last night at work

Holy freaking crap, you guys, so last night at work there was this massive thunder and rain storm, one of those crazy ones where the sun is still out and unobscured except by the sheets upon sheets of rain. The tables in my section were mostly outside so I didn't have much to do for a while. Eventually the rain let up and I got some action and all was well.

And then walked in two gentlemen who looked forlornly around the restaurant, as customers often do when the hostess is occupied. I'm normally a good little team player, but I must confess that the only reason I ran over to them immediately is because one of the dudes was one of the frontmen of Broken Social Scene, a band that you may have heard me mention once or twice, and the other was one of the most attractive (to me, anyway) men I have ever seen in my entire life. They said, "There must be a long wait for six right now, huh?" and I said, "Yeah, but the hostess knows for sure, let me go ask her," and OOTMA(TM,A)MIHESIMEL said, "Don't worry, we'll talk to her," and ever so gently--lovingly, I like to imagine--patted me on the back as I ran off to do something or other.

Once something or other was over I noticed them standing outside, near my tables, doing some texting. I couldn't wait any longer. "Are you, um, in a band?" I asked the guy in the band who I knew was in the band but because I'd thought about it too much wasn't entirely sure of anymore. "Yes," he said. "You'reinBrokenSocialSceneohmygodyou'relikeoneofmyfavoritebands. ImeanlikefavoritebandsEVER. Didn'tyoujustplaysomelittleshowlastnightinBrooklyn? I'mcomingtoseeyounextThursdayinProspectPark!" Despite my extreme geekdom, we managed to have a nice little conversation about those darn expensive ticket prices and the first time I saw them play (an intimate $2 show at NYU) and how they'd just played Letterman, and they both introduced themselves as Brendan the musician and Brendan the manager, and then they said I should watch the Letterman show if I was home by 11, and I said, "Ha, I'll be lucky if I'm out of here by 2!"

Actually, no, I only said that when I imagined the conversation in my head later and I'd acted cool. Instead I smiled sheepishly and ran off to attend to my 7-top reservation for the first time since they'd sat 20 minutes prior. Once I'd translated the menu, the guys were gone, and I retreated to the downstairs bathroom to pee for a good five minutes straight. All I wanted at that moment was to give the sweet Canadians anything they wanted, but in retrospect it was probably good they didn't get their table with, presumably, more band members, as I was pretty much useless for the next hour as it was.

My job is turning me into a bipolar alcoholic with serious back problems but my god is it cool sometimes.

a michael stipe update

SCENE: Several months ago. My restaurant. Dinnertime.

My Friend M: Goodeveningthankyouforcalling[myrestaurnt]thisisM!

Michael Stipe: Hi, M! This is Michael Stipe!

My Friend M: [doesn't know who Michael Stipe is*] Okay.

Michael Stipe: Can I get a table for six tonight at 10:00?

My Friend M: Sure, that's fine. Can I get your number please?

Michael Stipe: Is E [our General Manager, who is very much a hippie, and very much awesome] working tonight?

My Friend M: Yes he is.

Michael Stipe: Can you tell him not to play any Phish?

END SCENE

*After a long moment of consideration upon hearing this story, I have decided to remain friends with M.

video monday!

Via Ellen via Jason: Girl on Maury show expresses phobia of pickles, is my new hero.

Via Fat Asian Baby: Brooklyn hipsters mock Brooklyn hipsters, do pretty good job.

And with that, I am off to go eat another slippery, scary food, oysters, in, um, Williamsburg.

t-storms

Summer in New York is so awesome! Someone please wake me up in September.

10-Day Forecast for
New York, NY (10003)


Tonight
Jun 24
T-Storms
N/A/69°

Sun
Jun 25
Rain / Thunder
72°/67°

Mon
Jun 26
AM Showers
79°/71°

Tue
Jun 27
Scattered T-Storms
79°/72°

Wed
Jun 28
Scattered T-Storms
77°/72°

Thu
Jun 29
Isolated T-Storms
76°/71°

Fri
Jun 30
Isolated T-Storms
81°/68°

Sat
Jul 1
Isolated T-Storms
80°/69°

Sun
Jul 2
Scattered T-Storms
82°/68°

Mon
Jul 3
Scattered T-Storms
81°/66°

oh, boys

*Trust fund kids are truly a special breed:

"Stupidity, stupidity and more stupidity," Ms. Lillis said, between puffs of a Merit Ultra Lights cigarette as she rolled through East Hampton in her silver 1984 Volvo wagon on Wednesday afternoon, on the way to post fliers for a lost cat. "Those are three reasons pets go missing in the world."

On the seat beside her, next to a container of cat food, Ms. Lillis had evidence to back up her point: a flier, posted throughout Bridgehampton last week, for a missing terrier-Chihuahua mix named Little Joe. The dog, it turned out, belonged to the teenage children of the artist Julian Schnabel. Ms. Lillis didn't know who he was — or much care. She only knew that on the flier, which she now shook contemptuously her hand, 19-year-old Vito Schnabel had spelled Chihuahua "jiwawa," and that when she'd shown up at his house to volunteer to help him look for the dog, the young man had an open bottle of beer in his hand.

