sour grapes

go figure: there's a downside to shoddy construction.

since i've been in chicago i've lived in the same 1960's 4+1 in lakeview. well located? yes. off-street parking? yes. thick walls and ceilings? no. and even though my beautiful hard-wood floors had to be covered up with wall-to-wall carpets lest i disturb the "very good tenant" who lived downstairs, no such courtesy was bestowed upon me and i've had to endure a series of loud, inconsiderate, elephant-like upstairs neighbors.

the thing about loud neighbors is that they are often enshrouded in mystery. my building is so big and anonymous that i'm not sure i've even seen these people. given the episodic quiet periods i'm assuming that the turnover for the apartment in question has been pretty high, and i've never really been able to conjure up a good mental image to go with my rage and indignation.

sometimes the offenses are quite obvious in their origin, although that doesn't usually make them less irritating - i mean really, who vacuums at midnight? more often than not, i have absolutely no idea what these people could possibly be doing to generate such a disruptive racket. the booms and clangs and thuds just don't seem to correlate with any routine human activity that i can readily identify.

until i get woken up at 2:30 AM on wednesday to a particularly offensive brand of rhythmic banging that can only be the result of one thing.

for a moment there's confusion. what time is it? why am i awake? dear god, what is that noise? what could they possibly be... oh... eeeew! i find lying in bed alone when you'd like to be sleeping having to listen to strangers have sex a mere eight feet from me to be a pretty distasteful experience. but i fall back asleep, briefly, before being awoken AGAIN, this time to a chorus of such stereotypical moans and "OHMYGOD"s, so ridiculous that i have to ask myself, "who on earth has such raucous circus sex at 2:30 AM on wednesday?" i was tempted to get out the broom and wack it on the ceiling to see if i could at least break the concentration required to fake such a melodramatic orgasm, but was afraid of effecting encourgagement, rather than the mortification and buzz-kill i intended.

as i barrel towards my 30th birthday with alarming speed, i have to ask myself if i've become such a curmudgeon as to actually resent people who have drunken, late-night, weekday sex, or if i'm enough of a prude to be shocked by such behavior... but seriously, have you seen the people who live in my building? i have, and believe me, they just don't look like they have it in them. and besides, given how empty the parking lot is during the day i know they all have day jobs. i just don't believe that anyone who can afford the lakeview rent mark-up and tolerate living in a neighborhood so lacking in edge has any inclincation to be awake at that hour.

so instead of going out and finding my own ways to shock and offend my neighbors with a life of sin and debauchery, i daydream about the job i could have taken in north carolina where the same rent check would get me a house with its very own roof and ceiling, and about the snide notes i'd like to slide under the door of my new arch-nemeses... something along the lines of, "if i wanted porn i'd rent some."

i'm open to suggestions.

warm fuzzy holiday greetings

not all of us celebrate spring holidays with baskets of pastel eggs and chocolate bunnies. in an effort to integrate the holiday season, and having recently attended both an amazing yummy seder at my blogmate's place and a quirky easter get-together with 98-year-old grandpa, i would like to present the following reasons why it doesn't really matter which holiday you celebrate this season:

seder: matzo ball soup - chicken stock with mysteriously delicious balls of flavored dough.
easter: italian holiday soup - turkey stock with mysteriously delicious balls of flavored beef.

seder: extra table setting and cup of wine for elijah's coming.
easter: extra 1/2 hour of conversation about my father, and why he isn't coming.

seder: while sitting around the table, learn the story of exodus, wait to find out who starts snickering first at the word "bondage."
easter: while sitting around the table, learn that uncle and partner recently attended the international men of leather festival in chicago.

seder: reminisce about last seder's grilled turkey, which tasted suspiciously (deliciously but sacrilegiously?) like the sausage that had been recently cooked on the same grill.
easter: delight to discover that grandpa now makes turkey by stuffing the whole thing with bacon.

seder: drink 4 glasses of wine, become unable to see straight to drive home.
easter: drink 4 cups of coffee, become unable to sit still to drive home.

seder: friend comes in with surprise gift of manischewitz-flavored chocolates for our gracious hostess.
easter: grandpa starts telling stories about friends back in the old country coming to him with surprise gift of 40 chickens.

seder: learn fun facts about your friends, like their new condos and love of existential literature.
easter: learn that grandma's relatives used to be in the mafia. (sorry, but what parallel can you draw for that one?)

seder: wake the next morning a little hungover, vow not to drink so much for a little while.
easter: immediately afterward, buy several 6-packs of beer and vow to not open them at least until getting home.

p.s.

my good blogmate has already told you about our adventures in new york. now that we're back in what suddenly feels like quaint little chicago, i just wanted to reassure our readership that we did more than just drink and shop. we learned things about one of this nation's great cities...

