First day of my at-home vacation. Spent the morning reading self-help books. This is such a cliche, as I have an entire library full of quasi-spiritual texts with words like "quantum" or "light" or "thin thighs in 30 days" in the title.

I should probably stop reading so damn many self-help books. Maybe I should get a book on the subject? My typical solution to virtually any problem or neurosis - everything from anxiety to toe fungus - is to run to the new age section of Barnes & Noble.

At any rate, it's been a delightful day. I love sitting around the house alone. When alone, it's much easier to sustain the little illusions we all like to maintain about ourselves. The problem with other humans is that they hoist their own opinions and perceptions upon us. For instance, this morning I went to the corner bakery without brushing my hair or teeth, or putting on any makeup and/or pants. We live in a rather snooty neighborhood, where people are expected to wear pants (or shorts, or a skirt, or some form of trouser) every time they go into a place of business. People on the Upper East Side are SO uptight.

Back home, sitting on the couch in my underwear, staring intently at the wall -- who's to say I'm not a genius? And a very snappy dresser? Francis and Seymour are asleep, and even if they weren't, I can assume they would agree. And if they don't, well - they're cats.

I just had a lunch of chinese food (lunch special, Rainbow Shrimp), enjoyed on the couch, without the burden of clothing. Eating while naked really does make you eat less. This is a good diet strategy, but one that would be harder to pull off at work. Most of my co-workers are French, so we could probably get away with being topless, but full-on nakedness might raise some eyebrows.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I'm sure that, if not for work, I wouldn't enjoy not-working this much. At least, that's what I keep telling myself. Even though it's a lie. I love not working. Some people aren't good at doing nothing, but it's kind of my "core competency." If doing nothing was an event at the Olympics, I would be a medalist. And that would be impressive, considering the French would probably sweep that category.

After reading my self-help books, I decided to read some of the fiction of Robert Benchley, from The Complete New Yorker (the cd-roms of all the New Yorker issues, ever, from the beginning -- way cool). New Yorker fiction hasn't changed all that much since the 1930's. And the cartoons didn't make any more sense back then, either, which is strangely comforting. And if you fill in some (slightly) different names, the gossip and goings-on-about-town are all more or less the same as they are today. For instance, you can just substitute "Bush" for "Mussolini" in the politics section, and you'd have a perfectly salient commentary on current events in 2006.

Strangely, I'd never even heard of Robert Benchley until recently, but he was basically the proto Woody Allen. Except in the sense that one of those hard-to-pronounce characters from a Greek tradgedy* was the proto-Woody Allen.

As coincidence would have it, I'm going over to the New Yorker offices later this afternoon. I'm going to have a drink with a friend of mine who works there, so I have to practice talking without moving my back teeth, a la George Plimpton. I love going to the New Yorker offices. Last time I was there, I saw not one but TWO dudes under the age of 40 wearing - and I shit you not - argyle sweaters. And no, they didn't mean it ironically. Who wears argyle sweaters? Dudes who work at the New Yorker, I guess. It's simultaneously so awful and so cool ... an irresistable force vs. an immovable object ... My head hurts just thinking about it.


*such as the little-known tragicomedy, Clytemnestra and Her Sisters

Of Cat Real Estate and Vacations ...

I have next week off from work because it's spring break #2 at the school where I work. It's a French school (that is, a regular K-12 school, but mostly everything's taught in French, because most of the kids are from French-speaking countries. Like France, for instance.).

The French luuuuves them some vacation. They love vacation as much as they can love anything that isn't cheese. Which is one of the many reasons they make good employers. That, and they take any excuse to drink wine and/or champagne at work or work-related events, such as breakfast meetings. Well, only on special occasions (March 24, for instance, only comes once a year).

