6:05 AM

I live next to the train. In the morning, I can hear the sound of my lateness approaching.

Mind the Gap

Yesterday a subway construction worker was on the F train with me, and he hopped out at every station to measure something at each doorway of our car. He pressed an L-shaped piece of wood between the outer door openings and the platform edge, calculating, I suppose, the gap between the train and platform. It was sort of like musical chairs, him bounding up from his seat and leaping from one doorway to the next and in at the far end of the car to note something on his clipboard, all before the train took off again. The announcement of each station and the caution to watch the closing doors set the time. It was nice to see some of what those orange and yellow signs mean when they tell you that they've hacked the regular train schedule to bits and "Why are we making these changes? We are making track improvements." One day, though, it might be nice for them to finally admit that all the detours and skipped stops are because "We are just f*cking with you."

Now Might Be the Time to Pick Up Praying

Mosquito bites or bed bug bites?

Dinner

When I first moved in, it was the old macaroni with cottage cheese and ketchup comfort food. OK.
Then it became veggie cutlets with cheese, plus tomatoes and spinach tossed in mayo and salt.
One night I attained a bruschetta.
Then it slid to pasta with spinach and mayo/salt on the side.
Last night I found the on-its-way-out pepper and added it to my pasta-spinach-and-old-hunk-of-cheese combo. Dinner was two spoonfuls of ice cream I had withstood for two weeks.
Tonight it was just the Ben and Jerry's.
I shudder for tomorrow.

The Move

There are several advantages to unpacking. One, for example, being finding your toothbrush. But let's see...I moved in on July 4th and today is the 18th. So that leaves me holding two brushes, one new, one old, and wondering how to fix the situation. Anyone not as young, destitute. and earning less per hour than her own cleaning lady would simply throw out the old one. But I, coming of age in our Modern Depression, have instead stuck it somewhere in my half-unpacked room, comfortable in the knowledge that when I move out one day, I will have yet another worthless piece of crap to cram into a cardboard box and shove down three staircases.

Which serves me right, I suppose, after what I did to those poor movers on Independence Day. It was a heat wave. They nearly died. We nearly had two dead chassids on our front lawn.

I have also come across numerous old folders and notebooks from college and high school. It's nice to riffle through them and remember my classes, professors, and all that stuff I learned and wrote essays about. But, after a few days of madly ripping through papers from middle and high school, I also wonder when I will finally chuck these, as well.

One of the best things I have found is my floor and the far wall of the attic alcove where I had crammed most of my boxes. Omigosh, I thought at one point toward evening, there is the wall. The actual frickin wall. I can see it, dead on. The end is in sight. Upside: the cat doesn't have to work so hard anymore to hide away in the crawlspace. Downside: all the weight I had worried about in the alcove is now transferred to the perimeters of my bedroom. There are moments when I think the floor may actually cave in from the weight of all my books, sending my room crashing down into the kitchen below. That would be, like, number two on the top ten list of Ways to Get Voted Out of Your Apartment.

But the best thing I have found so far? Yes, my time sheets! Thus end about a week's worth of frantically searching for the damn papers. Home, office, Teaneck home, subway, Columbia's lost and found, and a bagful of shattered glass later and it all comes down to an unmarked cardboard box. Here, I think, is a prime example of the doom and futility we face by moving. Because, you see, I had originally put those time sheets in a cleverly marked "Now" box. Granted, the all-important Now box had some pretty useless job search papers and bus receipts in it, and the scissors I would have used to cut away all the packing tape were tossed into some nameless box corned behind dusty Chinese scrolls, boxes of Magic the Gathering bought while I was in elementary school, and bizarro shoes I've worn only once, and under twelve tons of books, but still, the idea of orderliness was admirable if not fully realized. In any case, I went back and forth between Brooklyn and home a few times when I was just moving in, and there were also those excursions to my place of work, all places I carried my time sheets to in the hope that I'd be able to complete them and fax them over to the payroll office. But no. No, no, no. Doom and futility. When leaving home with the last of my possessions for the penultimate time (that word was used just for you, dad), I must have blithely tossed the time sheet folder into one of the half-filled boxes, filled with that rosy delusion that I would 1) fully unpack within a few days and 2) be able to keep track of which boxes contained what. I packed reasonably. I unpacked optimistically. I repacked unthinkingly. I unpacked resolutely. I found those sheets by the grace of whatever you believe in because, quite frankly, when I look at all the boxes left to unpack and how little storage space I have in my room, I know that here's a good chance that I would never have seen the sheets till October.

