My interpretation.

Good job MIKA. On my way to work this morning you crawled into my earholes and looked in my brain and sang me a song about what you saw there. And it was called "My Interpretation". A song I've heard many times before but that fits just perfectly now.

You talk about life
And talk about death
And everything in between
Like it's nothing
And the words are easy.

You talk about me
And talk about you
And everything I do
Like it's something
That needs repeating.

I don't need an alibi
Or for you to realize
The things we left unsaid
Are only taking space up in our heads.

Make it my fault,
Win the game,
Point the finger,
Place the blame,
And curse me up and down
It doesn't matter now.

'Cause I don't care
If I never talk to you again.
This is not about emotion --
I don't need a reason
Not to care what you say
Or what happened in the end.
This is my interpretation
And it don't --
It don't make sense.

The first two weeks turn into ten
I hold my breath and wonder when it'll happen.
Does it really matter?

If half of what you said is true
And half of what I didn't do could be different,
Would it make it better?

If we forget the things we know,
Would we have somewhere to go?
The only way is down.
I can see that now.

'Cause I don't care
If I never talk to you again.
This is not about emotion --
I don't need a reason
Not to care what you say
Or what happened in the end.
This is my interpretation
And it don't --
It don't make sense.

It's really not such a sacrifice...

If I never talk to you again.
This is not about emotion --
I don't need a reason
Not to care what you say
Or what happened in the end.
This is my interpretation
And it don't --
It don't make sense.

And it don't have to make no sense to you at all
Cause it's my interpretation.

Odd irritations.

I really don't mind adults. Honestly. On the whole there are many other groups of people that I dislike more. Teenagers. Typical drama kids. People from New Jersey. Etcetera.

Let me stop for a moment and address the fact that I am, in theory, an adult. Okay, yes. I'm twenty-one. But...shut up. I'm talking about adult adults. Liiiike...let's say thirty-five to fifty-five is my age-range for the purposes of this entry. That age group represents to me this sort of distant, uninvolved group of people going about their lives with pretty much no input or disturbances from me. They have full-time jobs, they have health insurance, maybe they have children. They're perhaps the same age or a little younger than my and my friends' parents, or my professors at school, but, having just moved forward into this large and terrible world known as adulthood, myself, it's a group with which I was anticipating low interactions.

Enter Natalya. Natalya is the newest roommate in this massive sublet grundlefuck that I've become a part of. I use that word because, currently, no original member of the apartment lives here. Now it's just four ignorant subletters who don't know where the garbage goes, can't fit all our food in the overpacked refrigerator, and, because we haven't yet found a ladder, are unable to change the three overhead lights that have now gone out. But we're doing the best we can. Except Specimen Three. He is NOT doing the best he can. I know this because the sink is still full of dishes and my soul is still full of resentment.

But anyway. Natalya is Allyson's sublet, from home, I guess, and she's eighteen. Which I didn't even give a second thought when Allyson told me, except that she goes, "Don't freak out, but she's eighteen. But she's one of those old eighteen year olds. She totally doesn't seem eighteen! It should be totally fine. Don't even worry about it."

Hmmmm...

You should all know that sentences beginning with "Don't freak out, BUT..." are not sentences that should be directed at me. This is because I am an insane person. Not only am I perfectly capable of freaking out on my own, but I will in fact do it commonly even when it's entirely uncalled for. So when I'm told as a preemptive measure NOT to freak out, I become instantly suspicious. And...in essence...freak out. And there's logic behind this, too. If you're telling me NOT to do something, it obviously means that in some place in your mind you're worried that I might do it. Which theoretically makes my reaction justified. Hence the suspicion. (Also I'm crazy.) ANYWAY. I hear these words and am automatically suspicious of this totally-not-eighteen-seeming-eighteen year old about to come into my life.

So I meet her in passing one time last week when she was stopping in to pick up some stuff -- I guess she's been staying with her boyfriend for awhile because it's convenient, and didn't officially move in here until last night -- and she seems very nice, totally normal. Anyway, I'm sitting on the couch around eleven last night with Mark and Joel, who were over, and there's a commotion at the bottom of the stairs, and up clatter this girl and her mom. And I say hello to her, and her mom emerges from the stairwell behind her and surveys the room and introduces herself. I don't remember her name -- I'll call her Venya, I don't know why -- but I do remember that after I introduced myself she looked pointedly at Joel and Mark and said...and you all...live...here? And then after I explained who they were, she looked pointedly at our wineglasses instead. Because, yes, I can't wait 'til you turn your back and I can begin corrupting your daughter with Trader Joe's three buck chuck.

