Below are the 15 most recent journal entries recorded in deadkytty9's LiveJournal:

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
9:59 pm	There's no place like home... So I got a plane ticket back to Texas.  I fly back to Houston (that's where my truck is, with the parentals) on Nov. 2, then I'll drive to Austin a couple days later.  I'll stay with my excellent and oh-so-forbearing grandparents while I look for work.   I feel oddly compelled to justify the decision to move back, though no one's really been less than understanding about it.  Basically, it comes down to 1) not being able to find a permanent job/enough money to live in NYC long-term and 2) homesickness.  I miss Austin.  I miss my friends, the laid-back culture, the food, the cost and just about everything else.  I don't dislike New York (though I do dislike poverty), but I'm pretty sure by now that I like Austin better.  Ce la vie.  No regrets about moving up here; if I hadn't done it, I'd have regretted not taking the risk forever.  Now I know where I want to be, and have a bit more appreciation for home.  By some fortuitous chance of fate, I've been scheduled for my two favorite temp jobs (crazy lawyers and the clothing company that gives me free food) this last week here too, so that'll be a nice send-off. Nothing else really to report - I've been pretty sick most of the past week, so apart from sleeping and coughing, not much has been going on.  I picked up most of the ingredients for my Halloween costume: I'm going as a Butt Pirate (basically Cap'n Jack Sparrow with a giant plastic ass and a bag of Pirate's Booty popcorn), because it's cheap and funny.  With such previous costumes as 'Underpants Gnome' and 'Walk of Shame', I have to keep up my standards.  The upcoming weekend looks pretty packed with Halloween events - there's supposed to be a pumpkin carving, the Thurs dance, a blues party, a Halloween dance, Rubelad (giant city-wide party), a parade, and the opening of Jenny's roommate's cafe to go to.  In the meantime, I hermit myself away in preparation for excess socialization. Oh, and I recently read the best one-liner ever: "I hereby excuse you from appearing in my idea of you." - Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet.  I thought that one was too good not to share. Current Mood: sniffly Current Music: Man Man - Harpoon Fever (Queequeg's Playhouse) (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 18th, 2009
9:40 pm	...in which I eat copiously. Best news: gramma has been released from the hospital to a nursing home-type facility, which means she's still in a lot of pain, still can't take care of herself, but is starting to get better.  No more fear of an aspirated lung, now she just has to do lots of physical therapy while her pelvis heals.  They give her lots of pain drugs, most of which make her loopy, but I talked to her today and she seemed a lot more in control, which is awesome.  She'll definitely be in the care facility for a good bit of time, though, before she can go home. As for the rest of things, they go apace.  I didn't get as much temp work as normal last week, which is disheartening, but it gave me more time for tracking down potential jobs and putting in applications.  The hardest part isn't applying, it's finding jobs I'm even kind of qualified for.  If I was an engineer or a computer programmer or a nurse, this would be much easier.  I still have not figured out the secret to the 'how to get job experience when they won't hire you because you don't have job experience' thing.  I suspect it may lie in the slavery of unpaid internships, but I certainly can't work for free right now.  I continue to apply diligently in both NYC and Austin.  We'll see. Socially, this week's been all up and down.  Rob invited a large group of us out on Wednesday (he always picks weeknights for these things) to see Regina Spektor at Radio City.  It was really really good.  Way better than Tori (no blasphemy intended).  Then we went to dinner at a steakhouse across 6th Ave., and I ate a prodigious amount of steak (about 5 different kinds), 2(!) lobster tails (by myself!), about half a dozen oysters on the half shell (yum!), plus sweet potatoes and creamed spinach and regular potatoes and bread and probably something else I can't remember.  Plus wine and desserts, of course.  I brought home the leftovers, and have been eating steak and cake for breakfast for several days. Continuing the free food trend, the job that I ended up getting Thursday and Friday (10 hours straight, both days, which I actually appreciated because, hey, it's work) involved serving catered food to some SAG execs breakfast, lunch and midafternoon snack.  Of course, the 5 execs did not eat the entire trays of food, and the two women I was working with - Isadora and London - were that starving-model-I-can't-even-look-at-sugar type, so I got first dibs on the leftover trays, before they went to the company kitchen to be pounced upon by the hordes of hovering vultures.  