When you've dated someone awhile, but can still remember life before the relationship (B.C. in my case), the little anniversaries mean a lot. Cade and I can't agree when we started dating, but we can't argue the significance of Sakura Matsuri, the annual Cherry Blossom Festival at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. We went last year when my camera was a new plaything with all sorts of functions I didn't know how to use, and I guess you could say the same thing about our relationship. We were total rookies, having fought once. We're old pros now. In fact, we've earned Heisman trophies for arguing. I'm the MVP, Most Valuable Pouter.

Cade and I headed to Brooklyn on a few hours' sleep and didn't have to wait too long in the ticket line. Last year, we bypassed the line with a corporate membership. This year, it was different, which is a whole other blog entry. It was early afternoon and the festivities were underway - Japanese dancing, origami workshops, a procession of kimonoed marchers. This year was a tough one for cherry blossoms. They started blooming early, but then it got cold again. Most of the ones we saw had reached their peak some three weeks ago. Now they were stingy with their beauty, tightly flowered and drooping at the edges.



The magnolias and quince blossoms didn't disappoint, though. They were gorgeous. The flowering quince tree was abuzz with bees. Cade and I stood there for awhile watching the hard teardrops of pollen the bees were carrying on their backsides. I'm not sure how they did it. Perhaps their adhesive fuzz? It was quite impressive.


When the cacophonous dancing procession passed the flower beds of tulips and hyacinth, a terrified rabbit went racing for shelter deeper into the garden. Wild animals in the city delight me. Saturday night, Cade was walking crosstown at 3 a.m. and came face-to-face with a raccoon near Central Park South. It was doing what anything in Central Park does in the wee hours - smoking crack and looking for women to assault.

After walking throughout the garden, our fingers were tired from all the photography. Cade appeased me and we went to the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at The Brooklyn Museum. There we saw a naked woman use a barbed wire hula hoop, a padded cell made of maxi pads, and some silhouettes that challenge race relations among women.

Last year, Cade and I left Brooklyn exhausted. We went back to Manhattan and hours later, he whispered that he loved me. Saturday, he didn't have to get the courage up. I didn't have to wait for it. I said it first, but I knew he agreed anyway. It goes without saying.

I think there's no better way than that to celebrate the beginning and enjoy the middle.

Friday Night

Cade and I were at White Horse Tavern in The Village on Friday night to celebrate my friend Julia's birthday. On his way to the bar, Cade spotted Malcolm Gladwell, who Cade only knows as "that guy who was on iTunes talking about chunky pasta sauce." I quickly walked over and stared at him, trying to match the picture on the back of Blink with the skinny afro'd guy at the nearest table.

It was definitely him. I'm not the best with faces, names, or numbers, but even I could see that it was Malcolm Gladwell. I scurried to find Julia. She's even read The Tipping Point, and I knew she'd embarrass herself with me.

We tried to think of an attention-getting strategy. I suggested, "Hi. Are you Malcolm Gladwell?" Cade thought it was lame and obvious. Amy suggested standing near the writer's table and saying, "I hate that book Blink. Have you read it?" Then Cade and Julia started talking, and Julia was nodding.

We walked up to him, Julia drunkenly leading the expedition. Cade stayed at the bar. The following is a transcript of the conversation:

Julia: [to Gladwell and friends] Hi. Excuse me. I just wanted to let you know that there are a few people here who also like chunky pasta sauce, and one of them is behind me.

Gladwell looks behind Julia. Cade gives Gladwell a sly look from the bar.

Gladwell: Uhh, great.

Me: And we like Blink!

Gladwell: Thanks.

Julia: We want to know if you'd like to be involved in a picture.

Gladwell: What do you mean "involved"?

Julia: You being in a picture with us.

Gladwell: I'll pass.

The whole interaction was hysterical. I hope Julia remembers it tomorrow when I give her some chunky Ragu as a belated birthday present.

It wasn't so long ago that I wrote about all the older people living in the nice two bedroom apartments in my building with slight resentment. They pay $200 for apartments I won't be able to afford once they pass on and the building owners spruce them up.

