All Right, Already!

Friends, I love you all, and I'm a staunch non-fan of Sarah Palin (except, of course, for the endless humor opportunities), so quit, already, sending me that damn poll! I voted against her, okay? Thank you.

I worked today - and quite pleasantly, too. It was one of those seminars, which, admittedly, would have been nicer had I not been in the same room with it, on account of having to listen to all the nonsense. Usually we greeter/facilitator types are outside the actual seminar room. But the gal leading it was nice, and the subject matter not too dull (it was on how to communicate effectively in business) (and nobody objected to my tuning out and reading a book), so all in all, not bad.

However, I must pose a question here. When in the world did we start having to have all these damn fool seminars? There are literally hundreds of them per day in New York alone, and they are seem to be on subjects that I would have thought were complete no-brainers. How To Look Right For A Job Interview. How To Write A Resume. How To Communicate With Your Boss. How To This, How To That.

Back in 1902 or so, when I started working for a living, this was all a known quantity. You communicated with your boss by saying Yes, Sir (well, in the Dark Ages there we didn't have any Ma'ams to say Yes to). You looked good for an interview by putting on a decent suit and pumps. You wrote a resume by putting down your most recent jobs. I mean, everybody knew all this. When did it become so damn complicated?

But, of course, we now live in a world where MBAs have to be taught remedial punctuation - I know this because as a secretary, I've spent a LOT of time fulfilling this necessary function. (I once had a long, long fight with a boss about commas in dependent clauses because he kept taking one of them out, saying that commas 'cluttered up the page'. I got him straightened up, but it took quite some time.) That and teaching them that verbs and nouns are intended to agree. And we live in a world where a legal secretary I once worked with was absolutely covered in very visible tattoos - and where a new partner came in for her first day at the same firm in a pair of capri pants and promptly kicked off her flip-flops (of course flip-flops) and spent the day barefoot. Evidently I'm deeply out of touch with the modern world. Thank God.

Meanwhile I also noticed today that one of my most hated styles is still alive and kicking, that of the dress over pants. What is this? I think only one thing when I see this - this person has just done a midnight flit without paying her rent and has hastily put on every piece of clothing she owns so the landlord won't see her carrying a suitcase. If you want to put something over a pair of pants, how about wearing a TOP? You know, a blouse or sweater? The other thing this looks like is that you got dressed in the dark - not least because neither the dress or the pants in this assemblage ever seem to have any relation to each other whatsoever. Beige cord jeans with a flowered dress. Regular jeans with a lace dress. Plaid dresses with pinstriped pants. Just stop this, okay?

Tomorrow I am off to UN territory to stuff envelopes for Angola or whatever the hell the job is. And I have to start out an hour and a half before I need to be there, which is annoying. This is General Assembly Week, you see, and there is no practical method of getting over to the UN via subway without a hell of a long walk - and it's going to be raining. Ergo, since they want me there at 9 am, I'll have to leave at 7:30 because I'll bet anything that once I get near the UN the streets are going to be half shut down and the other half clogged up with various dignitaries arriving for breakfast meetings. (In case you want to know how to get to the UN from the far West Village where I am, you catch the crosstown #8 to 3rd Avenue and then take the 101 uptown. Are you deeply thrilled to know this?)

Ah, lovely. The rain has started, which makes wonderful sleeping music. Unfortunately, it's still going to be raining when I wake up. While bedtime rain is useful for soporific purposes, it is, of course, no good at all in the morning - due to those same soporific qualities. Skylights in the bedroom are a mixed blessing when one has to get up.

Love, Wendy

I Went to the Library

Yes, children, that was the sum total of fascinating and exciting things that happened today. Although I must say that the notion of having a whole bunch of new books to read is pretty neat.