I actually brought home *bags* of leftover pastry, cheese and crackers, cookies and finger sandwiches, which I have been nibbling upon delightedly since.  So basically I feel like I've gained like 10 lbs in the last 4 days, because I'm constitutionally incapable of letting free food go unscarfed.  The starving grad student in me cries "lay in blubber for the winter - it's cold out there!"  I've mostly depleted my doggie bag reservoir by now, though, so I'll try to go back on a healthier food, non-gorging diet in the upcoming week.  I've picked up a lot of cans of soup from the cruddy grocery store around the corner, because it *is* damn cold outside.  My little velour cocktail jacket is not doing a real great job keeping out the wind and rain, but I'm going to stick it out till early November without buying a thicker coat - either I'll get a job, in which case I'll have the money to purchase necessary clothing, or I won't, in which case I'll go home and can get my thick grey coat out of gramma's attic.  In the meantime, I hope to see snow sometime soon; we had a couple freezing rain days this week - which is actually colder than the New Yorkers say is normal for this time of year - but no snowflakes yet.  Been super-tired and sleeping a lot lately, I think because of the weather combined with the sleep deprivation from staying out for the fancy dinner Wednesday.  Missed the dance Thursday because I was falling asleep on the subway, so I decided to go home early, and was actually asleep by 8pm.  Then went out dancing Friday night, but could barely keep awake on my feet, even after like 10 hours sleep the night before.  I think a good chunk of the tired is just stress wearing me down, though. Going to start taking my iron pills regularly again (which I should be anyway...), in case that's part of it too. Stuff I'm reading right now: At B&N: The Hindus: An Alternative History, by Wendy Doniger (Too expensive and bulky to buy, but really fascinating. I do love history.) On the subway: The Russian Debutante's Handbook, by Gary Shteyngart (Courtesy Ryan W., who also loaned me the sequel, Absurdistan, which I've already finished and returned.  They're both kind of modern-day A Confederacy of Dunces's, but lampooning Russia, Russian Jews, and America - specifically New York - instead of New Orleans.) At home: Harry Potter #2 en Español. (Found a copy for $2 in the Village., figured I should brush up on my Spanish reading comprehension.  It's very slow going, since I haven't studied Spanish in like 8 years, but sadly I'm still better at it than I am at Arabic.) Still miss all you Austin (and assorted other places) people lots.  *Hugs* from afar. Current Music: Man Man - Werewolf (On the Hood of Yer Heartbreak) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 9th, 2009
8:50 pm	...in which I assess some goings-on and contemplate life. Yes, this post is super-long, but I'm not going to put it behind a cut cause most of it is important to me, and I haven't posted much in a while.  In approximately descending order of importance: Gramma My gramma fell last Saturday and fractured her pelvis.  This is not the first time she or my grampa has fallen. Last time she broke an arm, and it took damn near a year to heal, and this summer while I was living with them my grampa fell and cut his head up, but luckily had no other damage.  Apparently when this happened my grampa called 911, and then handed the phone to my gramma so *she* could talk to the operator since he can't really hear well on the phone, which just makes me *facepalm* when I think about it.  But yeah, they got to the hospital and doped her up on morphine, which she's allergic to, so she wasn't real lucid for the first little while.  My aunt Julie drove to Austin to be with them, but nobody called me to let me know about this until Monday evening, which is sadly very typical of my family, who like to hide medical problems from each other until they're gigantic.  I got to talk to Gramma a bit Tuesday afternoon, and she seemed more together, since they'd put her on other drugs, but still in a lot of pain.  Tuesday was also the day that the hospital decided that gramma should be discharged, despite the fact that she couldn't sit up by herself, and thus couldn't get into a car, even from a wheelchair.  Despite my aunt's harranging of the hospital administrators, gramma was sent home in an ambulance that night.  Another of my aunts, Robin, flew from New Mexico to Austin to be there so that Julie could then go home to Sugar Land, where her husband Joe was to have an appendectomy.  So gramma went home for a night, only to be readmitted Wednesday with a fever and distended stomach.  They've also found evidence from her MRI's that she's had another heart attack sometime recently.  