And now I must go. It's nearly 12:30 and I should have been heading off to sleep by 10 PM...so that I can get up around 5:30 AM for my 7 AM shift to wake 2-3 teenage girls at 9 AM. Somewhere out there my mom is laughing her a** off.

First day of work

and already heard the cleaning lady's labor story.

Evolution and Your Psychotic Sensations

In the dermatologist's office, being educated on formication.

Doc: I guess we're just not meant to be walking around.
Me: That's so right. We should all be lounging like Romans, draping grapes into our mouths.
Doc: We're probably still supposed to be crawling.

Dad

While in Taiwan, my friend and I liked to compare our dads, competing to see whose was weirder. Hers, a doctor, had once excitedly rushed home for dinner, at which point he had his family sit down and continually twist their feet to the right. “Now,” he cried, preparing them for the crowning achievement, “twist your hand to the left!” Triumphantly, he watched them all stall in place. He had discovered this phenomenon while doing paperwork in his office.

My dad has this guy covered.

Take the other day, for instance. My mom and dad had been measuring furniture that they wanted to post on Ebay. Later, as we sat around the kitchen table, my dad whipped out the tape measure and snapped it out from his seat to the nearest kitchen cabinet. “Hey! Hey!” he announced, “if I want to get a piece of chocolate, I’ll have to go seven feet to get it. By the time I get back, I’ll have gone fourteen feet! By that time, I’ll be ready for another piece. Better take an extra for the road.”

They’re selling their furniture because they are moving to Israel. In August. They’re downscaling from a fourteen-room house to an apartment with a four-by-six dining area. Just about everything must go. As the announcements go out to the community and eBay, even I have taken to wandering around, seeing what I might like to scavenge for myself. Faced with a future ~$650/month apartment in Brooklyn and more simplistic taste than my parents (Queen Anne vs. American Craftsman), my choices are pretty minimal.

-“I saw you have two of those three-step stepladders. I’ll take one if you don’t need both in Israel.” My dad looks up from his furniture spreadsheet.

-“We can give you the first two steps.” And back down to the computer screen.

-“But seriously dad, I need to figure out what I can afford and where I’m going. When do I have to move out by?” He looks back up.

-“What time is it?”

They’ve been practicing their Hebrew, as well. Every time they have to fix or replace something for the people buying our house, my dad stares down at the hardware in his hands and wonders how you say “bolt,” “biscuit-shooter,” and “bottle-nosed pliers” in the Holy Language. They’ve already discovered that plywood is called “sandwich,” leading to a host of terrible puns regarding lunch items and a certain English nobleman. Today, we found a couple cartons of berries going bad in the fridge. I muttered, my mom called out that the strawberries should be at their sweetest now—as apparently they are at their ripest, juiciest (if mushiest) best right before they rot—and that we’d received the blackberries old from a friend anyway, and my dad launched into a loud and energetic rendition of “Great Green Globs of Greasy, Grimy Gopher Guts.” He strolled through the first floor singing it two or three times and then we heard a noticeable pause. Hesitantly at first, and then ever more confidently, he switched the lyrics and belted out “chavalim shel gopher batanim, chavalim shel gopher batanim, CHAVALIM SHEL gopher BATANIM!!!” Yes, “gopher guts” in Hebrew. My mom and I rolled our eyes and put our head in our hands. He moved on to another part of the song. “But I forgot my spoon! ...Aval shachachti et ha…aval shachachti et ha…ha…­” He appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Alana, how do you say spoon?” “Kapit.” “Aval shachachti et ha kapit sheLEE!!!” Congrats, dad. You’re totally ready to move.