So far this is normalish behavior...she was getting her daughter moved in, wanted to see who we were, etcetera. The only thing odd about it was that it was a little late or whatever. So at this point Venya decides she wants to take a shower. Ooookay, fine with me. So she comes into the living room and says, "Are there any extra towels? My daughter only has one and I don't want to use it." Are there extra towels? I don't know? I mean I'd assume not...this isn't a guest house. Poor twenty-somethings live here. And they don't even LIVE here right now. I live here. And you're not getting my towel.

So I told her, "I'm sorry, no, I don't think so."
"No one has any extra towels...?"
"No...I'm sorry...I don't even live here. I'm subletting, too."
"Oh. Okay..." (Insert really doubtful look and an embarrassed wince. Embarrassment for ME, not for herself.)

Woman, if you think I'm about to walk in my room and hand you a towel that I use not only on my body but also to wipe up minor spills on my floor between washings, you have got another think coming.

I'm sorry, adult lady! We don't have a linen closet! We hardly even have a closet! A fact that I didn't feel bad about until you came adulting around here and scowling at the stains on the carpet. Stains I did not even make but suddenly feel obliged to apologize for!

So obviously, something about this woman being in the house really put me on edge and I don't know why. I mean, yeah, I guess I do know why. Because the life that we have here is one of common agreement -- this is just temporary. We stay out of each others' way, we don't have, like, sitdown dinner parties or a guest bedroom. Each of us has exactly what we need, and sometimes not even that. Forget about extra towels, m'lady: you're lucky we even have toilet paper.

And for some reason that I've not yet figured out, she didn't even LEAVE after her shower. She slept in that room somewhere. With her really-mature-for-eighteen daughter. And then this morning they had a nice mother-daughter chat at 8:00am in the living room separated from my bedroom by five feet and some flimsy French doors. Which of course woke me up, but I was able to lie in wait until they left. Thinking that she was gone for good.

BUT NO. She came BACK again tonight! And took another shower -- god knows what towels she used, but she didn't ask for mine -- and the two of them are now secreted back in that room again for the second night in a row! That's weird, right?

Oh! And before she disappears tonight, she goes to the shared pantry -- we each have a shelf -- and goes, "I guess there's not much food in the house." WELL NO. There wouldn't be, would there. Because food costs money...we don't have, like, extra heaps of fresh fruit and vegetables and big sides of fresh meat lying around. It was like she was getting ready to whip up a supper for herself and her daughter, and she was surprised that we didn't have the ingredients. Not many casseroles call for Easy Mac and peanut butter. (A fact I'm sure someone is hard at work on.)

It just really irked me that she was going through our things, judging our lifestyle. I felt like all of a sudden I had to answer to somebody -- explain why I had friends over, what I was watching, why I was having a glass of wine.

And the weird thing is, these probably weren't even things she was thinking -- I mean, she was definitely judging the living conditions, that much was obvious -- but I don't know this woman, what do I care? I shouldn't. It was just my weirdo reaction to having a foreign adult in my living space. A space that's partly appealing just because of how un-adult it is. If I don't have work, sometimes I hand around all day in my pajamas, yeah. And I'm re-reading Harry Potter, YEAH, and sometimes I leave my clothes on the floor of my room, YEAHHHHH.

Part of me wickedly hopes the toilet paper runs out, because I'm the one who's been refilling it and I'd love to see her reaction. That's from the same wicked part that wants her to come across a cockroach as well. Put things in a little perspective.

What an odd reaction to a perfectly innocuous woman.

Top chef.

I do not cook.

Wait. Let me correct that statement. I know how to cook eggs -- I cook a mean scrambled egg -- and I know how to make a sandwich. Beyond that, it was always easier just to watch my mom cook and stay out of the way. Because she is an absurdly good cook. I will use the word "absurdly" with no guilt, because that's what she is. And what's incredible about her gift is that it doesn't involve insane checking of recipes like some peoples'. It's all about pinches and hints and dollops and sprinkles.

