SNACKS

I have never been one of those people who carries little baggies filled with healthy snacks along in my bag. I didn't come from a baggie-toting kind of family. When we were kids, my friend Annie always had a baggie packed with carrots and cucumber and another baggie with advil and vitamins. Her mother is a nurse. Annie was always prepared for any eventuality. My mother was a floral designer. We always had tissue paper in the house.

I often see grown people--women, mostly--feasting on bagged goodies on trains and planes and the like. It takes a kind of foresight...

"Yum! What a delicious breakfast! I am quite satisfied. Of course, that satisfaction will not last forever. Some wheat thins in a baggie might be just the thing I will need later, when I am no longer full".

My brain just doesn't function like that:

"Yum! What a delicious breakfast! I am quite satisfied. I wonder what it would feel like to be turned completely inside-out."

Spending a flight pining away for someone else's bell pepper strips is no way to travel.

(Is this the best fucking topic I could come up with for blogging? How pathetic!)

Is there something profound here? If I could think enough into the future to pack some veggies for the road maybe I would be happier? More successful? Less prone to fits of dispair?

(I have a master's degree).

(Parenthetical remarks are meaningless and should be ignored.)

If I started carrying baggies around, would more people read my blog? That would be an absurd correlation, don't you think?

THE GREATEST SENTENCE I HAVE EVER READ ON THE INTERNET

"Even if you hate Park Slope and you think you'd like this video, you'd hate this video because it's not even bad funny."

SITTING IN UNION SQUARE...

I look over the shoulder of the bearded boy next to me, scribbling in his moleskein notebook. I see the words, "life" and "hate" and "imagine" and I remember being young and disdainful of money. I think of my beardy ex-boyfriend. He just won some kind of a fancy grant.

Fuck him.

It was a long day. An early day featuring plumbers and a kidney bean-shaped coffee table and a 16-year-old girl from LA who asked me where kids her age hung out in New York. I made something up because, after all, how would I know?

Today I schlepped a drawing worth tens of thousands of dollars on a city bus. Because I could. Because it was practically door to door service. Because it was free. Because I don't think I should treat a drawing better than I treat myself. If the bus is good enough for me, it's good enough for an overpriced Dzama.

Am I becoming a hater? Sometimes I feel like the kind of person to which the "Mean People Suck" bumper stickers are referring.

TIME THE REVELATOR

This morning I picked up a magazine from May of this year and felt a twinge of nostalgia for time gone by. To recap: I felt nostalgia for May when it is barely July. There was an ad for the final Sopranos episodes, long since broadcast and analyzed to death by the viewing public and those in the business of helping that public understand the things it sees on something called an "idiot box".

(I don't mean to bad-mouth television or those it employs. I wrote a pilot after all. And if any of my five readers have a contact in Hollywood, please do not hesitate to share! Desperate times indeed.)

It just seemed so sad that the time had passed. Only that it had come and gone, not that it was any more wonderful than the here and now.

My nostalgia for a month ago brings to mind the first job I had upon moving to New York. It was in a cosmetics store in Soho (actually, Nolita, but I refuse to acknowledge Nolita [North of Little Italy] as anything other than a bogus real estate construct). I spent most of my days in the store alone, since there were very few customers and therefore, no real need to employ more than one salesperson at a time. I filled my hours reading and giving myself one makeover after another. The store's owner lived in Canada most of the time. It really was a pretty cushy job, though I often left the store with some outrageous shit on my face. It was a strange era for me, fashion-wise. Yellow eyeshadow, for example, is the kind of experiment only a bored makeup salesperson would venture. A smarter one than I would insist on a full wipe down before the day's end. Me? I thought I looked fierce.

In any case, the owner left maybe three CDs that we were meant to play at the store. Before the end of my first week, I was sick to death of the mellow Euro techno-pop albums. There was one album though, someone must've left it there, Gillian Welch. I listened to it over and over again:

And every day it's getting straighter
Time's the revelator
The revelator