Earlier this evening, someone buzzed my apartment. This happens every now and then with delivery people or visitors lacking basic buzzer knowledge. I pressed the button and called out to Central Park West, "Helloooooo?" A staccato, unmistakable reply: "Police! Please open the door!"

I buzzed the fuzz in. Three officers. They headed upstairs to the geriatric ward. Minutes later, they stomped downstairs and I stood at the peephole and eavesdropped. A call someone had made, an elderly man who hadn't been seen in a few days, no answer at the door. It seemed all the story needed was the terrible stench of decomposition.

The NYPD began knocking on my neighbors' doors before nearly beating down mine. I unlocked it. "Hi." They smiled and didn't offer an explanation. "We're trying to reach the super, but we can't get into the basement. What do you know about him?"

Ha! What do I know?

"He lives in the basement. I don't think you can get in without a separate key. I have his cell phone number, let me get it."

I yanked the post-it that says "Not So Super" and the number off my refrigerator. I showed it to the cops, covering the "Not So Super" with my thumb. Why beat a dead horse?

"Here it is. But I have to tell you, I have never reached him at this number." I didn't add that he told me to call an electrician to change my lightbulb.

The cops sighed and thanked me.

More cops showed up, the super never did, and the man is either dead in his spacious two bedroom apartment or just keeping a low profile. Frankly, I'm disappointed a door wasn't kicked in.

There's nothing that ruins your self-esteem like being a hair model. Today I took a personal day which personally, I don't think I take enough of. My day consisted of appointment hopping and a half hour trolling of a drugstore beauty aisle, looking for a fix. This was after I had my hair razored and spritzed to the point that it felt like Davey Crocket's coonskin hat. Despite the wind outside, it wouldn't, nay couldn't, move.

My hair place is on one floor of what appears to be your ordinary enormous building. But one foot out of the elevator, you realize that this is the land where everyone looks like they came out of a catalog. Not a Sunday sales sheet, a catalog. The women aren't high fashion, but they're the kind that always looked amazing in the yearbook, driver's licenses, and passports. Even the plumper ones - the kind that might be in the maternity section of the catalog - are beyond pleasantly plump. They're those really cute girls who just happen to have some meat on their bones. The kind whose belly rolls are imperceptible because all your attention is drawn to their gleaming smiles. That, and they wear a lot of chic black clothing.

I'm sick right now, so I know I don't look my best. Who does when they're coughing up yellow mucus? (Answer: Alright, Angelina Jolie. Whatever). But when I was riding the elevator to my follicle destination, I didn't expect to suddenly feel so ugly.

The elevator doors opened. I took my clipboard, sat in the waiting area, and wrote down when I want my next free haircut. Then my eye started to pulse with pain. I rubbed it, accidentally folding my contact lens under my eyelid. The tears were pouring out one eye and snot was dripping out the opposite nostril. I felt kind of like Carrie at the prom.

By the time I was called to my stylist's chair, I'd resolved the problem as best I could. I had to throw out the folded lens, and I'd wiped up all the bodily fluids. The woman who was randomly assigned to me had hair dyed a purplish-red color and mom-ish jeans. I thought we'd get along fine. When I started to speak, I could barely croak the words out.

"Oh no! You can barely talk. Do you have a book you can read while I do this? That will help me remember that I shouldn't speak to you," the stylist said. I took my book out of my bag and accepted the throat lozenge she offered.

Reading was impossible. I'm near-sighted, so I couldn't read without the book being embarrassingly close to my face and in the way of the stylist's razor. I gazed at my reflection in the mirror, appalled to see that even as a myopic blur, the intense worse-than-dressing-room lighting made me look washed out and blobby. At this point my hair was wet and clipped into weird sections on my head. That didn't help.

I closed my eyes, pretending to meditate. Well, actually I was, but it was mostly, "Om... Crap, I took terrible! Om... Is this what I always look like? Om... Curse this lighting!"

