City Wendy

Looking For A Sign

When I was a kid, my family was always on the move. Okinawa, Japan to Chinhae, Korea when I was three, Tokyo when I turned six, then to Seoul a few years later; to northern Germany when I was thirteen and then to Bitburg, Germany 2 1/2 years after that. And in each of those places we moved from home to home — sometimes base housing, sometimes an apartment in a neighborhood where we were the only Americans, once on a missionary compound, and for nine horrible, terrible months two small adjoining rooms in the Harbor House hotel. 

We don't ever talk about those nine months we lived in a hotel. Not directly, anyway. Every once in awhile something sort of inconvenient or sucky will happen, like, maybe there will be an intense heat wave in Europe and my mom will call and complain that she and my dad don't have air conditioning and it's just so hot and the sweat is dripping off her and I'll say, "Well, it could be worse. You could live in the Harbor House." And my Mom will sigh heavily and say, "Oh, God, that was so terrible." And then we'll quickly change the subject.

I was 13 the year we lived in the Harbor House. We'd just moved from Seoul to Germany and the hotel was supposed to be a temporary place to stay until we found a house to rent. I was familiar with the set-up — we'd always had temporary housing for every move before and it usually took about two or three weeks until we moved into our "permanent" place of residence. In Seoul it took a little longer than that, but the government put us up in the Hyatt Hotel and it was pretty swanky so none of us minded too much. I remember moving out shortly before the holidays and the staff had just decorated the hotel and I was sort of sad to leave the enormous gingerbread house they'd put on display in the lobby even though it meant getting a bedroom all to myself again. But the Harbor House was decidedly no Hyatt Hotel and when you're 13-years-old and you've just moved to a new country — a new continent — in the middle of the school year, and you're sharing 325 square feet with your mom, your dad and your 6-year-old sister, the angst is pretty tangible. It's like a rash that won't clear up.

I guess my parents were under the assumption we'd be staying put for awhile this time, that there wasn't another move immediately on the horizon. So they were serious in their search for the right place to nest. My mom had a long, long list of things she was looking for in a house, from bedroom closets (they basically don't exist in Germany) to built-in kitchen cabinets (also a bit of a novelty) to plenty of room for her miniature collection. After nine months — nine long, anxious months in which I routinely entertained thoughts of running away to France and becoming an underage barista  — we finally moved to our new house. We stayed there less than two years.

My mom's always been a big fan of visualization and "signs." If I had ever had a boyfriend who cheated on me when I was single, my mom probably would have said something like: "Well, I guess that's a sign he wasn't the right guy for you." No, it's a sign he's a total asshole, is what it is.

Anyway, when Drew and I started our preliminary search a few months ago for a place to buy, my mom suggested we make a detailed list of everything we're looking for and to start visualizing the place and seeing ourselves living there. She told me I should ask for a sign to let us know when we'd found the right place, just like she did all those years ago when we first moved to Germany.

"You asked for a sign?" I said.

"Oh, yes." she replied, "A specific sign. And I didn't stop looking until I saw it."

I feel like things would have gone a lot more smoothly — like maybe we wouldn't have spent nine months living in a hotel — if the sign she asked for was, say, a sink in the bathroom, or a foyer area where we could leave our shoes. But I digress.

In a way, I think she's kind of on to something. I don't know that I'd turn down the perfect place if it didn't have the sign I'm looking for, but having one might make things easier if there are ever several places we like and we can't make up our minds. So I've been thinking about this a lot, about what the sign should be, and I guess it ought to be something that's unique enough we won't see it at every place we look, but not too crazy we'll spend years waiting to find it. And this is what I've decided: we'll know we've found the place for us when we see a map of Graceland tacked to the inside of a hall closet. That's it, that's the sign. Come on, Elvis fans; show us what you got.

Apples To Apples

Have you guys ever played "Apples to Apples?" It's seriously the bomb. I heard about it years ago and thought it sounded fun, but didn't get the opportunity to try it out until my last visit to Chicago in November. My friend Chad pulled it out and a bunch of us played a few rounds over several bottles of champagne. I liked the game so well, I put it on my wish list for Christmas, and when my parents got it for Drew and me, we immediately opened it up and my whole family played it for a few hours on Christmas evening and again the next day and again the day after that before Drew and I flew home.

