life improvement

A decade or more ago, while I was in law school, I bought a keychain at a little True Value hardware store by my school. It was a loop of cable attached to a little round piece of metal. 

Keys slid off and on like a dream with no breaking your fingernail trying to pry the pieces apart wide enough to fit a key on there. In a pinch, I could open the ring and attach it around something so that it would never fall/float/drift away.

I used it alone for a long time and then started attaching it to the ring on my wallet when I started using a little id case with a key ring attached as a wallet. 

It looked like this, only blue:

(image from amazon.com)

Eventually, it started getting a little ragged. I periodically looked for a similar one when I was in a hardware store, but no one had one and the customer service people were uninspired when I asked.

In the last few months, it started fraying. The metal cable inside the plastic is breaking, and I keep stabbing myself in the finger with the little metal pieces. It hurts more than seems reasonable. The little spikes stick in my finger until I pull them out. 

Today, I was running an errand outside of my normal zone. When I got out my keys to get back into the car, I noticed that the fraying has gotten to the point where the cable is going to break in half, so I google-mapped the nearest hardware store.

If you ever wonder where the customer service in the world has gone, I can tell you: it is stored up in this one little store in Gone West.

The guy at the counter got the owner, and the owner found the closest keychain they had (not at all the same) and looked it up in the computer and looked through the other keychains near it in sku and  found the right one and ordered me two of them. And he's thinking about ordering some for the store. Winning. I speak so highly of this keychain that I have sold it to other people now, too. 

(Of course, as soon as I managed to get it ordered from a real store, I also found it on amazon. But you have to order it in sets of five on amazon. Which is not to say that I couldn't use all five. I could. I seriously love these things. Go forth and purchase.* You will not regret it.)

...

* HAHAHAHAHAHA. As if someone paid me to say this. No. No one pays me for jack on this website. Or anywhere, at the moment. I am merely telling you about a product that has made my life better and will improve yours, too.

[5] nom nom nom

I made the crucial mistake tonight of deciding to run a couple of errands before eating dinner. Look, I thought it would be easier, because I didn't have a sweet potato readily available at home, so I had to go out anyway, and I wanted to be back in time to make lentils and rice for lunch tomorrow.

I really should know better. 

By the time I drove through traffic to one store, walked a few blocks to another store, waited half an hour for a prescription that the pharmacy turned out not to have, waited in line to buy milk, walked back to my car, drove to another store with better produce, bought two sweet potatoes, got home, and started microwaving a sweet potato, I was dizzy and blind. I hope I didn't hit any of those cars parked along the street on the way home, not that I would remember if I had.*

But! It was a very good sweet potato, and the pomegranate that I ate about a third of afterward was stellar as well. 

I remember in law school once telling a health professional that I was not very good at eating, and she very carefully said, "What do you mean by that?" in the way that tells you that she is asking if you have an eating disorder, but what I really meant was that I tend not to feel hungry until I am RAGINGLY HUNGRY GIVE ME ALL THE FOOD NOM NOM NOM, which is sort of a problem when you are studying in the library until all hours and then suddenly you are too hungry to either 1. see the page, or 2. determine how and what to eat to get rid of the low blood sugar, especially when all stores in the immediate vicinity turn out to be closed because it is the middle of the night, weird, you haven't been outside in daylight hours in ages thanks to exams. It results in a lot of vending machine food.

I think the health professional suggested almonds, but have you tried eating almonds lately when your blood sugar is super low? It doesn't exactly pop it back up right away.

I've gotten a lot better about eating healthy food at regular intervals, never fear. 

The sweet potato did just fine. All is now well.

...

* (Kidding. Obviously)

[15] ice bells

When I lived in New York, the first year, when I was homesick for my little town in Rwanda every single second, homesick for that house huddled under the hill next to the lake, I would go out walking along the edge of the city. I knew the piers along the Tribeca/Soho/West Village/Chelsea stretch of the Hudson by heart.

In the summer, there are plenty of other people out there, too, with dogs and kids and lovers, but in the winter, it was often just me.

