buffalo bill

So I am in the middle of a heartbroken hunt for a new place to sleep/stuff my Social Studies 10 textbooks. (Tocqueville - why have I kept you unopened on my shelf for seven years? Habermas...Habe-what-what? Simone de Beauvoir? More like Simone de Ho-voir! Apologies to my thesis advisorl.) I have had a run of luck in meeting the least cohabitable people in New York, who also happen to be the people renting their uninhabitable apartments for the most unconscionable prices!

For example, on Monday, I looked at a room in Buffalo Bill's apartment. Buffalo Bill, for those of you not old enough to remember Kris Kross, was the "transsexual" villian in the 1991 Academy Award Best Picture©-winning film Silence of the Jodie Foster who kidnapped heavyset women, starved them, then skinned them to make himself a "woman" suit for evenings out/lounging about the house. But what you don't know from the movie is that Buffalo Bill lives on the Lower East Side and has a room for let in his 2-bedroom for $725/month! And he has a flatulent chow chow who appears to enjoy eating crusty entrails out of a wilted tupperware cannister. I walked into the windowless kitchen of the apartment, which was lit only by one flickering donut fluorescent fifteen feet overhead, to find the walls covered in artifacts from different cultures (kimonos, burlap shirts, military artifacts) all of which looked like strung-up torsos. Lining the top of his kitchen cabinets were about a dozen hands in different states of rigor mortis. It could be presumed that these hands were made of "plaster" and that my soft-spoken, shifty-eyed Buffalo Bill was the "artist" he claimed to be, but still I gave a quick "I have other places to see" and booked it home to cry/continue the neverending Craigslist trawl.

Yesterday, I went out to Park Slope to see a "studio" (read: living room partitioned by a black tapestry) let out by a Buddhist (read: unkempt + prayer flags) couple (read: a white guy with stubble and a white girl with a nervous, high-pitched giggle) for an absurd price (read: four digits!). The doors were duct-taped shut. There was more Hello Kitty paraphernalia than I was comfortable with. I could sense that, with March 1 fast approaching, their Buddha-blue eyes were filled with not just lovingkindness but some measure of desperation as they kept trying to pawn off what was clearly a raw deal as the catch of the century. We're never home! they said. It's so nice in the summer! they said. So close to the park! they said. Thank you, I need to go home now! I said.

Another fun figure from the last week's apartment hunt is the top-heavy twenty-something who tried to convince me that $900/month for a 6'x6' room with a neck-breaking sleeping bunk in an apartment full of uptight hobags would be my good fortune to secure. Ran out of there, too.

This weekend: New Haven, then a tiny railroad room in Bushwick (bend over and I'll show you East Williamsburg) with a dog door and garden access. We Shall See.

This is just to say

Let me just point out that if the acronym was not the name of an unpopular applicator-free feminine hygiene product, designed to introduce runaway cotton fragments to the walls of the vaginal canals of menstruating women, I would declare right now that I am the O.B. (That's Original Blogger to all of you slower of wit.) Try as you might, you'll never be me. Let me also point out that the blogging cohort of my lawyering section includes such infelicitous derelicts as a Communist-bloc homosexual who knits for pleasure, a half-French grammarian who speaks often of her predilection for dining on the flesh of newborn babies, a man who shares a name with a buttery chocolate dessert/diarrhea, a candle-headed Californian, and other assorted perverts and undesirables.

To recap (or the "takeaway," you might say):
O.B.: 1.
A.R.Y.B.H. (All the Rest of You Bitches 'n' Hos): 0.

Bring it on.

Subpoena This

Now almost half of my lawyering section is on blogspot. AWESOME.

Subpoena This

What I learned over the weekend

1) I can ski better than I thought I could.
2) I am petty and mean, and I make unreasonable demands of people I barely know.
3) Nothing says I love you like an actuary's abacus.

Life lesions lessons.

plea

This apartment is torture. The subway ride uptown is torture. The transfer at 59th Street is torture. Black scarves are torture. Boo's unconditional love is torture. The Manhattan housing market is torture. Cooking is torture. The commingled books on the homemade shelves are torture. The junk mail is torture. Cutting keys is torture. The guitars strung up by their necks are torture. My dreams are torture. Andrea Bernstein on Morning Edition is torture. A gallon jug of maple syrup we will never finish is torture. Music is torture. I wish you were here.

