welp

• the ballet i saw on monday, lady of the camellias, is tragic because the beautiful courtesan (marguerite) has tuberculosis and is going to die. she keeps it a secret and can not be with the man whom she loves because of this. she dances! and then she coughs. (moulin rouge! is based on la traviata which is based on lady of the camellias) but, with the weather constantly changing (hot sun, cold rain, hot sun..) it seems as if everyone in nyc is sick, as well. and the entire audience was coughing and coughing during the performance, right along with our girl, marg. life imitating art? art imitating life?
  
• i went to dinner last night, it was raining so i brought my umbrella. i checked the umbrella before i went to my table at the coat check. when i went to retrieve my umbrella after the meal - it had vanished! the restaurant gave me a replacement to take home. but! the umbrella i had brought had already been a replacement umbrella! several months ago, emily and emily went to dinner and emily (not my roommate) took my umbrella to dinner by mistake and when she ended her meal, she took someone else's accidentally. emily (roommate) felt bad and bought me a new one (really nice of her and unnecessary!) to replace my old favorite. so this replacement umbrella has now just been replaced (and downgraded - as the original replacement was extremely sturdy/non-folding, as was the original) and now i'm left with this dinky fold-up one. yikes.
  
• for the past week, the water in my shower goes from very hot to very cold - every few minutes. this makes showering very unpleasant. but it also makes me think of when there wasn't the advancement yet of running/hot water. and then i feel like a pioneer and don't complain!
• jenna is my oldest friend and sometimes we get into terribly petty fights and we won't talk for months. and then out-of-the-blue we'll both say "i miss you! i love you!" and laugh and then things go back to normal. but she's been away on a cruise with her lovely boyfriend this week and i haven't spoken to her since sunday and it makes me so very sad! come back, boo boo!
• i went to my old office building this morning (across the street from our new building) to visit my old doorman and we hugged and talked about summer and his love of soccer. good to know there is still some heart in midtown.

emily's shadow and emily's cane's shadow. a past yoga injury haunts her resulting in occasional need of a cane:

to do

right around christmastime, a little old lady came up to talk to me as i was shopping in sephora. and we had a very pleasant twenty minute conversation, but because of her heavy accent, i wasn't sure if we were talking about the loveliness of manhattan or about recruiting me for a religion. it was all very fuzzy. but it was about the loveliness of manhattan! and at the end of our conversation she gave me a sheet of paper that she wrote on both sides of. it had the details of wonderful events and museums to attend to in the city, complete with her commentary ("fabulous!", "grand!", "excellent!"). it's written in the most beautiful cursive, states the addresses, hours of operation, which exhibits are not to be missed. and she drew a heart around it all. i don't believe she had any association with these places and just wrote it out of the goodness of her heart.


it really makes me smile.

lady of the camellias

last night, i attended to ABT's performance of lady of the camellias. a terribly romantic and sad story. as always, the ballet was lovely. the music (chopin), the costumes. i have a season seat and it just makes me happy to be there. i go by myself and it really is a few hours of my week to just completely enjoy myself. when i can just sit down and be in the midst of everything beautiful. and it makes me just feel lovely being at lincoln center. especially after the performance, walking out with the audience at night and to think that we all just enjoyed the same thing, all at once. and how we can all say how beautiful our evenings were!

fest

yesterday was the egg rolls and egg creams festival down the street. a celebration of the chinese and jewish cultures of the lower east side. we ate fortune cookies and pickles and emily said she never felt so much at home!

momix

last night, emily and i went to see MOMIX perform at the joyce theater. if you ever have a chance to see them, GO. MOMIX is a troupe of modern dancers/illusionists and they are just phenomenal. i don't think i can really find the words to express this. i kept thinking "this can't get any better" and it always did. our seats were pretty close to the stage and yet there were so many times when i thought "how did they just do that?!". their use of their bodies/costumes/props was astounding. and they were smiling the entire performance, you could tell that they loved what they were doing.


as emily and i walked (partially) home from chelsea to the LES, we couldn't stop chattering about how incredible it was. and how fortunate we are to live here. it really is wonderful. every night, there are a gazillion brilliant things happening all around this city. anything and everything you would ever want is at your fingertips and it's always the best of. this month, i have tickets to five ballet performances (for ABT and NYCB) and it just makes me giddy. along with festivals, book readings, concerts, etc. delight!

and i feel really lucky that my friends want to explore just as much as i do.

hail!

i like how some out-of-towners get a thrill from hailing a cab in manhattan.

a gesture that i often overlook in a rush to get to wherever i am going next. but when i think about it, it really is a romantical-sentimental-new york-ish thing to do.

friendship bracelets! and such

hard to believe (as i write this from my LES apartment) that yesterday morning i was lounging on jenna's porch in cut-off shorts (that i would never wear in the city), getting a sunburn and making friendship bracelets. and that last night for dinner, my parents barbecued and we sat out on our deck to eat. i love going home for a few days but it really makes me miss being there and being with my family. it makes me miss summers in connecticut and nature, in general. jenna and i talked about the great outdoors and the wonderfulness of returning to connecticut after being in manhattan for a while and the thought that parks are nice for city folk who don't have lovely backyards. and i must say, the community garden on avenue c/9th street is rather idyllic and may be the best green space in downtown manhattan. but really, nothing beats actually being in nature.


in any case, i made countless friendship bracelets this weekend (in tompkins square park with brooke and richard, on the train to connecticut, with jenna, on the deck while my mom read/meditated, on the train back to manhattan, etc) and i've become quite the pro! so i'm taking requests from now until i run out of string!

years ago, jenna and i went to summer camp together in maine and yesterday we went through her camp autograph/address book. we wondered where some of our old friends are now and then wondered about this loopy advice from our counselor:

and then we had cones!

love jenna's formal living room.

pippin-kate olsen.

then i dashed back to the city late last night, quickly caught a cab downtown and made it back just in time to see emily's brother's band, a locomotive, perform. ideal.


oh and a very happy birthday to molly! a beautiful and wise friend (and my freshman year roommate!) whom i love, love, love!

teevee

after living in the city for almost a year and a half, emily and i have not had television. some people like to boast that they don't own one. it's lowbrow and they have far better things to do than watch it. but not us, we love television! but a) we didn't have a living room until we moved out of the west village and b) now that we do have living space (and a tv!) cable is so expensive, man. we'd rather use our monies for other joys. so after a few months of having a tv in the living room (which only the dvd player had been used), dad suggested and bought us an antenna and, to our delight setting it up last night, we receive twenty one channels. free!

curious/scared to see how this changes life. will we watch it for hours each night? will we never turn it on? we've gotten along just fine without it but now...