rates and the like. I'm not in the best situation to opine on gentrification because a. I haven't lived here before it took off and b. as a tenant of a management company that's buying up huge chunks of Harlem and upper Manhattan I'm part of the problem. But isn't there a way to improve a neighborhood and accommodate new residents without pushing the old ones out?

It's capitalism run amok, really. I don't think you can fight basic supply and demand without a. more people owning instead of renting, therefore not having to pay someone else skyrocketing amounts of money just to stay in their apartment and b. a serious crackdown on the kinds of unethical property management practices in the aforementioned Village Voice story, and/or c. regulations on landlords and businesses that many people would consider profoundly un-American. In that way I can see Manhattan as a microcosm of how the American free-market system will eventually cannibalize itself if left unchecked.

What boggles my mind about European urban development is that in so many places it manages to balance the past and the present — you can go to school in the very same building in which Inquisition prisoners were held 500 years ago, and big wealthy business chains can't swallow up the smaller ones just because they can afford to break the rules that confine their competitors.* Which requires not only some intervention from -- gasp -- democratic socialism, but the squelching of the colonize and conquer, destroy and rebuild, darwinist mindset that has fueled American history since the first white dudes set foot on this continent. Europe has a few centuries on us in the western-civilization business, and we could take a few hints from them on pacing ourselves.

*In Spain, for example, most businesses aren't allowed to be open on Sundays, and I believe there's some kind of regulation on closing for siesta. Though that made life a huge pain in the ass at times while I was in Valladolid, I think it was a small price to pay for keeping the city as close-knit as it was ... with the side effect of legislating a more relaxed way of life.