My magenta stylist remarked tersely, "You're going to have to sit up straight the whole time. I know it's uncomfortable, but I appreciate it." Her words sound all sweet and nice even as I type them, but I knew she resented me. Perhaps she wanted a customer to talk to. Or at the very least, one who didn't look like the "Early Stages" section of a medical dictionary's ebola chapter.

I managed to sit straighter and close my eyes, just waiting for my next appointment, one that would be loads more fun that this - my Pap smear. "Cel-e-brate good times, c'mon!"

Then she said it.

She was messing with the hair at the nape of my neck, and then she called some other stylists over to look at my hairline the way one emergency room nurse tells everyone on staff to check out the guy with a Coke bottle stuck up his butt. From the conversations literally behind my back, I deduced that I have an unusual back hairline. Ol' Purple Head even called it a "nightmare hairline."

Whaaaat?!

Was my hairline knocking off liquor stores after stealing old people's money? Was my hairline taking off someone's clothes in front of the whole school or killing loved ones?

I've never seen the way my hair grows in the back, but I don't think so.

I kept my eyes shut the rest of the haircut, urging my hairline to do something worse than be difficult to turn into a razor bob. I suggested that it grab the razor from the stylist's insensitive hands and give her plum-colored mane an asymmetrical cut that even the 80's would be too embarrassed to claim.

Yeah, that sounded like the plan of attack...once my hairline found a way to dim the lights a notch.

2:33 a.m.

How do you go from the kind of sleep that forgets your existence to complete wakefulness? This morning, I startled from sleep. The apartment was enveloped in the thick darkness that is between 2:00-6:45 on a weekday. On a weekend, this darkness might be full of laughter, last calls, whispers, and even light. The day before work, it is unfamiliar and uncomfortable as a distant relative.

I lay in bed, suddenly very awake, listening. My apartment is one of the quietest in New York City, I think. The windows face an alley that is muted in color and sound. Sometimes I hear the wings of pigeons when they burst into flight. When the subway rumbles and skids to a stop under my building, the radiator rattles. I notice this at night, and sometimes if it is especially still during the day. The rattle reminds me of a cup being placed on a saucer between sips.

But then I heard the soft scuff of shoes in the alley. My body tensed, and I thought of the window, how it was open wide enough for a man to slip through. He'd have to scale the apartment walls maybe five feet from the alley's concrete floor to get to my first floor apartment, but he could do it, possibly grabbing onto the window bars. Window bars he'd have to saw through to get in. I dashed to the window and closed it with a resounding schlunk, unnecessary precaution or not. Then I scrambled back to bed and let the headlines and facts wash over me. Like drinking a liter of soda after a Hostess snack cake binge, it was not good.

In the last week, a woman who eats where I eat, walks where I walk, was brutally raped. I was horrified when I read about what happened to her, a woman my age: a strange man was accidentally buzzed into her apartment building, forced himself into her apartment, and tortured her for nineteen hours. Her eyelids were slit, her beaten body tied to a futon, and the futon later set on fire. Miraculously, she escaped her burning apartment, and the man was later found.

A few days before this happened, on a rainy weekend afternoon, someone buzzed my apartment. I answered it, assuming it was Cade. The buzzer in my building is pretty crackly, as most are. "I lost my cell phone. Buzz me in," a man's voice said. "Cade? Is this Cade?" I asked. The guy answered yes, I buzzed him in, and I never saw anyone actually come into the building. It wasn't Cade. I wondered if it was someone who just wanted to get out of the rain or if it could be someone up to no good. The real Cade and I have since come up with a discreet buzzer passcode.

I've read that crimes and accidents are more likely to occur where we feel safe, places we don't have our guard up. You're more likely to get run over in front of your local supermarket than on that trip to Mexico City. This is what I thought of as I stopped breathing, waiting for more footsteps.

Sleep eluded me as long as I could think of the different layers of my experience with crime. A man with a gun at my old residence hall, my passport getting stolen, the time the scary men circled me in the Bronx on my way to a job interview. I remembered our house getting robbed one weekend when my parents were out of town, Megan and me at my aunt's. Megan cried and cried that "They stoled Flipper," referring to her missing toy plesiosaurus, the one we found a few days later. I'll never forget that brush with crime, either.

