Halloweak

Thank god Halloween is over. I hate the crowds, I hate the rowdiness, and I hate the cheap, slutty outfits. I realize that this pretty much describes New York on every other day of the year, but believe me, on Halloween it’s actually worse. For starters, I definitely noticed a sharp uptick in the number of puddles of puke on my walk from the subway this morning. But I’m fine with it, as long as it means that the cashier at my local deli will not be dressed as a slutty pirate.

Now. Let’s proceed to the next holiday, shall we? It’s the one where I get to sit at home and stuff my face with starches.

Love Her

How can you not love a lady who writes a recipe like this:

Start cooking those noodles, first dropping a bouillon cube into the noodle water. Brown the garlic, onion and crumbled beef in the oil. Add the flour, salt, paprika and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.

Also? She called it “Skid Road Stroganoff.” RIP, Peg Bracken. You are totally my deceased BFF of the day.


Love to Cook? You're Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't [Jezebel]
Peg Bracken, 'I Hate to Cook' Author, Dies at 89 [NYT]

One Less Way to Get Herpes

Avoid a monkey attack.

Even if the offending monkey does not have herpes, do you really want your arm torn to shreds? By a monkey? Be smart, read the article.

Cirque du SO LAME. But not really!

Last weekend I allowed my boyfriend talk me into something I swore I would never do. I have always judged it to be somewhat bizarre and frankly terrifying, but I want to be a good girlfriend, so I acquiesced and agreed to attend a performance of Cirque du Soleil. Also, my parents paid for the tickets, and when you’re pushing 30 and your parents offer you free stuff, you take it.

I guess I should explain my issues with “Le Cirque.” Basically, if there are two things in this world that make me extremely uneasy, they are clowns and French Canadians. The fear of clowns is hardly unique, so I don’t think I have to go too into depth here, but my issues with French Canadians have haunted me most of my life. Think about it: can you think of any Canooks Francais who are not super intense and a little bit self-important? Hello, Jack Kerouac? Celine Dion? CELINE DION?!

So it was not without a little trepidation that I entered the basketball arena in which we were to see “Saltimbanco,” a show that “explores the urban experience in all its myriad forms.” I can’t say that I immediately grasped the theme, but I can say that I nearly became incontinent when I found myself less than 10 yards from a troupe of what my father called “post-apocalyptic” clowns (although, owing to the number of crop tops sported by the male clowns, Gay Pride Parades also seem to be a strong influence on their look). We were in the second row, so I was deathly afraid that one of them would pull me out of the crowd for some “audience participation,” but thankfully they humiliated other people instead, including one poor guy who got his shirt stripped off (See?!) and thrown into the crowd. Since I do so delight in the suffering of others, I was having fun in spite of myself.

After that some acrobats come out and flung themselves through the air, which I did not appreciate as it made me very nervous, but I respected their strength nonetheless. I mean, I went indoor rock climbing once and almost wept from fright. So good on ya, acrobats. There were also a set of bald, musclebound twins that did handstands on each other’s necks. It was an impressive display of strength, but they were just so not into the choreography – when they had to raise and lower their arms in unison, you could see the disdain in their squinty eyes. Why you would join Cirque du Soleil if you aren’t willing to bring the flair is beyond me.

Even though I came in packing plenty of skepticism and irony, in the end those spunky French Canadians charmed the pants off me. If you ever have the opportunity to go, I highly recommend it. And to all the performers, thanks so much for putting on such a great show. Except for the clown who mimed drowning in his own shit. That was just altogether too French for me.

Thesis Meeting

Famous Prof: You really have to decide on your thesis topic.

Me: Um…I loved your book.

FP: Thanks. But you still need a topic.

M: Doesn’t that Dave Eggers just get on your last nerve?

FP: Yes. But still, topic.

Me: Great, so I’ll forward you that LOLcat I mentioned earlier?

FP: …

Me: Smell ya later!

Who's That Girl?

I know I’m a little late to the party on this one, but I just got around to looking at Hot Chicks with Douchebags, and oh holy Jesus is it scary. Funny, but still scary. True enough, these dudes are total douchenozzles*. The Ab Lobster, the Joey Porsche Experience, Rooster Wank – all world-class, grade-A chodewheels*. But the only thing that keeps me from giving this site “Daily Reads” status is the women. They make me so, so sad, and also kind of angry, for all of womenkind. These are the kind of ladies who think that flashing your boobs gives you power on par with say, owning your own business or holding a congressional seat. I also imagine that in their bedrooms they have A LOT of photos of themselves and their friends holding drinks with the sides of their faces pressed together. What is that? I have friends who were in sororities in college and apparently they teach you that at pledge week.