1. in bars on wall street, the line to the mens' room is longer than the womens' - but ladies' night somehow seems creepier in that context.
2. tequila in hot chocolate is delicious.
3. if you do not speak english as your native language, it is apparently acceptable to sing along to bryan adams in the airport.
4. if you are a do-gooder vegan undergraduate at columbia, it is totally acceptable to go on in long strident tones over ethiopian food with your girlfriend and your tragically-new-jersey-accented aunt about what a do-gooder you are, and how much your expensive columbia education will go to bat for you in the lucrative and competitive field of designing programs for disabled adults.
5. if you are the tragically-new-jersey-accented aunt at said ethiopian restaurant, yes, we want to hear you speaking so loudly, and of course we are interested in that time in the 70s when you went on some macrobiotic diet without actually knowing what that meant.
6. if you are riding the m60 bus from la guardia to harlem, not only is it standard for the bus driver to holler at you over the loudspeaker, but it is required that you shout back, in kind of a warped tent revival fashion: "is there room in the back?" "NO!!!" "i SAID, can you give me some roomintheback, people?" "NO!" there might have been dancing and speaking in tongues but it seemed dangerous given the amount of slamming on the brakes.
7. if you are a featured artist at moma, you need to wear high-watered bad pants. incidentally, you know that usual museum commentary on the wall about how the artist develops his work by "listening" to what the inanimate subjects are telling him? not so mystical and artistic, once you know that said artist is schizophrenic.

so a special set of thank-yous to our gracious hosts who showed us around new york!

-sm, for uncomplainingly ushering us around the city, even on a sunday morning after her saturday evening of mainlining wine.
-js, for getting us successfully from point a to point b every time, and for boiling down complicated concepts like arbitrage to little words that us non-business types can understand (when she described someone's business plan as a "bank of a bank of a bank," we knew we'd found the right friend.)
-sm's roommate k, for showing off her new alcoholic popsicles, and insisting that it's really ok to want fries and ice cream right after breakfast. also for agreeing that no, falafel cannot be involved in arbitrage, because it's a low-risk commodity.
-mk, for navigating us through dim sum: "you just sit there until you're full, or until you're peckish, and then you eat some more!" for finding us lots of yummy food and drink, and appreciating my long rambling stories about people she's never met.

and of course, to my blogmate, for one-liners like "sometimes we pass zantac wordlessly back and forth like a bong," for completely forgetting that it was my idea to embark on the crazy let's-give-up-our-plane-seats-for-$400 adventure in the first place and not holding it against me, and for being willing to laugh about this and still tolerate my presence after it's over.

bloggers in the big apple, reprise

there's something really nice about spending a whole weekend in an unknown city without ever getting out a map or asking for directions. i'm not sure what we did to deserve such red carpet treatment, but with the aid of our gracious hosts we were able to accomplish exactly what we set out to do: gawk shamelessly at high-brow new yorkers, eat a lot, and haggle over knockoff hermes burkin bags in chinatown.

it was awesome.

except for the end. which sucked. but i'll get to that later.

the good parts included beer, mexican food, wine, tequila, bourbon, coffee, dim sum, gelato, coffee, ethiopian food, wine, falafel, coffee, bloody marys, cuban food, pizza, diet coke, hot dogs, bourbon, and new england clam chowder. in that order. there was also sm, her roommate (k), mk, js, kl, dh, ea, kn, ak, his bf (j), lh. and there were also purses, sunglasses, pashminas, and shoes.

we wrapped up our weekend at the MoMA where my blogmate repeatedly made me blow the cover of my feigned hipster persona by whispering her names for the avant-garde photgraphs we were inspecting, each time making me laugh so hard that if i had been drinking something it would have come out of my nose. each one had some kind of abstract name followed by the year that followed, such that the picture of the guys standing outside with all their papers blowing all over the place became, "god damn it, 1972." meanwhile i wondered exactly what kind of privileged up-bringing i must have had if my visceral reaction to the galleries upon galleries of impressionist masterpieces was some kind of "geez, not another picasso" eye rolling. occasionally i managed to stop being blase long enough to wonder why i'd missed the memo that one is only allowed at the MoMA if one is a 28 year old 5ft 5 inch tall male who carries a messenger bag, wears converse and frowns alot.

it's a good thing we had fun. the residual fuzzy feeling of hangover plus self-congratulation made our long and rather miserable return to chicago a bit easier to take. for the record, it isn't worth the $400 of airplane voucher to give up your seat on the 2-hour shuttle from laguardia to midway if it means sitting in the airport for another hour to catch an inevitably delayed flight to boston, even if it means a fabulous room at the hyatt overlooking whatever big body of water it is that boston has while you gaze at your blogmate over a manhattan... because of course you'll have to get up at 4:30 to catch the 6AM flight back to chicago which of course is cancelled, resulting in a nearly wordless standoff with the very unhelpful delta agent, resulting in a move to united airlines for a flight back to the right city but the wrong airport. having made peace with that debaucle of course you'd get pulled out of the security line for some kind of special, thorough searching. but at least you'd finally get back to your car, in an economy parking lot whose office smells so much like urine and feet that you'd wish you were back with the angry delta people. but happy to be home.