pizza coffee whiskey beer

I'm really excited about  tonight, but I'll write about it later.

Friday night the lab people had a party and I got back at 3:30am. Still not 100% how that happened, but there were some nice graduate students for the engineering department who joined us. Saturday I wandered around Brooklyn until I finally found Essie's place. She made me oladushki. Then Sunday morning was my last day in NYC, I said goodbye to Sasha and cracked open the door to Luisa's room but she was still sleeping. Met up with Valya and two of her friends from Princeton and Liza and Kostya. Pizza, coffee, I had class the next day but I put off leaving until last moment, coming back to Red Hook at 10:30. I sat between Andres and a girl from Mumbai who goes to the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) on the train back.

eat cake

Monday I met up with Kostya in the West Village, by his university, and went to Three Lives & co. (a bookshop) where he got a book of essays, which made him feel like he had bought contraband. Then we continued our adventure at The Strand (where he got two more books and I got three). 
Spent the next morning battling the snow, but made it the Jewish Museum for the Chagall exhibit. Even on a Tuesday afternoon it was pretty crowded, but Chagall is one of the first artists I ever remembered.
Wednesday I went to a bar in Harlem called The Shrine with Ben, and there were a few sets of music and debates about the pursuit of happiness, and then we parted and I went to meet my housemates&friends at Barcelona Bar in midtown. Their shots taste like cocktails - Surfer on Acid, at least, did, that's the only one I got. I was tempted to get Dante's Inferno until I found out it contained hot sauce. Luisa put Taylor Swift on the jukebox machine, and Sasha tried wrestling me with two arms against one of mine. A guy talking to Luisa thought we were all teachers: the bartender said we look aloof. After that we went to the bodega by our apartment and got cake-mix and icing.

Eating cake at past 1 am on a Wednesday.

laundromat

It’s 2am and I was planning on being asleep right now, but the yarn of time slipped through my fingers. The music outside is loud and rhythmic and of my time.

Thursday night I came back to the apartment and heard a girl on the other side of the wall (outside, walking on the street) say “no, you're not listening. My mother is a very forgiving person. All you need to do is show her that you can be a good girl” - in a voice filled with patient insistence. I had been out with Kostya, at his friend Cat’s birthday party. It was at the Bowery Diner in the Lower East Side. Happy hour drinks enticed me to order cocktails for the first time since I was 18: The Green Antoinette, and a Grace Kelley (which had a candied hibiscus flower). I think the birthday girl enjoyed herself. She tried convincing me to come to Hawaii with her next winter vacation.

When I was little, my father would sometimes take me with him to the laundromat of the apartment complex we lived in. I would get to line up the quarters in a row in the little slots before pushing them in to be eaten by the machine. The place I went to this morning had a different way of putting in the quarters (just one slot, where you put the coins in one by one: five for the wash, and one for the dryer, but three times). After that Sasha and I went to the Guggenheim. The Wool exhibition wasn’t my favorite, but they also had a small room with some late Kandinsky paintings and another room with various painters (Picasso, Cézanne, Gauguin …) Mostly I enjoyed the architecture of the building: walking along the inner rim, the hum of vertigo by my side. 

wax and envelopes

A couple days ago Sasha and I went to park nearby, and ended up photo-hunting a bit. On the way back to the apartment, we walked past this tree, covered in layers of candle was. A guy walked towards us and stopped, taking his earbudds out. "Hi" I said, "hey" he said, and then "that's for my boy, he died", and I could see the that someone had traced the letters "RIP" into the wax when it was still warm.

I walked into the '99¢ more or less' store and asked the cashier if they had envelopes and he pointed to his left - "keep going" he said until I finally found them. My pea coat on, hair up in a bun, scarf, as usual. He rung me up for $1.30 and I started digging through my bag in search of my wallet, plopping down a stack of articles I'm reading. "You're a teacher" he said with certainty, as I put down a quarter and nickle on top of the bill "no, I'm not, what made you think that?" "well, the papers, and your look - you look like a smart woman".