So what is the correct pejorative to describe this girl, the girl who yammers on her cell phone while on the elliptical at the gym about what she ate for breakfast that day? The girl who starts raging passive-aggressive bitchfights with other girls with the statement: I love you, but… As in: “I love you, but...you’re an evil horse-face”? I mean, I want to support all women in this world, because god knows it’s hard enough without stabbing each other in the back, but won’t someone let her know that she’s ruining it for the rest of us? At the very least, can I just watch "Rock of Love" on the treadmill in peace?


*Credit: Annie A.
*Credit : Jessie S.

A Typical Sunday

Last weekend, while walking home from brunch, we saw a large clump of Hasidic children milling around on a corner down the street from our building. As I’ve mentioned before, we live in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, which has one of the highest concentrations of Hasids in the country, so we often see families out and about. But a large pack of shouting, unruly boys – this is unusual. As we drew closer I could tell that they were unloading crates off of a truck. Crates of LIVE CHICKENS. Before I knew it there was a 10-year-old boy with sidecurls barreling toward me holding a squawking chicken by the wings. Behind me his mother yelled and he darted past.

All I could think was that those kids were in for one fucking fresh chicken.

It's Our Reunion

My ten-year high school reunion is in a couple weeks, and though I have no plans to attend, I have thoroughly enjoyed the emails that I have been receiving through the ELHS Class of ’97 listserv (there’s also a website, featuring arcade games and a CNN news crawl(?)). The reunion was organized by our senior class president, a young man who went on to earn his bachelor’s degree in just nine years. Predictably, the whole thing is a clusterfuck. Here’s a sample email:

I have already purchased my flight to EL for this occasion. I am sure many others of you have as well. I am concerned because I have NO information on times/dates/venues, etc...

Um, yes. I booked a non-refundable, cross-country airline ticket based on one email from a dude who barked like a dog in my 8th grade French class. You’re seriously surprised that the plans are half-baked? Unlike our class prez, who was always fully baked. Zing!

Initially, the reason for my not going had more to do with the cost of air travel than a fear of reconnecting with the past. When the reunion website went up, I checked every day to see who posted new photos, eager to see who had been smacked around by the hands of time. Only it wasn’t all that satisfying, because it turns out that I had completely forgotten that half of my class ever existed. I recognized maybe 12 people. The same 12 people I was focused on impressing in high school.

I considered posting a photo of myself, but I don’t think I can take the rejection.

Mmm...Soft Focus

Okay, so, this is the post where I wanted to dazzle you with photos of my spectacular pigs in blankets, but I pretty much rely on one friend to document my life for me (Do you have that friend? The one who you always think of when you’re going ready to go out, and contemplate lugging a camera because you always wish you had more pictures, but then you realize that your One Friend will be there and she always takes loads of photos? That’s Sarah.) and she hasn’t yet posted the images on Flickr. Anyway, suffice it to say that the blankets were fluffy and lovely, and my pastry-making confidence was further bolstered.

While searching for photos of my own food last night, I got to thinking about an observation that a friend of ours had made about the latest trends in food photography in general. He noted that older cookbooks tended to feature almost panoramic photos of elaborate tablescapes with a bunch of different crap all stacked up next to each other, often against a black background. But now, people seem to favor very tight shots with a crisp, central focal point and softness radiating outwards. I am such a sucker for that shit. I’m pretty sure that I could be convinced to eat a vacuum cleaner belt if you topped it with heirloom tomatoes and photographed it like that.

The Precious

If I haven’t been posting as often recently (my sincere apologies to the three of you reading), it’s because I’m over blogging. My new obsession: puff pastry. As I may have already mentioned, my pies are the stuff legends are made of, but I’m hardly one to rest on my laurels. Puff pastry is a challenge that I knew I would eventually face, and I have been gathering strength for that day. I knew not what form it would take – turnovers? danish? croissant? – but I knew that the task would require a quick wit, great patience, and 2 pounds of unsalted butter.

Last week, in a vision, I saw the One Ring: pigs in blankets. In the past I have relied upon cocktail weenies in Pillsbury Crescent Rolls, but such parlor tricks are no longer adequate for the Queen Baker of Bed-Stuy. The blankets, they must be made from scratch! You cower in fear! You quake before the hundreds of delicate, buttery layers! Will you not take up your rolling pin and fight beside me?

