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SkieShauphen's Journal


SkieShauphen's Journal

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4 entries this month
 

Dream Journal Entry Saturday, Aug. 22 - Sunday, Aug 23

21:13 Aug 23 2009
Times Read: 591


Last night I had a dream about vampires. Watching too much TrueBlood lately.

It started in my father's old house back in Hutto, Texas. It was night and several vampires had broken into the house. I spent time escaping them and gathering my family. Finally I went after my two kittens and one of them; Chase was a vampire/kitten LOLZ and he tried to bite me. He was still just a kitten so I put him in a covered cat carrier and left the house with everyone. The sun came up and I was trying to make sure the sunlight didn't hit my poor kitten. Yeah...definitely too much TrueBlood.


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Blood Feast 3 (I did not write this)

02:52 Aug 16 2009
Times Read: 599


Chapter 1: Suspend Your Disbelief (part 3)

08-10-09



“Oh tell them about the time with the ranch house!”







“The ranch house?” my friend Markie mouthed across the room to me. I shrugged even though I knew the story and threaded my fingers between Jake's as he moved to gently stop my hand from stroking up his thigh under the table. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye and grinned wickedly even as he ignored me and stared attentively at the dinner guest preparing her tale. There was a glass of red wine sitting in front of me along with a whole assortment of miss-matched serving bowls holding a vast array of treats: mashed potatoes buttered and baked until brown and crispy on top, crisp sweet pea pods in light lemon juice, the tea eggs sliced carefully and adorned with a sprinkling and a clump of paprika the color of rust, then crown lamb arranged like a picket fence made of bone around Moroccan bean dip.







“You tell it.” My friend Danielle poked my arm from across the table as she nibbled on a crescent roll.







“Me?” I blinked. “Oh no, I'm never any good with stories.”







“Oh come on!”







“Tell it!”







“I can't! It's not nearly as interesting as you think!”







There was a loud knock at the door. Oh Amy, I thought, for once in your life you have managed to make the perfect entrance. “I should get that,” I said.







“No no no,” Jake's hands were suddenly on my shoulders. “You sit, tell your story. I've got it.”







“Well that's just stupid because I'm not going to tell the story,” was my response. “Danielle is.”







My protests did little good. I watched him wander out of the dining room with a sly grin that said all I had to know. He wasn't the slightest bit interested in the story, he just wanted to play the same borderline trouble-making flirting games we always played. I smiled despite myself.







“We can tell it together!” Danielle said.







“Wow this lamb came out really good don't you think?” I reached for and picked up a tiny little chop from my plate, ignoring the glares and amused hyena glances from around the table. Actually it wasn't a chop anymore, all that was left were the thin strings of meat that refused to be separated from the bone. I fixated of stripping them off one by one.







“Yeah, I'm so proud of you. It's like borderline Martha Stewart.” Vicki said. “Should be in a magazine or something. Like Better Homes and Gardens.”







Jake came back escorting a flustered looking visitor by planting his hand firmly between his shoulder blades and simply pushing him. “I think this is yours,” he said to me.







“Huh?” I looked up with the naked bone of a baby lamb hanging from my mouth. This was fortuitous timing because I was awfully close to cracking the bone and sucking the marrow out barbarically, which I can't imagine would have gone over well. “Oh.” My eyes caught sight of the mess of black hair and the bulky frame that was pushed into a dress shirt-- slightly wrinkled and too long in the arms but a deep beautiful burgundy that made his skin seem smoother and creamier-- and black slacks. “OH!” I stood, nervous for some reason. “Hi!” I flinched as I heard myself, voice too high, too loud, flighty and raw. I fumbled a quick look and a hand wave gesture around the table. “Guys this is my neighbor Illya, he helped me move in.”







Illya shifted in position. He was in front of a sitting fire squad armed with generic minimalist Pottery Barn silverware and too tall glasses of wine placed next to barely touched glasses of water, looking for the world like he was wishing for a blindfold so he didn't have to see the execution coming.







Instead he was indelicately placed in an open seat, his plate taken away from him so that it could be passed around and my friends could ensure he got the right amounts of what we had weeded through as the best recipes. I cleared my throat and rattled off their names and small bits of information while trying not to notice the growing look in his eyes that was practically flashing “run run run”.







By the time I was done his plate-- heavy with food-- landed with an unintentionally hard clank in front of him.







“So anyway, ranch house story!”







I fumbled a little, legs and arms wobbly as if drunk. Maybe I was drunk, I had had two glasses of wine and red wine loosens me up like not much else can. As I carefully sat back down I bumped up against the table and swallowed the curse that rose subconsciously from my throat with a deep guttural growl.







Jake looked amused. Like he knew something about me that I didn't even realize myself yet, and I thought what business does he have knowing something before I do?







“Right, the ranch house story.” I straightened my fork and knife on either side of my place setting so that they were perfectly perpendicular to the edge of the table. “Well, Danielle and I, when we were kids, used to break into houses for fun.”







That got the reception you would more or less expect it to.







“Not like actual houses,” Danielle said.







“So what, fake houses?”







“No ... I mean, nobody's home ... abandoned houses. There were a lot where we grew up.”







“Yeah and,” I began. “We didn't steal anything. We just liked to look around.”







“Explore a little.”







“Exactly.” I started up again. “So anyway, you know we were kids and whenever there's a vacant house on your street, in your neighborhood you know, as all kids know, that no one lives there because there's an axe murderer locked up in the basement.”







“Naturally,” Markie grinned, chewing horsely on his food and washing it down with the red wine from his overfilled glass.







“Anyway this particular house hadn't been unoccupied very long, maybe a year or two, and since we all remembered the people who used to live there, obviously, there was no axe murderer in the basement.”







“No, certainly not.” Danielle confirmed. “But he was a drug runner.”







