your rent is $3,000 and your shampoo costs $35

"Sarah Avrin, a 23-year-old music publicist, said she was struck recently by the sacrifices that some people make to sustain their New York lifestyle when one of her friends endured the long, painful process of selling her eggs."

UNNECESSARY.

top five things not to do at a wedding.

1. Do not make an agreement with the person sitting next to you that you will drink mojitos with him all night.
2. Do not develop a drunken crush on someone at your table (who you are not drinking mojitos with) and do not be horrendously obvious about it.
3. Do not tell the brother of the groom he is harassing you, even though is he definitely harassing you.
4. Do not forget to change the batteries in your camera, because then you will have no documentation of your stupidity.
5. Do not drink a glass of champagne, 2 glasses of wine, 3 mojitos, a shot of southern comfort, a shot of whiskey and a massive margarita on the night before you have to drive back from Pittsburgh to New York.


(Thanks for the picture, Laura.)

flood-tide below me!

Now that it’s warm, I’ve started to walk home from work sometimes. It’s an interesting walk; start out in Tribeca, walk south past City Hall, over the Brooklyn Bridge, through Cadman Plaza, past Borough Hall, all the way down Fulton Street to DeKalb Avenue, and then you’re in my neighborhood. It takes about an hour and fifteen minutes, if you don’t a) get run over by a bicycle on the bridge or b) get distracted by all the strange stores on Fulton Street.

Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge is, of course, my favorite part, even though it’s thronged with tourists who insist on blocking my path to take pictures. About mid-way across the bridge, the Statue of Liberty comes into view, but by then the crowds have thinned out, because very few tourists want to take the Brooklyn Bridge all the way into, you know, Brooklyn. By the end, it’s just the locals and the intrepid (and, if you’re feeling romantic, the ghost of Whitman) who trot down the steps and into Cadman Plaza.

Living in New York can be mole-like. You shuffle down into the subway, and half an hour later you emerge in the next borough, and on the other side of a river. The time it takes to get places often has little to do with the distance traveled; going from 14th Street to Atlantic Avenue takes two stops on the N train, or 10 stops on the 2 train. In these transportation equations actual locations are reduced to subway routes, and physical distance becomes almost irrelevant. Things are as close or as far as the subway makes them.

I know, because I did it during the massive blackout five years ago, that walking from the Upper West Side to Brooklyn Heights takes about 4 hours. New York is smaller than you think. I could walk to Boston! It would only take me like...a month. I could do the whole thing in moccasins. It would be awesome.

the levantine crotch.

I had a bad day today; so much so that I spent a good two hours at work writing a long post about things that I hate. Really, a list of things I hate. Instead of that crap, you should read Leon Wieseltier's review of Martin Amis's newest book, The Second Plane. Maybe I've been reading too many book reviews lately, or too much about theories of history, but I found it sharp and, frankly, amusing:

"The masculinist account of terrorism brings to mind the feminist account of nuclear weapons, according to which all you need to know about the origin of the danger is the shape of the missile. The genital theory of history may be novelistically useful, but it is analytically silly. In this case, it reduces decades and centuries of philosophies and cultures and religions and tribes and classes and nations and movements and states and empires to the Levantine crotch. Surely we must be able to imagine, not only for the sake of our literature but also for the sake of our security, that there are sexually satisfied enemies of decency and modernity. And enough about those patient virgins in the sky: the threat from suicide bombing, and from the political cultures that prize it, is founded on deformations more worldly and more substantial than a harem fantasy."

your whining oppresses me.

A woman I know recently told me that she thinks, if she were a man, she would have a more prestigious job. She didn’t mean that as a man she would able to get a more powerful job, but that she would simply want one more. She thinks that men are under more pressure to be successful – to wear suits and make money and have blackberries – and are therefore more likely to succeed. Women, she thinks, are taught to focus more on their looks, and finding a husband. That’s why they aren’t as ambitious.

This idea reminds me of high school, where all of the incredibly lazy potheads were consistently described as “actually, really, really smart.” Were they, really? Did they really get rejected from Georgetown only because they refused to “play the game”? Or could it be true that not going to class and not doing any work is actually an indication of intelligence and ability to succeed in college? I was always bitter (and can you tell?) that the rest of us, who were both smart and hard-working, often got less recognition from our teachers and our peers.

Life is just so much more interesting when something is oppressing you, isn’t it? Either you are complacent at work because society never pushed you to succeed, or you end up failing P.E. in your senior year of high school because, it’s like, waaaay too stifling to conform to the fascist constraints of a high school gym class. Please. You failed P.E. because smoking pot in the woods behind school was more fun than playing badminton, and you didn’t get promoted at your job because all you do at work is update your blog. Just admit it.

Society did not program you to be less ambitious, or less successful, than your brother or your boyfriend. “The man” did not prevent you from attending Princeton. Jews do not actually control the government and media. George Bush and Dick Cheney did not kill your dog. That is not to say that shit doesn’t happen. Bad things happen to people who deserve better, and some of those problems are products of our government, our society, etc. I'm all for changing things that aren't fair. But, as a recent article in Slate put it: “No one in America can corner the market on suffering. Who the hell wants to spend their life in a corner, anyhow?”

The only answer I can come up with is: most people. Corners can be quite snuggly.

life is hard, #11

My apartment has been without hot water for two days.

I just took a shower using two pots of hot water and a cup.

This does not make me happy.

nowheresville, pa.

So, yesterday was Easter, in case anyone missed it. Family tradition states that if I'm somewhere between DC and Boston, I go to my Grandmother’s house for Easter. She lives about 20 minutes south of Philadelphia, so we usually drive for about two hours and then sit around her living room and listen to my Aunt and Uncle and cousins gossip while drinking large quantities of tea. At some point everyone goes to Church, while my Dad and I stay behind and read the newspaper.

This year was blissfully unlike the others. Instead of going to Nowheresville, PA, we managed to convince my Grandmother to come into Philadelphia for Easter. So instead of reading the Sunday Styles section while others went to Church, my Dad and I got to take a tour.

Despite having been born in Philadelphia, I have never really been to Philadelphia. At least not that I remember; I moved to Brooklyn when I was one and a half, and since then I’ve only really come back to the area to drink tea. I’ve decided, though, after reading Confederates in the Attic, that my American History Self-Improvement Project should have a travel component. Tony Horwitz spent months sleeping in muddy Civil War battlefields, getting beaten up in back country bars, and visiting the last confederate widow in Opp, Alabama (among other things). I am not cool enough to do all that, and I don’t have a publisher willing to pay for gas, but I can try my best.

In any case, I spent my Easter Sunday at Independence Hall. For those of you watching the John Adams mini-series on HBO, you’ll be happy to know it looks exactly the same in person, though maybe not exactly the same as it did in 1776. The tour was actually good, too. At least, unlike HBO, the tour guide had the sense to mention Thomas Paine.

I also got to see the site of Ben Franklin's privy! History is thrilling, isn't it?