The humid August air threatened to take from me all that I held most dear. My hands were swift, but could it contend with the moist air that threatened to descend upon the work surface. Again and again I cast the flour down, folding and rolling and folding again, until the stubborn pockets of butter blended seamlessly with the dough. The battle was over. My enemy retreated into the refrigerator to rest.

At daybreak my worst fears were realized: the dough was stiff. With my last ounces of strength I pounded it into submission until it lay before me in a docile sheet. As I cut it into strips and rolled the weenies, I knew that once I cast it into the fires of the oven the test would be complete. Only time would tell.

In tomorrow’s installment: will the weenies rise up in their blankets?

Most Likely To...

Last week I got back in touch with an old friend from high school who recently moved to New York. I’m not really friendly with anyone else from back then, save the occasional email exchange, and for the most part I’ve been really okay with that. But when I heard from this particular friend, I got really excited. He was one of those people who seemed a little bigger than our school, like he had already figured out that how popular you were at 16 didn’t really mean shit in the long run, which is a pretty advanced concept for someone that age.

When we got together, I learned that 1) he was (duh) gay, and 2) I was unbelievably naïve as a teenager. Apparently, while I was at home picking out Indigo Girls songs on my six-string, fantasizing about a boy who never talked to me, my friends were trafficking illicit substances and engaging in polyamory. I mean, I knew the popular kids were drinking and having sex because they talked about it all the time, but I just assumed that my friends were as lame and confused as I was. Not so much. My innocence was so obvious that nobody had the heart to break it to me. Somehow I managed to miss the bongs rattling around with the Burger King cups in their back seats.

Now I live in New York City, one of the world capitols of all things seedy and perverse. I find it odd when I don’t see a tranny for a few days, and I can’t walk from my apartment to the subway without witnessing a drug deal (though I generally take pains to look away—I saw nothing!). When I meet someone new, I usually assume that 1) they are (duh) gay, and 2) they have a weed man. I’m sure that in many ways I’m just as innocent as ever, but I’d still probably give my high school self a heart attack.

Kinder Surprise, Or Not

I was listening to the Brian Lehrer show on NPR the other day, and they were discussing taste and memory, i.e. why certain foods trigger specific feelings and memories. Some people called in to talk about the best slice of pizza they ever had, or how they couldn't stand raw tomatoes because they associated them with the day someone died or something. That got me thinking about how for the longest time I could not stand cornbread, and I know exactly why. My parents both worked, and for a couple summers they put me in this day care center called KinderCare. I HATED KinderCare. I don’t remember much about it now, except that it was run by a really large woman with frizzy hair (the horror!), and that every single day we had the same snack: grape juice and cornbread. Every day. For three months. For a good ten years I associated cornbread with fluorescent lights and broken toys. And that horrible minibus they used to drive us around in with the pictures of happy children on the side. I never saw those kids. I think they died of an amino acid deficiency.

Through repeated exposure I’ve finally gotten over it and learned to appreciate - even love - cornbread, but grape juice still makes me gag. Then again, does anyone love grape juice?

The Sunshine of My Life

This past weekend, I made the mistake of exposing my skin to direct sunlight for more than fifteen minutes, and once again I was reminded of my genetic legacy of pallor. When I was a teenager, I spent many summer afternoons lying on our deck in my bathing suit with my body smeared in baby oil in the hopes of getting a tan like the popular girls. Except that there was just one problem: I can’t tan. It’s not like I turn pink and then tan, I just turn bright pink, then peel. The best case scenario is that I wind up with a few extra freckles. It took me an embarrassingly long time to finally accept this, and at least once every summer from age 13 to 18 I would subject myself to a near-paralyzing sunburn because I was sure that I over the winter I had developed the ability to produce melanin.

After years of voluntary exposure to damaging and potentially deadly UVA/UVB rays, by age 22 or so I finally got it through my fair skull that sunblock is my friend. Probably my best friend, even more so than corrective lenses and lip balm. Since then I never leave the house with less than SPF 15 on my face, even at night in the dead of winter. For a summer weekend of swimming and boating, I break out the heavy artillery: an SPF 30 formula that was determined by researchers at the Environmental Working Group to provide the best broad-spectrum protection. It feels like body armor, and after 40 minutes of floating in the lake followed by a vigorous toweling off, I was still greasy enough to leave a Kat-shaped stain on a deck chair.