Then, this past Friday in an effort to tackle at least two of my New Year's resolutions, I baked a big pan — well, two pans, actually — of lasagna, something I've never cooked before (!), and we invited three couples over for a little dinner party/game night. Side note: I used this lasagna recipe and everyone raved about it. I added a bunch of veggies and next time I'd add spinach as well and substitute fresh basil for dried, but all in all, it was a big success! Anyway, after dinner one of our friends, John, said he brought a game over he thought we'd all enjoy and it happened to be "Apples to Apples." The eight of us played all night and while I'm not convinced everyone loved it as much as I did, I know all the cool kids did. They know who they are! Anyway, I highly recommend the game if you've never played before. I think the perfect number of players is, like, 5 or 6, though you can make it work with anywhere from 4-8 people.

Speaking of resolutions, I'm just going to go ahead and admit it: I haven't worked out once this year. Not one time!! And you know what? I don't really care. I know I'm supposed to feel bad about that and all, but right now it just doesn't seem all that important to me. I've done some hand weight exercises at home and some sit-ups and stuff, but beyond that I'm totally unmotivated. January just isn't a good time to kick-off a fitness program. Maybe next month I'll be better. Maybe when Drew's gone I'll be more focused.

Drew leaves Sunday! I won't see him for almost a month! Wahh. And, you guys, I just found the perfect house for us to buy and I don't think it's going to work out with him leaving for six weeks. And do you know how hard it is to find a great place? At a reasonable price? In a decent neighborhood? It's been practically impossible! We've been looking for months and months. And I'm ready to move, like, yesterday! I don't know if you've picked up on it the roughly 1000 times I've mentioned it, but I am so over this neighborhood and ready to make a new home somewhere else. I'm a 33-year-old newlywed with with a biological clock that's about to explode and I'm in serious nesting mode and I've got nowhere to nest and it's driving me bonkers! Bonkers!

So I finally found this really adorable place, but the real estate agent said someone's already made an offer and he thinks another couple is about to make an offer and... well, this isn't the kind of place that's just going to sit on the market forever. It's awesome. It's going to be snatched up right away. And, okay, fine, we haven't actually seen it in person yet (we're going to on Friday), but I can tell by the photos it's amazing. It is! IT HAS CENTRAL AIR. It has a garage, too, which is funny because I can't imagine we'll ever actually have a car to park in it. Have I mentioned Drew doesn't have a driver's license? He doesn't. He's a Manhattanite, born and raised, y'all, and never learned to drive. And I happen to be a terrible driver and haven't been behind the wheel of a car in over two and a half years and can't say I have any desire to do it again soon. So, basically, our kids are gonna be kind of fucked. Well, except that they can turn the garage into a studio they can use for band practice with all their friends while Drew and I sit in our central air playing Apples to Apples with our friends while eating tasty lasagna!

Yeah, I'm not getting ahead of myself at all. You know, now that I think about it, I could probably stand to calm the mind a little with a yoga class or eight.

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.

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?

The Show Must Go On

Whew, this has been a week, hasn't it? My corkscrew's been working over time. Last night Drew and I split this bottle of cabernet called The Show. Actually, that's a lie — we didn't split the bottle last night — I drank most of it the night before and left about a glass and a half for Drew, just so it wouldn't seem like I drank the whole bottle myself, and then he finished it off last night. It was good wine, and I really like the label — love the colors and stuff, and if you can't tell in the photo, there's a picture of a cowboy riding a bucking horse on it, which is sort of cool looking. Drew said he picked the bottle as a nod to the American West photo exhibit we saw at the MoMA, which may seem like a dorky reason to pick out a wine, but it made perfect sense to me.

