City Wendy

'Tis The Season

For anyone who reads this blog on a fairly regular basis, you know that one of the biggest points of contentions in my life — the thing that keeps me from truly relaxing into my role as a sane and civilized member of society — is my neighborhood. To give you some perspective, I live close enough to Times Square that if I suddenly got the urge to take a photo with the Naked Cowboy, I could run down the street, find him amidst the tourists, pose for a picture, run home, upload the photo and post it online in about 20 minutes flat — 15 if I hustled. I live two blocks from Broadway, a ten minute walk to 5th Avenue, and a hop skip and a jump from Central Park, and let me tell you, if the rest of the year didn't already make me feel crazy enough, in the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year's, when my neighborhood is held hostage by tourists so overcome with holiday squee they dangle jingle bells from every available limb and swing shopping bags with gusto, it's all I can do to hold my shit together with strands of stray tinsel and reindeer farts. I'm over it.

This past week things have really come to a boiling point. In addition to the holiday commotion, there's been daily jackhammering right outside my livingroom window every morning from 8 AM until noon (as I type this, the jackhammering has stopped and there's now literally a gigantic saw slicing a grid down the middle of the street). Friday night our neighbors had a party that kept me awake until 3 AM, and on Saturday when all I wanted to do was spend the cold, rainy afternoon at home watching a movie, one of our other neighbors — a woman who's at least 40 years-old and should know better— blasted Britney Spears for hours on end while she vacuumed her fucking walls. Suddenly, I no longer felt bad for her that another neighbor got so drunk a few weeks ago that he barfed the entire contents of his dinner right in front of her door on the way up to his apartment after a hard night of partying.

Of course, I'm safe saying all this now that my friend, Susannah, who's flying up to New York to catsit for us while we're in Germany over Christmas, has already bought her ticket. Hopefully, all the noise and commotion will make her overlook the mice problem. Kidding! (Sort of). And if not? Well, she can always run down to the Naked Cowboy for comfort. Happy holidays, indeed.

My Other Writing World

Hey, did you guys know I have a regular advice column? I do! It's called, fittingly, "Dear Wendy," and it runs (almost) daily over at The Frisky. The Frisky, for those who don't know, is my day job. In addition to the advice column, I blog several times a day over there about pop culture, love, relationships, stuff like that. Sometimes — maybe once or twice a month — my personal essays and articles get picked up on CNN under the "Living" section. I used to get kind of a kick out of seeing my name on such a well-read site, but now it just makes me anxious because the CNN commenters are so incredibly vicious. It takes a thick skin to deal with all the nasty name-calling and character assassinations, and since I'm rather sensitive, I just avoid looking at the site.

Still, I always know when I've got something up on CNN. Suddenly, traffic to this here blog doubles or triples (from people angrily googling me name and finding it) and if my essay particularly hits a nerve, my email in-box will flood with notes from readers. Fortunately, the ones who take the time to actually send me a message are usually supporters. A couple weeks ago someone wrote to reassure me I wasn't a terrible person even though everyone was claiming otherwise. I had no idea what he was talking to so I went over to CNN and sure enough, a recent article I'd written, one I thought was pretty innocuous, had garnered several pages of hateful comments. It seems to me some people are awfully miserable and simply looking to project that misery on someone — anyone — else. I try not to take any of it personally.

Anyhow, if you're interested in what I'm up to over at The Frisky, you might check out my advice column (feel free to email me at dearwendy@thefrisky.com if you've got an issue I might be able to help with. I promise anonymity). Yesterday I wrote about gaining weight after getting married. The day before I wrote a particularly personal essay about how Drew just paid off my student loans (can't wait to see what the CNN readers have to say about that!), something that makes me both profoundly grateful and pretty guilty. And recently The Frisky re-ran a popular post I wrote last year called "What every woman should have before she turns 30."

As grateful as I am for my job — and believe me, a day doesn't go by that I don't acknowledge how lucky I am to be making a decent living as a blogger — I'm so happy I still have this little tiny corner of the internet that's all mine. I know most of you never comment and I certainly don't have the kind of readership many other personal bloggers have, but still, it means a lot that you guys take the time to click over here and see what I'm up to. You continue to make this a safe place for me to share insights, stories, observations, and what-have-you. So, thanks for that. Some days it makes all the difference.

