Usually when I come to New York, it's seeing a lot of people and finding out what they've been up to for the past year. Sometimes people have moved apartments, sometimes they're caught up in the same interpersonal drama as last year, sometimes nothing has changed at all. Over the past week I've been meeting up with some friends that I actually haven't caught up with in years. So we sort of do a little, "What has been going on since 2002?" life update and then we move on. As much as I dislike the "what have you been up to" talk, I find myself wanting to know everything in detail if I'm going to hear any of it. Watching a Seinfeld marathon the other day, I realized that the show about nothing encapsulates the sort of friendships I prefer. Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer focus on the minutaeia of each other's lives and they basically go around discussing and judging all the little things, or getting inflamed by small injustices.
My friend was worried the other day about whether or not she was "interesting." I assured her that she was, because she genuinely is, but there are obviously a whole host of people who aren't interesting at all. I'm finding, as I run around meeting up with different people, that my inability to handle conversational silence threatens to make me an overtalker. When meeting someone I have to pepper them with questions in order to bulldoze over the gaps. I think this week I'm going to work on keeping silent and seeing what happens.
Tuesday night I went to a zine reading event at St. Mark's Bookshop. The editor of the Zinester's Guide to NYC was on hand to present a few of her contributor's works. I've long admired zines and given time travel, would have started one in my teenage years. It would have been mundane and not angsty in the least, but it would have been mine.
Now I still hold an ambition to make one, but it seems slightly anachronistic as I'm much more capable online -- plus I don't have an office to make copies of my potentially best selling series. After visitng SF Zinefest last year, I did look up prices to print zines so I know it's both financially viable and easy to do. My new life goals list includes making a zine. There, I said it.
The type of zines I like are very particular. I don't do crappily drawn zines, I don't do image heavy zines, I don't do scrapbook zines, I don't do poetry zines, I don't do hard to read fonts zines. I need words and personal stories. My favorite zines of all time are Cometbus and Doris, so anything along those lines works for me. Most of the readers presenting tonight were up that alley, and I was delighted to add their work to my list of stuff I need to support and follow. Because my friends were a bit hungry, we left before the Q&A portion of the night, but there's another event on Sunday I hope to attend.
There are a lot of ramen places to try in New York, but the reigning king in my mind is Ippudo. The line for them was an hour long so we put down our names and went around the corner for a beer. Every social event here requires a beer or a drink. I'm going to run out of Pepcid AC very soon. On the TV behind the bar, the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center was about to be lit and Susan Boyle had been imported from England for the occasion. Over the next few hours, our beer and then noodles conversation swung from the apathy of our citizens versus the French to the necessity of soon to be thirty year olds participating in one night stands.
I haven't hung out with my friend Alice since our college days. I noted that I'd completely missed the non-single Alice times, and now that we've had the chance to hang out some, I realized how much I like/missed her mix of curiosity and enthusiasm, a quality that hasn't been tempered in the least.
Afterward, I walked across town to find Stef and her people at a swanky sports bar. The mystery of the night settled in when a waitress came by to take a coffee order, but then twenty minutes later, another waitress came by. We asked her if the other girl had gotten the coffee. She said, "What other girl?"
At first we thought she was just kidding but it soon became clear that while our party was suspicious of her, she was suspicious of us -- she had walked up during a conversation we were having about drugs. We insisted that there was another girl and she kept insisting that there wasn't. This amused us and after awhile we decided that the ghost waitress had just pulled off an amusing scam. Dressing in all black, wearing a half apron, taking people's checks, and then cruising out the door seems like a ballsy thing to do. We gotta try it.
No comments:
Post a Comment