We in the family are wondering how the hell they didn't catch this before now, since she's been in for tests quite a bit lately.  And that's all the info I've got so far; Robin or my mom are supposed to notify me if we get any more news from the docs, and if it gets too much worse then I'll fly down to be there. Finances I'm still poor.  Temping gives me just enough to scrape by day-to-day, but won't be enough once my loans start coming due in December.  It's also rather stressful, since I never know whether I'll have work each day, and whether that work will suck.  You've heard this all before.  I've been contemplating the situation (read: constantly worrying) and have decided to give it one more month of heavy application, and if I don't have a real job by mid-November, I will go back to Austin.  This is really less of a decision and more of a financial necessity.  I simply cannot live in NY without a certain income, and that income would have to be quite a bit higher here than in Texas, because of things like cost-of-living and especially taxes, which are ungodly high (like 25-33%).  My student loans are in the range of $35K, and to pay them off in 10 years, I'd have to give ~$400/month.  My original goal was 5 years at ~$680 a month, but that seems laughably steep to start out with right now.  There's just no way that I can pay even $400 a month in addition to rent here ($550?), plus food ($200-300 if I eat only at home), plus subway pass ($90) on what I'm making now (I think I made about $1200 last month from the temping, and that's cause I'm lucky and got a lot of work).  That would leave negative money for emergencies or just for fun.  All the cute thrift stores and bookstores and bars NYC has to offer are kind of useless if I'm on a starvation budget.  The online loan calculators tell me I need to be getting a take-home pay of at least $32K a year to realistically be able to pay my loans back.  In NY, because of the taxes, that translates to a salary of closer to 40-45K, which has just not been forthcoming.  So yeah, if I don't have a decent-paying job by mid-Nov., expect me back home, living in Georgetown with the grandparents (who might need someone there anyhow) to save money.  I've started applying for jobs in Austin in addition to NYC, to be prepared; please let me know if you know anyone hiring for a position I might be qualified for. NYC In General As everyone here warned me would happen, I've hit that two month depression where I'm not excited by the constant influx of new stuff anymore, and am just tired and homesick.  Setting aside finances for a minute, even culturally NYC is very difficult.  It doesn't have (or I haven't found) the culture that Austin does of friends gathering in restaurants to discuss their week; I miss Julio's dreadfully, and not just for the queso and meximarts (though there is that).  I haven't found a good substitute for things like girls' night watching Project Runway and gorging on pizza, or game day with the guys, or water volleyball, or just hanging around on somebody's porch drinking beer.  Alcohol is actually outside my price range completely here - I think I've only drank once on my own tab since arriving, and a couple times when Rob was providing the beverages. The swing dance scene here is actually better than in Austin - it's more accepting, with more social mixing of different skill levels - but it's not making up for the loss of the rest of my community.  I'm not sure if this is something that will fix itself in time, as I meet more people, or not.  I'm also not sure if I'm willing to wait to see.  I hate to fulfill everyone's doom and gloom prophesies about not liking NY, and I *certainly* don't want to pull a Lenneville and return to Austin, only to remain unsatisfied and go back to NY a second time, but I'm also unwilling to stay here for too long if I'm unhappy, just to prove a point.  And thus, I vacillate.  Again, the plan now is to stick it out one more month, then reassess in November.  The financial situation may make the question moot. Friends Here The above paragraphs have been rather dark and complainy.  But not everything in the city sucks, and I don't want to forget about the happy stuff here.  I actually had a really good time for most of last weekend, starting with the Thursday dance at Fram, when I looked up to the DJ booth to see my friend Keith spinning tunes.  I hadn't realized (since I have no money for attending events) that Blues Blaze was to go on that weekend, so a few Austin people showed up to teach and DJ and dance, and I got to spend some time with them. Saturday I went over to Ryan's place for a movie night.  We watched PCU (awesome, and Jeremy Piven is surprisingly attractive) and were halfway through The Warriors when Ryan's friend Aaron Prado (who I knew peripherally, long ago at KRTU) showed up to chat.  