My Favorite Documentaries (So Far)

First, thank you so much for all your documentary suggestions. I can't wait to watch some great films over the next few months. I wanted to share my list of favorites with you guys too. I've probably inadvertently left a couple off and I'm sure I'll no doubt add to it as I continue watching the docs you've recommended, but as of today, to the best of my recollection at the moment, these have been my favorite documentaries:

Grey Gardens
Capturing the Friedmans
Born into the Brothels (I watched this last night — so good!)
The Cruise
Man on a Wire
Crumb
Alone Across Australia
Rivers and Tides
Jesus Camp
The Up Series

Grizzly Man

A few that I've seen recently that aren't necessarily favorites, but still very much worth watching:

Crazy Love
Mad Hot Ballroom
Street Fight

Person Jesus Camp

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Real Life

Last week I spent Thanksgiving with Drew's family at his father's place on the Upper West Side. It's the same apartment Drew and his brother grew up in, which, as someone who lived in five different places before she was ten, always kind of blows my mind. It's funny to stand in the kitchen there and imagine maybe a 7-year-old Drew licking brownie batter out of a bowl, or pushing his toys cars and trucks up and down the hallway like his 3-year-old nephew did last week. I like that by living here in Manhattan, just a mile or so from Drew's childhood home, so much of his personal history is available to me in an almost tangible way. I like that it gives me a deeper insight into him, but maybe just as great is simply the window it gives into a life completely different than my own.

Maybe you're like me and you're fascinated by the way other people live their lives — you're reading this blog after all, and chances are we've never met in person, so there must be something that draws you in. For me, it's not even so much that I think other people's lives are fascinating — I'm just fascinated by the way they live them: the way they form relationships, the things they talk and think about, the stuff that's important to them, the things they dream about.

Lately, I've been feeding my insatiable interest in other people's lives by watching a shit-ton of documentaries. I love 'em. Even the bad ones — and God, there are some bad ones — can still be kinda great. The ones that are bad are bad for a variety of reasons all of which are the fault of the director. Usually a director fails to let his subjects tell their own stories and reveal their own truths. He's got his own agenda and becomes more a puppeteer than a filmmaker. I hate that. Why bother making documentaries? Make a fictional movie if you've already got your script. Anyway, all this is a long-about way of asking if you've got any good documentary recommendations. There's a chill in the air and I need to stock up for the winter.

Love, Life, Thanks

I did one of those Tweet Clouds yesterday where Twitter users can see which words they tweet most frequently. Looking at the cloud, it seemed my top three words were "love," "life," and "thanks," which I liked a lot and seemed fitting, but on closer inspection I realized that my three most-used words were actually "wedding," "time," and "night." Oh, right, there was that whole six-month period this year when I discussed almost nothing else but my nuptials. Still, I feel pretty good that "hope," "happy," and "people" are among my top words as opposed to, say, "despair," "sadness," and "nobody." Also, Chicago was at the top of my list, but no New York, not yet.

I was in Chicago a couple weeks ago. I wandered through my old neighborhood, danced and laughed with my friends, and drank champagne for breakfast, lunch and dinner. At Cafe Bong I sang my whole karaoke repetoire, hugged the owner multiple times, and left with a free Heineken stuffed in my purse. "I have to close now!" Jinny said at 2 AM, handing me the beer as a peace offering. "You drink it next place!" she said, pushing me out the door.

Earlier that day I walked along a street near Roscoe Village and felt a pang of homesickness. Actually, what I felt first was familiarity, and something deeper than that — comfort, I guess. That street near Roscoe Village, that street whose name I couldn't even tell you, a street I may or may not have ever walked along suddenly felt more familiar to me than anything else I'd experienced in recent months. It felt like home.

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Yesterday, by a combination of lucky mistakes, great timing, and some good old-fashioned sweet talk, Drew and some friends and I ended up in a most magical bar at the outskirts of Brooklyn, in Red Hook. The bar, Sunny's, is usually closed on Sundays, but the six of us or so were able to finagle our way in for the late afternoon into early evening. We caught up on each other's Thanksgivings, shared some leftovers, and listened to a college station on the small radio behind the bar.

Sunny's is a well, worn-in joint near the river with slanted floors, cracked red leather booths, and nautical-themed artwork and family photos on the walls. It's not a shiny place, but it glows. There's even a banjo made out of a bedpan in one corner. 

"I like your bar," I said to Sunny when he came back from having dinner with his wife and daughter next door. 

The booze had made me feel warm, but not yet dizzy, and I was in that zen-like spot between mindfulness and daydreaming. Everything, of course, was painfully significant.

"I appreciate that you like my bar," said Sunny, who has eyes like shiny marbles and a long, thick mop of grey hair on his head, "but when people say that, what they really mean is that they recognize something in the bar that they like about themselves. You like things that remind you of what you like in yourself."

Hope, happy, people, love, life, thanks. I guess he's right.

It's Damn Fun Being A New Yorker

Since Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind" was released in September and certainly since he and Alicia Keys played it before game two of the World Series, it's become an instant anthem for New York City. On warm afternoons when I keep the windows open, I hear it playing in cars passing by on the street below all day long. Sometimes the lyrics blasting from the cars almost match exactly where they are in my own living room. In New York, concrete jungles where dreams are made of/ there's nothing you can't do, now you're in New York!