She just has INSTINCTS. Cooking instincts. It's not really fair, ultimately. You can't learn it, they can't teach it; you just have it. And she just has it. And when someone just HAS something, it's not wise to spend your time trying to duplicate that. You notice it, you accept it, and you sit back on your well-upholstered chair and you consume their gift. You don't waste time trying to tailor your own gift. You. Eat. Her. Gift.

So fast forward to now. I can cook nothing. I've never attempted. What was the point? She could make it better. And I wouldn't want to cook in front of her anyway for fear of looking stupid. (Which I am, when it comes to cooking, let's be fair. I'm Captain Stupid.)

SO. My friend Mark and I go to the store yesterday and begin shopping for a night of cooking at my apartment. This should have seemed like an ill-formed idea, since neither of us could cook, but instead it felt like an adventure, and we were both very excited. So we purchased whole wheat penne, zucchini, an onion, a thingy of garlic (what do you call it? A clove? But isn't that just one?), spicy jalapeno chicken sausage, and marinara sauce with whole plum tomatoes in it.

Only to come home and discover that Specimen 3 -- friendly yet messy gay boy -- is comandeering the kitchen with his mess and will not be budged until an hour too late to start dinner. So we postpone. Until tonight.

Tonight dawns. Slightly before 8:00, which is the appointed hour, I casually look up how to cook zucchini. That seems to be enough prep for me. Mark arrives. I've begun chopping the zucchini and the onions. Mark pours two glasses of the Oregon wine he's somehow found. Sauvignon Blanc. Of course I'm enchanted. We continue cooking.

One whole zucchini and one whole onion chopped go into a pan and start sauteeing. You like my use of vocabulary there? Yeah -- sauteeing. It's a cooking word, don't worry about it. It means to...cook...in a certain way. Three cloves of finely minced garlic go in. Minced -- to chop very small-ly. Some fresh ground pepper and some salt. Nothing is yet on fire. How magical and delicious.

Through some miracle, the onions start to become translucent and the zucchini begins to soften. We start cooking three links of the spicy jalapeno chicken sausage and add the Classico basil sauce with whole plum tomatoes to the onion, garlic, and zucchini combination. We start the noodles cooking. There are good smells permeating the kitchen. Again, nothing is on fire. This makes me nervous.

We add the sausage to the sauce and taste it. It's not quite right, so I add a dollop of red wine. Look at me and the dollops, now. My mother's daughter.

I taste it again and it's better, but it's still not quite right and I don't know what to do about it. Out of nowhere, I get an instinct that we should add vinegar. Ew. This could be a terrible idea. We add in a swig of vinegar and taste it again.

Oh. Oh yes. Somehow it did exactly what I wanted it to. It added an edge to the sauce that I didn't even know how to add until I'd added it. How is that possible? I literally jumped up and down after I tasted it. Mark can confirm this.

And the sauce turned out IN-credible. It was really really good. I honestly can't even believe it worked out. Even Joel and Sam, who came by later with more wine, tasted the sauce and said it was delicious. It was my first foray into cooking and it was not only successful but also delicious.

I suspect foul play.

*Post-script: please inspect the photograph in the upper right corner of this blog entry for conformation that the author did indeed complete a meal. One can confirm that the meal was homemade by its presence in a pot.

My sedentary life.

After seeing a movie the other day, I found myself in the city with nothing to do with my friend Ariana.

Now, if you're like me, you already take issue with that statement. I was in the city, and I had nothing to do. And this is New York City, a place filled with more people, activities, restaurants, tourist spots, museums, parks, and theaters than anywhere I have ever been. There is no END of things to do.

HOWEVER. The thing about me is that number one I'm not good at finding that stuff out, and number two, even if I do hear about something or look something up online that looks awesome, I'm really bad at following through with it. I'm much more comfortable staying in my little rut and doing..."my own thing"...which usually entails me hanging out by myself wasting time reading or on Facebook or watching TV or a movie.

And I've always been that way. A lot of people I know, if they get a day off, they go and DO something. Like my friend Ross, for example. He had a day off the other day and went and took a hip hop class. By himself. With no experience. And he had an awesome time! But I would never do that -- either because I'm afraid to look stupid, or I'm lazy, or I just wouldn't have enough follow-through. Bottom line -- as much as I theoretically like doing new things, I typically don't like the feeling of doing new things, especially by myself, and especially especially in big groups of strangers. And what is New York City if not a HUGE group of strangers? Thus my usual paralysis.