That's when it must have occured to me - that home, though apparently fraught with peril, is still home. And then I went back to sleep.

There's currently a Yahoo! headline that reads, "Russell Simmons calls for end to 'offensive words' in music."

When I first saw it, I immediately thought, "What does the Sweatin' to the Oldies guy have to do with the music industry?"

Heh, heh.

Tonight my window's open wide as the golden-petaled daffodils that line the sidewalks. It was a beautiful weekend in NYC. The spring fashions were finally unhindered by jackets and sweaters. Flip flops revealed pale, boot-distressed feet. My freckles square-danced in the sunlight.

I walked to Broadway today and found a street fair in full swing. Cade and I meandered through part of it, looking at the irregular Bloopers underwear being peddled and smelling the burning of corn, funnel cakes, and bare shoulders. This weather reminds me of when I first moved here - how I didn't have anyone to walk about with, so I just walked in crowds like these. How I never felt alone nor together, just a comfortable in-between feeling.

The alone-together feeling occurred last night, too. Cade and I had gone to Long Island City, because this is the place that keeps coming up when we think about relocation for money's sake. We were sitting on a bench and gazing at Manhattan across the river. "We're close enough to see cars, but not hear them," Cade observed. The skyline looked so beautiful and twinkly and innocent. It's Long Island City's nightlight. "Surely that can't be the city that seems to eat up so many souls, the city that is a cruel mistress to all the driven, naive fools who think half the battle is getting there," I thought.

Cade was right next to me, yet I was very far away. I was thinking about how beautiful all of it is, but how even the most spectacular things become familiar. Skyline, you don't transfix me anymore, not like you used to. I'm not sure it's a bad thing, perhaps just a nagging reality I ought to attempt to fight. Like crow's feet.

I snuggled closer to Cade on the bench and we watched people in their apartments, flicking lights on and off, watching tv, getting dressed to go out, cooking... We took the train back to that glowing beacon, moths to its flame, and baked impromptu snickerdoodles together-together.

The beauty of the pictures Cade took in Central Park yesterday shocks me. Sunday has a way of making Saturday look especially beautiful. It's essentially the parade of less attractive bridesmaids designed to elevate the bride to goddess, which also explains the general hideousness of bridemaids' dresses. I'm together-alone now with Cade. He's the finger responsible for the pictures that warm me like Saturday.

Ten Things I Meant To Tell You Yesterday

10) I knew it was going to be a good day when I could overhear the music blaring from the headphones of an urban youth next to me on the subway bench, and realized it was Todd Rundgren's "Hello, It's Me." I love that song.

9) Christopher Buckley's Boomsday is so original and clever and naughty that I saw him read a few weeks ago. He said, "People are way too protective of the elderly. It's like, if you even mention Social Security reform, they say, 'Oh, you hate old people.' But really, the elderly are a huge drain and we've gotta do something about it." I want the book for my birthday - hint, hint.

8) The six fat, greedy, Lawnguy Land-dwelling owners of my apartment building are trying to eradicate all the working, student-loan paying tenants (e.g. me). My rent went from a sweet preferential rate to an exorbitant legal rate. I learned the news on a chaste scrap of legalese that basically said, "We're jackin' things up, yo! You gots to bounce if you can't pay up, chump!"

I handled this catastrophe like all the others - excessive crying, then looking up my legal rights, then crying. In the end, I visited one of those lovely state buildings where I was given a really hard time at the metal detector. I learned that the steep rent hike was legal, though completely immoral and likely to send the building owners to hell. All I could do was negotiate. I met with my building manager and did just that. I get to live here for another year, and yes, I got it all in writing.

7) I have a hole in my beloved beaded black slip-ons from November 2005. It's conspicuous, as it's right at the toe. I'm not sure I could handle throwing the shoes out, because I bought them for $10 when my parents were visiting. Great origins, these shoes have. I also just love the beading and haven't been able to find any other shoes like this. Just a minute ago, I had this hare-brained idea that I would cut up the shoes and use the detailed beading to decorate a notebook or make a bookmark. Now I'm looking up cat adoption services to expedite my descent into cat ladydom.