[for all my looks, I have yet to figure out how to make these pigeon peas, they are taking forever to cook]

m&m cookies

Perhaps one would expect four 20-somethings in NYC to go out and have a wild Friday night. (I don't know who you are, reader, but perhaps you know better than to expect this of me?). We got two bottles of red wine and made m&m cookies and stayed up until a pointless hour. Saturday I headed for soul food at Amy-Ruth’s in Harlem with some people, before going to some shitty bar in upper west side. Wouldn’t say that food spoke to my soul, personally, but then I don’t like fried food or rigorously salted food or food I have to pay more than 9$ for, and they are famous of their fried chicken on a waffle, which isn’t something I would order, so I’m a bad judge. The bar was Bourbon Street, and had bras hanging from the ceiling from all the girls that had danced they away in exchange for a free drink - bar policy. Not sure why: bras are way more expensive than drinks. The TV screens glared at us from all the walls.

Yesterday I went to Spectacle Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to see a movie with Damon. The theater was small, so that we missed it twice before finally realizing that what we had been walking past were not apartment buildings. The movie was a rather odd 1987 Japanese documentary called The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On. Odd because there’s a combination: the main characters search for truth of the horrendous campaign during WWII by the Japanese in New Guinea. Then there’s the ideological side of what makes a good man, what it means to bring peace to the dead, how to prevent further wars, what is the cost of bringing up the truth, the use of violence. Then there’s the characters themselves, the veteran heading the expedition is, for lack of a better word, mad. 

3$ falafel and 2.50$ for baklava

review

The British pub Cock & Bull called upon us, and so we heeded its cry and imbibed. That was Monday. The beer and the cup of coffee were perfect. The area where I’m living current is a bit less strictly residential than where I was for my internship, so that there are shops and restaurants close by. It’s also not summer, my least favorite season, and I’m living in a room that doesn’t look out straight onto the exterior of another building, but onto the street, so there's proper light. I like Luisa and Sasha much more than the woman I found on craigslist. Overall, NYC is less overwhelming. I can pick out individuals and see humans rather than an impossible swarm.

Tuesday I went up against the chill of winter to meet Bianca and her friends in midtown for a good-bye Korean dinner before she leaves for Vienna. While wandering around Penn Station later (waiting for someone) a lady came up to me. She started unwinding a long story, but first “is your English fluent?” “yes” “oh, thank God”. I think she misinterpreted my little smile because she asked a couple questions and then again “are you really fluent?” trying to appeal to my xenophobia. She smelled homeless and she started telling me a story about her daughter being airlifted out of NYC to a hospital in another city “and the security guard told me to get to go to…Grand Central and take metro north” she said, pausing at the name of one of the most famous stations in the world as if she had forgotten, opening up a piece of paper with neatly written out instructions, the folds softened and browning with numerous unfolding and refolding.

Yesterday Hannah and I went to Bischoff’s concert at Saint Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, primarily because contemporaneous was playing, so we knew some of the people on stage. Contemporaneous started as a group the year before I started college, and by now they are playing concerts in NYC, and this concert got a positive review in the Times.

Sickles Street

Yet again I have arrived in Manhattan. This time I live even further uptown than last, where the streets cease to be numbered. One of the resulting intersections is that of Dyckman St and Seaman Ave, right after Cumming St.

I'm staying with Luisa and Sasha for the month, we went to Blake's party in Astoria, Queens in
accidentally matching outfits. My first night here was also theirs; they just moved from Jersey City.

spelling

I've just given both my brothers haircuts. I've spent time with family and seen friend (Annutik is going to India! She just came back from Australia. Everyone else seems to be staying on this continent for the next few months). I'm leaving for NYC tomorrow morning until classes start up again.

My sort of New Years Resolution:

I've attempted to make New Years resolutions before - twice. However, neither of those years ended with me doing the intended split. Mama says Russian's don't make resolutions, and I have a conspiratorial theory that it's a habit brought to culture by capitalist gyms trying to sell memberships (everyone who goes to gyms regularly hates this time of year).
But in spite of my mother, and myself, I've decided that there is something I should work on. Spelling. And what better place to make sure I do this but here? I'm not sure how I've managed all these years - read so many books, written so many papers - without absorbing the proper way to order letters. Most people seem to make adjustments without conscious effort. It's at the point where it looks like I'm making errors in my grammar and pronunciation, particularly in Russian, but in English too. Sure, it's embarrassing. But mostly I want to improve my spelling because I'm vain (vane, vein) and I got two really great compliments on my speech this year. Amanda consistently tells me I speak and write poetically (in English). Kostya told me that sometimes he thinks I'm quoting classical literature, and then realizes that I'm just talking (in Russian). If spelling is blockading my ability to bring poetry to the page, then I should work on it. Right? Of course, I have yet to figure out how I'm going to do this...