But back to the story -- Ariana happens to be the exact opposite of me in regards to all this. She's done a lot of traveling, and knows what she likes, and, even better, knows a lot about the city. She's one of those people who goes on vacation and gets. her. money's worth. Our friend Louis was her roommate in London over January and he tells these stories of going to like, Kensington Gardens, and Ariana just being on a mission. She's a woman with a plan.

So anyway, we get out of the movie, and we're both feeling a little weird, and my inclination is to just go home and be with my dear friend Harry Potter and his Order of the Phoenix. But Ariana suggests that we go check out the High Line, which is an elevated freight line from the 1930s that the city has made into a park. So it's this elevated walking path, basically, and the plants they've chosen are all the flowers and grasses that would grow naturally in an abandoned area. It's right up next to the river, looking out over everything, with these beautiful flowers and grasses waving, and it was the perfect day for it -- a little bit cool and breezy, late in the day. It goes from Gansevoort Street all the way to 20th (and they're building more of it so one day it'll go all the way to 40th) and the views out over the river and back toward the city and even the Statue of Liberty were amazing. It was so nice to be up over the city and just walking for the experience of it, instead of to get somewhere. I do stuff like that so rarely.

And afterward we got sandwiches from Cosi and sat out on the waterfront watching people jog and bike and walk by. At sunset. With boats.

So I guess what I'm saying is I went on a date with Ariana. And I liked it.

Regina Spektor -- On the Radio.

This is how it works:
You’re young until you’re not.
You love until you don’t.
You try until you can’t.
You laugh until you cry,
You cry until you laugh.
And everyone must breathe until their dying breath.

Now this is how it works:
You peer inside yourself,
You take the things you like,
And try to love the things you took.
And then you take that love you made
And stick it into some —
Someone else’s heart
Pumping someone else’s blood.

And walking arm in arm,
You hope it don’t get hard.
But even if it does you’d just do it all again.

I hope it's still that simple when I get to it.

Dishes.

I've come to the opinion that in the world, there are some people who always clean up, and some people who never clean up. By which I mean to say there aren't a whole lot of middle-grounders: people who sometimes clean up and sometimes leave a mess. And I have proof of this. Please read on.

In this apartment that I live in, there are four people (including me), one bathroom, and one kitchen. The kitchen includes a sink, a fridge, and a garbage can. Now, in my four weeks of residence in this particular apartment, there has never been a time when I've entered one of the two common areas (kitchen or bathroom. You remember.) and NOT had some sort of mess to clean up before I can go about my business. If I'm showering, someone else has left hair in the drain. If I'm cooking, someone (or someones) has used the pots and pans and failed to clean them afterward, or they've used the stove and left splattered oil everywhere.

The one that gets me the most is when the sink is full of dishes because WE HAVE A DISHWASHER. Let me walk you through this process:

1. Finish eating.
2. Proceed to sink.
3. Rinse dish.
4. Place it in dishwasher.
5. FORGET ABOUT IT and move on with your daily life.

In an ideal world, the above five steps take place, and then at some point down the line, someone will put in the last dish that will conceivably fit. Let's call this person "Specimen 1". THEN, because this is, after all, an ideal world, Specimen 1 will thoughtfully run the dishwasher and go about their day. Then, someone else in this perfect little world -- let's call them "Specimen 2" -- will open the dishwasher and see -- ah! marvel of marvels! -- someone has run the dishwasher! Perhaps I will take five to ten minutes out of my day to UNLOAD the dishwasher! Specimen 2 will then thoughtfully unload the dishwasher, knowing that her friends, Specimens 1, 3, and 4, will appreciate her gesture and no doubt reciprocate somewhere down the line. Perhaps next time it will be Specimen 3 who notices that the dishwasher is full and decides to run it, and Specimen 4 who thoughtfully unloads it. It doesn't really matter who it is, because in this magical, mysterious world, all Specimens are equally selfless and conscientious, and everyone coexists peacefully.

