This is the second time a crane has collapsed in Manhattan in as many months. What's going on?
Since I moved here in 2000, I have certainly seen and otherwise become aware of all of the treacherous possibilities that this city has in store. The rest of the country has its many dangers, no doubt, and all big cities seem to offer an even greater potential - or some might even say "odds" - for bad things to happen than do more rural areas. But New York, people, New York is *special.* Manholes combusting, electric currents zapping, subway grates falling, paved streets inverting, subways flooding, skyscraper cranes collapsing, even the skyscrapers themselves imploding. This is not even to mention the risk you take getting into a taxi cab or the backseat of the average over-machismo-bearing Brooklynite on his yearly steroid cycle. (Watch out! They could be one in the same!)
A couple of years ago, my friend Frannie and the rest of her family were getting ready for bed in their apartment on the upper east side when the building behind theirs went up in flames. They were evacuated and spent the night in a Red Cross van. If they'd lived in the country, yeah, their neighbor's fire probably wouldn't have affected them (and also they would be living in the country), but because of the close living quarters of the city, we are all butted up against each other. There is only so much space on the island of Manhattan, in particular, as most non-morons know. Therefore, people decided to build upwards. That is why we have skyscrapers and why New York has more of them than anywhere else in the world. It irritates me that people say things like, "Why don't they just stop building skyscrapers?" Why don't we stop having wars? That's killing more people than these crane collapses. Skyscrapers...ehhh, they're nice to look at. But boy do these contractors need to be more careful!!! (I realize that may be a small understatement.)
This is my favorite Youtube video ever. I can sit and watch it over and over again, dancing in my seat or even on my feet. These folks know how to have a good time.
I have to confess, there is a new love in my life. But I swear that I did all I could with the last. Eventually though, I had to give it up. After a good five years of abuse, my old crappy primary saute pan was fated for the curb. Enter my brand new T-Fal saute pan. I knew when I retired the old one, that a new one of better quality would improve my future cooking and eating experiences, but there is no way to over-emphasize how huge that difference is in reality. Everything I cook in that thing comes out the picture and flavor of perfection. Pork chops, french toast, eggs, vegetables. I made bacon in it this morning that came out lusciously crispy, and then I used the same pan, drippings and all, to make the most incredible roasted potatoes - perfectly crispy skin on the outside, soft and buttery on the inside.
I decided to make Rob a couple of his very favorite things - as I may never do so again after he moves out. So tonight I made Chicken Kiev. It turned out better than ever before. I made a compound herb and garlic butter days ahead of time and coated the chicken in panko breadcrumbs before frying. Panko is so great that I would never even think of making fried chicken with anything else ever again.
I made that with the bacon roasted potatoes and a romaine and red pepper salad topped with manchego cheese and balsamic dressing. It was beautiful. I almost cried when I tasted everything. I said to Rob, "You know, you may never meet and fall in love with another girl for as long as you live who will cook you a meal this good."
"That's true," he said. Even though he should have been the one to say what I said.
I'm not being conceited, but it really is true. I may be a crazy bitch with a complaint for every minute of every day, but I can cook like nobody's business. At least I know he'll miss that, even if everything else is a wash. :) And speaking of washing, remember girls and boys, food may be the way to a person's heart, but if they ain't steppin' up to do the dishes...! Well, you know what to do.
I'm not saying that the United States judicial system is by any means perfect, if anything it is deeply flawed in many ways, but thank god the police here generally take rape claims seriously!
Can you say HORRIFIED? And this is a people that boast of being the most "civilized" in the world? They should be doing a better job of living up to that. Shame shame.
I wonder how many more of these we're going to see in the coming years, not that it's the first...
Seems that no matter how many of Bush's former aides and cabinet members resign and write books testifying to the crimes of the Bush Administration (and strongly condemning the very tactics that they so heartily participated in utilizing during their tenures), no charges will be brought, no impeachment trial commenced, no real accusations ever laid against this president. Seems he will leave office with the same canary-eating grin with which he came. No revelation of dishonesty or wrong-doing shall fell him, no utterly substantiated accusation will be validated against him or his remaining miscreant accomplices. No.
It's like the United States is Sleeping Beauty and it can't wake up for anything. Wake up! Wake up Sleeping Beauty! Impeach Bush. Impeach Bush. It's not too late. It's not too late until the day he leaves office. Do it for the record. Do it for the honor of this unfairly disgraced country. Do it for my brother Josh (it's all he wanted before he died). Impeach this man in the name of the war crimes for which he is so flagrantly responsible. I dare you to be a country that lives up to its revolutionary roots. Bring these fuckers down.