It was really nice to get to hang with the guys for a bit (and Prado is much easier to talk to now that he's not technically my boss). It hit around midnight, and Prado had to go DJ a 1AM-6AM jazz show at WKCR, the Columbia station, so Ryan and I headed to the Blues Blaze late night, with plans to stop by for the tail end of Prado's show and bring him coffee.  We somehow managed to get into the dance for free (halleluiah!), and while the dancers were kind of crappy and overly invasive of my personal space, had some fun.  We got to the station at like 5AM, and I had a really good time listening to good jazz and to Ryan and Prado, who are pretty expert on it.  Finally I rode the bus home, arriving at like 7AM.  Awesome night.  Sunday evening was pretty great too, since Rob held a party in his apartment for the last day of Blues Blaze.  I got to see a bunch of out-of-towners I hadn't spent time with in a while (Damon, Josh and Devona, Steven Mitchell, as well as Keith and Chris from Austin), and drink from Rob's never-ending liquor cabinet.  Emily and I were also on a roll with the witty banter, and I think I figured out a good cheap Halloween costume for this year, on par with previous years' masterpieces. All in all I've made some pretty excellent friends here - George, Will, Jenny, Rob - and am fitting in well with the swing scene, but I'm still feeling most happy when I hang out with the people I knew from Austin, or run into people visiting here.  I don't want to downplay the cool people here, because there are some.  (I absolutely *love* the fact that one of the best leads here in my opinion - Ken - has started to seek me out often at the dances because of how well we dance together.  I think he asked me to dance 5 times this Thursday, in the 2 and a half hours I was there.  That sure as *hell* doesn't happen in Austin, where I'm generally considered pretty mediocre.)  But wow do I miss my Austin people a shit-ton.  Current Mood: homesick Current Music: Iggy Pop - Isolation (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 28th, 2009
5:36 pm	I am still alive! Still alive, still in NY. Hitting that point people talk about where the city stops being so exciting and the loneliness kicks in. I miss my Austin community something dreadful. (This means you, beloved readers!) Still getting plenty of temp work and living in austerity, so I've got more money in the bank than when I got here, but not by much, and not enough to get an apt of my own yet so I could come visit Austin and pick up my cat. Still living in fear of December when the student loan paybacks kick in. Eek. Interesting things I have done in recent times: - Went to the West Indian American Day Parade. Got mildly groped by Jamaican dudes. Started a flag collection with Emily. Ate the 2nd best mac & cheese ever (the first best comes from the kitchen of Summer S.) as well as a ton of fried chicken. - Went to Central Park with Emily and George. Watched sexy rollerskating gramma (1:30) and tons of other crazy rollerskaters, who are apparently go there every day. Waved to Batman on his Batbike; Batman waved back. - Ran into some crazy gay pride/pro-Palestinian/flamenco celebration. Couldn't understand what group was throwing it, since they were only doing announcements in Spanish. - Went to the German-American Oktoberfest Party. Ate spicy sausage, saurkraut, crappy German beer. Sang along to an oompa-oompa band covering 'Margaritaville' and Neil Diamond. Got a German flag to add to our collection. - Crashed some girl's birthday party, but it was ok, because we came bearing pies. Helped make infinite potato dumplings. - Gone blues dancing twice. Each time they have had some sort of dance contest; the first one was 'solo blues', which apparently equates to 'striptease without taking off clothing, sans pole'. It was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Em and I considered entering so we could pantomime fucking a goat. We don't have much patience with people who take themselves too seriously. - Flirted with a cute med student at the most recent Thursday dance. We'll see if he comes back next week, or if I scared him off. ;) - Met up with Jenny and Genevieve for Italian food (so scrummy!) and drinking for Em's birthday. I was a lame-ass and came home early, because I'm tired from all this temping. - Hit the San Gennaro street festival in Little Italy with Em and George and Will. Ate more Italian sausage/cannoli/puff pastries/calamari/beer than I thought humanly possible. Could not find an Italian flag for sale, alas. Current Music: The Fall - The Classical (Comment on this)
Sunday, September 6th, 2009