Except in the world that I live in, Specimens 1-4 have all mysteriously been played by me. None of my fellow Specimens have even been completing the five-step process I laid out above. They can invariably make it through the first two steps, but 3-5 seem to really stump them.

To be fair, I'm sure that people do things I don't know about, but it's clear to me that SOME people are slacking, because logic tells me I shouldn't encounter a full sink AND a full dishwasher when I go to make a sandwich.

So, to return to my initial hypothesis: there are those who always clean up, and those who never clean up. This is a true statement, and here's why. Members of the "always" group, like myself, are typically pretty anal-retentive. When I enter a room and find it messy, I have a physical reaction. (Oddly, this only applies to shared spaces. My room can be a complete disaster and while it bothers me, I don't have that visceral reaction that I get in shared spaces. I think it's because I feel I have a responsibility -- a shared responsibility, with all the other members of the space -- to keep that area clean, because it's a common area.) To return to what I was saying, when I see a common area that's messy, I have an impulse to clean it up. Now. I can put off that impulse in the hopes that someone else will do it, but it's really only a matter of time before I surrender to it and find myself in the kitchen scrubbing out someone else's cookie sheets and digging someone else's soggy Chinese food out of the drain.

And herein lies the problem. Imagine that Specimen A is an always-cleaner, and Specimen B is a never-cleaner. Every day, Specimen B leaves one dish in the sink. Let's imagine this scenario from both angles:

SPECIMEN A:
I eat one meal a day at home. After I finish, I rinse the dish and put it in the dishwasher. When I get home, there is a dish that is not mine in the sink. I suspect it was left there by my less-dilligent (but very friendly) roommate, Specimen B. I will leave it there for a day to see if she cleans up after herself.

The next day there are two plates in the sink. I rinse mine and put it in the dishwasher. I will wait a day to see what happens to Specimen B's dishes.

On the third day, there are three dishes in the sink. This bothers me and makes it difficult to rinse my own dish, so I rinse them and put them in the dishwasher. This process repeats until the dishwasher is full and I run it.

SPECIMEN B
I eat one meal a day at home. When I've finished, I leave my dish in the sink. This is a good place for dishes, because every three days, they clean themselves! My life is good and nice. I like my roommate, Specimen A, except when she is frustrated and I don't know why.

Why would either of these people change what they're doing? I like things clean, so I try to keep them that way, and as much as I'll grumble and gripe about it, if people leave dishes in the sink for long enough, yes, I will do them. I won't like it, but they will be done, because I can't really operate if they're not.

So...I guess the bottom line here, is I have a sickness. It's not contagious and it's really convenient to those around me. Not so convenient to me, but I'll accept it.

It's a sickness of the anus and it's called "anal-retentivity". I encourage you to catch it. For my own sake.

Pure adrenaline.

Oooookayyyyy so Queens just cracked open and tried to kill all its inhabitants.

I don't know how it went down in any other areas, but where I am, the biggest and worst thunderstorm I have ever seen just passed through.

Before I explain this, let me just say two things:

Number one - I. Sleep. Through. ANYTHING. Earthquakes, screaming arguments, parties, minor attacks to my person -- there's simply no waking me up. My friends can attest to this.

Number two - I'm not even AFRAID of lightning. I have seen that it is a frightening thing for other creatures, such as dogs and children and sometimes loud screechy girlfriends, but it's never struck me as anything particularly scary.

Until tonight.

I'm dead asleep, it's maybe 2:45 and I wake up sort of confused, not completely sure what's woken me up...and I hear rain. This confuses me further, as it was just drizzling when I went I went to sleep, and this sounds more serious, like legit rain. I'm also confused as to how rain woke me up -- I am from Portland, after all -- when I hear some distant traces of thunder. Ah yes. Thunder. That would make sense. (I guess I should also admit here that I'd transitioned from reading in bed with the lights on, to falling asleep in bed with the lights on, to waking back up with the lights on, so my room was fully lit up. I imagine that played a part in my waking up as well.)

So I'm still lying there, just listening to the now torrential downpour, and the thunder, and counting the time between the dull cracks to the flashes of light illuminating my windows, and I'm not an idiot, so I notice the storm is getting closer. The sounds of the thunder are getting sharper, the flares of lightning are getting brighter and longer, and the time between them is decreasing. I'm not a weather expert or anything, but this storm is getting clooooooose to me. It's now at a volume where going back to sleep is not a possibility. But again, I'm not afraid of lightning, so I'm not scared. I'm just lying here marveling, wondering how close it's gonna get. And at this point we're at like, three seconds between lightning and thunder.

