Tonight's The Night

Thank Goodness For Chef Boyardee!

It's 1:53am and I'm here sucking down Spaghetti-Os with Meg. Tomorrow we move to our palace in Crown Heights, and tonight we've both got a bad case of the Christmas Eve-feelings, as we pack and wish we could just fast-forward to the un-packing and setting up portions of the event.

Movers are expected at 3pm tomorrow. I've had a number of beers but they don't seem to be doing the trick -- I'm not sleepy yet.

I look forward to resuming our weekly vegetable deliveries (we signed up for a subscription service to organic vegetables, did I mention that? It's called Urban Organics and it's so great. If you live in greater NYC and are interested in signing up, tap me for the details. If we refer someone, I think we get a free box of vegetables or something. It's an organic vegetable ponzi scheme!)

Right, I look forward to resuming the deliveries because I haven't eaten a vegetable in a while. Last night I went head to head with some French food, and it wasn't necessarily such a good idea. Meg and I didn't feel like cooking, so we went to one of the many local French bistros, also as a way of saying goodbye to the neighborhood. See you later, Carroll Gardens. Don't ever change. Stay as bourgeois as you were in the mid-aughts.

Tonight we pack, tomorrow we gentrify. Weird.

Please Allow

the 'Nietzsche Family Circus' to tickle you as much as it does me.



More NFC, here.

Hat tip: Hannah

My Favorite Branch of the Sciences

...is chemistry. Just so you know.

A Gold Star For Having Made It

I'm exhausted tonight. Weary. Feeling a little rough in mind and spirit.

(I am thankful to be at home, in bed, in my plaid bathrobe, surrounded by belovedly garish sheets and blankets, drinking tea, full of leftover chicken/potatoes/veg. Comfort food -- who thought of you? Best idea ever.)

So things are about as good as they can be, in here, right now. Outside? The wind is blowing over Manhattan, over Brooklyn. Chilly-ish. "Those are the winds of change, Katherine," Nikhil said earlier. Maybe so. I hear the leaves outside rustling. Dry twigs shaking. And it's almost Halloween.

I'm full of a fall-type melancholy, or something. Or maybe not, maybe I'm just overextended. The last few weeks at work have been the hardest in recent memory. Not totally sure why. Not even the workload so much as a stressful vibe that's permeated the air; sometimes I fancy I can feel it, it's like a free radical or something, working its way into tiny obscure places inside, making trouble. That's an indulgent way to put it. But. As we geared up to say goodbye to the second co-worker to depart inside of a month, naturally there was a lot of nervous energy in the air.

So I feel a need to shake that all off. Purify. Collect myself. Get back into it in a good way.

Meg's out of town so I'm in the middle of a week of just me here. I miss her, but it's good to have some time alone. Quiet time. Tomorrow morning I'll make toast, coffee, maybe an egg, and read the Times. Then maybe I'll take my wool coat to the cleaner's and see if they can replace the buttons that are missing. I might try to pack a little, and then Theo is having some people over for pumpkin-carving at her place. Then I'm taking my tools over to the new apartment; I told Stephanie I'd help her put together her new Ikea bed, and then sleep over. Sunday I think I'm meeting Larry and his krew for a drink or something.

I told Meg a while ago that when I'm in a certain mood, my life here in New York feels like a beautiful frosted doughnut with a distinct hole in the middle. It's sweet, it's luscious, it's...missing something. I've been feeling that way a little bit lately. It's like fall is bringing the somber-ness with it, whether I like it or not. These past couple of months have felt buoyant, happy go lucky; it's been easy to believe that Everything's Going To Be All Right, that I'm going to Figure It Out or, even better, that I won't need to figure it out because things will doubtless fall into place since that's what things do when you're generally a fairly hard-working and well-meaning person on the up-and-up with the world and...and these last couple weeks I've felt that wholesome sense of well-being slip out from between my fingers without there being the damndest thing I could do about it. Tres frustrating.

Part of me can't wait to be settled in the new apartment (the 28th!), but part of me hasn't quite accepted the commitment, or something. I, uh, left my heart in San Francisco a little bit; at least, I entrusted much of it to a San Franciscan, and it's fucking with my mind a little bit to be feathering a new nest here while that's all up in the air, or out there, or whatever spatial metaphor works for you.

The only sure thing is that everything changes, so I'ma try to have as mellow a weekend as possible, for starters, and I'm looking forward to the plate tectonics of my life bringing things into a more favorable arrangement soon.

Too Much Katherine Elsewhere, Too

Last week, two flattering things happened to me on a single day.

In the mail, I found a yellow bubble envelope from Penguin USA. A review copy? But at HOME? Wha'? I opened it, and it turned out to be a copy of 'What Would MacGyver Do?,' edited by Brendan Vaughan -- an anthology of essays about personal resourcefulness that includes a contribution from yers truly. I trust you will look for it wherever books are sold.

That felt pretty good, and then before bed, I checked my email to find that a piece of mine had been accepted by Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, a cool site of personal writing about New York that I've admired ever since taking a personal-nonfiction class at the New School in 2002. 'Get a piece accepted on Mr Beller's' has been like the 75th item on my to-do list for four years. So it is with great satisfaction that I cross it off, though I hope it won't be the last thing I'll publish with them, either. (The story is called "The Coffee Incident," and you may have read an early version of it on this very blog.)

Check it: www.mrbellersneighborhood.com

So -- bully for me!

Blog of Neglect!

So my life right now is like a five- or six-tentacled beast. Except this beast only has the motor power to work with about four of the tentacles at once. The others hang there, limp and waiting. This blog is one of those tentacles (a small one, more of a stub really), and it's been immobilized lately as I wiggle some of the others around. One big tentacle that's beginning to come to rest, thank gawd, is the 'find another place to live' tentacle. We found it. We found a place to live.

Finding a place to live in New York City feels like simultaneously winning the Superbowl and being ground into hamburger.

With a little bit of being robbed thrown in on the side.

But we found it. A little spendy but truly grand (I can't wait until I can post up some pictures), in a decent area and convenient to trains. I'm happy. I'll be happy when we're there and settled in again. I swear, the older I get, the less my tolerance for even minor upheavals. You get used to sleeping a certain way, leaving your glasses in the same place each night, the number of steps it takes to get to the bathroom. Right? I guess I do. On balance, though, I'm real excited for this place.

And it'll be good to have a little more free time for other tentacles: various kinds of writing, 400 Words, exercise (ha!), social life.

The View From the Top of the Week-Slide

Well, it's 2 a.m. and I wish I could freeze time for a little while before the work-week starts, but no dice. I'm feeling strangely non-verbal today and in fact all weekend, and I'm afraid that typing on this very loud ancient keyboard might be keeping up Christina, who is sleeping on the couch in the next room, so I'll just mention this one thing:

Tonight, I learned about my new favorite waste of time-cum-surrealist exercise, Google Whacking.