get realtors

Jackie and I are in the process of looking for a new place to live. Maybe it's the lack of light. Maybe it's Typhoid Mary and his chronic cough. Maybe it's the heavily sedated woman with the shopping cart and three inches of grey root sprouting from her otherwise four-toned brown hair who spends the better part of every day banging her cart down the stairs one step at a time. Two summers ago, this same woman yelled at Jackie from her window for smoking out the entire building when we tried to bbq in the "courtyard." Her Librium prescription must have lapsed because normally all of her energy is channeled into breaking the world record for making as much noise as one can with a shopping cart while moving so slowly most people might suspect you of being dead. A little known category for Guiness, but one in which she has far and away excelled.

So we made the fatal mistake of checking out a couple of real estate websites for apartments. The website search is always a crap shoot, especially in New York City, since realtors are schooled in a code of deception that I thought was solely reserved for communications during wartime. But then, I guess the search for a place to live in NYC is a little like going to war. In the website photos, the realtors all wear a kind of standard issue uniform that I suspect they purchased at the Cold War Vintage Shop and smile out at you with a look that positively screams "I am totally going to screw you over." Anyone who's ever had to search for an apartment in NYC knows some of the buzz words: "charming" equals small, "cozy" means small and dark, "oversized windows" means bigger than the hole in the wall you expected but not necessarily one that looks out on anything more than a brick wall. Today we discovered a new trick in the realtor magic bag: taking digital photos and stretching them to fill the small space on the site. Instantly, a room that was 5' x 7' suddenly looks like a ballroom. For awhile we were sucked in. "Ohh, look at this HUGE living room!" Jackie said to me about one place. I marvelled at the expansive kitchen. It wasn't until we clicked on a photo of the bathroom and noticed that the toilet looked like a flying saucer that we realized what was going on.

The other thing that gets me is how anyone can charge the kind of exorbitant rent that is standard in NYC. $2200 for a studio with a "kitchen" that honest to god looks EXACTLY like the one I had in my Barbie Dream House 25 years ago? If I had a better nose for the market, I would have hung onto the Dream House and sublet it. Jackie and I could have moved into the Dream RV and gotten our bbq-on with The Family Ken wherever and whenever we chose. No shopping carts or coughing allowed.

there's got to be a better way

I have never claimed to be a tree hugger. Sure I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where the average age of most first time parents is 45. And ok, my parents liked folk music and my mother still wears far too much patchouli oil. And yes, I did go through a tie-dyed period in 8th grade during which I believe I also wore a sizeable peace sign earring (Just one. It was the `80s after all.). Maybe it was all of the recent news reports about how, thanks to global warming,the Arctic Circle is getting so hot some polar bears were actually spotted sweating, I decided it was time to do something about it. I already recycle (Disclaimer: except for when it's really late and/or I've had too much to drink and that plastic container of cookie dough that I'm feverishly eating goes right in the trash can. Sorry.). When I heard about Zipcar, a car sharing program (a concept made popular in Europe and everyone knows the Europeans are totally down with the environment, cigarette smoking be-damned), I decided "Ok, I'll share a car with lots of people I don't know. I'm down with the enviroment!" In truth, the decision to sign up was also motivated by the fact that I'm too cheap to pay for insurance and, oh right, a car. I'm going to skip ahead and just say that while I appreciate the idea behind Zipcar, I do not appreciate the inordinate amount of money that it costs to participate. Yes, your gas and tolls are paid for. But you're lucky if a car is ever available when you need one and you're almost always guaranteed to pay at least $100 for the day. And don't even get me started on the fact that every car you drive has ZIPCAR and the slogan "WHEELS WHEN YOU NEED THEM" emblazoned on the side AND back of your vehicle. In other words, you get to pay a lot to drive around in a slightly less obtrusive Oscar Meyer weiner-mobile. If I wanted to advertise for a company, I'd wear a t-shirt. Honestly, you cannot be cool riding around in something with a logo on it, as made evident to me the day that I spotted some hipsters on the street pointing to my car and laughing. And then there's this little thing that happened to me yesterday that might have turned me off the whole thing for good. I popped open the trunk and there was a pair of dirty jeans. Since I was still wearing my pants, I knew these couldn't be mine. While in any other situation, seeing someone's pants in the back of your car might be kind of endearing - a memory of a past backseat fling - I knew that I hadn't "flung" in the back of this car and that whoever did was a) someone I did not know and b) had touched the steering wheel perhaps after said backseat fling. 24 hours later and I am still washing my hands.

hangin' with The Dysfuncs

The past two days have been ridiculous. My sister is back in the hospital and I've been avoiding the hole that Jackie and I call our apartment like the plague. It's dark, it's cold, it makes you want to watch tv all day, eat entire cheesecakes and then stick your head in the oven. I started to feel like being productive meant putting on my sweatsuit (versus wearing just my underwear) and making the bed (versus returning to it). Since I used to work 20 hours a day, I never realized that the only light the apartment sees during the day is in the bathroom, meaning my option for not losing my mind is hanging out in the john. A note on eating meals, doing work, etc. in the can: I don't know if it was the white tile or the fact that my toilet was two feet from my breakfast that made me feel like I was in prison, but some primitive "do not eat/use a laptop where you poop" instinct eventually kicked in and I realized I could no longer dine by the crapper. Also, I got tired of people calling and asking me about the echo chamber. One friend laughed and asked if I was peeing while talking to her and I didn't have the heart to tell her that, while I was in fact sitting on the toilet (seat down), I was actually enjoying a snack and checking my email.