6) I'm feeling really busy and stressed out these days, hence the infrequent blogging and repeated excuses when I actually do blog. But I've found time to enjoy myself at least once this week. Cade introduced me to Shaun of the Dead last night. It was hysterical.

5) My photography class was really nice this week. Two of my most challenging brats were in trouble for bullying a lower grade kid and stealing candy from her lunchbox. Another kid went home. Now all the kids know how to use the cameras, and I just have to walk around and remind them to take portraits of their partners, remove the lens cap, and stop representing.

4) The most romantic thing I've said to Cade recently: "I hope you're The One. I know too much about your bowels for you not to be The One." Violins (and large intestines) swelled.

3) I just learned about the Wii last month, and geocaching in the last week. It's like I live under a rock in Central Park. One of the big schisty kinds.

2) Somehow I have been volunteered to sponsor the middle school yearbook at my place of work. It's all because of the cameras, and possibly the fact that I have game.

1) My school is under review tomorrow, and we were blatantly told to fudge some records. Also, the principal has violated two special education laws. Hello, fallout.

I thought crime fighting blimps were just a part of my wildest fantasies.

Throughout the day, I've read breaking news about the tragic shooting at Virginia Tech. The accounts have brought me to tears, and I'm deeply saddened. This doesn't happen to me often. Normally, there's a kind of barrier between me and the news. I think most of us develop this kind of desensitized way of going about our lives, thinking that so many stories, while heartbreaking, are also distant. They happen somewhere else to other people.

I'm not so far removed from college, where I lived in a dorm and worked as an RA. My alma mater previously held the record for shooting fatalities. These personal factors might contribute to my unusual feelings of grief and connection to the community where the tragedy occurred.

Nonetheless, I know I speak for many people from all walks of life when I express sorrow for all the people who woke up Monday morning not knowing what senseless violence would ensue - all those who survived and all those who didn't. My sympathy goes out to all Virginia Tech community members and their families.

I smile every time I see this.

1) The critics say the only original thing about Disturbia is its name, but I venture to say that this movie doesn't need to be original or twisty to be entertaining. Hundreds of moviegoers aren't wrong this time. I got free sneak preview tickets last Thursday and dragged Cade for some spooky movie handholding action. The teen characters definitely fit types, but I think Shia LaBeouf is a great actor. I also jumped so much during one scene that I pulled an abdominal muscle.

2) I've spent recent weeks reading juvenile fiction, because I started writing a YA book of my own last year and abandoned it. I just got stuck, and hadn't made up my mind about the best way to use the narrator. I've read Speak, Sold, Love that Dog, and The Hundred Dresses to get a feel for different ways to tell a story.

3) The Don Imus media blitz makes me think a lot about freedom of speech and that saying about rightfully swinging my fist until my neighbor's nose. It also reminds me of times when I have been called racist, images I see everyday, and one very loud altercation I had with a guy in college. I'll be blogging more about that later.

4) Something special happened to me last week. It probably wouldn't mean much to those of you who can dance to a beat or run and dribble a basketball at the same time. To me, though, it was special. One of my co-workers saw me shooting hoops during indoor recess in the gym. He complimented me on my form, which is usually done by Dominican men on the street. Later that day, he added this on to a staff-wide email string about a student vs. staff basketball game (my co-worker Dan had just proclaimed himself "one heck of a sixth man"): "YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE A HARD TIME BEATING AMANDA OUT - I SAW HER SHOOT AROUND TODAY AT RECESS AND ALL I CAN SAY BROTHER DANIEL IS YOU WILL BE ONE HECK OF A SEVENTH MAN."

He then proceeded to tell me I've got game. I'm not exactly sure what that means, but I'm totally eating it up.

I'VE GOT GAME!