This has all been coming along gradually. “You weren’t like this when we were dating!” my mom wails at least once a week. Granted, he did take her to see Monty Python and “School for Wives,” and asked her about the quality of her teeth.

One of his quirks has been around for a while, and this one I told to my friend in Taiwan. My dad likes to play pinball at the dinner table. Literally. He’ll sit there at the head, call everyone’s attention, and then announce that he is about to shoot this rubber band, the one thinly stretched between his pointer finger and thumb, between the coke bottle and orange juice carton, where it will rebound off the pasta bowl and then the saltshaker to land next to my mother’s fork. The more convoluted the route, obviously, the better. After a few tries, he usually succeeds. This only encourages him.

After dinner, he may move on to range shooting. This would be where he stands at the chest-high cabinet between the kitchen and the eating area (only seven feet from it to his chair!) and takes careful rubber band aim at various kitchen knobs, appliances, and groceries. A typical example: “Alana, do you see that cluster of grapes? See the top grape on the right side, leaning right in front of the Keurig? I’m going to hit that grape on its top left corner.” (It’s amazing, actually, that he would allow anything to go flying near his beloved Keurig coffee machine. It was that machine, whose voltage cannot be adapted to Israel’s electric standards, that posed the single greatest obstacle to my parents’ move.) He’s a pretty good shot and will eventually hit his target.

-“Did you see that?!”

-“No.”

-“Well…it was close.”

He has a particular method—product of careful study—of winding the rubber band around his hand and releasing the tension. He shows me how he wraps his ammunition and lets another rubber band go whizzing through the air to land on the floor, loop itself over a handle, or smack a grape into oblivion. “Now,” he tells me in a confidential aside, “there is a precision rifle mode. I use a ruler for that.”

The Treatment is Worse Than the Disease

Last week, I mentioned to the people in my office that I was feeling dizzy at times and experiencing frequent headaches. It’s the heat, they told me, and then began to prescribe a regiment for treatment. No chocolate. No oranges.

“No oranges?!” I cried. You have to expect that chocolate is going to take a hit when people get started on healthy eating, but oranges? I then launched into a spotty account of how citrus had saved the lives of countless seamen. Reaching back into my Forensic Osteology course, I turned to my dean and stated that Vitamin C is necessary for healthy bones.

“Vitamin D,” she said. I’m pretty sure C also plays a part, though. Maybe more in terms of blood vessel walls? Well, as you can see, I’m a little hazy on the subject one year after I took the class. So I let that point slide and just shook my head.

“Vitamin C is very important,” I reiterated.

“You can eat a few oranges,” my dean amended.

“You can get it from other things,” someone said—Yi Jun? Ugh, I do not want to eat that much broccoli and “leafy greens.”

They went over the list with me again. No chocolate. No milk. No cheese. No tea. I have to admit that the “no tea” thing also threw me for a loop. The Taiwanese have a whole tea culture.

“But I drink tea every day,” I said. This is only too true. Between two to four large take-out cups a day. Things were looking grim. “The treatment,” I noted “is worse than the disease.” And indeed it was.

Modern Day Duck and Cover

Not commenting on or "liking" any posts on Facebook so your friends can't tell you're avoiding their messages.

Why It is Important That When Establishing a Nation, You Conquer the Entire Continent

So that later when calling a corporate office and the branch in NY has closed for the night, you can still reach them in Chicago or California.

Gotta Love

Two old ladies complementing each other on their fur coats.

Impending Laundry Crisis

Down to fugly socks and wedgie underwear.

Paint Job Not Strictly Needed

It has now officially been so long since I last did the laundry that when I saw "white wash" on today's to-do list, my first thought was "but I'm not looking to redo my walls."