"Born and reared in New York City and can't spell Chihuahua," she said, shaking her head forlornly. "And drinking! Don't get me wrong — I love drinking. Everyone should drink. But there's a time and a place for it. When your four-pound dog goes missing, it's not the time to be slurping beer." Ms. Lillis was so unimpressed with the Schnabels' effort that she took control of the search-and-rescue operation herself.

You go, Ms. Lillis!


*And here's one of the very few reasons I miss living on the Upper West Side:

My walk home from those Midtown office buildings sure was lovely.


*Did I say I didn't feel like writing about my "personal life"? Oops. So last night/this morning, at 1:50 a.m., the Bartender, whom I haven't seen in weeks save for a few hours at his bar a couple days ago, called. He informed me that he was heading to [Popular Williamsburg Bar] and wondered if I wanted to come, and, hey, maybe we should just scrap the bar and go to his house, and also he was really drunk. Like, really drunk? Yes, really drunk. I had just gotten home from work and was pleased that I was about to conclude a whopping two days without nicotine and alcohol. Clearly, the appropriate response to this inquiry was a simple, "No thanks, I'm staying in tonight." Of course, my response was, "Yeah, ok. Where do you live, again?" And then I went downstairs for a pack of cigs, a Bud Light tallboy, and a cab. I wasn't so much mad at myself as confused. Why am I doing this? Upon seeing him wobbling down his street holding out a brown bagged 22-ouncer for me, my icy heart melted and my head cleared. Bartender is absurdly adorable, in that fucked up lost boy here-please-let-me-feed-you kind of way. And for whatever mysterious reason (ok, our extreme slutiness and resultant skill level,) the sex is kind of great. Best, and most exciting of all, I do not want to date him! Not at all! So I just may have found what I've been looking for all these years: a real, honest to goodness fuck buddy. In my dreams I'd always imagined that such a creature would live in my closet and emerge only when summoned, but I suppose I can settle for middle of the night phone calls and a hop, skip, and a gypsy cab over the East River.

astor place k-mart: the most special place on earth

This afternoon I swung by the Astor Place K-Mart to get a new computer chair, as my old one (which I'd also purchased at the Big K) broke when I sat on it a couple days ago. I entered the building and noted that the escalators were not running. (Last time I was there and bought my heavy yet incredibly flimsy desk it was the elevators.) So I made it up to the furniture section and there was nary an employee to be found. I went into the shoe department and encountered a portly, gruff lady who informed me that she'd page someone. Ok. I went back over to the display area and sat in the floor model of my soon to be new chair. After about ten minutes and no helpful K-mart employees in sight, I searched out another red-smocked person and he said he'd page someone. Uh huh. I returned to my chair and swiveled around listening to OK Computer, enjoying the double dizziness of the swiveling and the cold medicine (my chronic consumption has flared up again), for the entirety of the album. There were a couple of kids also waiting to get some sort of shelf thing who were totally missing the joy of slipping in and out of consciousness to the crooning of Thom Yorke and the swiveling of a poorly constructed desk chair, and they were sly enough to stop a khaki-shirted manager. He went to the storeroom to check on our items and returned empty handed. He told the kids he didn't have the shelf. They left, dejected. About to walk away, I asked, "and what about this here chair?" and he said, "No." But, oh! They do have the kind without armrests. That was fine and dandy with me, I said. So I waited another ten minutes and walked off with my brand new chair in a box on my shoulders. It is the same brand as the folding chair I had that just broke, but it was only $30, compared to $60 for the exact same model with the armrests in which I'd been swiveling. I'd think the "pneumatic height adjustment" and "easy care upholstery" would contribute more to the cost of the product than armrests, but what the hell do I know? My checkout process was as smooth as my prior service. I made the sly decision to switch lanes when the lady in front of me at the first register got into a bitch fight with the cashier over whether or not the shorts she was trying to purchase for her toddler were, in fact, to be sold separately or only as a set. Lane 2 informed me upon arrival at the register, my $31 and change at the ready, that "no cash!" would be accepted. Third time was a charm, and I carried my new baby the five blocks back to my house. Time to assemble this motherfucker and pray it lasts more than a week.

look, ma, there's a street in my closet!

(As an avid anti-reading-the-instructionsist, it took me about a year with my camera to figure out how to turn off the flash.)

ain't life grand?

Oh, Doctor Dictionary, why must you mock me so with your daily emails??

Word of the Day for Wednesday, June 21, 2006

languor \LANG-guhr; LANG-uhr\, noun:

1. Mental or physical weariness or fatigue.
2. Listless indolence, especially the indolence of one who is satiated by a life of luxury or pleasure.
3. A heaviness or oppressive stillness of the air.

And now to use it in a sentence, I find it more than a little funny (and I mean both funny weird and funny ha ha) that I'm writing for a website about nightlife and drinking and regularly failing to turn in my articles on time because I've been fueling my langour with late nights and alcohol.

just another day in wisconsin

Via friend ADF:

Deer causes flood, leaves dog unconscious

Associated Press
Jun. 7, 2006 10:37 AM

RACINE, Wis. - A spooked deer rampaged through an apartment on Monday morning, leaving a flood, temporarily displacing a family and leaving the family dog temporarily unconscious.

