Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down

Things that made me smile today:

• An old van with porthole windows and an airbrushed scene of the ocean on it's side.
• A friend's newborn baby.
• A steak burrito.
• Typos in a class syllabus.
• A guy in the subway dressed in a black suit, black t-shirt, black sneakers, black ponytail, black earings, black shades, and a black fannypack.
  
• Using a page from the Internal Revenue Code to make an origami penguin.
• A couple dozen compliments on my shirt.
• A new phillips-head screwdriver with molded rubber grip.
  

Things that made me frown today:

• A subway car with no airconditioning.
• A woman poking me with her Swiffer mop.
• No chipotle sauce for my burrito.
• An airconditioning unit crashing to the ground outside my apartment in the wee hours of the morning.
• Guy next to me at the urinals feeling the need to strike up a conversation.
  

Things that made me squirm today:

• A friend's newborn baby.
• Stepping on the remains of a chicken dinner as I came out of the subway.
• Stinky cat-woman in the coffee shop.

Yep, school has started, so not much going on...

Strangers with Candy

Sorry I've been M.I.A. recently. I've been trying to stuff in as much dating as possible before school started... Oy, my poor poor wallet...

It isn't just the fiscal blow; dating in this city can be seriously tough on one's resolve to meet new people. After the past couple months, I think I'm going to lay low for a while. It's interesting to date complete strangers. Back in Philly I'd at least get to know a girl before dating her. Here, that's the reason to date. We're heavily fortified before marching in. No real illusion of commitment at the early stages. No leaps of faith. We've got our parachutes firmly attached. Sometimes, I think dating and interviewing are pretty much synonymous.

Trends start to pick up. So the dating formula (at least for me) seems to be two weeks of shameless bliss, followed by the actual "get to know you" part where you learn about personalities instead of anecdotes, then comes the realization that she's just as mixed up about life as I am, and finally the "wow, your quirks are endearing" vs. "whoa, this is way too much" weigh in.

What surprises me is how arbitrary the reasons are for dropping the whole affair. On both sides. I guess there isn't much holding you back when you get bored, or anxious, or skeeved, or just confused. I mean, there's no real investment, right? It does however create a breeding pit for persnickety behavior. All the commonground in the world is suddenly swept aside because one person doesn't like the color red. Or, suddenly, there's a huge issue with the age difference when it didn't matter at all for the past month. Or (worst of all), all those endearing qualities and quirks are quickly becoming offensively intollerable. I'm hardly blameless, a good share of these stupid reasons are my own.

Anyway, it's been a fun summer during my off-time, but I'm both weary and wary of dating now. When I first moved up here, everyone told me how hard dating was up here. I'd laugh it off and say, "What the hell are you talking about? I never have a problem finding a date up here, it's like a carnival!" But now the excitement of living in a new city has worn off and I'm just another tired, persnickety, and hyperentitled New Yorker.

Chapter 2: In which our hero gets lost, found, lost again, and retires for the morning.

Oog, long week, but I've finally got a minute to update this thing.

So Monday night, I had a great evening with an old internet friend. She'd just moved up to NY (well, Jersey City) so I wanted to show her some fun places to hang out. It was pretty late, so I escorted her home to make sure she got there ok. On my way back into the city, everything went wrong, then right, then wrong, then right again.

So, the train decides to simpy stop at some random station in Jersey with no further connections at that station (at least none that were announced. After an hour of waiting some of us got a bit antsy and decided to find alternative ways home. Some people found rides, others called taxis. I knew a taxi from Jersey to Brooklyn would be way out of my pricerange, so I decided to hoof it to the next nearest station. Little did I know that "just down the street" really meant that I needed to wind around a daedalean labyrinth of streets for five miles.

By about 4:30 AM, I ran into a group of guys looking for the same station. They were a bluegrass band from Dublin. They had a few 40's and spare cigarettes. We ended up searching through abandoned Jersey streets for an hour before finding the station, but in the meantime we had some amazing conversations about travel, Americana, Dublin, and one of the band members whom they seem to have lost sometime during the evening.

All said, I made it home just in time to watch the sunrise and take a quick nap before showering for work.

Wasted

An amazing weekend has killed my Monday.

Friday was a wine and cheese party in Columbus Circle with lawschool friends. Much wine and champagne. Waaaay too much wine.

Saturday, my house held our first BBQ/movie screening. Tandori chicken, grilled asparagus, burgers and veggies galore under the backdrop of Repo Man. The backyard was standing room only and dense with good conversation.

I ended up meeting a girl at the party and spent the rest of the weekend with her. Watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, played three hours of ping-pong, went to a couple bars, wasted an afternoon away on a rooftop, fooled around, watched bad TV, and hunted down some coffee in Bed Stuy.