I also got a job for the next four weeks. Before you all go completely batshit with huge rounds of applause, let me hasten to say that this job is actually for the next four Fridays. According to the temp agency, this is for a large multi-national firm that sends out mailings every week to its many far-flung offices, and they need someone to make up the packages and keep track of them. (The gal at the agency asked me if I thought I'd be able to handle foreign addresses - gee, maybe...) I think I just might be able to handle this. Also, it pays a whopping $16 an hour for a full - 9 to 5 - day, which is a gross of $112. Considering that my last paycheck was for $44.09, you can imagine that I'm thrilled to the very core of my being at this elegant sufficiency of money. (Pause for hollow laughter.)

And I'm getting the best present ever! My best friend of forever (we met when we were about 7) is sending me a gift certificate from Trader Joe's! Isn't that the neatest thing in the whole world? I am going to indulge in cheese and crackers. Well, you get as broke as I am and see how far YOUR horizons shrink. Lo, how the mighty have fallen - I USED to dream about caviar. Now I dream about anything that isn't cheddar (because that's all that Joshua ever buys, for some reason into which I do not want to inquire, because he might tell me - at enormous length).

My child is gallivanting about in Portland, Oregon. Nice for some. The only traveling I'm going to be doing is out to Long Island for the biggest wedding of the century - Saint Tiger Lily and the Boss, of course - but on the other hand, traveling anywhere that doesn't take a Metrocard seems pretty damn good to me. I love New York with every fiber of my being, but there are days when I would kill for the sight of somewhere else. (And it doesn't help that I'm reading a book about a group of people who spent a month in France. Eating and going to markets. Which is exactly what I've wanted to do all summer. Grrrrr. Why did I take that book out of the library anyway?)

And tomorrow I'm going to get up and crawl around the floor in Sarah's room, because I've only got a dollar. Unfortunately, tomorrow is Wednesday, which is the Food Section in the NYTimes. And the Times now costs $1.50. Luckily, Sarah's room is always good for small change. Yes, I know this may sound just a tad bit odd, but reading the Food Section is something I insist on - one simply cannot let one's standards slip, can one?

The above reminds me irresistibly of a story my father used to tell about a Chicago millionaire named Titus Haffa, who, in the midst of the Depression, lived in a baronial mansion and every night changed into his dinner jacket so that his butler could serve him, at the (baronial, of course) dining table, one peeled apple on a crystal dish, that being all the food he had. Well, naturally. We aristocrats understand these things.

Love, Wendy

Question

Why can't cookbooks understand that if you are looking for a recipe, the recipe you find should have some relationship to the one you were looking up?

I realize this may sound slightly odd, but I was looking through my big Bon Appetit cookbook and ran across a recipe that was called Macaroni and Cheese. It included red bell peppers, celery (stalks, seeds and leaves), blue cheese and penne.

Well, this may be a very interesting cheesy casserole thing (although I find that you can easily overdo blue cheese, much as I love it), but had I been looking for a recipe for macaroni and cheese, I would have been highly confused by this one. Macaroni and cheese has cheddar. It has elbow macaroni. In my house, it can have chunks of ham in it (which is an excellent way to use leftovers if you happen to have baked a ham). I assure you that it has never under any circumstances included any kind of celery, much less three separate components of celery. If you are looking for greenery with your mac and cheese, make a salad. Honestly.

For this same reason, I tend to shy away from restaurant menus that announce some favorite dish of mine (escargots, say) - and then tag it "Our Way." Um, oops...could you explain that a little more explicitly, please? Uh-huh. Blue cheese and celery, eh? No, thanks. Every now and then somebody comes up with something that is in fact a wonderful idea (I am thinking here of a favorite restaurant of ours, now defunct, which served its escargots in their proper garlic butter in little dishes with indentations for them, rather than shells, and topped each snail with a tiny puff pastry hat) but for the most part, "Our Way" lets you know that there is a rather young chef in the kitchen who is determined to be a trailblazer. This can work (I bet Mario Batalli and Fergus Henderson caused a LOT of raised eyebrows originally), but you need to be a creative genius, and there just aren't all that many of them.