9:29 pm	Law Firm, Fram, MoMA, Williamsburg I spent all last week working as a receptionist for a law firm, and since that was full-time, I didn't get a lot else done in the beginning of the week, but by the end I was really enjoying my time there; the people I was working with were all absolutely hilarious.  I think every person there came by my desk to gossip about everyone else, and two of the lawyers, most of the other secretaries, and several of the clients told me how much better/nicer I was than the regular girl, who was lovingly described as "that bitch" (people in New York don't seem to have ever learned any phone manners - it's bizarre).  The interpersonal dynamics of the office were just fascinating, with the Brazilian guy in the mailroom paranoid that one of the lawyers was going to put something in his drink to fuck with him, the perpetually-smug head lawyer pissing everyone else off by chain-smoking in the office (in the Empire State Building!), and the office manager being truly psychotic.  The cute lawyer (who liked to come by and flirt with me, though he was - alas - married) told me that the office manager had worked for the firm several years ago, then started taking week-long trips to South America for sexcapades with random guys she met on the internet.  Then one time she went on one of these trips and didn't come back for a year and a half.  The law office had no idea where she was and they almost lost their business cause she was in charge of payroll and apparently if they screw up their escrow fund then their licenses get removed, or something.  Finally they replaced her, but then she showed up again and the smug head lawyer let her do part-time work for them again, and their was a struggle between her and the replacement lady, and they canned the replacement and put her back as office manager again.  So yeah, fascinating. As for non-work-related life, I've been pretty social this weekend.  Em and I discovered the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck (they have a facebook page!) on Thursday, then walked to the dance at Fram, where I was finally introduced to George and Will, dancers I've known for years through Yehoodi, but had never met in real life.  Friday hujhax came to town to visit, and I tried to meet up with him at MoMA since they were having their free entry night, but we quickly got separated and I ended up just exploring (a very small) part of it by myself.  Then I headed up to Ryan's apartment to hang out.  We walked by Grant's Tomb, then grabbed beers and had a discussion comparing the relative merits of our Middle Eastern Studies programs, then watched the movie Sneakers.  Saturday I hit B&N for a short bit, then Em and I wandered around the Village for awhile.  We grabbed food at a tasty vegetarian/macrobiotic buffet, I bought some books off a street vender, and then we met up with hujhax and his friend Melinda at a neat coffeeshop with tubes that ground up the coffee in the ceiling or some such thing (very Willy Wonka-like) and I had the best chocolate-chip cookie ever created.  After that, Em and I walked around a bit on the Lower East Side, had drinks at a dive bar, then rode the L train across to Williamsburg.  We met up with her ex Dan in a quiet bar near the Bedford stop, and heard an excellent story from him of how he got propositioned by a 70-yr-old while he was working on the Obama campaign.  Then we went to Alisha and Peter's apartment for their 'we just broke up, come celebrate now that we're single' party, which was fairly awkward.  Most of the people there had been drinking heavily for quite a while, and honestly did not impress me very favorably - boring, pretentious hipsters, mostly.  We pre-drank some more at the apartment, then went to an unmarked club thing, where they had a dance party going on in the backroom.  It was pretty lame, except for the bathrooms, oddly enough, which had murals on the walls with lots of video cameras painted on and soundtracks that talked to you about surveillance, which I thought was kind of amusing.  We stayed at this club for *way* too long, and didn't even start heading back to Alisha and Peter's till like 3am, which meant I didn't get to a subway stop till 3:45, which meant that I didn't get back to Astoria till like 5am, at which point I was almost gibbering with fatigue.  Today I've mostly spent sleeping, decompressing alone and reading.  Tomorrow's Labor Day, so I don't know if there'll be any temp work around, but I've got 4 hours lined up for Tuesday afternoon, and I'll give the agencies a call to see if they can scrounge up anything for me later in the week.  What I really hope is that that law firm will succeed in pushing their current receptionist out the door (there were many hints that this was in the works) and feel like hiring me for real in the near future.  That kind of thing is certainly not a position that I'd like to stay in for very long, but it'd be infinitely better than temping while I continue to look for better work.  Current Mood: contemplative Current Music: Band of Horses - The Funeral (Comment on this)
Monday, August 31st, 2009