Jerry Falkner said he "heard glass breaking" and "thought someone was breaking in," after the deer smashed through a window.

"The next thing I know, a deer is running toward my room," he said.

The animal ran into the bathroom, and the family locked it inside. The Falkners, however, did not know that their pit bull, Shadow, was in inside the room with the deer.

The deer kicked on the water, flooding the apartment, and briefly knocked the dog unconscious.

Police, with the family's help, got the dog out of the bathroom, while Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources officials tranquilized the doe and took it away.

Police Officer Victor Cera said the deer apparently was behind the apartment building when it was spooked by dogs let out of a kennel. Falkner said he believed the doe came through the window to elude children who cornered it near two 7-foot-high fences behind the apartment.

"In the 16 years that I've been doing this, I've seen all kinds of stuff," Cera said. "But this is probably the most bizarre."

pals

All the pictures E sends me from her work email have this fucked up blurry thing going on. In this case, the blurriness of the picture perfectly illustrates the blurriness in our heads. Hooray for drinking champagne out of straws!

last night at work

Last night I came to the sad but seemingly necessary conclusion that the time has come to put this dear blog out of its misery. It's been a good two-plus years, but ever since I threw away all my biz cazh clothing and started working at the restaurant the Urge to Blog has been elusive. I've tried to find the Urge, but the Urge has a mind of its own. This has resulted in almost as many unfinished drafts as completed posts, and that is a little depressing. Although I suppose it makes sense.

No longer am I sitting in front of a computer all day scouring the internet for hilarious links like this YouTube Taco ToWn! video. And for reasons unknown I've lost all desire to share the details of my personal life, as the celebrities like to call it (although I prefer the more apt description, "whom I'm fucking,") with strangers on the internet. Even though I should've had stories galore, like, say, the time Bartender called me at 5:30 in the morning the night I found out Jose died and since I was lying awake anyway I hopped in a cab to Brooklyn where, in his basement warehouse bedroom, he sang songs about women and Jesus until we decided it was time to get naked, and how my roommate's friend from Georgia was supposed to crash on our couch for five nights later that week, and let's just say he did not sleep on the couch much, and how Bartender called at 3:30 am just seconds after Roommate's Friend and I sealed the deal for the first time, and how the other night after work I was drunk with N at our favorite Bar Around the Corner and texted both Bartender AND Scruffy Brit, whom I have not heard from nor attempted to contact in months and am completely 100% over, even though I'd probably still have sex with him if I ran into him on the sidewalk after work one night and he said in his suave, Gina-killing Manchesterian way, "Let's go have sex," which was exactly what happened the last night I saw him and which I also never bothered to write about.

Anyway, so I'm starting a new feature here, and it's called Last Night at Work, since that's all I have the capacity to write about at this drunken, nocturnal juncture in my life. So last night at work, I was extremely exhausted for non-debauchery related reasons and owe the retention of my job to two tables who kept me entertained and awake. On an outside table sat three folks who were clearly seasoned restaurant patrons. Low maintenance, asked about the restaurant's history, let me decide what they should drink, etc. As I brought out a bottle of kickass limited production Cerasuolo rosato (bottle number four for them--clearly my kind of folks,) one guy was standing next to the table smoking a cigarette and looking shaken. He'd just stopped a robbery, he said, as he pointed to the man being led out to a police car in handcuffs. He'd gone to the bodega nextdoor for a pack of cigarettes and, on his way out, noticed a man fleeing with a wad of cash. As the man reached the door, my drunkenly emboldened customer slammed the door, trapping his cash-filled hand in the door, called the cops, and held it until they arrived. Then it was back to that delicious rosato. Aaah, New York. Meanwhile, back inside, one of my twotops had been sat with four very, very French people. Like, barely-spoke-English French people. They were all talking, nay, shouting, at the same time so finally I just said, "I am going to bring you this, this, and this. Yes?" They sat there for a couple hours and blew through about five bottles of wine and spent about 3/4 of that time outside smoking cigarettes. Their final bill: $166.84. Their tip: $3.16. Aaah, France. I actually kind of loved them for their complete, stereotypical obnoxiousness. Had they tipped me even remotely reasonably I'd have had to revamp my whole worldview. Nevertheless, if it were my restaurant I'd totally add "and the French" to the part at the bottom of the menu where it says "20% gratuity added for parties of six or more."

ridiculosity

The last two weeks have kicked my ass. Last week in mostly bad ways, this week in mostly good. (And by weeks I mean increments of seven-ish 24-hour periods, since my concept of days of the week is inferior to that of even the most delinquent kindergartner.) Point being I have nothing to say until I've gotten some sleep and can once again form complete sentences. So go read my bff Ellen's new blog about nerds and restaurants, Slender Retort, and my new pal Andrew's cell phone cam chronicle, Seen Around Town. You're welcome.