Yesterday I grabbed my iPod and went for a 4 1/2 mile walk to Union Square and back, down 9th Avenue, across 36th street to 6th Avenue, down to 25th street and over to Broadway. It was a sunny afternoon, but the skyscrapers blocked my view of the sky and shaded the streets. At intersections, I turned my head up, caught some sun peeking through space between buildings, turned Jay-Z and Alicia up. These streets will make you feel brand new/Big lights will inspire you, let's hear it for New York!

"Hey, smile!" a guy unloading a truck yelled at me as I passed by, "It's a beautiful day and you're  gorgeous lady, so smile!" I smiled at him. More than any other comment I get on the streets is a request for a smile. I guess it's what New Yorkers are hungry for the most.

"Can you help me get a bite to eat?" a homeless guy leaning against a wall asked. (This is the second most common request).

"No, I'm sorry," I replied.

"How about a smile, then?" So I smiled.

"God bless," he said.

On 17th street I stopped in a lingerie shop to find a new bra. A man with dyed black hair and an uneven bowl cut walked in a few seconds after me.

"I'm looking for a really pretty bra," he told the saleslady when she asked if he needed any help.

Call it a sixth sense, call it being prejudice, but I immediately suspected he was shopping for his sex doll.

"What size do you need?" the saleslady asked.

"Uh, like, maybe a 32 B," he replied, "Or, well, probably, like, a C, a 32 C. She's nice and full."

"Okay," she said, handing him a particularly flimsy black lace bra, "How do you like this one?"

"Oh, that's nice," he said, "I'll take it."

"Do you need anything else?" she asked.

"A thong."

"A thong? What size?"

"Definitely a small. She's ... she's tiny," he said, gesturing with his hands the size of her ass, or roughly, the size of a honeydew melon.

After the saleslady handed him a matching thong in size tiny, she asked if he wanted to put the purchases under the recipient's name so she could find replacements easily the next time she came in.

"No," he said, "Put it under my name. She doesn't come here by herself."

"Do you want these gift-wrapped?" she asked.

"No, that's okay," he said, "I've got a box at home."

Yeah, I bet he's got a box at home.

After he left, I wanted to ask the salesladies if they suspected what I did, if they got guys like him in there often, but I resisted. I bought my bra and made sure to smile.

Heading back up Broadway I passed Stacy London from "What Not To Wear," a show I watched almost daily until a couple months ago when I got bored of it. She saw me see her and we had that moment I've had so many times now with celebrities when they realize they've been recognized. There's a whole unspoken conversation in that moment that basically goes like this:

Me: Are you...?

Celeb: Yeah, but please, I'm sorry, I don't feel like talking to anyone right now.

Me: Okay, don't worry, I'm not a freak or anything.

And then, depending on what I think of the celebrity, I usually smile or nod or even do a little wave. Sometimes the celeb smiles back.

After I got home Drew and I took a cab up to the UWS to have dinner with his pops. I brought my iPod along, and gave Drew one earbud and kept the other for myself. I played "Empire State of Mind." Drew looked at me, nodded and smiled. We both looked out the window toward the bright lights and all the stories, Jay-Z singing a love song to New York in our ears.

Tricked Out

For the first time since we met, Drew and I bothered to celebrate Halloween together. We bought our costumes earlier last week — another first as neither of us has worn store-bought costumes since we were kids —  but on Halloween day I wasn't feeling very excited about mine and went out looking for something else to wear. When I still couldn't find anything I liked better, I was suddenly struck with some inspiration and decided to cut almost two feet from the bottom of my foam ketchup bottle, add some lacy footless tights, and a vintage lace robe and go as "sexy ketchup." How meta, no?

In totally unrelated news, the Yankees have a chance to win the World Series tonight and put baseball season, 2009, to bed forever. I'm making a bargain with God. If the Yankees win game 5 tonight, I'll quit writing "X-mas" and actually take the extra one and half seconds to write "Christmas." By the way, I saw my first Christmas commercial of the season at 10:13 AM on November 1st. Have you seen yours yet?

I Should Have Asked for a Finder's Fee

There's a fabled vintage store here in Manhattan, near the garment district, packed with incredible finds, but usually closed to the public. It sells mostly to celeb stylists and costume designers for the movies. A lot of the "Sex and the City" wardrobe comes from there. Anyhow, earlier this month the owners had a big blow-out sale for the store's tenth birthday and decided to open its doors to us common folk for two weeks, three hours a day.

I made a mental note of the sale when I first heard of it on Twitter, but then promptly forgot all about it until I got a helpful reminder Tweet on the last day I could go. I checked the time — I had two hours to get down to the store and do whatever looking around/bargain shopping I felt like doing before they closed. I grabbed a jacket and threw on some shoes. Just as I was headed out, Drew walked in the door and asked where I was going.