10:29 pm	District 9, Live Music & Chinatown I stayed in bed most of Friday and a good part of Saturday, so my feet are feeling much better. I won't be taking any more standing-for-long-period jobs unless they allow tennis shoes, and I'm going to look for shoes with better support/insoles too. The big scare of the weekend was hearing from Lasso that he lost my cat, Billie, for a couple days.  However, she returned for food on Sunday, thank god, so that's a huge relief.  It makes me really *really* want to get a job and my own place, so that I can come retrieve her soon.  Will continue to work on that. Saw District 9 with Emily on Friday.  It was much better than I expected.  Good strong sci-fi plot and they didn't overdo the apartheid allegory in my opinion.  Em liked it a bunch too. Saturday Em and I went out walking in search of interesting things to do, and ran into awesome live music pretty much everywhere.  Started out listening to a high school jazz group in Union Sq. Park, then wandered to Washington Sq. Park to catch a much better jazz trio (really good saxophone player who got really into it, in front of the fountain that they shot the theme to Friends by).  We found $4 margaritas which were actually decent at a place called Wicked Willy's, then got peach bellini girly drinks in a bar that had a swing band with a female vocalist.  And after that band finished, a classical duo came up and played something cute that made me think of fairies on violin and flute.  We grabbed pizza next, since I still hadn't tried a real NY slice, then headed back towards cheap margaritas, where we discovered an awesomely fun cover band and made fools of ourselves dancing.  Then as we were heading back towards the subway, we ran into an a capella jam circle back in Wash. Sq. Park, which broke up at midnight when it started pouring rain.   Sunday I spent in the Barnes&Noble and sleeping in, then met Em's friend Jenny and her friend Josh in Chinatown.  We got bubble tea, took pictures riding the stone lions outside a bank, got fish maw soup (oddly chewy) at a random restaurant, and haggled and bought small trinkets from the market.   Today I was a receptionist for a snitty law firm (seriously, every single person there was snitty), a position which should continue all week, and it was chilly outside.  In August.  I may need to find a new thick winter coat faster than I had imagined, since I'm already wearing my thin jacket around now.  I love the brisk air and the smell of fall coming, though. Current Music: Rafael - Dinga Dinga Dee (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 27th, 2009
9:37 pm	Ow Well, I seem to have fucked up my feet pretty badly by standing on concrete for 13 hours today at my temp job. I think I have plantar fasciitis, which I just exacerbated a fuckton.  The bottoms of my heels hurt really really bad (I already had tendencies in this direction), and my Achilles tendons are all tight and sore.  They want me to work again Fri-Sun at the same job; this is not going to happen.  I barely managed to walk home, crying from pain.  I've had my feet up for a couple hours now, and they're still throbbing. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
11:24 pm	Temping and Speakeasy Yesterday I did absolutely nothing besides work as a receptionist (job description: answer phones, smile vacuously, say a chipper "good morning" 8 bajillion times), and read Emily's copy of the New Yorker (really good article on NYC Mayor Bloomberg).  I worked for the same company, but for fewer hours, today, and it was much better. I still had the receptionist boringness, but I also got paid to sit in a corner and read a book for an hour, and they had free fruit and danishes.  I was a poor college student long enough that I still feel the urge to stuff myself silly when the words "free" or "buffet" are written anywhere in the same zip code as food.  Don't have anything lined up for the rest of this week yet, but all next week I'm going to be working for some law firm in the Empire State Building.  I imagine it'll be much less fun once I'm there for work, rather than to see the view. After work today, I went to the Barnes & Noble and read an intro to Derrida and Philip K. Dick's Ubik, then met Emily at a real live speakeasy.  I can't tell you anything about where it is or who runs it, but you'd never find it if you weren't looking.  Em and I had to be invited and then put on a guest list, and you had to have a password at the door.  And the place was absolutely beautiful - one of the nicest, fanciest venues I've ever seen (though still way too small for the number of people dancing, as everywhere in NYC seems to be).  I danced with a whole bunch of guys, but then started to get a little weary of constant new people and small talk, so I headed home after a few hours, and I am quite tuckered out now.  If only forcing myself into the extrovert mold wasn't so very draining... Current Music: Tin Pan - When I Get Low, I Get High (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 23rd, 2009