One day in the winter of my 1L year in law school, as snow was pouring down, I walked out to the end of one of the piers, all bundled in warm clothes. I couldn't see New Jersey across the river. When I looked back, I couldn't see Manhattan, either. I was alone in a snowglobe, shaken and set down.

The world was silent. That isn't common in New York, but I couldn't hear any people noises. As I stood there, I finally realized that the one noise I did hear sounded like music. I looked around, and it was the ice on the river. The river had frozen, somewhere upstream, and then broken up, and all the millions of pieces of ice were gently knocking against one another with a noise like bells.

I stood there for a while, just listening. I closed my eyes and raised my face to the snow.

And then I walked back to school.

busyness

I had a Rwandese friend who moved to Canada. We were not particularly close in Rwanda, but we were part of the same group of friends, and when he was in New York for a few months on his way to getting permission to stay in Canada, he emailed me, and we met up to talk about Rwanda and our common friends.

He invited me up to the Bronx to eat Rwandese food, to the tiny back-alley apartment where he slept on the floor of his Burundian friend's room, the other rooms full of immigrant men from other Francophone African countries, also scraping by, also far from their families. I rode the 4 train north out of Manhattan, and S. met me at the subway stop. When it was time to leave, he and his friend not only walked me back to the subway, but rode the train all the way to my stop to make sure that I was safe.

"Our neighborhood is not very good," they told me. "Not very safe. And these black American guys are so strange. They stand in front of the stores and yell at us, 'Hay, you gah-da kwah-der?'" They exaggerated the Bronx accent through their African-French accents. "You gah-da kwaaah-der."

S. moved to Canada, and I saw his friend twice more: once to pick up a bunch of presents to take to his wife and kids in Rwanda when I spent the summer there, and once to bring him the gifts that they sent back with me to him. My head hurt from speaking French. In between, in Rwanda, I spent a lovely afternoon at a craft fair with his wife and kids, wandering the booths in a shaded park I'd never really noticed in downtown Kigali.

It's like that in East Africa. Friends or friendly acquaintances you met once will email you and say, "I'm going to be in your town. Can you show me around / help me buy all the requisite gifts to bring back / take these things I have to send back to my country?" and you do, because that's just how it is, and because if you were in Khartoum / Nairobi / Kinshasa, they would do the same for you, or would find friends to do it on their behalf.

The reason I thought of this story is that months later, after S. had settled in Canada, he called, or we exchanged emails, or something, and he said, "I used to think that people in America or Canada were just making excuses when they said that they couldn't call or email because they were too busy. But now I see. People really are that busy here. I am that busy now, and I don't have time to call or email my friends at home the way I want to do."

That is exactly how I feel right now, only busier. I don't even have the time to call or email my friends down the street right now. There have been evenings - entire days in a row - when the only thing I did on the computer was work and make sure no one was in crisis. Before these last weeks, I cannot remember the last time I got home and did not turn on the computer at least to play for a little while, except on nights when I'd gone out late with friends. But these days, I'm too tired, too often.

Postscript:
A few weeks ago, S. said hello to me on f@ceb00k. We hadn't spoken in five or more years. We were both immersed in our North American lives and just too busy to keep up acquaintanceship in the East African way. He told me that he had married a Rwandese girl he met in Canada, "and we didn't even know each other before we moved here!" He posted photos of their wedding, of a lovely, happy woman and his smiling, handsome face, and the photos made me smile because they were surrounded by the Rwandese community in Montreal. I love that kind of community in a place far from home.

you have a boat

I meant to go outside today. It was all pretty out there, and I was going to ride my bike to RE1 and look for hiking boots. But then I got caught up in catching up on some emailing and got a headache from looking at the computer screen (this happens to me at work about three days a week) and then I spilled hot tea in my lap and now I am icing my lap.

So my advice to all is this: do not attempt to hold your tea upright between your legs while reaching over to get your computer. It will hurt, unless your tea is lukewarm, in which case there is no point to it anyway. In that case, make some new tea.

I have been slightly obsessed with this plane that landed on the Hudson. I love planes. I love them partly because I am a little afraid of them. Like a rollercoaster, they wouldn't be any fun if they were completely and totally safe. And I seriously need to learn how to fly them myself.