And my cousin Joshua has won his damned disability case, and I can't even begin to tell you how monumentally sick I am getting of the crowing he's doing. He even got MORE money than he asked for, which I think is just awful (yes, of course I'm jealous). But really, considering the currently distressed state of my finances (distressed, hell - they've gone beyond distressed and are now completely hysterical), you can see how it's a bit difficult to sit (as I have been doing for about a week now) and listen to someone tell you endlessly about the rich life he's going to live in Thailand, and that a friend of his thinks he can invest some money so that Joshua can live in Provence when the weather is too hot for him in Thailand, and the $4500 Lamborghini leather-covered laptop he's buying...did you know Lamborghini made laptops? I certainly didn't. To quote Sherlock Holmes, now that I know it, I shall do my best to forget it. I can't think of anything on earth more disgustingly nouveau riche than a Lamborghini laptop. Yuck. It's like one of those $25,000 watches - one of those things you buy just to prove you can, which is a cast of mind I just hate. Personally, I buy a $20 Timex about every five to eight years, which is how long they last. They keep time and look fine, so who needs more than that? I comfort myself with the thought that Joshua is going to be lugging this thing in and out of airports, and if I ever heard of a thief magnet, that computer is it. Hee, hee, hee.

Today I went for a walk (it was just die and go to heaven gorgeous out) through the neighborhood and read menus and planned all kinds of really neat meals to eat out when I finally have some money again. Then I came home and broiled myself some bluefish (Caesar went fishing a few weeks back and brought back more bluefish than we could possibly eat, so I packaged what we didn't eat for the freezer) and ate more of those damn peas and carrots I bought a big bag of (and am now heartily sick of), and now here I am at the computer.

My life is a ball! (From which you will gather that none of my now three damn temp agencies has come up with a job for me for tomorrow.)

Love, Wendy

Two Days in the Sea of Stomachs

The Sea of Stomachs can be found at the Jacob Javits Center here in NY, that being where I have been working for two interminable days. It was a computer convention called something like Intecon, or Interop, or some damn thing, and I have never seen so many enormous male bellies in one place in my entire life - even, I think, including Times Square (this may be because I usually run through Times Square as fast as I can, thus limiting my exposure).

As far as I can tell, computer men don't ever get up from the keyboard, and are intravenously fed beer and potato chips. You would not have believed it. Here I am, spending two days in guy heaven - men all over the place - and in those two days, I saw precisely two men (one each day) who were even remotely passable. Amazing. Sagging belly after sagging belly after sagging belly.

My favorite was a guy that I kept sneaking peeks at because I didn't believe he actually existed. (My job consisted of clicking my little laser reader at people's ID's, and business was pretty slow where I was, so plenty of time to people watch.) This man had a world class bellly to begin with - it rippled when he walked, which was interesting, in a sort of nauseating way - and he had chosen to clothe himself in a blue polo shirt (size 400) and a pair of plaid Bermuda shorts. It got worse after I finally dragged my eyes away from his midsection, because under the shorts, he had elected to wear knee high black socks and a pair of what looked like Uggs. A fashion plate!

The few woman at this fandango were predictably dowdy (computer people don't really care about fashion), except for a few. These few broads had, for some reason, decided to go for broke, and were wearing skin-tight everything and 4-inch heels.

Well, why? Computer nerds don't notice this sort of thing anyway (they're entirely likely to look at a women's tits and ask how many RAMs they have). And who in their right mind would decide to trot all over a place the size of the Javits Center in spike heels?

Ah, well. At least I get paid for this.

Nothing else is at all new. The sun rises and sets, the cats yell for food (and throw up with amazing regularity - cats are such fun). The money is tight.

But the weather is amazingly gorgeous, and my newest temp agency has given me two jobs in two weeks (admittedly little low-paying ones, but we'll see), so things are vaguely looking up, right?

Right.

Love, Wendy

No LEHMAN BROTHERS?

I am bereft. I am just so sad.

I realize this may sound a bit odd, but the first real job I ever had in New York (you know, the old 9 to 5 routine) was Lehman Brothers, where I worked for many happy years with a wonderful, wonderful boss who was also a friend. I am just terribly sorry about this whole thing.