7:50 pm	Hmm, I seem to be really bad at updating this thing. So I've not been so good at updating as I meant to when I got here. Mostly this has been because I'm super-busy and never home. I get to the room late at night and immediately fall asleep instead of playing online most nights.  This is generally a good thing. I've found pretty regular temp work (I actually had 9 days straight of it, which grew wearying), so that's a bit of a relief, though still no real permanent job, but I'm still sending out resumes, so hopefully someone'll bite soon. The temp agencies tell me that things are starting to pick up a little bit, which is good news. So far I've been a receptionist, worked at the info/registration desk at the New York International Gift Fair, and stuffed bags of L'Oreal products to send to famous hairstylists. Tomorrow I'm a receptionist again.   I've been pretty busy socially too. Em's friend Rob is exceptionally rich, and took me and Em to see Tori Amos at Radio City Music Hall, and then the next night treated a large group of people to a 6 course expensive dinner, plus a different expensive wine with each course. I ate so much I wanted to die. There were 3(!) different types of foie gras, which, btw, is so awesome.  I've also hung out with Ryan and Shelley at their apartment near Columbia, and gone dancing a couple of times (Swing 46 and Fram). Gotta get used to dancing in hot, terribly crowded conditions. Spent a fair amount of time with Mike and Em S. as well. I'm also spending quite a bit of time most days sitting and reading in the Barnes & Noble, because, well, it's free and air conditioned and I can amuse myself with books for forever. Can't wait till I get my first paycheck from the temp agencies, though, cause then I can get my own library card (they require proof of residency). I feel like I'm adjusting pretty well to NYC, though of course I miss my friends back in Austin so very much. I sent out a bunch of postcards, and plan to write pretty regularly, since I'm so terrible at using phones. I will be very happy when I am financially stable, so that I can get my own room, however; seeing Ryan & Shelley's nicely decorated, clean place makes me long to nest in my own space. Living with Em is rather like camping out, except there's a large Turkish man who has to go through our room to get to his, and I don't remember anything like that from Girl Scout camp. Much love to you all, and I'll try to be better about writing here more often. - J (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 9th, 2009
9:37 pm	Barnes & Noble has 4 floors here, and I want to live in it. Alas, I discovered that the NY libraries are almost all closed on Sunday, so I could not go to the big one on 42nd. However, I also discovered by searching around online that I couldn't have gotten a library card anyway without proof of residence in NYC, which I don't have, obviously. I consoled myself by having an authentic NY bagel (I wanted lox on it, but that would have been kind of expensive), and then going to Barnes & Noble (thanks Mike!) and picking up Italo Calvino's The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount and Philip K. Dick's Ubik, both of which look awesome. My plan after that was to go walk around in Central Park, but Em called and wanted to get together for food, so I killed an hour reading the first half of Adolfo Bioy Casares' The Invention of Morel and then accidentally ran into Lenneville in the street while going to meet Emily. We hung around Union Square Park for a bit to watch hot guys play a pickup game of soccer, then got gigantic salads at Whole Foods, then met up with Emily S. at a coffeeshop. Twas a relaxing day, compared to the last few, which is nice, since tomorrow I start the mad temp job search, and will try to meet up with kicue  while she's in town for a theater conference. Current Mood: happy (1 Comment |Comment on this)
1:51 am	Oh, so *that's* what saag paneer is supposed to taste like... I'm really tired, so this'll be a short post. Em and I walked around some more today, starting in the Lower East Side (so cute!), and then moving towards the NYU area. We hit up a farmer's market for free samples and then got amazing Indian food - makhan dal and saag paneer that was unlike any in Austin, and oh so good. And they gave us free mango ice cream. I saw Lenneville today too, since he came out to the dance that I went to at Swing 46th, with a pretty good band called the Boilermakers. Dancing here is *way* crowded and kind of expensive, but the people were quite nice. I also got to go off the leash for a bit, since Emily didn't come out dancing - I figured out the subway system enough to get myself across Manhattan, and then to get back home to Astoria alone, for which I feel quite proud. I'm still in that stage where everything in New York is super-exciting; expect me to be blase next week or so. ;) Tomorrow, my goal is to find the library with the stone lions, and possibly to ride one. Current Mood: cheerful (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, August 7th, 2009