Given that I lived for a year four blocks from what used to be the World Trade Center in New York, given that I have friends from law school all over that city, the words "plane crash in New York" made my stomach drop into my toes. When I opened the NYTimes website, I was flabbergasted. "People survived that crash!" I told my coworker. "They are standing on the wing!" And they even rescued the plane. If I were in New York, living where I lived two years ago, I would have walked over to the pier where the plane was tethered, just a few blocks from my apartment. That is where I walked when I needed to get out and see sky.

It is not just because it is New York. I swore off New York, after all, when I left there, beaten and exhausted from three years of city chaos and law school. (I think now that I might have liked that city better if I'd had a happy light back then...) But watching ferries converge on that boat, I kinda sorta thought I might be willing to go back. It is a city, after all, where bike messengers stop to help you carry your couch up five flights of stairs. And, as it turns out, a city where commuter ferries pull the survivors of plane crashes out of the water.

How, I kept wondering, did people know what to do? Then again, what else can you do? There are people in the water, and you have a boat.

i got nothing

Life is all law, all the time, at the moment. It doesn't really make for riveting drama. I went back and re-read my Sudan posts (c. Aug.-Nov. 2007) and laughed hysterically, though. So that's always an option, if you are bored. I also spoke online to a colleague from Sudan who informed me that Tilt "was the worst site, by far" of the sites this colleague had visited in Southern Sudan. I will note that this colleague was THE SAME ONE who told me, before I went to Southern Sudan, that the location was "quite nice, actually." The alleged defense for this blatant lie is that "you wouldn't have come otherwise," a defense that persists despite my having said many, many times that I would have gone, regardless, but I would have gone knowing what I was getting into, which would have been better all around. "I would have gone!" I keep saying, "I thought I was tough! And now I know that I am, because I survived there." (I also gave this person this web address - Hi, G.!)

I'm also infatuated with my own photos. Not photos of me, but photos I've taken. I got a digital camera for the first time right before I moved to Rwanda in 2002, and I've been taking excessive numbers of photos ever since (as an example, I think I have nearly 1000 photos from three months in Sudan - what is that, an average of 10 a day?). Here, now, sometimes I leave my computer on, just to watch the screensaver of photos. Someday soon, I will post some of the ones that have caught my eye recently. But maybe not on a day when it is 20 minutes to 11 p.m. and I have not studied all day and I have to be somewhere at 9 a.m. and theoretically I'm supposed to produce some law for a practice exam at that time.

Just as an aside, can I just say that I lurve this city? And I lurve the alumni who come from my school? So nice! So not like New York! Eh-hem. Yes. Still disparaging New York, eight months after fleeing it. Someone asked me the other day if I ever missed New York and I thought for a while and then said, "The only thing I ever miss is the restaurants. There are some great restaurants in New York." And this is true.

hot summer days

On the day I moved to New York, in August of 2004, it was hot, as New York tends to be in August. (Although I wouldn't really know; I've never spent more than 8 days of August in New York. I avoided summers in New York as if this was 1615 and the plague was running rampant in the streets. If New York had streets in 1615.)

So, it was August, and it was over 100 degrees everywhere, and hotter in Manhattan because of those ground-warming subways, and I hadn't yet figured out that it's only something like $6 to take a taxi from Penn Station to the area I was to inhabit for most of the next three years. I took a train in from Newark airport, and then I took the subway to my stop.

I had two huge suitcases plus a smaller carry on suitcase, but in the airport after disembarking from my flight, I had condensed them into the two big suitcases, which had space for more weight than they were allowed, if that makes sense. So I had two huge 70-pound suitcases and I was hauling them through subway stations in 105 degree weather in New York City. Some very kind men helped me carry them up the staircases, since I could only do one at a time, and then I came out of the ground at what I knew was my stop, but didn't know which direction I was supposed to go and there were people all around and I didn't want to take out my map and inspect it. So I just started walking.

Two blocks later, nothing looking familiar (I had visited the school, after all), I put everything down, fished out the map, and discovered that I was going in the wrong direction. I was going north when I should have gone east. I stood on that corner, sweat dripping steadily off the end of my nose, and I wanted to sit down on my suitcase and cry, except that there was no shade and no respite from the heat, so I had to keep going, over and back. A woman moving in her undergrad daughter helped me with a suitcase, and eventually I found my new home.

