cut on a diagonal

Whenever my step-father made me a sandwich he would cut it on a diagonal and said that this meant it was made with love. My step-father and I didn't exchange 'I love you's' very often unless it was in sandwich form, and we didn't need to.

I wish more things in life were cut on a diagonal - strange and special and secret and filled with all kinds of meaning.

stella

This morning I woke up disheveled, disoriented and fully clothed on the hard wood floor of my living room. I was covered in granola bar wrappers. No pillow. No blanket.

Stumbling through my morning routine I gradually began to piece together the night. I had a total of 4 Stellas at Elephant and Castle, a quantity I could easily crush for breakfast on any given day. But last night was unlike any other encounter I've had with beer, or the 'death juice' as it will now be referred to. Granted I only had 5 chicken wings for dinner last night, I've been a faithful drinker since I was about 16 years old.

After leaving the bar I took the brown line through downtown and headed north toward home. Thank God for phone records. Without fail, I can usually dig into my cell phone and find calls or texts that refresh the blurred events of the night before.

Me: Night. don't forget you still stole my backpack.
C: You mean my traveling back pack :)
Me: OMG! I was just dreaming on the brown line. I don't know where I am.
C: Haha, dreaming of [censored]'s tender touch?
Me: Oh god. Just fell asleep for the second time. C I don't know if im going to make it off the loop. Wake me up again in 30.
C: Wake up N. (angry cow)

It was that last text that eventually woke me up to find I had missed my El stop but fortunately I managed to stagger off the train a mere two stops after my intended destination. So I peeled my forehead from the grease smear I had created on the train's window, and from there I continued my hazy journey home on foot. Along the way I decided it would be a good idea to stop into Walgreen's for the bare necessities:

• 6 packages of Ramen noodles
• 2 Cup-o-Noodles
• 2 boxes of granola bars
• a gallon jug of iced tea

My Dear Stella,

You were a bad girl last night. You took me down. You took me down hard. let's play nice again soon.

I love you more than I can say,
mn

hairy legs

One day while on a plane traveling between New York and Chicago I read about 50ks in 30 Days in one of those airline magazines that about a thousand other people have flipped through and all the cross word puzzles have been disappointingly completed, or at least amateurishly attempted. It's a writing challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. The theory is that writing is all about quantity rather than pure quality. That it takes quantity to strip down to the quality.

This challenge got me thinking how wonderfully painful and exhausting it would be to disappear into a bubble for 30 days and crank out word after word. To live fueled on bottles of wine and next to no sleep. To sacrifice personal hygiene, friends and family for the perfect sentence.

But alas I have to live life to write about life. I have to live through the hairy legs and morning breath of personal relationships in order to truly experience them. After all, life isn't about perfect skin and silicon breasts, well maybe it is in places like LA, but not here where I live.

No, I need to know the hairy legs, the dirty fingernails, the eye crust, the pubic hair on the toilet seat of life. Because without all that, the good wouldn't be nearly so good.

That and the money thing. I need money to live.

sippin' on gin and juice (with my laptop)

I'm not sure I should be allowed to write when I'm drunk. At the time it seems like a perfectly logical idea. I believe that the very best writers kill themselves and that the great ones all have a healthy drinking problem. Usually a few drinks into the evening, I've convinced myself that I could very easily saddle up at the bar and flawlessly integrate with this second echelon of literary masters.

But what always seems to result from my drunken moments is something that should have been written by some sappy, teary-eyed teenager, most likely because I'm horribly self-aware much like a sappy, teary-eyed teenager.

Nonetheless here is my latest drunken rambling I wrote while unpacking one of my few remaining boxes:

As I rifle through boxes, whose contents I had long forgotten (some of which haven’t been touched in over a year since leaving New York), I’m faced with a divestiture that I’ve struggled with since I was eight years old. Wrapped in yellowing newspapers and pushed into the far corners of my mind, I am faced with photographs that haunt me.

In one hand I hold my father… someone I have looked up to as a superhero of sorts, a David in a sea of Goliaths. He was always on the outskirts of my life, living an existence that did not include me, but endlessly intrigued me. Can the irony be any greater than that I have now found myself in the same occupation that stole him from me? Growing up he was a mythological character who slipped in and out of my life as he traveled the world from one intrinsically important meeting to another, and I was just a dust speck on his radar, hopelessly wide-eyed and waiting for the slightest sign of acknowledgment that he just might recognize me not only as his daughter, but as his. It was from him that I inherited my unmanageable hair and ability to win a crowd over on wit alone.

In the other hand I hold a photograph of my step-father, a term that feels so plastic at times that I wish I could invent a new word just for him. Immediately when I think of him I don’t remember his struggles with alcoholism or the fact that he died from a drug overdose. What I remember is every Sunday morning since I was eight years old. Promptly at 6am he woke me (and just me) to get suited up to go skiing. I’m truly convinced that it was on the ski lifts, in its eerie silence, that someone spoke directly to me as a person, and not just as a kid. The lift ride was long enough to delve into the latest heartbreaks, teenage gossip, and life tragedies, but short enough to be punctuated with adrenaline and a sense of accomplishment, all of which I shared with him (and just him). Sundays were our secret bond that I still crave to this day. It was through him that I learned I was greater than a high school diploma and that I just might be someone worth listening to.