For those of my readers who may not have been alive (for God's sake) back in the early 70's, Wall Street was a miraculous place to work. We damn near killed ourselves (70 and 80 hour weeks were not in the least unusual), but we were paid enormous amounts of money and enormous bonuses, and oh, my God, we had fun. Yes, and I was a secretary. Even we had fun.

It seems to me that there was a LOT more teamwork and a lot less of the gulf between boss and secretary back then. My boss and I became the best of friends (still talk to each other on occasion). Neither of us were dating anybody for any length of time back then (mainly because nobody else would put up with those insane hours we worked), so we'd often go out to dinner after work (this would usually be around 10 or 11 at night) or have a couple of drinks.

And it was nuts. I mean, NUTS. You couldn't walk out at lunch without somebody trying to sell you dope. All the associates kept stashes in their desk drawers. People were calmly smoking joints in the street.

And money. Oh, my God, the money. My boss and I worked on a deal (still famous in Wall Street circles, if there are any left) which kept us in the office for 23 straight days, none of them less than 15 hours long - and those were the weekends. There were a lot of days when we'd get to our respective homes in time to shower and turn around and get back to the office. (And no, before you ask, we were nothing more than good pals. So there.)

One night, we got sick and tired of the whole thing - which included basically cold cheeseburgers and fries for dinner every night because back then, there were no people on Wall Street after 6 pm, therefore no restaurants. There was this one deli, from which (out of necessity) we ordered every night. There were also no microwaves in offices then - actually, there weren't any microwaves. So my boss, said, more or less, the hell with this shit. And ordered us dinner. From THE PALM. Yup. You heard me. The Palm. A steak dinner from The Palm to be delivered to Wall Street at 10 at night.

It was AMAZING. A white coated waiter turned up with these dishes under silvery domes...steak and potatoes and salad and vegetables...all of it HOT...and he actually stayed around and SERVED THE DAMN MEAL. It must have cost a good $300 - in 1973 money, children. And do you know, the expense report passed right through without a murmur? Can you honestly imagine any office these days calmly passing through an item marked "Dinner for self and secretary - $700"? (Which I think it would be in today's terms.)

Oh, poor Lehman. I did love it.

And I am thrilled to the very core of my being about Sarah Palin. I think she is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Should you think that I have completely lost my mind, let me start by saying that I think sliced bread that you could buy in stores was a terrible idea, because it led to Wonder Bread, which isn't bread but a substance invented to make breadballs with at lunch at camp.

McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as VP has turned this election into Ringling Brothers' Greatest Show on Earth. Now, we already had an historic election - the first black Presidential candidate - to be precise, the first mulatto Presidential candidate - but now we've got the first Vice-Presidential candidate since about 1823 who can shoot and dress her own moose! You have to admit, this is clearly the sort of expertise we need in a Vice President. Now, see, if Cheney had known how to skin and gut that guy he shot, he could have had a decent meal out of it. Such a wimp.

No, really, this has to be a joke. I realize that McCain had terrible experiences as a POW, but I hadn't realized that they had turned his brain to this extent. I mean, I never thought he was all that tightly wrapped, but I think that way about anybody who favors idiotic wars. But this choice is simply - well - NUTS. I cannot think of anyone more likely to alienate people than this fundamentalist, moose shooting broad with no - repeat NO - experience on any kind of large scale - and who, if you'll pardon a descent into the personal - has one of the scariest fixed grins I've seen since I met Nancy Reagan during the Reagans' first campaign.

Unfortunately, to be serious, we tend to forget that we in New York (and in the wider intellectual community) are, unfortunately, in the minority. If anyone remembers the Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover of many years back, showing New York absolutely enormous with the rest of the country all squeezed into a tiny little space...sadly, it's the other way around. Snug in our knowledge of our own superiority, we forget that there is a LOT of America out there, and very few of us in our little insular charmed circle. There are lots and lots and LOTS of people who think that Sarah Palin represents exactly what they think. And that John McCain is a war hero and that war is good and that all boys should go to fight and die and be made into men...dead and/or maimed men, but men.