So since sleep is off the table, I get up and wander into the living room, where the windows actually look out on something (versus my windows which have these papery screens in front of them that I've not yet fully figured out) to see what's going on outside. Our windows are thrown completely open, as always, and the smell of rain is THICK on the air. It's basically a flash flood out there. But it no longer smells like actual rain, it smells like dirt and water and grass and...storm, basically. Everything is flooding around in the streets and on the sidewalks, and when the lightning strikes, everything is lighting up. It's down to one or two seconds, sometimes less, and I'm feeling a little paralyzed in the living room, so I go back to my bed and try to lie down. Still...not scared, but getting a little panicky flutters in my chest. And the counting seconds thing has sort of stopped helping me at this point, because I've realized it's only fun when the storm is moving. Once it gets where it's going, and that place is where I am, counting seconds is no longer reassuring. When you go from five seconds to four, to three, to two, to one, to less than one, to zero zero zero zero ZEEEERRRRROOOOO why am I counting seconds like an asshole, I am IN this storm! Cue terror.

The lighting sounds like big electrical rips at this point, and even though I can't see it, I can feel it because the thunder is literally shaking the building. There'd be the shortest instant of white light and then the thunder would overlap it with this deep, extended cracking that I can only describe as a tree being ripped in half. A sapling that gets all its sap boiled as it tears apart. So lying down starts to feel like inaction because these are the loudest and biggest thunderbolts I've ever heard, and car alarms are going off and the rain is still coming down thick like a monsoon, and my heartbeat is getting pretty intense. And I'm basically like a horse in a barn, like tossing my head and rolling my eyes, pawing at the ground and braying.

So I kind of ease off my bed, jolting heavily each time the thunder and lightning go off SIMULTANEOUSLY because HOLY FUCK I am in the direct middle of this storm! But I'm still instinctively starting to count seconds in between like an idiot because that is my knowledge of thunderstorms. That is all I know how to do. I know I'm not supposed to get hit by lightning, and I will know how far away the storm is as it's hitting me with its lightning: zero miles. How very helpful.

And in the living room, also standing around in paralyzed terror, is my roommate Allyson. We're both half in and half out of our bedrooms, half embarrassed to have been caught out of bed by the other one during a storm, and half relieved that the apocalypse has so far spared one other human. So we're like caaaaaaasually talking about how fucking terrifying this insane storm is, and the zero second lightning bolts have been taking a brief hiatus -- we're back to the half-second or one-second lightning bolts, and I've used my highly-tuned weather knowledge to infer that the storm is now RETREATING, that I've driven it off with my counting seconds and my...not...getting hit by lightning. Or whatever. And I'm still terrified, but I'm hiding it pretty well in my conversation with Allyson until all of a sudden, the biggest crack yet RIPS through the room, like floor-shaking, heart-rending thunder, and it's enough to scare us both fully into the room and toward the couch. And we're both laughing at each other's reactions, laughing it off, trying to shake it off when right on the tails of the other one, another HUGE crack echoes at the exact same time as this enormous bolt of lightning. Basically the sound you'd imagine if your house was being ripped out of the ground.

And that is how I came to be in the middle of my living room clutching an almost-complete stranger and scuh-REAMING at the top of my lungs at 3:00am.

OH my god...

So this whole event probably only lasted about twenty minutes in its entirety, but it seriously felt like it was going to go on forever. It felt like this moment that was separate from time, in which everything was ending and I had to watch.

It was like, from a logical point of view...okay...so the lightning is on our block at this point. From here, it's either gonna get closer...as in my apartment will be hit by lightning, or it's gonna go farther away...and it's only been doing one of those things consistently, so...it's looking like my death is imminent.

It was honestly like the apocalypse. The sky was just being ripped open and the rain and the light, and ugh...god. I mean obviously it was beautiful, had I been able to see it fully...and had I also had the knowledge that I was going to survive it, hahaha...