So for the first time in recent memory, I'm going to have an entire week to myself at home! For spring break #1, in February, I went to Jacksonville/Charleston, etc., and over Xmas and Thanksgiving we went to California, and most of my mini-vacations over the past year have invovled family members or close friends coming to my house or vice versa. Which is great, but it will be so weird and nice to have an entire week to sit around and pretend I'm unemployed again, which was really fun except for the part where you don't have any money, which puts a damper on all that delicious free time, because all you can afford to do is sit around the apartment not spending money.

In other news, we recently crossed over the border into the territory of Crazy Cat People. We got Seymour and Francis a cat condo (broker listing: High Ceil/HWF/Remodeled FKE MSE!!! Scratch away at this one!). Or is it a cat duplex? Either way, I'm pretty sure it has more square footage than my first apartment in New York.

For the first time in about two weeks, our apartment is perfectly quiet. Except for the sound of gunshots, repeatedly going off in the background. I'll get to that in a minute.

My cousin Kitty and her daughter, Lauren, 16, and her friend Monica, 14, just left. It was a fun visit. I learned a lot about lip gloss (cheap stuff stays on better than Juicy Tubes), text messaging (will eventually replace need for computers), and water polo (which is not, in fact, played on inflatable raft-horses ... ha ha, New York cousins are very gullible ... ). Remarkably, they weren't joking when they said that water polo is a real sport. Apparently, it primarily involves high school and/or college girls grabbing other girls bathing suits. Throw in Ron Jeremy and Gary Coleman, and it sounds like the premise of pretty much every TV reality show.

The girls they did their obligatory part to keep New York's thriving tourist (a.k.a. fake handbag) industry afloat. They even took the Staten Island Ferry one day while I was at work, because this is the best way to see the Statue of Liberty. If you're not too distracted looking at the dude with the spaghetti strainer on his head.

"Ohmigod, we saw sooooo many crazy people today!" Lauren exclaimed on Thursday night.

"Uh ... I think the preferred medical term is 'wacko.'"

"So, this one dude? On the subway? He, like, walked right by us, and pointed his finger at my map, and didn't even look at us, but kept walking and kept pointing ..." The scene was re-created by Monica and Lauren, like in the flashback sequences with questionable production values in those real-life detective shows.

"Then this other guy came up to us, and he said something--dunno what--and then he started slapping himself on the cheek!" Monica demonstrated. "And then, omigod, some other dude was talking to a tin can. Calling it Melvin..."

"And then, there was this other guy, and - get this - he was wearing a Bush-Cheney 2004 shirt!"

Okay, the last part's not true, but it's just a random example of the absolutely crazy sh*t you get immune to living in New York. I'm sure I see just as many crazy people in the course of any random day, but those of us who live here just learn to filter them out. We filter out a lot of stuff.
A fun New York game is to think of some random thing or phenomenon, and decide to notice it that day. For instance, decide to see nickels on the sidewalk (they're all over the place), or asterisks carved into posts or signs, or piles of barf in subway stations. A friend once said, "have you ever noticed that everyone in New York waits to go down into the subway before they hurl?" I said, that's crazy, you don't know what you're talking about! Surefire, that afternoon I went down into the subway to find a giant pile of human vomit. Of course, this is not so much a testament to synchronicity and the quantum interconnectedness of things so much as the consistently low sanitation standards of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. But after that, I noticed barf in the subway all the time. And now, I've passed the gift along to you.

We also went to a lot of museums. I only live a few blocks from the Metropolitan Museum and the Guggenheim and the National Academy Museum, which has the distinction of never having been visited by anyone. Not even the mothers of the artsist whose work is on display. I often feel sorry for this museum, wedged between the infinitely more interesting Cooper-Hewitt and the Gugg. I almost want to go visit it, for the same bizarre reasons that I kind of wanted to break our washing machine because I genuinely felt bad for the Maytag repairman. He seemed to represent-- along with the Dunkin' Donuts guy-- the eternal, lingering ennui that is the inevitable by-product, a.k.a. "buy-product," of the American corporate establishment. (Clever readers will note that the previous sentence is a pile of pretentious crap that makes absolutely no sense. That is, unless you majored in Comp. Lit. or possibly Women's Studies, in which case you might mistake it for "a very salient point." Whatever that means.)