Mah fellow Amurricans - no, sorry, I mean, my fellow anti-war, pro-choice, human rights loving people - let's keep fighting the good fight!

And if we can't, can somebody please look up some decent moose recipes for me?

Love, Wendy

A Lovely Day

Well, I was going to start this entry, but then I decided that I really need to go and get a nightcap sort of beer. Don't anyone go away. I'll be right back.

Ahhhhh. Gulp. Burp. Gulp again. Aaaah. There.

I had more damn fun today. Sarah and I went out to see our friend Zen (well, that's his name, for heaven's sake) in Theater for the New City's summer traveling show in Washington Square, and it was just terrific. Zen (David "Zen" Mansley, to give him his actual full nice name) is a truly WONDERFUL actor, set designer, costume designer and an all around lovely madman. He is, of course, yet one more of the cast of that horrible Richard III and also did the costumes for that, and I adore him, and the show was great.

And yesterday I went off (in the middle of the damn monsoon) to see my pal Zorikh (yes, yes, another one of the Richard cast) at his birthday open mike deal in the East Village. He's wonderful too.

Anyway, Sarah's and my friend Seth turned up in Washington Square just as the show was ending, and we were wandering back toward our place looking for somewhere to sit outdoors and have a drink, when I (clever, clever girl that I am) said "Well, shit. We have A. a front garden, B. chairs, and C. a nice RiteAid with really cheap beer. Let's go home."

Which we promptly did, and had a wonderful time talking about art and politics and sex and all kinds of good shit, and general stuff...at which point the kids decided to go grocery shopping and came back and cooked me a WONDERFUL dinner. Happiness is food that I didn't buy, didn't cook, and didn't have to clean up after, which tasted just terrific. Pork chops and potato pancakes and green beans and glazed carrots (my recipe - I taught the grasshopper well)...yummy lovely.

Now I am about to begin planning something that frightens me to death. I owe Saint Tiger Lily and the Boss a meal, God knows, after all the time I've spent chowing down with them. But, to be perfectly blunt, cooking for the Saint lady just fucking TERRIFIES me. I mean, she does all this honest to God stuff that involves sourcing rare vegetables and all like that...and I tend to go and buy some supermarket chicken and sling it in a pan with some wine and garlic and cross my fingers.

So I have decided that I am going to make the supreme sacrifice (after their wedding when they've calmed down somewhat) and some day in November I am going to haul out my copy of Mastering (oh, ye of little cooking...I mean the first volume of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking) and spend the day which it requires to make her full dress Boeuf Bourgignon.

Now, I do not embark upon this voyage lightly. I mean, ANYBODY who knows what a stove is can make beef stew. Beef, vegetables, some wine, throw the lid on the pot, and that's the end of that.

But Julia's requires the marination of the meat. Followed by the careful proper searing of the meat. Followed by the careful addition of the stock and wine. And then you have to get out two more pans because the last additions are the separately brown braised onions and the (also separately) brown braised mushrooms. Every now and then I think it would be a great idea to have nice hot from the oven homemade bread to go with this...then I hit myself over the head with a saute pan and come back to my senses and serve some nice potatoes. And some salad. And what I'm going to do about dessert I do NOT know, because I normally don't serve it. (I usually have nice fresh fruit in the house, which does fine.) But I may just do something madly crazy, such as a chiffon pie.

Hey. Can we say, in great big capital letters: SHOWING OFF.

Well, hell. Why not? (I'm intimidated by the Saint's cooking, OK?)

So I just put this missive through good old spell check. What on EARTH are they thinking? For Bouef, they gave me beef, beefy, buff, all of which make some sort of sense...and then they get deeply creative and gave me Boru, who happens to be Brian Boru, a tenth century Irish warrior. Eh? But that last one of the list really gave me pause... it was bf. What?

Then I went on to Bourgignon. I got: Burgeoning, Bulganin,Bargaining, Beginning, and Bludgeoning. I can see most of those, but as far as I know (and believe me, I KNOW), Bulganin is not a word. Do they perhaps mean Bulgarian? Wait. Let's try this.

