Re: Online Dating

A problem with online dating is well, for example, let's say a man with the username I Love Bacon sends you a message.

Now, I love bacon, once in a while. But what kind of name is that?

If I met this man in real life and he introduced himself to me as I Love Bacon, I'd think he was an asshole.

Wouldn't you?

Conversely, earlier I played a very bad round of You Don't Know Jack under the username Tofu, which wasn't my choice--my choice was the game chooses and that's what it christened me. I love the chick pea, more than I love bacon, and eat a good amount of vegetarian but tofu, tofu I loathe you.

I'm sure I had a point and that this treatise on online dating is probably maybe going somewhere but in the meantime------>When Bacon & Tofu Collide

THINGS

OK. All this "worst storm ever" talk in the media and...around re: Sandy, a bigger mess than we thought, is nonetheless horrific & stunning to me in that this storm's human fatality rate, tragic in and of itself, was fortunately low, which would be my own measure of disaster scale. But: guess I'm wrong again! So I guess what all this means is people on the Gulf Coast who died by the thousands during Katrina, not to mention its aftermath et al., are worth less than people's THINGS on the East Coast. Goddamn I feel alienated, alienated like the amazing people I came up with here have been drowned out too, with my childhood block torn up while city brats pitch fits over inconveniences, alienated like I'm there again, I'm there again sitting in a fold-out chair on the front lawn in MS after Katrina with the friend who has since killed himself (in my dreams I am sitting next to an empty chair) and having a random car drive up, seeing its window roll down and a camera come out: snap! And go.

Four

That's the number of times today I've now asked or reminded the company that manages my building to please have the maintenance staff take in the 20-odd garbage and recycling bins lining the back courtyard in preparation for the wind gusts, before it starts raining. I made request four to the porter, who was busy dropping off the rent bills (priorities). He then wanted to talk about the company's apparent plan to install new windows in all the apartments. I mentioned I was a tad more concerned with what would be happening outside tonight, such as bags of glass bottle recyclables being torn apart and blown around between two six-story buildings at 30 to 75 miles per hour, depending on which forecast I'm to believe. They're still there and

I'm talking to myself again.

Update: They continue to sit there as of 2:50 p.m. Another walk around just confirmed this is a neighborhood trend.

And this would be case in point re: why I get so annoyed with NYC attitude these new millenium days; while an odd person here or there is guilty of this sort of brattiness during Nola or LI storms, that person is just that: odd. I mean, this is basic common sense for a regular storm & then there's the juxtaposition of this refusal to lift a finger with the guy in the grocery store yesterday who decided he'd be joining my aisle, although it was moving the opposite way, by proceeding to literally ram my body with his cart, shoving me back.

And here the porter is again: "everything's closed" so they "can't" secure the garbage pails because they didn't think to get anything ahead of time to hold them to the fence. "Oh, well." I'm not really sure how that prevents him and the super, who, granted, has not been seen for days, from simply bringing them inside, but he's started to whine so I say bye bye. And now the management office is closed. And still I seem to be the only one who sees the down side in bags of glass bottle recyclables being torn apart and blown around between two six-story buildings at 30 to 75 miles per hour, depending on which forecast I'm to believe. From here, it's a simple guess as to which sucker is going to end up hauling said bottles over to the lobby...

Locos on the Local Reservation

A few feet of flooding during a bad storm was the norm in the basement of my house growing up on Long Island (my parents just got this fixed as one of their newly retired home improvement projects). Now, however, any water gathering in any form larger than a puddle is a calamity, got it.

The "flooding" already being reported for NY is pretty minor--in stark contrast to North Carolina, which I am hearing nothing about comparatively in the lamestream. But it's like people's brains, encouraged by the ratings-churning or truly informative? media and, for some, a desire to catastrophize that I will never understand, go right to images of people wading through the flood water outside New Orleans after Katrina. YES, this is exactly the same.

Look, even if it grows, this impetus to panic? Helps no one. The best thing I did for myself during various crises was to make staying calm a priority, a tough sell to the current NYC crowd, if the last two years have shown me anything.

It's odd how the suburbanites here have become more relaxed and less high-strung than the city residents (talk about role reversal). Imagine if Californians flipped out and started treating every fire, an also-annual event, as if it was the worst inferno ever and I think my local reservations become a bit clearer...

Thinking Caps On, Hysteria Off, Please

The way my building management works: the heat is blaring despite it being nearly 60 degrees outside & none of the recycling bins or garbage pails in the back courtyard have been secured or moved inside. Perhaps these kids should have spent less time yesterday pushing & shoving at stores?