The worst was over and Allyson and I retreated to our rooms again, and I'm like immediately checking the New York Times website...like...what? There's gonna be a front page news story about a storm in Queens? And of course there's nothing there but I'm like, "this is important! I don't want to be the only one who experienced this!" so I check weather.com and find the following gem:

Issued by The National Weather Service

New York City, NY
2:51 am EDT, Tue., Jun. 9, 2009

... STRONG THUNDERSTORMS WILL IMPACT BERGEN... BRONX... ESSEX... HUDSON... KINGS (BROOKLYN)... NASSAU... NEW YORK (MANHATTAN)... PASSAIC... QUEENS... RICHMOND (STATEN ISLAND)... SOUTHERN WESTCHESTER... UNION AND WESTERN SUFFOLK COUNTIES...

AT 247 AM EDT... NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR WAS TRACKING AN AREA OF HEAVY SHOWERS AND THUNDERSTORMS ALONG A LINE EXTENDING FROM NEW ROCHELLE TO RED BANK... MOVING SOUTHEAST AT 25 MPH.

INTENSE CLOUD TO GROUND LIGHTNING IS EXPECTED WITH THESE STORMS. IN ADDITION... VERY HEAVY RAIN... WITH RAINFALL RATES OF UP TO ONE AND A HALF INCHES AN HOUR... IS OCCURRING WITH THESE STORMS. THESE RAINFALL RATES WILL CAUSE MINOR FLOODING OF POOR DRAINAGE AND LOW LYING AREAS... WITH WIDESPREAD PONDING OF WATER ON ROADWAYS.

LIGHTNING IS ONE OF NATURES NUMBER ONE KILLERS. REMEMBER... IF YOU CAN HEAR THUNDER... YOU ARE CLOSE ENOUGH TO BE STRUCK BY LIGHTNING. MOVE TO SAFE SHELTER IMMEDIATELY.

Don't know if you caught the issue time on that weather warning...yeah...2:51am. Oh good! So when I'm doing my annual 3:00am perusal of the weather circuits, I'll come across it WHILE IT'S ALREADY GOING ON and my charred and sizzling corpse will have plenty of time to prepare itself for the afterlife. Thank you weather service -- and thank you also for the ALL CAPS. Color me reassured.

And finally, thank you for that touching passage about lightning being a killer. It was really at the forefront of my mind as I was desperately squeezing my ass cheeks together to keep from shitting my pants all over my subletted living room and my subletted roommate.

There will be no more sleep tonight.

Where I am now.

I'm hoping that LiveJournal is to sloppy teen angst as Blogspot is to mature adult musings.

With that in mind, here I am. A recent college graduate from Hofstra University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in the Theatre Arts, Performance track and a minor in Asian Studies with an emphasis on Japanese Language. Magna Cum Laude, 3.88...in a world where none of that matters anymore.

I'm living in Astoria, Queens. And by living what I really mean is subletting...while I try to find someone I know who wants to live with me as much as I want to live with them. Considering my difficulties sharing, irritation for loud noises not caused by myself, and odd sleeping hours, this is proving to be a difficult task. In the meantime, I'm in Astoria, and maybe soon in midtown. I just got a job as a counter girl at a new restaurant opening soon, for twelve dollars an hour. I'm not going on any auditions anytime soon, and I'm alternately relaxed and horrified. Right now is a mixture of epic loneliness and boredom and the knowledge that there's surely something better to be doing with my time than creating and updating a new blog. Examples: laundry, cleaning, unpacking, showering, working out.

Nay nay nay. Instead I'll while away the hours typing nonsense. And I do mean nonsense. I always really like the way other people write on their blogs, and I like the way I talk in public, and the way I'm able to write in essays...but for some reason the way I write when it's just stream of consciousness...I really don't like. So I'm gonna work on that. Here.

Today has been a whirlwind of activity culminating in me still sitting on my bed -- THE bed, these are NOT my sheets, they are SUBLETTED sheets -- in my pajamas at 6:00pm. My successes of the day include winning the French Open to cement my Career Grand Slam and the writing of seven thank you notes. I've used the term my successes very loosely, though, as the first success should technically be attributed to Roger Federer. If we're being really straight-forward about it. But I did get up at 9:00am to watch it, which is a step in the right direction, I'd say. It's really the first step of an uphill battle...at the end of which is a French Open victory. So I'd say the day has really been a success.

Now to find stamps...