After I dropped off my bags, I found my way to a bookstore and I sat on the floor in the children's section, reading a book, enjoying the airconditioning, and startling every time the ground shook with a passing subway train.

...

Every once in a while, I am tempted to very patronizingly say, "You are all so CUTE!" to the people of this, my middle and high school hometown. "So innocent! So adorable! So un-worldly!"

Why?

THEY DON'T WRITE AREA CODES BEFORE PHONE NUMBERS HERE. They just ASSUME that there is only ONE area code. Who needs anything more?

I had to tell someone my phone number today and I said, "9-1-7..." and then I stopped, because I saw her type this Michigan area code followed by 917. "No," I said, "9-1-7 IS the area code."

And everyone in the place turned to look at me strangely.

Hey, I'm always startled by the advertisements that just start out, for example, 385-0000. "Where?" I want to ask. "3-8-5, WHERE?"

That said, in Rwanda every (landline) phone number was only 6 digits long. And in my town, every number started with 5-6-8, which means that there were only 999 phone lines possible in the town. You only had to tell people your last three digits.

...

This morning I gave up quite a quantity of blood in the interest of discerning things like my blood type. ("Moment of truth!" I said to my mom. "Here is where we find out if I'm really your kid." As if there was any question, considering that I look, talk, sing, and sprain my joints exactly like a perfect mix of my parents.) Apparently it's good to know your blood type when you head off to little tiny towns in the middle of nowhere. Not that there is transfusable blood available.

Afterward, I went to find my Aunt Lisa, who works nearby and who, I think, does not mind her full name being used instead of "my aunt, L." (Right, Aunt Lisa?) Anyway, she shared the grapes from her lunch with me and we talked about family far and wide and how much fun it is to drive cars with dented fenders. Grapes and conversation, both, were lovely.

(Random movie quote: "There it is! There's that dented Beatle!" Anyone? T, you don't get to play because I KNOW YOU KNOW. Unless you don't, in which case, play on.)

jobless J.D.

Last week the big excitement was the having of the J.D. This week, it's all about the need to have a job in which to use the J.D. I just moved back into my parents' basement, which is not an exciting concept at the age of 27. Hopefully it won't be for long, because I can already feel it sucking my will to live. This basement is deadly.

Anyway, my sister and her friend came to New York to pick me up. They came in my parents' minivan, circa 1995, and we loaded it down in my little alleyway until it was four inches off the ground in the back, with various things strapped on top, and chugged our way through the Holland Tunnel, across New Jersey and part of Pennsylvania. We slept in an Econolodge in Drums, PA. My sister and her friend looked around and asked, "Are we really staying HERE?" but I didn't answer because I was already falling asleep. (What do they expect, a luxury hotel? I am a jobless J.D. in over $100,000 of debt. Take what you can get. They are lucky I didn't make them drive through the night again, like they did on the way there.)

A and J just finished their freshman year of college at the very same place I went. While we drove, they read a pre-teen book that they both loved eight years ago out loud to each other in funny voices, with -izzle on every word, and in the breathy tones of an explicit novel. In gas stations, they were doubled over laughing in front of the drink case. And things were funny. I laughed until my stomach hurt. I used to laugh that way a lot, back in high school and college. I wonder where it went? When did the world get so serious? I was hoping never to really be an adult, but I seem to have turned into one by accident. In March, when T and I drove from Chicago to Detroit, we stopped at the same sort of gas stations and truck stops, but we didn't laugh uncontrollably like we would have in college. I kind of miss that.

So I'm home, in the grand state of Michigan. There are compensations. Last night my sister invited me to breakfast in our very own kitchen for 10:30 this morning. At 10:30 this morning, she came into my room and said, "Let's do this later, whenever you wake up. Come wake me up when you want to eat." Having worked on a job application until all hours of the night, I was happy to keep sleeping until 11:30, when I crawled into her bed and started whining about being hungry. She had gotten cinnamon rolls as big as my head from the cafe down the road, and we warmed them and made coffee (her) and tea (me) and sat at the island in the kitchen eating them far too quickly. By the last few bites, we looked at each other and said, "I think I might throw up. I might have to wait to eat the rest." But two minutes later, we were both finishing them. Then she lay down on the floor in the dining room and said, "I have to spread myself out so this cinnamon roll will fit."