I met the Bulganin in the cafe.

Yup. According to Spellcheck, Bulganin is a word. Who knew?

So according to Spellcheck, what I'm going to be making for Tiger Lily and the Boss is bf Bulganin. One sincerely hopes they enjoy it.

Love, Wendy

Good News!

My, my, my. Things are finally looking up, thank God.

I got a call today for work from my crazy temp lady, which led to me spending the day uptown...and in case you care, I never want to hear a human voice again as long as I live, or make a phone call. As should be obvious, I spent from 10:45 am until 5:00 pm on the damn phone, which is the kind of work I hate, hate, hate. On the other hand, anyone who thinks I was going to turn down work of any kind whatsoever is nuts.

And as I was walking toward the building for today's job, my phone rang, and lo and behold, it was a very interesting call from Kelly Services, one of the big agencies. I had answered an email from The Actors' Fund about an event job for Kelly, and had sent them my resume, and they were interested not only in me doing the event thing for a 6 day week, but in the other stuff on my resume for lots of nice (well paying) temp jobs! So I'm going to see them next week!

Even better, my current straight temp agency actually PAID me for this past week's work (the week in that almost empty office). God knows I haven't got a lot left (what with prescriptions and whatnot), but enough to get me through the week at least. I'll worry about next week next week.

And I have various observations...after all, I left the house recently to do more than get the papers at the deli and walk two blocks to the cheap place to buy cigarettes and cat food. Quite the world traveler. So...

Today I saw a wonderful truck. It was a rather tattered white pickup truck, and on the driver's side door it said "NYC Department of Mental Protection." Well, I was charmed by this. Can't you just see this battleworn pickup cruising through the streets of New York, picking up all the random crazies, stowing them in the back of the pickup and taking them to some nice place of refuge? No? Me either. Turns out, of course, when I looked more closely, that some wit had simply scraped off the "enviro" piece in front of "mental." I liked my idea better.

Then tonight I was doing a double crostic, which is a form of mental acrobatics I highly recommend to any crossword puzzle person out there. Double crostics are a form of crossword puzzle with a second layer. In order to solve the puzzle, you must first solve a quote. The clues are at the bottom, each one lettered and numbered - i.e., "Q32." Going down the list, the first letters of the answers supply the name and title of the book or whatever, and the words in the actual puzzle are a quotation. They have them every other week in the NYTimes, and they're enormous fun if you are a word and book freak like me. Did you know, by the way, that researchers have figured out that doing crossword puzzles and other mental acrobatics tends to stave off Alzheimer's? Now I'm even more of a fanatic about them. (Parenthetically, I've decided to be a researcher when I grow up. They do all kinds of neat studies that take them two or three years to complete, during which time they get paid large salaries. One study I saw discovered that more gay men between the ages of 21 and 35 commit suicide if they have AIDS than those men of the same age who don't have AIDS. This was a five year study. Um...it took them five years to figure this one out? And they got paid in six figures for each of those years? See why I want to be a researcher?)

In tonight's puzzle (no, I didn't get the Times this early, I have a book of them), one of the answers was Hottentots, which immediately brought one of my favorite movies to mind - should you not have ever seen The Gods Must Be Crazy, you must immediately rent it. It's the story of a tribesman of a VERY remote tribe who finds a Coke bottle, and what he does about it. It's hilarious. SEE IT!

And, while I'm still wandering around in my puzzle, I was...well, puzzled...by a definition, even though I know it's correct. A manta ray turns out to be a devilfish. I know that mantas are called devilfish, but I'm damned if I can figure out why. How do you get the notion of a devil (or the devil) out of something that looks basically like a batwinged cape? I could see calling it a Draculafish (well, you know, the cape thing), maybe, but a devilfish? Not red, not horned, not cloven hoofed...why devilfish?

I am still doggedly submitting myself for background work in movies, but absolutely nothing is happening on that front. I went to the open call at one of the biggest background casting agencies, and made a terrible mistake the night before. I decided to set my hair.