If you live in NY, you should go check out the exhibit — it's pretty great. There's photos of, like, prostitutes with smeared makeup lying in the middle of the street next to photos of these crazy suburban neighborhoods with matching track houses and tricycles in the driveway, and pictures of these gorgeous mountains and lakes and trees and desert and stuff. I haven't spent much time out west but I really, really want to. Drew and I have this dream of traveling all around the country by train and stopping in diners in all these small towns and maybe writing a play about it sometime — about the characters we meet along the way. I get the feeling out west, it's kind of like New York where the environment is another character. I get the feeling that even the stillness is a character (maybe the same way the chaos is in the city).

Anyhow, I'm glad Drew picked out this bottle of cabernet. Turns out, in addition to its cool label, The Show is a damn fine wine. I just wish Drew hadn't finished it all...

Is This Thing On?

There's a weekend flea market not too far from my apartment — the Hell's Kitchen flea market at 39th and 10th. It's a few blocks long and features some cool stuff, but most of it is so so overpriced. Sometimes, if it's, say, a $7 scarf that really oughtta be a $3 scarf, but you like it a lot, you'll just pay the price and forget about it. I mean, who cares — it's 4 bucks, and it's not like you won't still enjoy it. You'll just skip your latte the next morning or whatever.

But then there's stuff like this antique microphone that's just ridiculously overpriced considering it doesn't work and it serves absolutely no function, and spending anything more than, say, 8 bucks on it would be a real waste of money. But it's cool, you know? Well, Drew and I thought so and so we bought it a few months ago, and we probably spent way too much on it, but who really cares. I'm sure if we'd bothered looking, we could have found one just like it on eBay for a fraction of what we ended up spending, but this one was there and we liked it and we'd both gotten paid that weekend and we wanted to buy something at the flea market, so we got it. 

Anyway, we like having an antique microphone. Sometimes, when one of us wants to make a household announcement, we'll sit in the desk chair, pull the mic close to us and say something in a booming voice. Sometimes I pretend like I'm the principal in the movie "Grease" and I'm reading the morning announcements over the loudspeaker to the whole school. Sometimes I imagine I'm an anchorlady in the 60s at a podunk, small-town local news station and maybe my name's Pamela and my favorite color is teal. 

Last weekend, we had a couple we're friends with over and the guy half of the couple, who does sound for movies and stuff, took a look at our mic and said he could probably fix it so it'll work for real and we could plug it into a speaker and go to town. We could announce the shit out of that thing! We could even hold the speaker to our livingroom window and yell at the people on the street below and totally freak them out! I could yell stuff like "Seek shelter immediately! There's a tornado coming!!!" even when it's perfectly sunny out and everything. Or, I could just yell at people to have a nice day or to "keep smiling!' I mean, think about it — I could seriously help make this world a better place one loud nicety at a time. And that? That's totally worth $60.

What Morning Brings

This is what my mornings typically look like. I wake up anywhere from 6 AM to 8 AM and immediately make myself a cup of coffee, find my spot on the couch (there's usually a cat nearby), and start checking my email and surfing the morning news. On chilly mornings, like today, I pull on my favorite sweatshirt, the brown sleeve of which is pictured here. I've had it for 3 or 4 years — it has a hole in the armpit I really should darn, and three flowers over the left breast I embroidered in two different shades of blue thread one spring afternoon in Chicago's Winnemac park.

The coffee cup I'm holding in this picture is my favorite and I drink from it every morning except on days I make a trip to the Starbucks down the street for a skim latte. I don't really like Starbucks coffee, but my neighborhood lacks any other coffee shop I might want to support — just one more reason I look forward to moving out of here in the not-too-distant future. I'm pretty sure the coffee cup is one I picked up at the Brown Elephant thrift shop in Chi-town about 6 years ago or so. I used to have quite the coffee cup collection, and in my old apartment I hung the cups along my kitchen wall on a bit of molding that lined the wall about midway down. Before I moved to New York I got rid of most of the collection, but kept the cup pictured here, as well as a bright blue one with sort of a Asian motif that I use as a vase for tulips and such. I kept two other cups, too, for sentimental reasons, but they rarely get used.