By Sunday evening I felt bloated from overindulging in red meat and margaritas, but it seemed as though my sun protection efforts had paid off – no pinkness, no pain. I must’ve been sufficiently cautious, right? So why did I wake up on Monday morning with a disgusting, prickly red rash covering my forearm? It’s as though nature has to find some way to punish me for not wearing a caftan 24 hours a day. At least my freckles are still kind of cute, because between the grease and the rash, I can use all the extra charm I can get.

Cease and Desist, Dawgs

According to Kanye West, "Only white people and older black people say 'bling' now." Mr. West brings up a good point: sometimes you just have to let things go. Here are a few other slang phrases that are way past their prime:

• “You go, girl!” – My mom stopped saying this two years ago.
• “Represent,” as in “East Lansing, Michigan represent!” – Just…no. See also: “In the house.”
• Women saying “Don’t go there!” Followed by a cackle indicating her delight at her own sassiness. Note to That Girl: you are not truly sassy until you have backhanded a nail salon employee. Am I right, Foxy Brown?
• “Get my swerve on” – Unless you actually can swerve, don’t let you mouth write that check.
• “Where’s the love?” – A hint: it’s UP MY ASS.

Lights, Camera, Pants

Working in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, I pass through film shoots fairly regularly. As any New Yorker will tell you, nine out of ten times it’s Law and Order. But every so often, it’s a real Hollywood feature with real celebrities (apologies to Sam Waterston). The Will Smith vehicle “I Am Legend” took over Washington Square Park for a few weeks, no doubt disrupting business for the local – cough cough – entrepreneurs. Though Mr. Smith is a bona fide movie star, friend of Tom Cruise and TOTALLY NOT a Scientologist, I’m not much of a fan (my father is incredulous at this, since he cannot get through the trailer of “The Pursuit of Happyness” without being moved to tears). I agree that he’s a good actor, and Lord knows I loved the Fresh Prince when I was a kid, but it still bothers me that sold out his talent in favor of action roles for which he could record a middle school dance-friendly pop hit. And what the hell did he do with Jazz? By the way, have you listened to the lyrics of “Parents Just Don’t Understand” lately? I find myself agreeing with his mother more and more every time I hear that song, and that’s just depressing. God, I’m old.

Anyway, “I Am Legend” is now in post-production, leaving the Square free for a more exciting project: “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2: Forever in Blue”! Little America “Healthy Body Image” Ferrera! Little Rory Gilmore who can’t act her way out of a wet paper bag! OMGPON1ES!!1!* (Apparently there are two other girls to whom the pants also travel, and I am just going to have to apologize to them right now, because couldn’t pick them out of a lineup and I will probably cut them off in line at the deli. I’m sure they’re very talented, though.) Keep it here for more updates on the Pants and their Travels…or maybe just some more posts about my neighborhood and pies and stuff. KBYE!


*Source: Slashdot, via Cute Overload

Baked

I started getting into bread baking a couple years ago when I realized that there is NOTHING better than bread. Except maybe…no, nothing. Sometimes my results are great, sometimes my loaves something closer to a giant hockey puck, but the more I practice, the more consistently decent they become. In the summertime, though, my appetite for bread ebbs somewhat and I start to look for something new. A few weeks ago I made a sour cherry pie that was, I gotta say, a-mazing. Like, change-your-life good. And it wasn’t just me; other people’s lives were changed as well. The crust was tender and flaky, the filling was sweet and tart, and it was all made from scratch. It was so good, I wanted to build a summer house in that pie and live there until Labor Day.

My friends heaped on the compliments, and I loved every minute of it. “I can’t believe you can bake!” “This might be better than my mom’s!” Then down came the hatchet: “You’re so domestic!”

I almost choked. There is probably nothing more terrifying that you can say to an urban professional woman of my age, especially one who has recently moved in with her boyfriend and is very, very touchy about falling into traditional gender roles. We are non-traditional in many ways, aside from the whole living-in-sin thing; KBF (Kat’s Boyfriend) does not particularly follow sports and he reads fiction. We are equal wage earners. I can be a bit of a hothead, and a certain futon delivery man might suggest that I have a ways to go in the patience department. He might also point out that my language is not very ladylike.

But God help me, I love to bake. Does this mean I can’t be a feminist? Or do I now have to subscribe to third wave, Sex and the City-inspired, The-Pussycat-Dolls-Are-Empowering brand of feminism? This is stressing me out - I’m gonna make some cookies.

We'll Never Know

The other night, as we were finishing a delicious pasta dinner, my boyfriend looked up from his plate and said, “Whoa!”

“What, what is it?” I said, grabbing the table and scanning the floor for cockroaches.