I'm flipping through tv channels as I eat dinner. On VH1, two random people sit together on a beach and gaze deeply into each other's eyes. Romantic music plays in the background. Something beautiful is about to be shared.

Woman: I dunno. Ever since the first time I saw you it was like, I had these strong-ass feelins for you.

Man: Yeah.

I chew thoughtfully and press the up arrow.

Today the Brooklyn Bridge is rain-slickened and cold, the pedestrian and bike area abandoned. When I went yesterday, it was sunny and crowded. Tourists walked so slowly that Cade and I kept stepping into the bike lane to quickly bypass the families loaded down with cameras and knapsacks. One surly cyclist asked, "You do know you're in the bike lane, right?" as he whizzed off. "You do know I could easily push you over, right?" I retorted to Cade. Someday I want to be a cyclist over the bridge, but I'll go easy on those traveling afoot. Foot traffic is slow and frequently interrupted across the wooden-planked bridge. Sometimes walkers have to stray in the bike lane.

I didn't know how to get on the bridge. Cade and I looked it up and wandered around trying to find it. We passed by skateboarding teenagers and their amateur film crews before finally asking a cop. Once we found the way, I was surprised to see how many people were walking from Brooklyn to Manhattan. It was a beautiful day, yes, but how many people walk across the bridge everyday, whether the weather's nice or not? I like the idea of walking across the bridge - famous NYC skyline beside me, Statue of Liberty looking on, zooming cars below, boats beside. It is involvement and removal at the same time.

Lately, I think of other kinds of bridges and points of connections, ways I'm supposed to get to where I want to be from where I am right now. I want a new job in a completely different industry. I want to improve, or at least, maintain my current standard of living when I go to a new square one. I want to be happier. At times, I have felt utterly isolated from anyone who really knows what I am capable of. (I am not in this league, not usually. I have a lot of doubts and admit I'm a pessimist). But in the last week, I have reached out and asked for help, and some semblance of a bridge appears to be forming. Perhaps it's just a few planks in the right direction, but nonetheless, some planks.

This week, I need to find more. In a few weeks, I need something to walk across.

Saturday morning, and the upstairs neighbors are at it again, though I'm not sure what "it" is. Maybe they're getting ready for an upcoming audition for "Stomp" and training in heavy combat boots for the added workout. Maybe they're throwing those huge ten-pound bags of dog food one buys at Costco in order to tease - or flatten - that Twinkie-shaped terrier I've see peeing outside. Or maybe this apartment building's ceilings and walls are as brittle as an octogenarian woman's bones, but I don't remember the neighbors being this noisy when I first moved in.

Whatever the reason, I usually don't mind it. It makes me feel like I have housemates, never mind that I don't know anyone's names and no one even grunts hello when we pass in the hall. This is not that kind of building.

Like many apartments in this area, it's an old building, the kind where elderly couples have been living upstairs for twenty years and pay $200 a month in rent. The kind where twenty and thirty-somethings mostly live downstairs in studios and pay at least $1,000 a month. There's a very perceptible generation gap. Young people stumble into the building at 3 a.m. screeching about jeans and gay rights. (This morning, actually). And old people shuffle-grumble, if you see them at all. They aren't milk and cookies grandparent-types. Large Neighbor, the man who sits on the stoop and drinks bodega juice, a $.99 beverage worse than Kool-Aid, flares his nostrils and refuses to narrow his sprawl when other residents need to get in the building. Another cantankerous woman hollers from the stairwell at her visitors.

One time I came back to the apartment after work, and there was a sticker on the front door. It had an unfamiliar name, an apartment number, a date and time. The bottom of the sticker bore the address and contact information of a funeral home.

"Whoa," I thought. "I live where people die." I know that any of us can go at any moment, young or old, healthy or sick. But my neighbor expired after living here for years and years. The issues that I'm dealing with are really different from those of my neighbors. The first and second floors are concerned with looking hip. The third and fourth floors are worried about breaking a hip. (This is putting it glibly of course, I won't get into that whole issue that rhymes with Mocial Mecurity). At this point, it doesn't make sense that the elders should have to climb stairs to get home. Maybe if they lived in the first floor studios...and more agile youngsters lived in the bigger, upstairs apartments... Well, you can see where I'm going.