Where are the real democrats when you need them to stand up in Washington? Where are you real democrats? Did you ever really exist? Is this, combined with evidence that government contract profiteering and theft of taxpayer funds has run rampant since the commencement of the war, along with clear violations of international treaties and United States Laws regarding pre-emptive war, surveillance, detainment and torture - is it not enough? I ask you. Is it not enough to impeach this entire administration and everything they have ever touched?
*UPDATE
ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz........
My MSN Horoscope today (I don't care how generalized you think these things are, I often find they hit the nail on the head for me):
Today's Virgo Horoscope: May 25, 2008
You may feel like a giant wrecking ball, dear Virgo, that is anxious to break down existing structures. Perhaps you are upset by a new development in your town, the political system that runs the country, or the power structure within your own home. Regardless of the exact reasons for wanting to do so, you are certain that change needs to happen in order for progress to be made. Often one must tear down an existing structure before a better one can be built.
See, I'm not trying to depress ya'll, so here's a happy ending to lift your spirits this precarious day (oops, sorry. God, I am so doomy at this point in my life, I can't even help it).
Hip-hop Pioneer "Slick Rick" Pardoned by NY Gov. David Patterson
It took a blind man to see that Slick Rick is a national treasure. :) Alright, alright...
This is one of the most unbelievable things in the news today.
So Bush is cracking down on immigration, and one of his latest "pushes" is for incarceration rather than deportation. The part this article doesn't cover is that, yes, we are charging these people with federal crimes now and sentencing them, but it doesn't mention where they go after that. Rather than sending illegal immigrants back home to their families to start over, we are locking them up here in the United States? Well why not? The industry of corporate prison building is booming bigger than ever, so with all that cell space, and all of those taxpayer dollars to be earned by corporations who are contracted by our government to build those prisons, why not start adding huge numbers of illegal immigrants into that mix? Finding more underhanded ways to fuck over illegal immigrants and make a buck at it? Priceless.
It seems to me that this is the kind of "Ignorance" regarding "Rules" which looks a lot like the people who have been running the Pentagon during the Iraq war have simply been stealing U.S. Taxpayer dollars and giving it to their friends. Am I mistaken? That is what this looks like, No? A confession that a massive crime has been committed against every taxpaying citizen of the United States, and that would certainly include myself. So why is no one handcuffing those responsible? If I announced that I had stolen BILLIONS of dollars from not only one person, but from millions of people, I have a feeling I wouldn't be walking around a free woman. But apparently, if you're the government, and you say that you "spent it" and you don't have any idea what you "got" for it, and you can't be held accountable because you weren't "prepared" or "knowledgeable" about how to handle funds and contractors during wartime, you just get to shrug your shoulders and say, "sawry. I know our nation is currently bankrupt, turns out we don't know what we did with all the money." But we're not stupid are we? Someone knows precisely where that money went and why there were no goods or services provided in exchange for it, but they're not telling...!
And if I'm not mistaken, this war is still on. Is there any way of knowing if this massive hemmorage of apparently unsupervised U.S. tax dollars is continuing as I write this? Something tells me it is.
Hooray for the thieves who have robbed us all blind. I hope every person who went out and voted for George Bush a first and second time has to scrape together their milk money this week. I know I will, and I didn't even vote for these motherfuckers.
So the latest is that I am a waitress and bartender at a new place that opened up in Carroll Gardens. I haven't worked in the food industry at all since I was a teenager, and I would say it scares me, except that I don't serve anything except brick oven pizza and chocolate chip cookies and a full bar - low stress menu items. Bartending is something I happen to have a natural ability for, given my propensity to drink heavily and entertain civilly, both at the same time. Somewhere along the way, between my Food Network addiction and my alcohol addiction, I became quite the little cocktail maker and shaker.
I realize that my past 10 years of experience working in a law office as a legal secretary doesn't sound very applicable to bartending or waitressing in a trendy pizza joint, but you would be wrong about that. The similarities are startling and so many of the most important skills translate easily. They both have their upsides and downsides of course. The money is much better in law, as you would imagine, and I would even venture to say that lawyers are less obnoxious than the average hipster dufus asshat or mother with children under the age of 10 (I know I will regret saying that one day). But you really can't beat the general atmosphere, the laid back attitude and flexible schedule of the place I'm at now. I haven't had an actual job outside of my home in over a year other than my summer bookroom assistant job (the most low-stress engagement humanly imagineable), so it's nice to get back into working in a social atmosphere that isn't school related. I've already had a couple of harried waitressing experiences, but you learn your lessons fast when they're all you're taking home.
