Bangin'

I can't stand how every time I come out of the Union Sq. subway station after work there are these dudes there with their upside-down buckets and pots bangin' away. I'm like, "bitch, it's not 1999 anymore. 'Stomp' was new and different - but not ever good - over a decade ago." Maybe it's a tourist thing, or maybe it's a matter of taste, but they still draw crazy crowds of people who, by standing around these douchebags, make it impossible for me to get out of the damn place. And really, like after a day in the office working behind a computer screen, I need to hear this crap? Bang bang bang. Gives me a damn migraine. And it's not even good! I'd take some dude on a darbuka any day. Maybe a drum circle with real f'in drums! Even that crazy guy who come onto the subway and mounts an entire keyboard on a stand in the center of the train is at least talented. And that other guy in the leather jacket that I sometimes see with an electric guitar, a small amp, and a slurred voice actually has some style to him. The mariachi band guys are decent too. And yet with these drumming guys, there's nothing cool or hip about the fact that they found their instruments in the dumpster. They sound like that's where they came from. A paint can was good for holding paint, but it's not all that good as a percussion instrument. And would a little inventiveness hurt? I mean if I'm going to come to terms with the fact that their gimmick is that they play "music" with trash, can't we at least pick some trash that makes OK music? What about like making a string instrument out of a cardboard box and old cables? Then maybe I'd impressed. Earplugs next time. For sure.

And while I'm on the subject of noise, the other day while I was enjoying a nice day outside, on the bench of a local coffeeshop, this guy drives by in his f'in Audi, windows rolled down, pumping some junk rap music with a crazy subwoofer that's, of course, making my iced coffee shake like some apporaching t-rex. Fine, so this guy is trying to compensate for something, he wants some attention, I get it. I've seen it before and I'm over it. But like, it's not enough that he's just going to drive by being dick, instead, he decides to park his car on the corner of the street along which I'm sitting and, get this, he gets out of the car and walks away. We're talking his car is just sitting there, windows still rolled down, keys still in the ignition, blasting this music while he just takes off. I think, OK, he stepped out and he's going to jump back in, but schmuck is gone for a good 10 minutes, forcing the rest of us to listen to his awful, awful track selection. What's wrong with people?

The Spark of Entry

This girl I know did a little project where she collected people's stories about how they got more into their Jewish identity. I wrote a little background story about my experiences which you can find here. It's kind of the more developed situation that existed behind the monologue I do for the "Monologues" show. Check out the rest of the site too. It's kind of small right now but I definitely think it has potential to become a blog of sorts or a larger collection of people's individual stories.

How Many Socks is Too Many Socks?

Its only in the last few months that I've allowed myself a luxury I never had before - giving all my laundry to the dry cleaners to do. I estimate that I end up paying a premium of about $30 extra per month in order to not have to do it myself. Is that worth it? Depends on how you look at it. Do I want to sit for a few hours at some random steamy laundromat (especially with the summer coming up), making sure that no one reaches into the machine to touch my unmentionables? Not really. Do I like spending more money? No. So it's kind of a little bit of a dilemma, especially when you consider that you probably care more about your own clothes than some random person.

So fine, I guess at some point the whole time thing really got to me - faced with the prospect of having to do laundry that week, I'd keep putting it off indefinitely because I just couldn't/didn't want to find the time needed to do it. That's like with me and cleaning. Sometimes it all just seems so exhausting and time consuming that I'd rather not do it at all. Now it's the little dry cleaning place around the corner that is the lucky recipient of my business. As a cash-only establishment, I get a little bit of a headache everytime I need to dig into my pocket for $25, but whatever, in healthy relationships everyone has their quirks.

Except that recently, I've found that my dry cleaner's quirks have extended to losing my socks. When I used to do my own laundry, this was a rare occurrence. I know everyone always seems to have issues with the aliens that come down while you're not looking and whisk away single socks, leaving you with sad, unpaired and useless slivers of fabric, but this didn't really happen to me. Maybe I was lucky, maybe I have a knack for spotting loose clothing and reuniting it with its other half. Whatever it was, I didn't have to go to Costco to purchase the sox six-pack to compensate for the lost footwear.

Now, in the last 2-3 months, I've found myself with SEVEN unpaired socks. Luckily they tend to be the cheaper, plain black or white socks, but still. SEVEN. How do you lose so many socks? And is this too much? I feel like it is. I get that, maybe, every month or so, they lose a sock. But this is at the point where they've now lost multiple socks in single loads. Yesterday I come in to get my laundry again, and the woman who runs the place - who at this point is holding onto my loose socks in the event that, miraculously, she should somehow find a matching sock somewhere - tells me "oh, so we were able to match a pair because we found a loose sock in the load you dropped off."