“Across the street.” He said, pointing out the window. I turned around and saw no fewer than twenty Hasidic men standing on the sidewalk across from our building, all gazing upwards a fixed point that seemed to be located just over our roof.

I should point out that our neighborhood, along with South Williamsburg, is home to one of the largest Hasidic communities (Chabad-Lubavitch, to be exact) in the United States. We live next door to a synagogue and across the street from a kosher bakery. Seeing roving groups of bearded men in long black coats and black fedoras is nothing new for us. But we are gentiles, so a few of their customs are a bit unfamiliar, and anyway, what in the hell were these guys all looking at? The longer we looked on from our fourth-floor window, the more black hats we saw running out of the synagogue to join the crowd across the street. There were a few young boys in their white shirts and yarmulkes, but no women.

My boyfriend suggested that we go up to the roof, and by the time we did, a fire truck was coming down the street. Things were finally getting exciting.

“Oh look, it's…"

"Driving right past.” No fire, apparently.

“It’s almost like they’re looking at the moon.”

“I don’t think they’re into that kind of thing.”

Moments later, a group of seven or so men took off down Bedford Avenue at a brisk walk and were soon out of sight. The rest milled around for thirty seconds or so before walking off in different directions at a similar pace.

“Man, I kind of wish I’d gone down there and asked.”

“We have got to learn Yiddish.”

Road to Recovery

It could easily be argued that there’s nothing left to say about Lindsay Lohan. But that argument is wrong. There will never be enough said about her, until something else shiny or borderline tragic passes before my eyes and I forget about her completely. But for now, as much as I try to fight it (or not), I am obsessed. And it scares me. So as of today, I am entering Lindsay Rehab. This doesn’t mean that I’m going to quit reading TMZ and watching VH1 clip shows entirely – that would be like asking an alcoholic to give up cigarettes and coffee – but it’s time to set some boundaries. Here are my twelve steps:

1. Admit that I am powerless over Lindsay. And Sweet Jesus, I am.
2. Come to believe that a power greater than myself can restore my sanity. I think it may be Victoria Beckham.
3. Turn my life over to the care of Posh, purchase steel-enforced corset.
4. Make a searching, fearless moral inventory: Delete mp3 of LiLo’s 2004 “hit” “Rumors” from my hard drive, purge closet of leggings.
5. Admit the exact nature of my wrongs: subjecting friends and loved ones to extended monologues, wherein I dissected the various missteps of Lindsay’s career, declared my desire for her to Get Out of My Face, then talked about that crazy interview with her in Elle magazine last year for another twenty minutes
6. Allow God/Posh remove these defects of my character. Also: 15 pounds.
7. Humbly ask God/Posh to forgive my shortcomings…until I can get to Mystic Tan, anyway.
8. Make a list of all the people I’ve harmed with my addiction. First and foremost: my own hair. I never should have grown you out to look like LiLo in Bobby. I never even saw that movie.
9. Make amends. Um, am I crazy, or does Lindsay owe me an apology? A text message would be adequite (did I use that right?).
10. Continue w/ personal inventory. Really delete “Rumors” from hard drive, not just from iTunes.
11. Improve conscious contact with God/Posh. Reread The Extra Half Inch: Hair, Heels and Everything in Between, pout.
12. Carry this message to others: If you see Lindsay, tell her I’m still waiting for my apology.

Be It Ever So Humble

I feel as though I’ve been taking a lot of jabs at my new apartment lately, and it’s not entirely fair. Like many people my age, I’ve lived in a lot of rentals since I left my parents’ house at age 17, and I can honestly say that this is the first one that I can actually see myself occupying for a long time. My first apartment was a furnished two-bedroom in Ann Arbor that was adjacent to a lumberyard and boasted views of the University of Michigan stadium, a.k.a. “The Big House.” Some Saturdays my roommate and I would sell our football tickets to scalpers and try to make out the scoreboard from the kitchen window. The remaining days of the week, the marching band would practice at a nearby field, so we always knew ahead of time that the halftime show would feature a medley of songs from feature films, such as “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic. This number was particularly memorable for several reasons, but most of the time the tuba was just the soundtrack to our days and I never really noticed it much.

After college, there was a brief stint in Hoboken, New Jersey, which I typically omit when telling Crazy Apartment stories with other New Yorkers. It’s not that I’ve become that provincial – I actually really like New Jersey (Tenafly, holla!) – but for me, Hoboken was like an entire town made up of fraternity row. And every bar was the basement at the Beta House. So many ribbed cotton sweaters. So many shiny black shoes with buckles. So. Much. Tanning. And the puka shell necklackes! I think I have PTSD from the puka shell necklaces. I don’t care if you are a native Hawaiian and speak fluent Samoan; they will forever scream “date rapist” to me.