There's a guitar in the photo above -- do you see it? That's Drew's. It's missing a string right now, probably as a result of the cats messing with it at some point. I used to have a guitar, too — inherited from my ex-boyfriend who gave it to me when we broke up and he moved out. I once knew a few chords — maybe I still do — but I just could never get them to sound good together. Plus, playing guitar hurt my tender, little fingers, so I finally gave the guitar to an acupuncturist friend of mine who gave me a couple treatments as a trade. She took classes for cheap at the Chicago Park District and one super cold February morning when we had a winter warmer party at our friends' place, she played all the songs she was learning in class. There must have been about 3 dozen.

Drew doesn't play guitar much, but he does play two songs very well. They're the songs he wrote for me and in one, he has a line that goes something like: "You threw out all my stuff/left me with just enough/ to call you mine." He played the songs when my friend Chad was visiting last week and Chad just laughed and laughed at that line. "Because it's so true!" he said, "You did throw out all his stuff." Just for the record, I did not throw out all his stuff when I moved in. I only threw out about half of it. And besides, I got rid of my beloved coffee cup collection. Well, most of it, anyway.

Off To A Good Start

This might be one of my favorite pictures of Drew ever, taken NYE just before midnight at our place. But I also really like this one, taken just a few hours earlier before he got so drunk:

Anyway, I hope everyone had a lovely New Year's (Eve and Day) and is ready and rarin' to get back to work today. After a few glorious days of sitting around watching old movies, reading books and giving myself manicures, I can't say that I'm terribly thrilled to be clocking in again today, but I am excited about the year ahead. I even wrote out 24 honest-to-goodness-no-irony-about-them resolutions over the weekend and if I keep even half of them, it's entirely possible I may have The Best Year Ever on my hands here.

And to kick things off to a great start, the universe provided a 2-for-1 sale at a local grocery store for us. True, the store is going out of business and that kind of sucks, but you guys, I got TWO ROLLS OF QUILTED NORTHERN FOR $2.50!! I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but I've been back to that store three days in a row. I now have enough rice noodles, taco mix and cans of tomatoes to last until June. Maybe July. It's just gonna be that kind of year.

Now here's Drew's favorite photo of us (he says it has the three things he loves most: me, budweiser, and the Marx brothers):

* Photos by our friends Rachel and Rob.

The Other Half

The New York Times had an article today about throwing a dinner party on a tight recession budget. A big-time NYC party planner was called in and given a budget of $30 a head to plan the writer's dinner party of 8. He spent $100 on groceries and the rest of the total $238.40 on paper products at K-Mart. The host served potatoes as the main course and the dinner did not include a single protein.

This evening, Drew and I made a "fiesta lasanga" (black beans, grilled chicken, salsa, cheese, cilantro) that could easily feed 8 people for about $15. For another $5-7, we could have thrown in salad and cornbread for our hypothetical guests. For dessert, I'd break out some brownies I baked earlier, the ingredients of which cost about $4.50. This afternoon we dug out our Christmas lights and strung them across our mantle and behind our sofa. For around $6 I could get some Christmas greens and cranberries and place around the lights on the mantle. A few days ago, I stuck some cloves in a few clementines and put them in a bowl on our coffee table so now our whole apartment smells like the inside of a pumpkin pie. We have nice friends and if we invited them over for dinner, they'd bring bottles of wine and beer. We'd stuff ourselves and get drunk and listen to old records and dance around and play dominoes and pull out the hula hoop all for the grand total of $32.50 plus an estimated $65 on 4 bottles of wine and 3 6-packs. So tell me, New York Times, how is it that my friends and I can live large on about $12 a person and for you, $30 a head is really tightening the ol' purse strings?

Spooksville

When I first moved in with Drew, I noticed a couple of things that made me wonder whether his apartment was haunted. First, there were the few random dimes I discovered in various places. Ever since I lived in a haunted apartment in college where the ghost(s) used to leave dimes all over, I've been quick to jump to conclusions when I see a dime anywhere other than a coin purse and a musician's case on a subway platform.

In addition to the dimes, though, there was another indication that Drew's apartment may be haunted. From day one, both my cats see things that Drew and I do not see. It's clear when their attention is turned towards the ceiling and they're meowing or hissing or growling and there's nothing that we can actually see, that something spooky is going on.