Unfortunately, she's leaving me tomorrow for ColoRADO. Who does that? Then I'm just the jobless J.D. in my parents' basement without even the distraction of my sometimes-annoying yet always-amazing sister.

I have a list of things to do as big as my arm, but I find it incredibly hard to get things done while living at my parents. I mean, when I lived here there was hardly email. I forget that the world keeps going while I'm in this little corner of it.

me, J.D.

That is, when I finish this paper. This one paper is all that is standing between me and the official packing in of the law school. The same paper as last week, you will note. It refuses to die. My best plan was to take a nap and hope that while I slept the words would appear. Except that I took a break from last Tuesday until today and no words appeared. Quite annoying, really.

I'm drinking a consolation prize bubble tea. I wanted a Cafe Aloha but the cafe was out of coconut milk. Then I ordered a mint mocha as a consolation prize, but it tasted like over-roasted coffee bean chalk and by the time i realized that I was too far from the cafe to return it, so I got a bubble tea as consolation prize no. 2, the bubbles of which are making me feel the tiniest bit ill.

you have to be kidding

I got my hair cut the other day and after she cut my hair, the stylist reached for some product to put in it for the blowdrying. "NO!" I said, "I hate having product in my hair. It weighs it down and I have to wash it sooner. And every time I get my hair cut, I tell them no product and they put it in anyway. Please don't."

The stylist said, "I completely understand. No product."

A few minutes later, post-blow-dry, discussing some flyaways, she said, "You could just try something really light, like this one." (pouring product into her hand and rubbing it around) "It would work."

And then she swiped her product-filled hands through my hair.

They can never resist.

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...

Then I went to the Apple store, where I fell in love with black and red headphones but ended up with boring white ones that don't quite fit into my ear, because of the $60 price difference. I tried to find a place to check out, but it turns out that now you can check out by credit card with any customer service person, wherever they are wandering through the store. They just slap a "Thank You" sticker on your purchased product and you get the receipt by email. Unbelievable.

boring

The truth, people? I'm bored. I have nothing left to say here because it's just more of the same. I've done this before: spring comes, which is nice, but so do exams, which are not nice. There are only so many semesters you can document the number of exams and papers left before you get bored even with yourself.

I'm too busy to notice the funny things going on around me (with the possible exception of the poor, poor confused tourists, but enough fun is made of them on overheardinnewyork). I've perfected the art of stealing time from one project to supply another, but nothing gets all it deserves.

And every once in a while, I just randomly shout out "JOB!" and S has to say, "You'll get one. Just channel your job anxiety into applying. Every time you worry about getting a job, apply for one." Which is good advice, but most of the time I don't have time to apply for jobs. I did consider getting up and applying for some this Saturday morning at 4:58 a.m. when I couldn't sleep for worrying about everything. But then eventually I fell back asleep, after some deliberate deep breathing and attempts not to think about anything because every possible topic is fraught. Fraught, I tell you. "JOB!"

Quasi-internship has turned into the quasi-internship that never ends. And all I've learned from it is that I don't want to spend my life in an office in New York writing about things that happen in the rest of the world but never actually doing anything about them. I think I might have known that before, so learning it wasn't that valuable.

BUT! Presumably I will actually get a job, eventually. And then, the excitement will be right here. Don't look away, all zero of you. (I checked. I have two subscribers on bloglines. One of them is me. The other is T. Heh. I can write whatever nonsense I want here.)

nightmare

Applying for jobs, that is. I am ready ready ready to be done with law school. But applying for jobs is like pulling teeth (not that I've ever had a tooth pulled, so that might be a bad example but I'm not sure because I don't actually know what it feels like). I am qualified for a surprising number of jobs. Surprising because as a friend of mine said, "No one is ever qualified for those jobs."