Fortunately, my roommate at the time had made plans to move in with her boyfriend, leaving me free and clear to escape to Brooklyn. (I still feel a bit guilty about that, since he was a complete tool and it was obvious that they were going to break up before our lease ran out, but c’mon, I was being supportive. She was secretly dying to live in Manhattan anyway, boyfriend or no. Don’t look at me like that.) Three apartments and five years later, I finally have on-site laundry, an elevator, and adequate storage place. Like most New York renters my age I am a bit of a real-estate whore, but I know when I have a good thing.

Summer Daze

It’s summer in New York, and I’m officially over it. All spring I counted the days until Memorial Day weekend, but once that’s over and the next three-day weekend is months away, what have you really got? If you’re me, you’ve got sweat-coated, seemingly endless waits on a stifling subway platform and a neighborhood that smells like sour milk. As if it isn’t bad enough that it already smells like poop and stale beer virtually every day of the year. Don’t get me wrong: I love where I live. It’s just, when you’re walking down the street and you step a track from someone’s weave TWICE IN ONE DAY, it’s pretty safe to say that you’re not in the Hamptons.

And really, that’s what most people think New Yorkers do on summer weekends, right? (Go to the Hamptons, not step on pieces of hair, I mean). Even I have outdated fantasies of sleepy little beach towns with sun-bleached crab shacks and bait ‘n’ tackle shops, but from what I’ve been told it’s just like the Meatpacking District, only with Burberry bikinis. Even if you are a part of the junior hedgefunder set, you’d still be crammed into a house with 32 other people, most of who are probably boffing each other. But what do I know about such things? My idea of a great summer night includes a cold bottle of $5.99 champers and my 12,000 BTU air conditioner. And God help me if that ever changes.

I wish I had a beach house. I wish I had a pontoon boat and a wind chime and a hammock tied to two trees in the yard. While I’m at it, I also wish I had the ability to tan. But for now I guess I’ll just head down to Warehouse Wines and Liquors and start planning another summer weekend.

Lofty Aspirations

Last month, I packed up my ramshackle studio apartment in Brooklyn Heights and moved just a few miles east to Bedford-Stuyvesant in pursuit of more space and cheaper rent. Despite having recently been named New York City’s dirtiest neighborhood, my boyfriend and I have had a great time exploring and speculating about the comings and goings of our local Hasidic population.

In truth, the real environmental disaster is occurring inside the apartment. We were lucky enough to land a loft space and I was lucky enough to land a boyfriend who is handy with a nail gun, so we both had visions of an airy, totally customized – and organized! – paradise. But the thing is, you know how difficult it is get haul your ass to the Laundromat after work, or have something for dinner besides handfuls of Corn Chex ? Well, it turns out that hauling sheetrock and two-by-fours around the apartment isn’t anything to look forward to, either. So as it stands, the art studio is for sawdust storage, my office is the miscellaneous hardware depository, and the kitchen doubles as a cardboard box fort/break dancing floor. But that’s loft living for you: work, play, sleep, and tetanus all under one roof.

Hi, My Name Is ______

One of the best parts of my job is having sole possession of a label maker. Not the kind with the plastic wheel and the lever in the handle, but a little ticker-tape device that looks like a first-generation Blackberry. This morning I took it upon myself to label the office supplies: staples, staple removers, tacks—careful! I’ve never identified, nor have I been identified, as a neat freak, but there’s something incredibly soothing about labeling. It removes all the guesswork, saves a lot of time, and keeps you from plunging your hand into a drawer full of tacks.

I guess it’s the same part of me that really, really enjoys the little aliases they give reality show participants when they’re doing their interviews, like “Candace: Pageant Queen” or “Nate: Lead Singer of a Star Wars Tribute Band” or “Ted: Has Webbed Toes.” It saves me from having to think too much, which is all I really want from a show like “Beauty and the Geek 3,” and life in general, actually.

Maybe some day I’ll take the label maker home with me, and start labeling everything as I go. If all goes well, there will be labels in the hair care aisle at every Duane Reade in New York: “That Shampoo You Liked at That Hotel in Baltimore” and on the guest of every party I attend: “Works at InStyle magazine - Do Not Make Fun of Scientology.” With any luck, I’d never have to think again.