"There's this really cool vintage shop that I've heard a lot about and they're hardly ever open to the public, but they are this week and they're having a big half-off sale on everything and today is the last day!" I said excitedly.

"Oh, that sounds fun," Drew humored me.

"You should come!" I said.

"You want me to come with you?" he asked.

"Yeah, come!" I said. "It'll be fun."

"But it's a vintage shop ... with probably lots of girl clothes and stuff. What am I gonna find there?" he asked.

Ladies and gentleman, I'll let this picture answer that question:

Canada or Costa Rica?

Readers, I need your advice. Because of a certain morning show that employs him, Drew will be working the Olympics again like he did last year in Beijing. This time he'll be headed to Vancouver for about five weeks for the 2010 winter games. Last time, I joined Drew in China for the final few days of the Olympics and then he and I took off for a couple weeks of travel around the country. It was fun, it was exhausting, it was expensive, but I'd do it all over again, because how often do you get an opportunity to travel around China (especially when your boyfriend's' ticket there and back is fully paid for)?

So, when Drew got invited to work the Winter Olympics, my initial thought was that I'd tag along like I did before and he and I could travel a little like we did last time. But then I thought about it some more. You guys, it's gonna be COLD in Western Canada that time of year, and I hate cold vacations. And it's not like Vancouver is so far away — like China is — that we won't feasibly visit on our own some time. I've heard summer is a wonderful time to go. Wouldn't I be better off visiting when the weather's a bit more welcoming?

Last year in late February, Drew and I went to Costa Rica, which was not only an economical vacation, it was good for our souls, too. Nothing beats lying around on a beach at the end of February, brushing sand out of your cleavage and ordering your fifth Mojito of the day (sure, I could have done without the near-death parasailing experience, but still). I asked Drew last week if he might be ready for a vacation like that after putting in his 5 weeks in Vancouver. He works hard during the Olympics — up to 18 hours a day, six or seven days a week — and is ready to relax afterward. He said Costa Rica would be nice, but so might hanging out in some ski lodge in Canada drinking hot toddies for a few days in a row.

So, internet, what would you do? Costa Rica or Canada? (The price would probably end up being about the same.) If I went to Canada, I might get to see a couple Olympic events, though that's no guarantee. And, not to sound all snotty about it because it truly is an experience, but I've already been to two Olympics, so it's not like it would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity I'm passing up. Still, I'd probably fly out to Vancouver maybe a week before the games end (I can telecommute for work from there) so I'd get a longer change of scenery than if I just went to Costa Rica with Drew for a few days when he's done working. Plus, I wouldn't have to wait as long to see him! We're newlyweds, after all, and five weeks is a long time to be apart! On the flip side: five whole weeks without shaving my legs!

Okay, I guess what I'm also asking is: what should we do and where should we go if we decide on a short vacation in Western Canada in late February? Travelers, Canadians: what say you? We don't ski, we don't want to ski, but we like the idea of a cozy ski lodge. I also like pretty scenery and yummy food. Is it a waste to vacation there during winter if you aren't a skiier? Will we get bored just sittin' around a fireplace, reading books and drinking hot whiskey for five days? Will we wish we were on a beach? What should we doooo? (And sorry for such an obnoxiously bourgeois post. Wah, I can't decide where to vacation! Life's so hard.).

Good Sense

Yesterday was 73 degrees and sunny here in New York City — one of those gorgeous, picture perfect kind of days. Late in the afternoon, I threw on my sneakers and jogging clothes, grabbed my iPod and headed north to Central Park. The plan was to run a few miles, but by the time I got inside the park, all I wanted to do was find a spot in Sheep Meadow where I could spread out and soak up as much of the sun and unseasonable temps as possible. With the forecast showing cloudy skies and a 20 degree drop in temperature over the next 24 hours, I knew it was probably the last genuinely warm day we'd have for a really long time.

The light in the park was the kind of golden hue Indian Summer is generous with. The sky was a cloudless bright blue, and the trees were in various stages of turning. Even the grass seemed greener than usual. I plopped down right inside the shade of a tree and sat: just me, the ground, my music, the skyline. I watched a bride and groom have their photos taken, the father of the bride directing the couple which way to look, the wind blowing his comb-over straight up in the air.

I listened to my current favorite song — Two Weeks by Grizzly Bear — on repeat a few times. I grabbed handfuls of grass, letting the blades fall through my fingers, watching the sun's reflection on the skyscrapers like a giant prism. After about 30 minutes I walked home. Outside the park, traffic roared, crowds gathered, and I was quickly swept back into the current, pulled back into unflinching beat of the city.

It was cold and overcast when I woke up this morning, making me even more grateful for a day like yesterday and the good sense I had to get out and enjoy it while I could.