It is between these two men in which I am torn, only one of whom is still alive. So the choice should be obvious, and yet my heart still can’t let go even fours years after his death.

If I could reinvent the dictionary you would be “dad.”

the move: hello wellington

A team of four movers arrived at 10am this morning to relocate me from one apartment to another. The crew consisted of Oscar, the quiet European, a Mexican version of Abraham Lincoln and Edwardo, who coincidently enough moved me into Hawthorne exactly one year earlier. It took this stealthy crew a mere two hours to get me from point A to point B.

As the mountains of boxes stacked up in the new apartment I began to panic that it just might not all fit, and considered just throwing out entire boxes rather than going through the pain of unpacking them. But I've found that hands down, unpacking is far easier than packing.

In the seven hours I've been in the new place I've managed to unpack all but 3 boxes, and could probably get to those if I had just a sliver of motivation left. But overall it's beginning to take shape and I can't help but feel the excitement of just being here.

The building itself features delightfully tacky floral printed carpeting in the hallways and a wall of fun house mirrors in the lobby. The decorative molding throughout the apartment itself makes me deliriously giddy with its sophisticated charm, and I can't help but wonder if my apartment suspects that it's better suited for someone far more cosmopolitan than a product of blue-collar America. New apartment, do you know that I come from a home that had brown shag carpeting and mismatched furniture?

And finally, the feature that sold me on this place: the roof top deck.



I promise to be good to you and love you for at least a year (as required by my legally binding lease). We'll regroup and evaluate our relationship this time next year.

PS - Thank you unsecured network "linksys" for your excellent signal strength and disregard for passwords.

the move: in limbo

Encased in a mountain of boxes and surrounded by bare walls, I find myself with the last of my unpacked items. Given all the junk we seem to accumulate through the years, I think that the last items we pack probably say the most about us, as the thought of going without them for even just a day is an unbearable burden.

My remaining unpacked items: a bottle of wine, a cork screw, my laptop, and the clothes on my back.

I think that says I'm a computer nerd with a drinking problem. Yep, sounds about right.

the move: goodbye hawthorne

As much as I hate moving, the thought of my rent going up $100 a month is just unthinkable on principle alone. So I've decided to pack up shop and move just a few blocks away to an apartment that's smaller, cheaper, but most importantly has a rooftop deck, a hot commodity in the city.

As my move date approaches this weekend, I can't help but feel slightly nostalgic. 596 W. Hawthorne Pl. was my first real adult home that belonged solely to me. So what if the dishwasher didn't work, the bathroom tiles looked like they were about to fall off at any second, the windows occasionally fell inward given just the right gust of wind, and the shower had two temperatures: scalding hot or ice cold. The squeaky floor boards, non-functioning fireplace, and kitchen cabinets and closet doors that refused to stay closed were mine.

Apartment 102 was my refuge after work, my hideout on the weekends. It was where I spent my first Thanksgiving and Christmas away from Buffalo, and witnessed my first and second Chicago Gay Pride Parade from my bedroom window. I can now flawlessly tell any cab driver in Chicago, "Broadway and Hawthorne," without the slightest drunken slur. I've capped off many evenings dancing around this living room and getting just a little too friendly with the marble lion statues on either side of the main entrance. My mornings will no longer be greeted by Nick, the 50-something Eastern European maintenance man, who without fail met me with, "Good morning beautiful girl," even on my not-so-beautiful days. Nick, you stole my heart.

As silly as it seems, it saddens me to say goodbye. You've been a front row audience to my first year on my own. Although far from perfect, you were constant.

Thank you for letting me prove to myself that I can in fact make it on my own. I will miss you. Strange that I only realize this now that I'm leaving you.

dante

It was a typical Saturday afternoon. I was just sitting around my apartment feeling slightly bored but relieved to not be working or thinking for just a minute. Interrupting the silence, my cell phone began to ring and the call came up as 'Private.'

Since my mother's cell phone number is blocked and is displayed as a private number, I didn't think a whole lot of it and answered expecting to hear the shrill sound of my mother on the other end. I couldn't have been more wrong. Instead I was greeted by Dante, a 22 year old African American young gent, looking for his brotha who owes him money.

Politely, I respond that I don't know what he's talking about and tell him that I am no longer in Syracuse. I have since moved to Chicago.

Dante, always the opportunity-seeker, takes this as a way in. As we progress through conversation Dante inquires what I look like by asking, "Yo... so wut chu look like?"

Just to egg him on, I decide to ask him what he thinks I look like.

Dante's response: "THICK. You know... a nice ass and some big ol' titties."

Once confirming my obvious thickness, Dante was hooked, and I began to feel slightly uncomfortable with the direction that this conversation was headed. After Dante suggested that we make things a little "more interesting," I told him that it was still daylight in Chicago, and such things needed to wait for nighttime.

Just before shaking Dante loose and getting him off the phone, he asked, "So you got a picta phone? Can I send you some pictas?"

The obvious answer was, "Yes." (In all honesty you would have been disappointed if I said anything else.)

What happened next cannot be posted here. Use your imagination. Dante wasn't joking around.