Anyway, we went to museums. I love the Met, and have ever since I read The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler when I was nine years old. The girls had never been to New York before, so I wanted to show them everything, such as how to get into the Met without paying (go in through the gift shop on the right, and you can walk straight into the museum), or how to use our Guggenheim membership to get four tickets in one day. It's important to teach young people how to rip off charitable institutions. These days, they've cut these subjects from the curriculum of most public schools. It's a darn shame.

I'm having an uproductive kind of day. Fortunately nobody at work knows what I actually do (this includes me), so it doesn't set off any alarms when I'm not doing it. Strangely, I'm usually pretty busy at work doing whatever it is I do. This year, we've managed to raise a lot of money, which makes me look good, but soemtimes I think it's purely a coincidence that things are going well.

In every job I've ever had, including this one, I always have a nagging suspision that I'm thorougly incompetent and a total fake, and one day people are going to figure out that if I weren't here, things would function just as well. And that they might as well replace me with someone who actually knows how to change a toner cartridge in the photocopier. Not that this has anything to do with my job, but nobody here knows how to change the toner, so we all gather around the copier like the monkeys around the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odessey.

All in all, I rather like my current job, because I like my coworkers, who come from all over the world, and because about once a week they give us hot, fresh croissants from top bakeries and sometimes we get to drink champagne at work. Because most of my co-workers are French, someone can always find an excuse (March 13 only comes once a year, after all ...).

Brokearm Mountain

Last night, my mother-in-law arrived at our apartment a little after midnight. Fortunately, she will never, ever know what the place looked like only 5 hours earlier. I won't say the place was dysfunctional looking, but if it were a car it would have been up on blocks on a front lawn.

On Friday, Paul had surgery to fix the arm he broke in October (read all about it here and here). As a result, we're temporarily back to square one with the arm healing thing, but at least this time it seems to be on the right track. I just wish they'd done the surgery 4 months ago, but they waited because it heals on its own in about half the cases. And the operation sounded pretty unsavory.

"It's essentially a filet of arm," said Dr. Yang, without a trace of irony, when he originally discussed the procedure.

"I hear that goes well with fava beans," I said. Neither Paul nor Dr. Yang was amused.

On Friday morning, we had to be at the hospital at 6 AM. The surgery wasn't until 9 or so, but they like for patients to come in early to sit in the waiting room for an hour, so that being cut open will seem like sweet relief when it's time for the operation. At Mount Siani, they give you a beeper (no joke) which buzzes and beeps when it's your turn. It would be more helpful if they just gave you a calendar to figure out when you're going to be called.

Lessons learned: In a hospital 6 am, nothing on earth is less interesting than the June 2004 issue of Golf Digest. Except possibly AARP Magazine, or The Liver Disease Survivors' Fan Club Newsletter. Maybe people have stolen all the good magazines? I flip through an issue of Time Out Chicago. If I weren't in a hospital waiting room, and it weren't 6 AM, and if I were in the greater Chicago area, this would be a much more relevant publication. Did they specifically subscribe to Time Out Chicago, I wonder? Are they that sadistic?

Anyway, Paul survived the operation and is doing well, although he's still on a lot of pain pills (which, of course, are wasted on actual pain). At the hospital, everyone kept asking how he broke his arm. I think he should start lying.

"... and that's why I was kicked off the U.S. Olympic Luge Team," the story might end. It's much better than the version with the wet hardwood floor and the laundry lady and me outside in my nightgown buzzing the doorbell (which, when you see that on paper, sounds much more lurid than it actually was).

Fortunately, Paul doesn't blame me at all for the whole arm-breaking thing. As he says, I'm the "co-Executive Producer" of Paul's Broken Arm. The laundry lady I was helping that fateful day, I guess, is the key grip.

(DISCLAIMER: the title of this blog entry does not imply that my husband, or his arm, is actually a gay cowboy. Not that there's anything wrong with that ...)