And I'm brave. Well, brave. I'm braver than I ever used to be. Applying for jobs is my least favorite thing in the job world (almost). I can do jobs and do them well, I just hate applying for them. But it gets a bit easier when you are qualified. That and having spent the last three years at a school that constantly tells you, "Everyone wants to hire you when you graduate from here! Everyone!" Which might be a lie, but at least it's an emboldening one.

I'm applying. I'm applying for Africa jobs, for the moment. I don't really have the experience to apply for jobs in Asia or Latin America, but I do think it would be great to work for an organization that might send me there after a few years.

Wouldn't it? Wouldn't it? I love thinking of the possibilities.

------------------------------------------------

One of the things I love about New York (I'm getting all nostalgic now that I'm about to leave) is the individual interaction. It's actually one of the things I also love about Africa. You can't hide behind a big shopping cart and a major retailer and a U-Scan in New York, or in Africa. You can't hide in your car. It is you and the guy selling incense on the sidewalk. It is you and the homeless man asking for money. It is you and the woman who cleans the bathroom. It is you and the crowd of teenagers on the subway. Every day you get to make a choice: smile and say hello, chat for a moment while buying the purse or the scarf, or shove past them. Unfortunately, you get a lot of shovers in New York. But you also get real moments of being human together.

stupid road construction

3 April 2007
0040 hrs

The thing about living in New York is that every once in a while there is a terribly loud noise and you hold your breath for a moment and think, “Am I still alive?”

Usually you are.

2 April 2007

Conversation last night:

M: So I take the A train a lot and I’ve noticed – okay, first, have you noticed that hardly any white people take the A train to Brooklyn?

A: I’ve always wondered about that. Which train do the white people take to Brooklyn?

M: The F. The F goes right through Carroll Gardens to Park Slope, where all the white people live. The 7^th Avenue F stop in Park Slope is the center of white people Brooklyn.

M: Anyway. White people on the train never give money to people who ask for it.

[Long conversation about patterns of generosity, essentially that rich white people give to institutions and less-rich non-white people give to individuals and churches. A had read a study.]

(Side note: why do the white people want to live on the least reliable train ever? The F is always and forever under construction. And it comes by so seldom. I mean, it’s just silly to choose to live on the F line.)

Today I got on a Manhattan-bound A train in Brooklyn and looked around my car. It was full. There was no seat for me. I stood in a doorway and thought about last night’s conversation and checked to see who was in the car. There were two other white-ish people down at the opposite end of the car. Everyone else was, you know, not white. I stood in the doorway looking at the teenaged boy sharing his headphones with his girlfriend and the old woman nodding slowly off to sleep and I thought, “I’ve never been so thankful for Rosa Parks.”

Realization:

I will buy only one more 30-day unlimited Metrocard before I leave this city.

coffee travails

See, what happened is that I FORGOT the sizes of things in middle America. I normally just order an iced coffee in the little hole-in-the-wall place with the best hazelnut coffee ever, or an iced tea at my favorite tea place, and they give me a plastic cup of iced beverage. Sixteen ounces of liquid goodness. But today I was running on five hours of sleep (because I spent more than an hour in the middle of the night trying to upload something to a class website while the school's server decided to be s. l. o. o. o. o. w. So slow that I never got it uploaded). Anyway, I wanted coffee (for the psychological benefit, as a reward to myself, because caffiene doesn't wake me up) and I wanted iced coffee (it's warm out now, so at least I have an excuse, but the truth is that I always get it iced if not an elaborate mocha concoction) and I wanted hazelnut iced coffee. I could either 1. stop at the school subway stop, leave the subway station, get the coffee, get back on the subway, and proceed to Quasi-Internship, or 2. stop at DK'd Donuts between the quasi-internship subway stop and the quasi-internship building. That's not the name of the company. But you know what I'm talking about, right - pink and orange logo? Ubiquituous donut store? Coffee is supposed to be good? DK'd is actually what the donut-stores-that-used-to-be-the-other-name call themselves in Honduras, because their franchise agreement ran out and they no longer have permission to use the other name. I always thought it hilarious. Pronounce DK'd Donuts out loud, in English, just once, and you will know why.