And I was like, "um, no. There weren't any loose pairs in that load. I don't randomly throw in a single sock for you to wash."

She didn't really understand what I was saying I don't think, because she kept repeating herself, as if expecting me to be really appreciative when, really, what it came down to was that they managed to lose another sock that matched with a sock they had already lost. Perfect.

Ugh, it could be as simple as going somewhere else, but I feel like maybe this is a problem with all dry cleaning places that wash your clothes for you? Really, they otherwise do a fine job and they're by far the cheapest and closest option, so maybe I don't have such a bad thing going? I don't know, I'm torn. And there's also a part of me that has a sneaking suspicion that they don't really add bleach when I ask them to. Maybe I'm just being paranoid about that.

The People Upstairs

Every morning at 4:30am, the ceiling above my bed begins to creak as the person living upstairs gets up for the day and starts moving around. I don't know who gets up at 4:30 to go to work, but apparently I have the good fortune of having one of these people living right above me. My building is post-war (I think), and it's all like "charming" wood finish and parquet floors, so I'm not surprised that it makes noise when you step on it. But what I don't get is how much this person moves around between 4:30 and 5:30 (when they seem to leave). First the sound is focussed right over me, so in the bedroom I'm guessing, but then for the next hour there's one set of creaks which move heavy, back and forth, from the bedroom area to the living room area, as if this person is just walking non-stop, for no particular reason. To the living room, to the kitchen, to the bedroom, to the living room, to the bedroom, to the bathroom, to the bedroom. Oh my God. It's ridiculous. Then separate from this main, louder noise, there's some weird scurrying sound that has to be some sort of pet (even though you aren't really allowed to have any, which means it could also be a scary crawling child monster) that creaks lighter. It moves on its own, apart from the main creaking, but also goes back and forth through the entire apartment for an hour.

Somehow I used to not be bothered by it and it didn't wake me up. But I guess since I'm older I'm becoming a lighter sleeper and now unless I wear earplugs, I'm up for an hour before the sun rises, until this person gets the hell out of their apartment and goes to wherever it is they go to in the morning. I'm just so damn curious to see who it is, but as always seems to happen when you live in an apartment building, I very rarely see anybody else entering or leaving. It's only in the hallway that I hear the occassional sounds, the opening of a mailbox or the walking up of stairs. When I first got here, I met one dude and thought "oh, this is going to be different than Manhattan because people are more social." Really, after that guy, I never met anyone else. Just now when I was getting my mail, there was a woman who walked in at the same time and there was this little awkwardness of us being neighbors who don't know each other. At one point, as I was turning my key in the lock, I looked back at her to be all like, "oh hey, you live here?" But she was already walking up the stairs and not noticing me. Interestingly enough, I got back to my place and the person above me seems to be home, so maybe she's that person? That would have been good to know because then I could have asked, "what is it that you do?" and "do you own a small rodent or are you in possession of a child that crawls?"

Still, I can't say it's as bad as my last apartment building where I gave every neighbor a holiday card, wrote my apartment number when I signed them, and never heard back from anyone. Not a peep. I kind of feel that if I went through the trouble of doing that here, at least a few people might get back to me, invite me over for dinner, set me up with their cousin(s). You know the drill. Neighbors are freaking crazy.

Self-Inflicted Literary Torture

I remember being back in college and hearing all these stories surrounding the James Joyce tome "Ulysses."

"Beware," they said, "beware this book."

It was always billed as the unreadable book. A masterpiece that existed more in a fantastical, collective awe than in any sort of reality. Why not reality? Because everyone just talked about how amazing it was but I never actually met anyone who read it. The thing they all said was how they started it but could never get through it. How they'd trudge through 100, 300, 500 pages and then just run out of breath. Some people had started it and stopped and restarted it up to 4, 5 times. This was the book that would bring grown men to tears. I'm not saying that grown men, particularly, have a harder time crying than others. Really, it's just an expression. I think you know what I mean.