Have you ANY idea how long it's been since I actually, in cold blood, took out the rollers and pin curl clamps and SET MY HAIR? Can we discuss 1965? And what's worse, I WASHED it and set it.

I really should have thought to aim my camera phone at my head and take a picture of the ensuing disaster. What we had here, ladies and gentlemen, was one huge, enormous, fluffy, looming...POUF. No, that's not quite right. What it was was a...POOUUUFFF. Pouffity, pouffity, pouf, pouf, pouf. A fandango of POUF. Stick finger in light socket POUF. Miles of it. Thank God for water, a comb, and a decent hair clip (although the raging pouf kept trying to escape...did I mention the humidity last Wednesday?). Pouf. Pouf. Pouf. Yuck, yuck, yuck. Never again.

Next I'm going to try to learn how to blow dry. I have a ghastly suspicion that this won't work either without bear grease or perhaps lard. Let us pray. Above all, let us not pouf. Deliver us from pouf.

Love, Wendy

Happy Labor Day!

Yes, well, I wouldn't like to say I've got nothing useful to do or say, but I just spent some time on the Weird Universe site watching a YouTube video of talking goats. This has GOT to be a new low.

Saturday I walked over to The Strand and sold a couple of books (the usual cash flow problem - i.e., it's non-existent), and something struck me that I never thought about before. It's a goodish hike over to 12th and Broadway from Charles and Washington, so I had plenty of time to think, you see.

The thing that struck me was, what on earth do all those water drinkers do when they have to go to the bathroom? I mean, Saturday was a warm, humid day, and all these people were out and about carrying huge jugs of regular water, imported water, fitness water, vitamin water...you name it. The problem is that New York simply isn't equipped with many public johns, not to mention public johns where you'd honestly feel A. safe and B. unlikely to get some sort of ghastly disease using, anyway. And restaurants all seem to have large signs sternly warning you that their bathrooms are for CUSTOMERS ONLY! And somehow it defeats the purpose if you have to go and buy a cup of coffee and sit down and drink it before you can take a leak.

Does Starbucks allow people to come in just to use the bathroom? I wouldn't know, because on principle, I stay out of Starbucks unless I'm forced - i.e., I used to work on occasion for a firm which didn't have a deli within any kind of reach on my way to the office (it was a block away in the opposite direction), so Starbucks was my only option. (They do have plain old American black coffee although they call it an Americano, for God's sake.) (This office was across the street from the Time Warner Center, which I assure you doesn't make any kind of effort for us poor people. It's Whole Foods and Starbucks all the way.)

Anyway, it's a point to ponder when one is taking a long walk.

And Caesar, bless his heart, came by and took me out to dinner on Thursday. If you're counting, that's two guys buying me drinks and dinner in a week! Either things are looking up, or the world is coming to an end - given my luck, probably the latter.

I had work all last week, thank God. Admittedly, it was without a doubt the dullest week I've ever spent. It was a little tiny law firm of six people, and the two people who head it up were on vacation...I was sitting in for the secretary/receptionist, also on vacation. Evidently all the clients knew that the head honchos were gone, so for a solid week the phone didn't ring, nobody came to the office, absolutely nothing happened. In one sense this was fine, because I redid my acting resume and got a lot of reading done, but of course, the days dragged interminably. If I have to work a straight job, I much prefer something where I'm run off my feet because it makes the day seem shorter (duh...). Of course, I don't get paid for this little gig until this coming Friday, so heaven knows what I'm going to do. However, I had enough to get the papers today, and I had enough after selling those books to get a two for one deal on cigarettes at good old RiteAid, so I'll make it somehow or another. Hell, if you consider that it's now 20 to 2 in the afternoon on Monday, that really only leaves me three days to scramble through, since the money will be in my account early Friday morning. Anybody can do that. Can't they? And there's food in the house (dull food, but food). So the only things I have to worry about are the morning papers, cigarettes, and cat food. I can dig that up, right? RIGHT?

Meanwhile I'm doing laundry, having made the dryer work again. I'm so clever.

Love, Wendy