10:32 pm	In NYC, alive and well and tired. Typed an entire post, then the internet connection died and ate it.  Suffice it to say, after delicious Italian food courtesy of msluyter and the last of my Austin goodbyes at the dance, I got 2 hrs sleep and went to the airport.  Long flights with toddlers screaming and layovers, one bus ride, then I found Em's place and helped her move into a new (bigger) room, which is awesome. Then we explored the immediate neighborhood in Astoria for a bit, took the subway to Manhattan and ate cheap tasty dumplings in Chinatown, walked through the Lower East Side to Union Square Park, saw some live music in the park, visited her friend Rob's apartment (23 floor right next to the park, and costs more than 3x more per month than I've ever made in a year, went to the Strand bookstore and then came home. I picked up some fresh fruit for breakfast from a local mart, as I figure since I'm in such a massive transition anyway, I might as well fix my diet and exercise at the same time. Tomorrow I think there's a dance we're going to track down, and Monday I'll start flooding the temp agencies and whatnot with my resume so I can find work soon.  Hopefully that goes well. I miss all you Austinites already.  Send me your snail mail addresses if you want to get letters/postcards!  More later. Current Mood: tired (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 6th, 2009
12:04 am	I love all my Austin friends I just went to my last Julio's dinner before my move, and Brit crying got me crying too. I got to spend time with Brit, Colin, Matt, Walker, Nikola, Pags and Zoran, as well as Stella and Julio, and it was great, but it's really hitting me now how soon I'm moving. No more Julio's nights with my girls, or game nights with my guys, no more Barton Springs and philosophy night and Sunday brunch and Thursday Fed dances and monthly dinners with Jen and clubbing with everyone.  This is by far the hardest move I've ever done; going to college was easy peasy since I wanted to leave Sugar Land so badly, and the move up to Austin was simple too, since most of my friends had already preceded me.  Even the Middle East trip was pretty ok since I knew going into it that it was only going to be a couple of months, but this one is *hard*. I'm going to miss everyone here so much.   I'll be at the dance tomorrow, and I think I'm going to get to have dinner with Mike beforehand.  I have a difficult time expressing too much emotion in public (with notable exceptions, thanks guys), but I'm all nervous and sad and upset and scared and it's starting to show around the edges.  Many hugs and much love to you all. Current Music: Aztec Camera - Somewhere In My Heart (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
2:42 pm	News! Yay! My move date is finally set: I will leave Austin for NYC on Friday August 7th. This means that if you want to hang out with me before I go, you should let me know quite soon! I'm so happy to finally have a scheduled day to go; the last couple months of first trying to find a temporary home for my kitty and then trying to figure out when I could show up without totally disrupting Emily's life have been very draining. I feel like I keep seeing people for the 'last' time, getting all sappy about it, and then not actually following through on leaving. But my limbo should be done with now, and I can move on to the next stage of life at last. The thought of arriving in New York and having to acclimate and sustain myself financially is still really really scary, but at least it's a different obstacle to face. I have been incredibly glad to spend time with everyone this summer - I've had like 3 'final' dinners with zenithblue , I've been working with Walker on editing one of Alisha's interminable term papers, I went to OJ's and racingpenguins ' goodbye parties (as well as my own), and I've spent good time with msluyter , britbrizat , Becky, and a ton of other people who are special to me. I gotta stop there, cause I'll get mopey again - I'd prefer to be excited about getting to hang out with all the cool New York people (the 2 Emily's, Lenneville, Ryan and Shelley, la_directora, Alisha when she returns) very soon now! Also, I'm going to try to start posting regularly in this journal again and leaving it un-friendslocked like I did last summer, so that my family and friends here can keep up with my move. So, you know, please don't write anything in the comments that you wouldn't be comfortable saying to my Gramma in person. Thanks ;) Current Mood: excited, terrified, relieved Current Music: Marc Almond - Tears Run Rings (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 14th, 2006
4:29 pm	Yep, it's my journal. Unfortunately for you, it's friends-only. Please comment to be added. (Comment on this)