So "Ulysses" has always been this "thing" for me, this book that I might just, possibly, pick up one day and challenge myself to get through because it's more about saying that I did it than actually wanting to read it. I mean, it doesn't actually sound all that good (the plot, that is), and I'm not a particularly big fan of Joyce (I read "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" in school and thought it kinda sucked). So for me it would be more about a personal challenge that wouldn't necessarily have much literary or intellectual value (particularly if the book ends up being a boring, rambling mess, and I forget its content as soon as I set it down, as has happened with plenty of other "classics" I've been encouraged to read). I kind of think of it in the same way I think about keeping Passover - it's more about the experience of seeing if I can stick to the whole no bread or pasta thing for the whole stretch than gaining any sort of particular cultural or spiritual value from it. Yeah, I like the seder meals and the food and the community part, but the act itself, the actual "fasting" doesn't really do it for me other than to make me feel cool that I stared carbs in the face and totally dissed them.

Which brings me to my other point, or rather, to the whole reason I brought up "Ulysses" - the book I'm reading now. If I pick up a book and get at least 100 pages in, I have to finish it, no matter how shitty it is. The only book that has ever stumped me was "The Gulag Archipelago" which is my own personal "Ulysses," which is to say I've started it and not finished it at least 3 times, each time getting to page 400 or so. And with that, it's not that it's bad; rather, it's just very dense and hard to read day in and day out until you get through the whole thing. I started it when I went to Cancun in March 2004 and I can still see the Bulldog Cafe flyer I used as a placeholder while I was trying to read through it on the beach. Sad.

Right now I'm on page 423 of "The Brothers Karamazov." Holy crap. That thing is a monster and it's not at all enjoyable or even good in a "this is good literature" sort of way. It's just not. I'm sorry. I know it's like one of the greatest works of man, but I don't know what the big deal is. And still, I just know I have to finish it. It's been a month, continuing from when I started it 2 years ago, and I'm like 300 pages away from being done. I'm totally not enjoying the experience and I kind of wish I knew how to quit it.

Modern Times

They're changing them on me. Slowly but inevitably, soon they will all be the same. It's 1984 on a NY scale, or maybe it's just me being dramatic. Maybe both.

Fine, I won't get ahead of myself, but it's already happening. Since November I've been a regular on the F train, the tried and true line of most of yuppie/hispter central Brooklyn, the blue blooded transport of the south eastern part of the borough. And so in these few months I have become invested in my train. In the mornings I see the same people getting through the same books, the same women in their late 20s and early 30s stroking their ring-less hands anxiously, the same young parents explaining inconsequential details to their children.

And then there's the voice, the reverberating of the conductor's explanations - transfer options, train traffic ahead, the need to stand clear of the closing doors. I have come to recognize two very distinct ones depending on what particular morning train I happen to catch. One is of an older gentleman, probably in his 50s, a heavy NY accent. He's definitely a local, and while he often sounds lazy, tired, bored, behind that superficial aspect of his tone, I hear a love, a passion he has for his City, for his work. His voice is an answer to every doubt I have ever had about whether this is the City for me. When I hear him, I can't imagine belonging anywhere else.

The other voice isof a younger man, clean-cut and precise. He's soft in the way he speaks, polite and considerate. During the winter, when the doors being open for even a second too long meant we'd all freeze, he'd apologize to everybody for it. Faced with the opportunity to transfer to the G from 3 consecutive stations, he'd consistently suggest that interested parties wait to transfer at a station that was underground rather than above, to avoid having to stand out in the cold.

And those trains that they run, there are two consistent types. Sometimes its the parallel rowed one with the grey seats. Otherwise its the old school lego block train with the interlocked seats, red and orange and yellow, stacked atop one another so that if you sit in the double seat the juts out into the middle, your knees touch the knees of the person sitting perpendicular to you.

Its the kind of thing you can't stand or don't care for until it's gone. And now, for the last few weeks, all I see are the new trains, the ones that have been running on the 6 line for over a year, and the more updated version which has been speeding towards Astoria for a few months now. It's all blue benches and steel, not enough to call it "sterile" but significantly devoid of grit in the way I think of NY. That part I'm actually OK with, but it's the voices too that have vanished. Replacing the sounds of the conductors I've come to know are the robotic voices of some unnamed woman and man who just don't really seem to give a shit about me in the way it seemed my human conductors did. And now they're everywhere, the stock voices on all the new trains. They still relay the same information, but there's just no humanity to any of it, there's no character to the particular train that I'm in. I'm just a thing being launched from one borough to another now, a number in a machine, not a NYer who is always running late and never seems to have enough time for everything he needs to do.

I wonder if I'll ever see my conductors again, or if I might just hear them once more at some point, a whisper coming from the edge of a platform on some late night drunken wait for the train that I'll recognize as what NY used to be.