"It might be Mr. Moffa," Drew said when I asked him who could possibly be haunting the place.
"Who's Mr. Moffa?" I asked, intrigued.
"He was my first landlord. He died a few years ago and now his son owns the place."
"Mr. Moffa, huh?" I said, and silently vowed to make friends with him.
"Yeah, I used to think he was haunting the place, and I told him he'd been a good landlord and I appreciated it, but that this was my apartment--I pay the rent here and I need my privacy," Drew said.
"Did it work?" I asked.
"Well, I haven't noticed anything weird since then."
"Until now," I added.
"Until now," he agreed.

So I introduced myself to Mr. Moffa. I told him that I lived here now and that I'd take good care of the place and that my cats were good and I wouldn't let them hurt anything and then I asked for privacy.

That was about 6 weeks ago and things were going ok for a little while, but now we have to reason to believe there are more ghosts. A female ghost perhaps. First, the cats are going crazy again. There's always something they see that we don't. They get transfixed on a spot on the ceiling, or on the rug, or on the wall and there's just nothing there. Not a bug, not a shadow, not anything. That we can see, that is. Then last week when I was trying to do some work, the desk lamp turned itself off and on a couple of times.

"No big deal," I thought, "It's probably just the wiring."
But then a couple days later, just beneath the desk lamp, I found an earring--a stud earring. One of those kinds of studs that little girls wear when they first get their ears pierced. I showed it to Drew and he couldn't understand where it could come from. He's had female roommates in the past, but its been years since another woman lived here, and the female friends we've had over would never wear this kind of earring.

"It's a birthstone," I said.
"For what month?" Drew asked.
"Well, it's yellow, so, November," I answered.
The day was November 30th.
"She wanted us to know it was her birthday, I bet," Drew replied.
I got chills.

I told Drew about the haunted apartment I lived in in college, about how I found a couple earrings there, too. That apartment was crazy haunted! There were the dimes and the earrings, but those were the least of the weird things. Appliances would turn on and off--once, when I was home alone watching Unsolved Mysteries, my hair dryer turned itself on in my bedroom upstairs. Sometimes the outgoing message on the answering machine would just randomly play without anyone touching it. I used to find shaving cream lining the entire bottom of my bathtub in the mornings. Once, when I was  putting some tator tots in the oven, a felt something down the back of my leg--I looked down and saw a dime drop on the floor and roll across the room. As I was watching that, a felt a tator tot hit me in the shoulder. These weren't even the scariest things.

I lost my glasses once. I'm sure I put them on my nightstand as I always did before going to bed, but in the morning they were gone. I looked everywhere. Everywhere! I called my mom and told her I thought the ghost took them. She was the only person I could say that to and not get laughed at. "You need to ask for them back," she told me. So I did. I said, "This isn't funny! I need my glasses back! They were expensive and I can't afford to buy a new pair and I need them!" Suddenly, something compelled me to look under my bed. I lifted the lid off a shoe box and there they were, my glasses. That wasn't the scariest thing.

The scariest thing happened one weekend when my roommate was out of town. These things always happened when she was gone, and in fact, if you were to ask her even now, I wouldn't be surprised if she'd tell you she's convinced I made it all up. But I didn't. These things all happened. And the scariest was that weekend she was gone and I woke up on a Sunday morning in my bedroom and the bedroom furniture had been rearraged during the night and right beside my bed, just inches from where I slept, was the rocking chair, facing me, like someone had been watching me sleep. I get chills even now just thinking about it.

So! I don't know what to make of the recent ghostly events here in New York--the cat's behavior, the desk lamp, the dimes, the earring. Is it nothing? Are there reasonable explanations? Am I a ghost magnet? Should I try to have a word with these spirits--the one who left her earring? I just don't know. Most of me thinks it's no big deal, that it's pretty harmless, really. But, what if it's not? What if it's an earring this week, and rearranged furniture next week? Maybe it's time for an intervention. Have you ever intervened with a ghost before?