So I returned to the doom and gloom of the rest of the dungeon/apartment and the S.A.D. inducing dim blue light that pools in the so-called courtyard that our apartment faces. By the way, this courtyard also serves as a fantastic echo chamber (apparently we've got a lot of them where we live) for the vocalizations of the lunatics in the rest of our building. One guy, we'll call him Typhoid Mary, spends approximately 22 hours a day coughing directly out the window. And this is not just any cough. It's a hacking, gagging, choking thing that I think might be done to check and see if anyone cares enough to shout "are you ok?" or "fuck you!" in response. I have shouted the latter and things quieted down for about an hour. The best hour of my otherwise dimly lit day.

There's also the person who finds one song a day and plays it over and over and over again. One day it was "Daniel" by Elton John. Another day it was "We Will Rock You." And, god help me, there was the day this person decided to play an album continuously (a merciful break from the continuous single play) and chose Bon Jovi's "Slippery When Wet." I call this the "Waco" album because I'm pretty sure the Branch Davidians burned up the compound after "Dead or Alive" was on it's third loop.

So I packed up my stuff and came home to mom and dad for a few days of light therapy. Amazingly, I've gotten tons done in the few days I've been here, basking in the sunlight like Ham and Franz (the heavy-set [Ham] and incontinent [Franz] family cats). Indeed, the price of light is hangin' with The Dysfuncs as my family has dubbed itself. But even with the fact that my anorexic sister has somehow fallen off the wagon AGAIN and that my family watches an absolutely inordinate quantity of TV shows(all TiVo'ed and viewed on their Buick sized television nightly), it's better than the dark lunatic asylum I call home back in Brooklyn. Sure, everyone's crazy here - crazier maybe than Typhoid Mary or One-Song - but there's more light and I actually LIKE my family which is more than I can say about my neighbors.

an OCD kind of day

I knew it from the moment I woke up this morning and put on my brand new pink sweatsuit that I would spend the better part of this otherwise fine Wednesday obsessing about stupid sh*t. Jackie calls it "looping." I call it being trapped in my own personal hell.

FDA
Department of Health
Water Activity
Commercial Kitchens

The list goes on...

All I have to say is I will never look at a box of cookies on a shelf and take them for granted any longer.

The End of Estrada

As an unemployed bum struggling to make cookies for a living, I realize I have an incredibly shaky leg to stand on when it comes to commenting on anyone just trying to make a buck. I'm not sure this rule applies to blown out former TV stars. I'm thinking in particular of one Erik Estrada. In his heyday, Estrada played a C.h.i.P, a choice I'm sure he believed would eventually lead to an Oscar in the first film version of a Chekov tragedy. When The Academy didn't come calling, Estrada wiled away the years getting fat and having plastic surgery. A couple of years ago, I tried to contact him for an interview for a doc I was doing for VH1 called "When Disco Ruled the World." The guy insisted on some amount of money so obscene in it's quantity, I've actually blocked it out. I can't even remember if we did interview him I was so outraged by his demands. This from the guy who would eventually credit The Surreal Life with reviving his career.

This morning, I turned the TV on as I always do for background noise while I'm baking and I heard Ponch's voice. I ran in from the kitchen to discover Estrada on one of those washed out, cheap-ass looking commercials hocking real estate in Tennessee. Or rather, hocking pre-fab houses in a place called Tellico Village. Apparently, this place is in such low demand they'll actually pay to fly you out there to check it out. I sat mesmerized, listening to Estrada stumble through his lines about how Tennessee is growing by leaps and bounds every year. In 2025, it will have grown 33%, according to our man. I don't know about you, but if I need statistics on population growth, Erik Estrada is not the guy I think of first. After bumbling through more lines he didn't understand (the only line this guy knows is "show me the money"), the commercial ended and I retired back to the kitchen. Not ten minutes later, but I heard his voice again and this time he was talking about Arkansas. Arkansas?, I thought. Tennessee, maybe, but Arkansas? I'm not sure Ponch would survive a day in that State. I dropped my tray and ran back into the living room. Sure enough, there he was again except this time he was talking about Bubba's hometown and even he couldn't seem to believe it. I'm still waiting for his pitch on Alabama.

the day after

This entry will be brief because my hands have grown too fat from yesterday's food blowout to type. I feel like The Nutty Professor.

