Some ideas for re-inventing a malfunctioning Queens apartment

Here’s the thing about our Astoria apartment: It’s a converted attic (vel third floor), which is, apparently, already a violation with the Buildings Department of the City of New York. It was erected in 1918, and I’m pretty sure only had one landlady since then— our current one, who lives in Long Island and is conveniently deaf when you try to call her. There is a single electrical circuit, which means that we can only have the hair dryer or the TV on, but not both. That is also a serious fire hazard, apparently.

The temperatures in summer range anywhere between 85 and 105, in winter from 55 to 62 during the day. There’s wind blowing in through our windows, cracks in the walls (no isolation) and electric outlets (the one in my room not working anyway). So we put plastic foil all over windows, which doesn’t really do much, but we can’t really put it all over walls if only because that will make the place look like an alien research laboratory.

There’s a hole in our bathroom floor still from when our substances-abusing super was fixing our leaking bathroom that used to flood the downstairs neighbor.

Now we have new next-door neighbors. They’re drug dealers.

When we’ve moved in, an old lady died in the ground floor apartment, and we really wish this place was at least haunted, or at least for something to haunt our drunkard super that has been non-fixing our front door doorknob (it falls out every time) for the past five months.

So how do you live in a place like this and not go mad?
There are several possible options:

- You convert your bedroom into an alien research laboratory
- You keep your sister’s bike there together with food and you plug off the fridge
- You smash all the windows (they’re useless anyway), cover the frames with candy wraps and make a performance art piece of your entire apartment
- You build a big fire place in the middle of your kitchen and use it
- You convert your bathroom into sauna (need to install a stove)
- You rent out the freezing bed-room as an electrical equipment storage
- You make your place an everyday open house and try to get as many people in daily as possible. It’s scientifically proven that humans can raise the place’s temperature. The more of them the warmer. Write in the invite there’s free wine then say you ran out of it.
- Report your trashy super and land lady to CIA for an international crime they haven’t committed
- Invite some trashy TV show over, if they find it newsworthy enough. If not, say that the super raped your cat.
- Start selling drugs
- Sleep in the staircase. To improve the effect, stop showering, build a carton box house next to your super’s door and do all the cooking there
- Pitch your place to Christo as a thing to wrap
- Open a brothel
- Open a speakeasy
- infest the building with bed bugs (only if you’re willing to suffer them yourself)
- Do go mad, kill every tenant with a fork which you then stick into the outlet in your room causing the whole thing to burn in a bright, Hollywood-style blaze...

If you have any other ideas, please, by all means, e-mail me.

beatae memoriae

Digging through my flash drive I found the portfolio from my first poetry workshop at the good old undergraduate program at Hunter. Here's a painful sample...

12-31-2007


Poem

The wisest people in the history of the world
were prostitutes--
who pondered nothing but the flesh,
who contemplated its soft biology and all aspects
of science—the materialism of weight
the stoicism of death
and rotting.
Who accepted meat
as everyday bread,
Who added no redundant philosophy or prudence.
Who were not insulting the audacity of the body,
Who felt the revealed flesh ,
Who tasted the bread,
Who first put it in their mouths.

Is this not
the best of religions--
acknowledging flesh
with no incenses
searching for imaginary
love

The view from my window

Cafetasia (Greenwich Village)

The Greenwich Village incarnation (or is this the original location?) of Cafetasia is louder, busier and full of drunken teenagers celebrating their birthdays over a flaming ball of fried ice-cream to the sound of the obvious song blasted from speakers, and performed apparently by a chef who’s simultaneously singing Happy Birthday and chopping off his fingers while attempting to chop bamboo. Human meat or not though, the Pad Thai is absolutely orgasmic, with the noodles thinner than usual and a delish lemony flavor that goes surprisingly well with eggs, cashews, chicken and bean sprouts. And yes, the fried ice-cream. Yum. Though it takes two to eat them (not the size—the slipperiness). Same gratification, less calf muscle.

No $4-wine, alas (it’s $5). No bedbugs detected thus far.

CAFETASIA - restaurant

Cafetasia (East Village)
85 Avenue A
(bet E. 5th & 6th Street)
New York, NY 10009
Tel.212-260-8570

Sadly, there’s nothing bad I can say about Cafetasia. Not only is the food tasty and affordable and the drink list long and even more affordable but they give you little cards to collect stamps every time you spend $10. Six gets you a free meal. It reminds me some coffee shops. And rightly so, because even decor-wise Cafetasia aims at a fusion of a bostro / cafe with a trendy lounge (dim lights, little table, slick minimalism and the Asian (elements of bamboo motif and an elephant wallpaper). The food is as noveau-East-Asian as the slick decor. The pan Asian menu (how I hate thatlabel for some reason) offers many choices of small, large and really large dishes—all in a brain-numbing range of $4 - $14. The brunch menu is also available with treats like the crispy flounder with honey-teriyaki sauce ($9). (As for drinks, it’s the $4 house wine for me. And nope, it’s not a happy hour). Apparently a friend of mine has tried every single dish on the menu (and there’s plenty), and she claims every single one is good. That I still need to check. But I will surely be back to get those stamps. I still need to check out their Greenwich Village location to find something to complain about. Though, alas, unless I stumble into NYU students, I might not succeed.

The whole idea of 'Jackass 3D'

A friend of mine put it pretty plainly-- and I'll have to sign under this-- when she said: "I don't want to see balls fly at me."

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger - review

There were supposed to be three profound moments, I think, in Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. The first one when the writer, Roy, finds out that his friend is not dead but in a coma, the second when Naomi Watts realizes that she might have had a chance to have an affair with her boss, Antonio Banderas, if she had only made the right move at the right split of a moment, and the third and final, when Naomi Watts realizes that her own creation (her mother’s belief in a fortune-teller) has turned against her (when mother refuses her the loan because the psychic said the planets forbid it-- that's a spoiler btw. But it was just so predictable). All three were supposed to have that slight subtlety of Match Point, of tiny yet breath-taking moments—Chris Wilton‘s realization at night that he has to kill Scarlett Johansson; the flying ring bouncing off a ramp instead of falling into the river. But the first one was ridiculously predictable and cliché, the second one came out almost unnoticeable, and the third one somehow lacks an impact, for reasons I can’t quite pin down. There was also a vague theme of life being impossible to predict (a general joke involving the character of the fortune teller), thrown at a viewer in conclusion of the movie by the annoying and, for the most part, completely redundant voice-over. That also misfired and left me as a viewer empty-handed.

Overall, it doesn't take a fortune teller's skills to predict most of the twists of the movie. People who look for something better are punished by not finding it, relationships with gold diggers end up in unwanted pregnancies, plagiarism will be punished and good looking tall dark strangers always end up having an affair with your best girlfriend.

But Anthony Hopkins lost a lot of weight since The Wolfman.