I've called twice this morning; no managers are available, but they'll deliver the message, which means they're going to make me have to yell at them to do the basics. Meanwhile, the overreaction has shut everything down. And yet.

It's like people only have two settings: hysterical or immobile. There's a fine middle ground, they might be interested to find...

East Coast, Calm Down?

Shoving people with your cart on purpose at the grocery store? You're scraping rock bottom here, sir.

Getting (throwing?) olives from the salad bar all over the floor, does that help you somehow? I mean, it's not like these olives are right on the edge; they're far down enough in the olive tray that you'd need to be handling them to move them over to the next aisle, floor. I think we better start sedating the hyper-reactive among us.

Also, I wish the olive I smashed down on before realizing it was there had been a grape.

This Again

Wow. I'd love to see today's crop of nyc hysterics during the blackout & ice storm of the late 70s, or Gloria in the 80s, or 70s/80s nyc period; now it's almost as if people here are so comparatively safe & privileged that the occurrence of ANY potential bad weather, or even the thought of it, is unacceptable, which of course is a hopelessly unrealistic way to live.

And equating tropical storms to one of this country's worst infrastructure failures ever, or Katrina, is both so inaccurate & disrespectful it takes my breath away.

Blast This

Will find way to disable: "Styleblaster documents all -- the visiting fashion plates, the hipsters and have-nots, the native Polish and Italian proud who have for years called this neighborhood home."

http://styleblaster.net/p/8260

Oh, good. Now if the cops aren't filming you wherever you go, these residents--can't call them fellow citizens, they're here urban touring--will oblige by rigging a camera up on a main block to record you for their own amusement. I mean, because they adore the community. It's all so very

objectifying, so very privacy violating, racist in both its omissions and its inclusions, and let's not even get into how very condescending, the "have-nots," how very, but hey if you're not doing anything it shouldn't bother you, right, you're out in public, right, what'd you expect for existing, right?

Well, I say ugh in their general direction. Enough already.

For all the lame buzzing about them, these so-called hipster children are just so joyless, nothing like my family and friends from Brooklyn and the 718 who were born and raised there. The so-called hipster children are not participating, they're pointing at people, all passionlesslike. They're not survivors. They're not direct. They're not wild. They're not real. They're not expressive. They're not conflicted. They don't work hard. They strike me as being like nothing at all; no politics that are tangible, no opinions grounded in hard reality, just

dead air

hanging there

like expired sushi

And yet they somehow manage to annoy others, almost as if, hmmm, they're going out of their way to do so and then decrying the rightful objections, all for something to rebel against, something to challenge that won't have them truly break a sweat. Is this the new edgy? The writer of the Gothamist piece about the latter url makes reference to feeling like these voyeurs are judging him and all I could think was, "Them? Who cares?"

They remind me of this annoying transplant twit who kept milling and even dancing around me and the friend I was having a pretty serious conversation with, or trying to, as we walked through the Quarter, my first visit back after leaving and our first time seeing each other since before she who shall not be named. Alas, Crapgypsy was imparting her wisdom about how to beeeeee in New Orleans, the way she told it, not that we asked or gave any indication of wanting her anywhere near us. I finally had to yell at her to stop blocking people on the sidewalk...I don't see the point of not honoring the place you've chosen to inhabit, learning from it, meeting people who are not carbon copies of you, for examples of things they're not doing on Bedford in Williamsburg (or that crapgypsies everywhere oppose by rote; Stevie this is not). I don't see the point when there's no joy, just leering, recording, co-opting; so what?

And stop with all the bad, insincere hats already.

Learn some manners.

Blast this.

I Blame Columbus

Re: Columbus Day, today there was one of those little street fairs that sell crap trinkets but good food right outside my building and all I could think was, "Why are you celebrating Columbus Day?"

The whole thing was odd & kind of creepy, considering they were the type of people he maybe probably would have slaughtered had he encountered them, i.e., they were not Caucasians.

I later witnessed a cab driver almost strike a woman carrying her baby in the crosswalk, even though she had the right of way because hey, he was in a rush so he just had to come within a foot of them. Then he went into the gas station just adjacent this intersection.

So, not being able to shrug off a baby and mother almost being grazed by yet another rager, I went up to him and asked if he had even seen them and what the hell was he doing.

He started shirking and waving me away angrily, saying all zombie-baby-like, "Go away, I don't like you. I didn't hit anybody." I told him I was calling the police, and a few other things; let him worry it out. Freaks!

I blame Columbus.