I don't begrudge anyone their bigger, cheaper apartment...this very minute. But I'm not happy that an upstairs neighbor is now vacuuming, and has been vacuuming for a straight half-hour. I think the machine is in a resting position, too, just sucking on the same piece of clean-as-it's-gonna-get carpet. The highly-decibeled hum will be in my head long after I leave the house today or some cantankerous and possibly deaf neighbor realizes there's a funny noise coming from the living room, whichever comes first.

What A Mess, Don: The Stephen Colbert version.

The seat of my pants, o how I fly by it!

Today was my first day back at work, and I wasn't very enthusiastic. Remember the Big Three struggle I wrote about almost a year ago? Let's just say there's a kind of deja vu lurking around the corner, ready to bonk me on the head with its rubber mallet. More details on that later, though.

I want to write much more later, as the nagging mom inside my head is telling me that I will forget the sentence that came to me on the subway, that I don't write about certain things enough anymore.

Alas, she also nags about bedtime and needing to take a shower. Goodnight!

Cade and I are complaining about how neither of us have slept very well in recent days.

Me: The other night, I woke up with my head and neck in such pain. The pillows were stacked in a weird way, so I'd been sleeping with my neck strained. I was sore all day.

Cade: If you'd slept as uncomfortably as me, you'd have been walking around like a hunchback that got hit by a car. I was on Paul's floor with the three couch cushions - one for my head, one for my butt, one for my feet.

Me: That was dumb.

Cade: Yeah. So I was up, down, up, down. I felt like a sine wave.

I'm a sucker for stories like this.

I found these laxatives at a Brighton Beach pharmacy. Chocolate Smooth Move is the best laxative name ever, second only to Spring Cleaning.

Begin Again

You can visit a foreign country for $2. Or at least, you can feel like you're in a foreign country for $2. After exiting the B train at the Brighton Beach, you're thrust into a world of Cyrillic signs, pulsing techno from passing cars, borsch, and the ostentatious spandex clothes of the early nineties. (Apparently, always en vogue in Russia). I don't understand why tourists opt for Chinatown instead of Little Odessa during their visits. Sure, I haven't see any stern-visaged former Communists peddling knockoff bags. But I truly feel steeped in otherness there, and not in a hey-other-come-buy-sunglasses-I-make-special-deal-for-you-only kind of way.

Cade and I went to Brighton Beach to take pictures, because Brighton Beach is not beautiful. It's a village that lives under the dirty roar of elevated subway tracks. Paint peels in huge, rusty chunks that shake off into the open-air veggie stands, onto the large meat-filled pastries sold for $1. The beach is riddled with the detritus of vagrants that lap at malt liquor like waves at the shore. Still, it sustains more wildlife than the significantly cleaner beaches where I'm from. When Cade and I visited over the summer and went swimming (I've accepted that now my kids will probably be mutants), we encountered a live horseshoe crab and multiple fiddler crabs. I was delighted, because 1) I'm easily amused and haven't seen much of the world and 2) I'm a science geek at heart.



The fog hovered over Astroland, the amusement park on Coney Island, and Cade agreed to walk over with me. Its last season of operation has just started. Coney Island, as a whole, is a kind of oceanic ghost town. The only association my generation has with it is Requiem for a Dream, which is pretty damn disturbing. Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs," on the contrary, makes me all warm and fuzzy. Oh, and didn't Alvy from Annie Hall grow up on Coney Island? I digress.

The sad thing about Coney Island is that it used to be a happening place. Throngs of people flocked to the boardwalks. Nathan's Famous Hotdogs were created and peddled to the droves. People thought the Wonder Wheel was a well, wonder. In these days of Six Flags and plastic unlimited ride-programmed wrist straps, Coney Island is the withered up, practically immobile grandparent of amusement parks. I think this deathbed status makes it all the more important for visiting, and its decay kind of beautiful.