Sometimes the Old Ways Are Best

I have been depressed recently. The reasons are neither important, nor interesting, nor your business. The only reason I mention it is, today I carved out rather a grand victory against said depression, and through a surprisingly well-trodden track.

My husband, you see, is going to run a race tonight in Prospect Park with our friend Paul, who back in the blog days guessed, incorrectly as it turns out, that his future wife was still in middle school. And I decided to make a picnic for after. And I went absolutely apeshit. Six different dishes, most of which I'd never made before, all of them Russian, except for the grapes coated in goat cheese and almonds, which are Spanish. Culminating in a three layer sour cream cherry cake.

Eric came home last night to the age-old, long-forgotten spectacle of me sweating (though not so much as of yore, thanks to central air) angrily pounding things in an inadequate plastic mortar & pestle. And he asked me, in that age-old, long-forgotten tone of his, "Perhaps you're taking on a little too much."

And perhaps I was.

But this morning I squeezing the water out of two pounds of spinach and felt that familiar arthritic ache. And I looked out over the courtyard of PS 1, where hapless architects are frantically trying to get their waterlogged and collapsed party space ready by next week. And I realized I'd reached 11:30 am (dark midnight of the soul for lazy freelancers) with nary a gloomy thought.

It's a start.

Petty Thieves Do the Darnedest Things...

So. Day before yesterday I got a mysterious slip in the mail saying I had a parcel at the post office with $4.05 in postage due. Today I went to pick it up - and it was my purse!!!! With everything in it!!! Well, not everything. The two dollars and the metrocard were gone. But my credit cards, my driver's license, Eric's keys that I'd had, every business card I've been handed in the last year and a half since I last cleaned out my purse, taxi receipts I can write off... even the beer mat from my reading in Bath that Hannah had made special and has been sitting in my purse ever since... all there!

It's enough to make you regain your faith in humanity, or at least in the humanity of purse snatchers, regardless of their ethnicity and moped-riding habits....

MEA MEA MEA MEA MEA CULPA. (Quite, quite seriously.)

Hey,guys, I'm totally very completely sorry for that last post. I forgot that I was in a public forum for a second. I was trying in my not at all intelligent way to recount a bizarre random conversation I had with my husband while hopped up on adrenaline and freaked out, and express a bit of husband-and-wife-speak that I should have known would never translate to the outside world.

What happened was this: I recounting the police's grilling of me regarding the identity of my purse snatchers. (They asked me if they were were white, black or hispanic, Asian not being a choice....) And I was describing my frustration that they were expecting me to answer such questions when I didn't really see a goddamned thing, and that I'd felt pressured to make a guess, and I guessed MAYBE Hispanic simply because the flash of skin that I saw seemed maybe more Hispanic-ish than white-ish or black-ish... And Eric made the joke about the Vietnamese and Mexicans not riding mopeds, the joke being that it was an entirely random stereotype that he pretty much made up on the spot. It was a sort of joke about stereotyping, or racial profiling, or something, and at the time it seemed funny in our little spousal conversation, and now I realize of course that I look like a great big horse's ass.

And also, I thought it was funny that all of a sudden I'm this stereotypical over-privileged white girl with stupid gadgets.

So I'm now lifting my first glass of the day to the proposition that even douchey ill-considered dumbass girls like me can learn from their blogosphere mistakes.

Mean Streets of LIC

I've watched After Hours, The Warriors, the Scorsese ouevre. I know that you have to be tough, and lucky, to survive in these gritty New York City streets. But never had I seen with my own eyes that dark underbelly, the menace lurking beneath. Until now. But now I too have suffered.

Okay, so getting my purse snatched by a couple of Vietnamese kids on a moped doesn't quite equal being stabbed 32 times or having Harvey Keitel force me to suck his cock, but I think I will claim my New York moment anyway.

Actually, I don't know that they were Vietnamese, that's just my racist assumption. Actually, it's my husband's racist assumption. My racist assumption was that the two kids in motorcycle helmets who raced by me on their twattish little bike and yanked my purse off my shoulder, pulling me down to the sidewalk and bruising the shit out of my arm in the process, were Hispanic. I based that on the only body parts of theirs that I managed to retain a memory of while screaming "Fuck you, assholes, Fuck YOU!!!!" and shooting them the finger with both hands. Their calves, beneath baggy cargo shorts, seemed somewhat brownish.

But then Eric said, "Hispanics don't ride mopeds."

I wonder if I ought to go into the police station and amend my statement. "I said they were Hispanic, but then I realized they must be Asian because no Mexican would be caught dead on a moped."

That'd probably go over pretty well.

Anyway, the dumb fuckers got two bucks plus $12 on a metrocard. They missed entirely my new white-girl mini blackberry and new white-girl video iPod. So the joke's on them, I guess.