96th Street

Dead man on the platform, slouched in the southernmost seat of the southernmost bench. He's covered from head to ankle in a plastic sheet that billows out as my train passes by. Of all the subway cars, of all the doors, the door I am sitting across from opens up so that I have a perfect view of him and the bored cop standing next to him holding a piece of caution tape against the tile wall; I guess they have nowhere to tie that loose end of tape. I can't see any more of the dead man besides his feet, which are out of his shoes, which are filthy and which I take to indicate homelessness or extreme destitution. I stop my embarassing, self-pitying sobbing long enough to look up in horror and look around the train to see if anyone else notices, but they don't, they're in their iPods and their conversations, and the train doors slide closed, and I gape and wonder how this man met his bloodless death. What the fuck is wrong with this city?

dream

2/11/06

I'm on Stern's futon, holding a paperback fantasy novel. There is a lengthy introduction. The spine is broken and the book is falling to pieces. I call Amy Star to ask her not to erase words from the dictionary. I'm talking to her from the heart but when I look down at the book I notice that words I'm saying are exactly the words in the introduction. I say, "Even if I can't use the word 'dragon,' the dragon is still there." Laura comes into the living room - where did she come from? She's not supposed to be here. I'm so happy she's here. She puts her arm around my shoulders and we're lying on the futon together.

I'm dying. My waking life is not my dream life. I am carving myself into my constituent muscle groups but I can't draw blood. Why is this happening?

goddamn they keep coming

everyone wants everyone to look at their entrails:

the wonderful world of des

dirty dirty fingernails

More stellar additions to the blogospheric firmament.

thisisnewyork

"Wonderful news!" Laura shouts,

"The best study ever!"

Low-Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Study Finds - New York Times

The Desiccation of Wit

New blahg pals: The Desiccation of Wit Read or die.

I mean, vote or die. Something like that.

It hard

Mad TV Geisha spoof.

http://www.youtube.com/w/Memoirs-of-a-Geisha--Mad-TV?v=_AQvqsZFgDY&eurl=

bowling alley

Dearest longpoo@colon.com, my most unflaggingly scatological of fans, as promised, here is the link to photos of the world's longest poo. Her name is Myranda Didovic and apparently she has something of a monopoly on the "megadump" industry. Behold, and be inspired.

In unrelated news, I have been absent from Bananarchist because second semester started and I got better things to do, like spend all 100 minutes of Admin researching flights to Puerto Rico (though that spring break plan has been nixed in favor of Katrina-related volunteering in New Orleans), or all 110 minutes of Torts reading for the next Admin class, during which I will not pay attention because I will be researching flights to New Orleans.

Just spent the weekend in New Haven (college pals, new baby, "Chicken" "chimichangas") and inside the Audre Lorde Project's conference room (volunteer organizations, community building, post-its, restructuring, nearly uncontrollable desire to hurl self out of window to escape procedural inefficiencies, newborn desire to commit time to queer Asian women and trans folks in New York). Now I am just starting Con Law. OOPS!

My parents just called to give me the news. Some of it is appalling, and I won't post that here. But some of it was just amusing, including

(1) My dad bought a "karaoke" keyboard at Best Buy (which he consequently returned and bought for cheaper! MUCH CHEAPER! musiciansfriend.com is so CHEAP! online) which is teaching him to play classical songs. Keys to be depressed light up in red and the computer corrects him when strikes the wrong keys. "But I have a musical question," my dad says, "What do you do with your thumb?" I reply, "Your fingers are a tunnel and your thumb is the car." Dad: "I am learning that song...'Love Will Go'? From Titanic?" Me: "'My Heart Will Go On'?" We have this conversation apparently while he is taking a bath in the tub.

(2) Mom: "We always warn you about scarves but..." Me: "We're not having the conversation about how scarves behead people anymore!" Mom: "But this just happened in Taiwan, a woman wearing a scarf was working at an auto factory and it got caught in a machine and she was beheaded!" Dad: "Mandy, [in English] DON'T EVER WEAR THINGS THAT ARE TOO TIGHT ON YOUR BODY. [Chinese] Her scarf was made of nylon." Me: "I don't believe you." Dad: "It happened in three seconds, there was blood everywhere." Me: "You should design a safety scarf, you would make millions." Dad: "Good idea! Will it tear away? The fabric must tear away." Me: "But people could just wear neck gaiters." Dad: "Gaiters?" Me: "[Broken Chinese] you wear it close to your neck." Dad: "Your head could still be torn off."

Chez Hu!