Summer classes begin soon, as does the bookroom job. I've got a packed schedule worked out, but I am so looking forward to all of it.
Meanwhile, life at home is a trainwreck. But I'm waiting for the burning embers of my personal life to stop sizzling before I start moving the furniture around and cleansing the corners of my new life.
I guess there's no harm in announcing to the world that I am going through the worst breakup of my life. No - stop - don't worry about me. I hate that, that worried tone people get, as if I might not be alright, because I am alright. It's going to be okay. But it truly is the most prolonged ending to my most prolonged relationship, and it is hard. Did you ever see that movie, "The Breakup" with Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn? Well trust me when I say that it is a lot like that (without the argument over property), nor will Rob and I be running towards each other in a final upturn to a happy ending. And maybe we will be able to laugh about some of it, but still, it is sad, I know it is so sad, and it hurts, hurts like total madness, but it's inevitable and it must be and we can't turn around now and there is nothing but the end of everything we started and worked so hard at for nearly seven whole years. In a way, I never thought we would get to this point and in another, it seems like we always knew we couldn't go on forever the way we have been (bad fighting over an endless array of issues). Of course, we had so much more than fighting, we still do. We had everything that came between the fights, that patchwork of moments that you weave with a person, a fabric which becomes so voluminous with action and interlocution, experiences that we've shared, places we've been, conversations we've had, the joys and privileges of knowing and loving one another... But we wove it together and then we both threw it down on the floor and used it as a rug to walk across, wearing it threadbare during arguments.
We are still living together, but his permanent departure is imminent, and though we manage to get along normally most of the time, we have plenty of lapses into anger and frustration over the whole mess as well. He will be moving to a place nearby, so we'll likely still see each other occasionally - or maybe not - who knows. Right now we are trying to be friends. And that's all we are. It's so weird because that's how we started, but it's not how I wanted us to end up. We met on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 55th Street, where the big red LOVE sculpture is in front of the Men's Apparel Building, which is where Rob and I both worked. I was a secretary at Kane Kessler on the 26th floor and he was an assistant in television sales at MGM on the 25th floor. We met over a shared nicotine addiction and a common interest in music and good times. He would join me and my friends for lunch, but I was with someone then and even though that guy was a jerk I didn't have my eye out for a replacement. Rob was just a sweet guy. But then he became more. And then I left my idiotic boyfriend at the time - well, I'll just be honest and say that Rob saved me from that crazy ex, really he did. And then he became a lot more, before he became everything, the love of my life, the one I wanted to be with forever. We both had those notions. Who doesn't? And it seemed possible, likely even. By the time we realized that our fights had the capacity to become legendary and terribly destructive, it was already much too late. We wanted to make it work badly enough to keep trying and to try for several years. And as happy as we have been at times - and we have been so happy too - certain problems have never gone away and certain ones have worsened a great deal.
So this is where we find ourselves. At the intersection of Heartbreak and Disappointment.
But it's not all doom and gloom. Of course it isn't. Nothing is. I've got a very exciting summer ahead of me with new jobs and school and reading and laying by the pool and being single. You can't tell me that sounds half bad. Even if I may or may not cry myself to sleep one or two more nights before I get there...
Today was the last day of my sophomore year of college!
There have been some really hard parts about the last two years. However, school has been the easy part. Death, of course, performed his starring role four times over. I hate to think of these losses as things that have happened to ME, but I do. Those were my beloved friends and family and though I know many others lost them too and that they - Howard, Ivette, my brother Joshua, Roger - they lost the flesh and bones of their selves, yet all I can wrap my mind and my heart around is my own sense of grief at missing them. I lost them all and they weren't all I lost. I lost the others too. I lost my grandma Eloise. I lost Tyler. I lost others still. Yes, other people lost them too. But how could I know how they feel, how they've felt? How could I know anything other than what I feel and what I have felt my whole life since that first loss at four?
Losing them has made everything I've gained that much more meaningful. What would I stand for if I didn't stand for the memory of all of those I've lost? Who would I be? Who am I if not a person who has been hammered with the reality of death and is trying to swallow every droplet of life for the knowledge of its minute passing?