So I went into DK'd Donuts and ordered a hazelnut iced coffee, not too much ice, lots of milk and the lady said, "Large?" and I, having forgotten the insanity of portion sizes in this country in places where things have sizes, said, "Sure." Now I have a cup of iced coffee bigger than my head and neck put together. And maybe the rest of my body as well. Thirty-two huge ounces. I was embarrassed carrying it into Quasi-Internship, it's so big. And do you know how many packets of sugar are required to sweeten a 32 ounce coffee to my sweet-tooth standards? It's shameful. I might as well be drinking soda, I mean pop, which my former colleague who worked in Kenya for the same organization that I worked for in Rwanda told us at a regional team event has 12 teaspoons of sugar in a 333ml bottle. (Twelve. Think about that for a while and it's enough to make anyone switch to diet. Or water.) And my former colleague in Kenya knows, because his dad used to run the brewery/soft drink factory in Honduras and he worked there for a while.

Honduras seems to feature prominently, if tangentially, in this post.

I've made it through half the gargantuan cup of iced coffee in the two hours I've been at Quasi-Internship. Which is why iced coffee should come in 16 ounce cups, because that's the right amount to drink.

Also, unrelated to the coffee, I click when I walk down the hallway. Not me, myself, because that would be slightly strange, but the cuff of my left pant leg as it knocks against my shoe. This is because these nice black pants, which I bought at the Loft version of Ann T--lor and dearly love, have unraveled at the cuff seams. I tried sewing them back up. They came loose again. My mom, who actually knows how to sew, tried sewing them back up. They came loose again. Finally while I was in Detroit, I stole a whole bunch of T's big safety pins for chair covering (er, sorry, by the way) and used them to pin the cuffs. So far this works, but now they click every time I take a step with my left foot.

Argh. I have to go to the bathroom again. Too much coffee.

humanity

I have a deep and abiding antipathy to New York as a physical location. I hate the concrete and the treelessness. I miss yards (yards!). I miss space (space!). I miss people who are not either, as my mom and I discussed earlier this week, "buying the Prada shoes or polishing them." The inequalities kill me. The prices kill me. The snobberies kill me. The unending buildings when you take off from a New York area airport kill me.

Not that I want to live in the suburbs. But Detroit seemed interesting. We drove down 8 Mile, which was the highlight of my Detroit weekend. That and the U-Haul. Or the dog with half his body out the window on I-94 near Kalamazoo, which we had to just keep driving past because the Oakland Drive exit where we otherwise would have gotten the world's best hot chocolate is currently in a state of disrepair bordering on total destruction. I like cities, just not cities with nothing but buildings all pressed together with no space between them, going on for ever. When my plane took off from JFK last Friday and banked over the ocean, the city to the west and a gray expanse of sea filling the east, I was silently saying, "Keep going east. Fly over this ocean and take me away."

But every now and then, New York knocks me to the ground with beauty and humanity. It happens in a subway station, when two men are playing South American pipes and the clear sound wraps around the rushing commuters. It happens on the street, when the man standing outside my grocery store begging for change nods to me solemnly, because we see each other every day. It happens on the waterfront, where a deep red sun-disc melts into the clouds above the boats in the harbor as I make sure the sleeping baby is securely covered in blankets. It happens in a coffee shop in South Harlem on a sunny Saturday morning, when the almost-old man behind the counter says, "Now, that's a real smile."

Sometimes it happens in the tiniest of little things, like the fact that you can pay $2 for someone to charge your phone in 20 minutes in a news kiosk on Broadway at 31st Street. That's not an independent, self-sufficient North American thing to be able to do. It's a world in which we need each other, and I like it.

So I'm back in this country, which I didn't really want to come back to, and things are plugging along. I have classes. I have an apartment (sort of - long story - but at least I came back to a place to sleep, unlike last year). I have friends, apparently. I miss a lot of people and things in Liberia but I also spend a lot of time going, "FOOD! There is good-tasting FOOD here!" It isn't really that there isn't food or isn't good-tasting food in Liberia so much as that without 24-hour power you can't really store much food and I so couldn't really eat at home and I worked too much to eat anywhere else, especially at the end of my time there. I discovered new things in Liberia about how long I can go without eating, and I'm a little bit alarmed that I am going to implode in a frenzy of excitement here in New York about Italian food and Indian food and Mexican food and, and, and... all of it. If one is going to Liberia, however, here are some things to remember:

• You actually can live on cream crackers and spreadable cheese (Laughing Cow is the best).
• Lebanese bread molds after a day or two. Also cheese molds, even if it is in the fridge.
  
