just suppose a juxtapose

yesterday i learned that this city is big enough to make room for people who knit during their commute on the train, those who pierce their faces like pincushions and scowl at everyone, and the ones who knit on the train while they scowl through their piercings. awesome.

i asked for snow

well, i asked for it. i bitched about how new yorkers kept promising snow but it never would come... obviously, it came. since saturday at noon, i've learned that snow in a blizzard comes down much the same way as rain in a hurricane. that is, sideways.

i learned that you cannot possibly hide your entire face from the blowing snow, and pink cheeks are overrated. i also learned to love my old gortex boots. ugly and functional, they're my new favorite shoes.

i hid from most of the blizzard at megann and brandi's house. let's hear it for pringles, dominoes and dvds!!

the dukes of hazzard

I was on the phone with a friend in New Orleans the other night, and we were debating the ultimate intellect of Daisy Duke. He said she was sexy but she offered sage advice and wisdom to Bo and Luke Duke when they got into trouble. I said she was a bimbo with her butt cheeks hanging out of her shorts.

This was not a common conversation for either of us, but I can speak intelligibly on the subject as needed. Any child of the South can, whether or not they liked watching that orange Charger get shredded every week.

The very next day, someone at work presented me with the second season DVD set of The Dukes of Hazzard as a joke. Now Bo, Luke and Daisy sit on my desk and watch me work at my fancy New York City job. How cool is that??

eyebrows

you have to adapt to certain situations in this city. my friend kevin lives in harlem, and my abode remains in brooklyn. so when my eyebrows grew bushy right before a fancy formal, we met in the middle on a secluded bench outside an eileen fisher store in the time warner building. as thirtysomethings bought scarves at banana republic across the hall, we sat there and had our own little tweezing session. it was lovely.

and in case you're morbidly curious, ahem keith b., my new and improved eyebrows can be seen in my picture folder here on myspace.

lucky

i am so lucky to have the family i got. i live in brooklyn in a bedroom so tiny i have to hang my shoes up under my loft bed because there's no space on the floor for them. and they all live in country neighborhoods in Arkansas where you actually have to mow the lawn or call it hay. but i was sitting here at the computer this morning, and i realized how close they really are, even from half a country away. i talk to my sister, grandmother and dad online almost every day, and my mom sends letters and calls on the phone weekly. i couldn't have asked for a better support system.

now i'm going out to buy a formal dress and the makings of the world's best bloody mary (thanks again to new orleans-keith's ex for the recipe.)

Two notes on NYC

I learned two things living here yesterday.

1. If you are of the female persuasion, such as we cute ones are, don't extend a handshake to men wearing Orthodox Jewish garb. It saves everyone a few awkward moments, and he doesn't have to explain that he doesn't shake hands with women becuase it's against his religion. That was a new one on me.

2. I also learned that New York keeps its kinky sexlife under wraps rather than putting it up on the balcony for everyone to see like New Orleans does. It makes it all that more surprising when the freakiness bubbles into professional conversation out of nowhere.

notes after midnight.

oh how i love to download music when i come home from a night out, slightly toasty from red wine (remember the new year's resolution to drink only red wine so as to shrink the rear-end!!)

i usually revert to my roots and download country tunes that i can't get up here. doug stone, better off in a pine box.

maybe a little billie holiday: gee baby, ain't i good to you?

Remember Alexandria, anyone?

I just read online that two public libraries in Mississippi have banned Jon Stewart's book America: The Book. They objected to the picture of naked Supreme Court Justices.

Leave it to Mississippi to make the backwoods stereotypes come true. It's a photoshopped, satirical picture, folks!! Come ON!!

What's next? Should we pull all of the art books off the shelves because they show, gasp, a dick on a statue?! What about those health books? They show up close and personal pictures of venereal disease... "Golly, Maggie, we better burn them nasty books so our sensitive readers don't get offended."

bag lady carts

i grew up rural. by that i mean, the roads in my trailer park were gravel for years before they sent a blacktop crew to make us all civilized.

now i live in new york city. in a few minutes i'm going to load all my dirty laundry (which means 20 pairs of black pants) into my bag-lady shopping cart and head down the block to the laundromat.

weird.

frozen foodies

moving from new orleans to new york didn't make me too nervous. i had already left my home state of arkansas, where i knew all the backroads and which flowers bloom by the roadside in the summertime, so going from one city to the next didn't seem too crazy.