Every year, my mother, bless her heart, makes Easter baskets overflowing with candy and weird incidentals (one year it was Smurfs, another it was shower caps and a tooth flosser). Every year I tell myself I will exercise self-control. And every year, I throw caution to the wind and eat everything in sight. Not a few times have I wound up with that fake plastic grass caught in my teeth from mindless hand over fist shoveling. I start out slow: a couple of jelly beans, a mini Cadbury egg. And then I lose my mind and devour my entire basket in a sitting. I've offered everything I own to my sisters and parents for just a small taste of anything they have. "But you don't even LIKE peanut butter cups!" I've whined. "So you paid to send me to college, but you're not willing to give up one of your Peeps?!" I've shouted. Jackie, like the good support coach that she is, normally keeps me from getting to this point, but she's all the way across the country so I was free to lose my shit. It wasn't pretty.

Here's hoping all of you can still fit into your jeans. I can't.

freak magnet

After a fine, fine night of sushi dining, my friend Joey and I decided to go wile away the hours and wait for him to get a cluster headache from the avocado he knew he wasn't supposed to eat in Tompkins Square Park. There was a time, not that long ago, when parking ass on a bench in TSP after dark was a sure sign your life didn't mean all that much to you and you were willing to get shiffed all for the chance to buy crack and prostitute yourself. Now, it's like something out of an Audrey Hepburn movie. It's almost irritating how many "waste receptacles" there are for the empty cups of iced lattes or the poop bags for the neighborhood pocketbook dogs. We completely expected to hear accordion music playing from somewhere in the distance and paused to soak in this latest bout of gentrification when the stillness of the night was broken by a dude on a bike bouncing up and down. Helmet on his head, baseball cards in his spokes, the guy would freeze his bike in place and stay like that until he tipped over. Over and over again he'd bounce and freeze. Bounce and freeze. Theoretically this should have been cool. I have no skill on any vehicle, let alone one with two wheels, so this should have been interesting. Instead, it was annoying. I imagined this guy's roommate kicking him out for bouncing around 1 room of their 2 room overpriced 1st Avenue "Jr. 2 bedroom." Now we were forced to contend with him and I found myself longing for the equally obtrusive but significantly less athletic crack addicts of yore. We headed to the F train.

Now, the 2nd Avenue F train stop is always a trip. Maybe it's the overpowering stench of urine that has some kind of hallucenogenic effect. Maybe it's the fact that virtually no one who calls that station home feels the need to wear shoes. This is not to say they don't have shoes. That would be cruel. They just don't wear them. And when you combine this fact with the urine and the oppressive desert-like heat, you've got a recipe for a smell that nothing living should ever smell like. This is an unparalleled stink that I would expect from Hell or Elizabeth, New Jersey. Anyway, it's rank. And if you've been unfortunate enough to also eat at any one of the local Indian dining establishments, is enough to make you sicker than you've ever been in your life. But I digress.

So Joey and I were standing on the platform, waiting for Godot (an apt nickname for the F train), when a pasty white gentleman in his early 30s wearing jeans, a polo and some very sensible looking black sneakers approached us. We gripped the pillar beside us because, seriously, you never know who might haul off and shove you on the tracks (not that there would be any risk of being hit by a train since it never comes). We made eye contact. "Did you guys catch South Park last night?" Pasty asked. "No, no we didn't" we responded. "It was pretty incendiary" Pasty said. "I'm just trying to get the word on the street." Joey and I looked at each other. We did not look at Pasty. Was it the urine stench that conjured this sad messenger? Was this code for something else? By the time we looked back at him he had gone off to ask someone else this very important probing question except now it took on even more weight: "It was EXCEPTIONALLY incendiary" Pasty said to a meek looking man in glasses who shot glances in our direction. We knew we could not help him for we could not help ourselves.

The moral: No matter how many trash cans or hipsters you put in Alphabet City, the lunacy remains the same.

Downward Dawg

As part of my hare-brained plan to become some kind of holistic guru for allergic and out-of-shape nerds everywhere, I've decided to learn to teach yoga, Svaroopa Yoga. This is not Power Yoga or Hot Yoga or anything that involves 110 degree rooms, headstands, back bends or, most importantly, "yoga pants." No, this is the yoga of folks like Fran Warner, my mother, and, as such, it involves a whole lot of laying down, cozy blankets for propping your legs on and a lot of meditation (read: napping). According to my mom, she hasn't been able to feel her feet since 1989 (when bunion surgery went horribly wrong and she wound up with a big toe that honest to god looks like it's giving the thumbs up), and now, with the help of Svaroopa, she's no longer careening down the street like a Weebil. So while I've never been much of a yoga person, I figure anything that can get my mother moving is probably a gold mine waiting to be discovered. And what a great backup plan for if and when my hypoallergenic cookies go bust! Next thing you know I'll be wearing sandals in winter. I've become a caricature of myself.