• Il Gelato has amazing gelato and amazing pasta (although the pasta is only good when warm).
  
• Both the Royal and Plaza Pizzeria have great pizza.
  
• The fridge and freezer take on a funny smell when they are only on for half the hours in the day.
  
• Diana's has the best falafel, but other places will do when you are so hungry that you are about to eat the table.
• You can only eat oatmeal so many mornings in a row before it makes you gag.
• The eggs are funny (something to do with being imported - old - from India because all the Liberian commercial egg-laying chickens were killed off when avian flu arrived). Don't bother with omelettes or pancakes unless you are willing to deal with them tasting like old metal about half the time.
• Liberian food is very tasty, but if you don't eat meat, you will get hungry again in two hours.
  

I happen to like Liberian food. Almost all of it. Not the clear fish sauce, but everything made with palm oil. I like bitterball. I like all types of greens - collards, potato, cassava leaf. I like palm butter. I like jollof rice. Pretty much just put palm oil in it and I'm going to like it. At a conference, one of my female coworkers looked over my shoulder and said, as I was tucking away a big plate of rice with bitterball soup, "You like our food?" Apparently, yes, because I am enjoyinga great deal of it a great deal. Unfortunately, it is often made with mystery meat, which I do NOT like. So I have to ask for it without the meat, and then it turns into rice and palm oil, basically, and I get hungry again almost immediately.

But anyway. Now I am in New York and overwhelmed with the options. I want to have cupcakes and ice cream and hummus and naan and crepes and frozen coffee drinks and bagels and everything all at once. I'm trying to go slowly. I'm still overly excited right now about baby carrots and Sabra hummus. I'm also overly excited about breakfast cereal with good milk. Like I'm eating the hummus and the cereal three meals a day. I'm sure that will, erm, settle itself soon.

i am an anime character

I went to the eye doctor today and she dumped yellow drops into my eyes, which oozed out over the next few hours and stung like mad. When I went to the bathroom an hour later, I looked in the mirror and saw that my eyes were a rim of blue around a huge black hole, like an eclipse. I wanted to show it to people but there was no one to show in the bathroom. So when I found M and DTL, I pointed it out to them and they were impressed. "You look like an anime character!" DTL said. And then, less flatteringly, "Have you been rolling?" Erm. NO.

living space

I put down a deposit on a place to live. It's with a 43-year-old Swiss woman whose job is arranging cultural exchanges - as J says, "So... no house parties?" Well, no, but the room is cozy and homey and allows me to have something I have always secretly wanted (not so secretly anymore since I'm blogging about it): a loft! It's a queen-sized bed and the ceiling is high enough that you can easily walk under the loft (maybe 7 feet high) with space enough above it to sit up on the bed. There is a nice window and a door with a window to the backyard, which is shaded by a big magnolia tree. It's on a quiet street in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and I love the neighborhood. It's full of beautiful, well-kept old brownstones, giant trees, and people of all ages and races.

Best of all, there is a washing machine in my new kitchen.

I am moving in on Thursday, assuming that the Financial Aid office has bothered to give me my loan money. They have it. Oh, they have it, because Cit.ibank (which owns my life and my future and that of any offspring, dependants, heirs or assigns that I have or may one day have) has sent it to them, but they have not bothered to send it to me. My regular bank account is down to $13. The other one has a tiny bit more, but I can't access it because I don't have the debit card because of a whole situation involving a fraudulent charge on that card and the bank being a meanie-head. And you thought it was only in Africa that banks could cut off all your access to your money without even trying.

S's kitten, which I like to refer to as "small kitten" even though its name is Birka, is currently trying to hop into my very large blue plastic suitcase. She managed it a minute ago and clung with her little claws to some random souvenirs made of wire and I had to pick her up (souvenirs dangling beneath her feet) and pry her off them one claw at a time.