there were really only two things about the move to new york that frightened me. number one was the winter. i saw a few ice storms in arkansas, including one that sent a tree through my rooftop at home and scared my little sister to death. but it only snowed two or three times a year there. when it did come down, or even look like it might, school and work closed down immediately so everyone could rush to krogers to buy coke, water and enough chocolate chip cookies to last three years. then we all holed up until the winter weather warning passed, usually the next day. so when i moved from new orleans to new york last spring, i expected to freeze solid in my ikea loft bed by november. that hasn't been the case so far, although i am sleeping with two comforters and heavy socks.

my second concern about leaving the crescent city for the big apple was more serious. i worried that i would never find food as good as it can be in new orleans. would new yorkers really be able to sit down at a mess of crawfish, potatoes and abita beer and understand how close to heaven they really are? would they appreciate red beans and rice that have cooked ALL DAY LONG, preferrably on holly miller's stove? do they fry their chicken/fish/steak masquerading as chicken/shrimp/oysters and mars bars? the answer is no. i tried red beans and rice once up here, at jacques-imos in grand central station, nonetheless, and it was a sad day. they were dry, and sweet, and served with some funky spices that made me think of yellow rice. and almost every shrimp i've seen has been steamed WITH NO SHRIMP BOIL at all! just naked. they're big, but they have no flavor. you can't excuse the high cholesterol without the flavor, so i try to avoid them.

although new york doesn't serve the food i love from new orleans, it does have a few things working for it in the food department. in a word, pizza. there's a garage-door down the street from me that opens late and stays open late and serves the best square pizza on earth. it's sicilian pizza, which means it has crack in the sauce. i feel happy the second i take a bite, and i always think i can eat two pieces, something that cannot be done by humans less than 7' tall. even bad pizza up here is better than most i had down South.

i also discovered udon, a hot yummy noodle soup that usually comes in a vat with chicken, mushrooms, onions and other goodies. i love it, even though i never can finish the vat.

new york also has the market cornered on finger foods. i've been to 100 parties/pr events since i moved here, and you cannot find better muchies anywhere. i can't recognize a lot of it (except the tiny cheeseburgers) but the spreads run the gamut from sweet and chocolatey to salty and crunchy. three cheers for this city's party food.

and there's a lot more food to try. i'm just getting familiar with korean food, and there are more indian and middle eastern dishes than i ever knew. i am enjoying trying all these new things, but i'm also keeping an eye out for the food i loved at home. it may have to wait until i can go back and visit.

no snow in brooklyn

yesterday our office was buzzing with warnings of snow and sleet and ice and general wintery blusters. six inches, they said! just wait and see, you'll need snow boots tomorrow, they said! so, being from the South, where the only winter precipitation that falls turns to black ice and ruins the roads, i got all excited thinking i would get to experience my first real snowy day.

well, they got some inches in westchester, where most of my coworkers live, but we got no snow at all in brooklyn. not even a fairy dusting, dammit!! i actually woke up early this morning, just to catch the sight of my neighborhood covered in white, but it was just wet.

this is my first real winter, and so far, it's not living up to my expectations. (cue the arctic blast from canada to punish my complaining.)

sweating to the oldies

it's a new year, so my dreams of having a slightly smaller, cuter rear-end swamped my brain right around 3 p.m. on New Year's Day. pausing between bites of french fries, i suddenly realized: i've got to go to the gym and lose some weight and get buff and refuse all the cigarettes keith offers me and drink only red wine in small portions to keep my heart healthy, except when i'm drinking water with my daily vitamins and sickness-preventing echinacea.

ACK!!

so i drug myself to the gym on monday, the same day everyone else decided to go, and after squeezing myself into my seemingly shrunken workout clothes, i climbed onto the treadmill. i had just broken a good sweat and was feeling like maybe i deserved a treat for being so dedicated to taking care of my body when the gym's music network broke out into some bob dylan. who the hell can exercise to "tangled up in blue"? i started singing along, and pretty soon i wasn't running on the treadmill anymore. i was sorta strolling along to the song. maybe the fierce mental consideration i gave to the lyrics made up for the loss of momentum, but i doubt it. my ass whittled no calories on monday, thanks to dylan's slow song and my wimpy will. i'll try to get some work done at the gym again tonight... hopefully dylan was just a cameo.