“The Koreans?” I asked.







“Oh yes, he was in the mob and he got caught stealing so that's why the whole family had to vanish overnight without any warning.”







“I suppose they went into witness protection?” someone asked.







“We don't know,” she said somberly. “No one ever heard from them again.”







“Well they pretty much kept to themselves in the neighborhood anyway,” I added. “So no one ever heard from them in the first place.”







“That's totally not the point.”







“Right ... well anyway, kids in our neighborhood were convinced-- CONVINCED-- that there was a whole pile of drug money buried or hidden somewhere in the house-- don't ask, I know it doesn't make any sense we just were convinced.”







“So what? They sent you two in to investigate?”







“Nah, we went cause we wanted to check it out.”







“Never planned on finding anything,” Danielle nodded, the end of a snow pea quickly disappearing into her mouth.







“So anyway, we broke the latch on the basement window and stuck our heads in to look around.”







“Nothing, totally empty.”







“Except for that horse poster on the wall.”







“Yeah, you're ridiculous, we never go in to steal stuff and she wants to break that routine because of a horse poster.”







“Okay,” I pointed accusingly with my fork. “You're the one who asked me to tell this story.”







“Ah, fine fine, continue, I'm just saying...”







“Right, so, the place is empty so we figure it's safe to go in. We're pretty small, I think we were like twelve at the time, so even though it's a tiny window it's really no problem to squeeze through. Anyway, once in we start looking around in more detail, opening closets, poking through storage units.”







“Any money?” Jake asked as he pushed a group of peas around his plate.







“No,” I smiled coyly. “But there was a still armed silent alarm.”







“Oh Jeez!” Markie smirked. “When did you realize that?”







“About three seconds before the cops showed up.”







“Ha!”







“At the time it wasn't funny.”







“Yeah but it's hilarious now.”







“Sure, easy for you to say. Cops are pretty responsive in our area because the community pays for them, not the county. So, there's just this one cop, waving his flashlight through the open window and we're so far back in the basement that I guess he can't see us.







“At the time, Danielle was standing right by the basement door, but it's locked from the outside so the only way out is the way we came in.”







“Oh!”







“Yeah.”







“So what happened?”







“We're dead quiet for about two ... three minutes, then suddenly the cop calls down to me and says 'your mother already called to let us know you were down here'. I guess that, since the house was sandwiched right in between mine and Danielle's, my mother had looked out our kitchen window and spotted us breaking in, called the police right on the spot.”







“Damn! That's cold.”







“That's my mother.”







“After that,” Danielle concluded. “We weren't allowed to play together anymore.”







“Actually I think we're still not allowed to play together.” I grinned. “So none of you tell my Mommy. Otherwise we'll get in trouble.”





Sunday dinners are a tradition we started in college. We get together as many people as possible, cook as much food as possible, open several bottles of wine and eat and eat and eat and talk for literally hours on end. It was a nice, and cheap, way to spend a Sunday. The guests got a home cooked meal for a third of what they would have spent in a restaurant or cooked themselves, the host got the leftovers for a full week's worth of dinner.







Illya spent most of this time trying to keep up with the pace of the conversation swinging wildly about the room. Overwhelmed would have been an understatement, he was like a salt water fish in a fresh water tank pressed to the side of the bowl gasping helplessly for relief. My friends, being odd balls themselves, took to him immediately and by the end of the last bottle of wine you could see little sparks of amusement, a harsh attention craving joy, in the subtle shifts of his expressions. He laughed at jokes he did not understand but did not care.







“Jaykles, you never eat anything!” Vicki scowled as she lifted his plate and inspected it. Empty, but you could tell the places where food had touched and the real estate that had been vacant was vast. This was a little ritual of theirs, Jake never did eat much. Some salad, which he sometimes picked at prudishly and obsessively, then little bits of this and that with careful discrimination, the order and method to which was a complete mystery to us.







“How can you not have some of this beautiful lamb?” A rare moment, Markie was joining in the hazing, lifting what was left of the roast and dancing it back and forth in front of him.







“I don't like lamb.”







“Ohhh...” Vicki turned back to me. “Did you know about this? Why did you make lamb?”







I came from ferrying dishes into the kitchen, grabbing a bone from the crown roast and ripping off another baby chop. “He doesn't like anything.” The meat cut smoothly in my teeth and bits of juices glossed my lips. “Besides, more for me.”







“Your boyfriend is, like, anorexic.”







We didn't comment on the boyfriend thing because the substance of her statement was more provocative. Jake had always been thin, but not in the conventional sense. He was deathly athletic: body sculpted like an anatomy model for med-students; every muscle perfectly defined with almost no body fat. Maybe anorexic wasn't fair, but that was certainly what you thought of when you realized you could follow the path of certain bones with your thumb from joint to joint.







“Anyway,” Jake said, patting his mouth with the napkin he had crumbled into a sloppy ball and sat next to his plate. “I have to go back to my apartment for something.”







This too was not an uncommon occurrence, though that never stopped Vicki from giving me a curiously owl like look and waiting for my reaction.







“Mmm...” I hummed as he came up behind me and gently wrapped his arms around my waist. Other boys might have kissed some accessible part of my body or held me possessively close, but Jake kept a half a person distance between us, rested his chin on my shoulder and spoke softly, assuming nothing.







“I'll come back later?”







“You just want to avoid doing the dishes,” I said.







He laughed. “Yeah, right ... I'll bring a snack.”







“Ooooo...”







“You can think about food after that?” Vicki laughed, forcibly taking dishes out of my hands with a sharp 'stop you cooked' and scrubbing them in the sink.







“Trust me, she'll be hungry later.”







Silly friends, they didn't realize that Jake was the snack.



..........................



New York roofs are black like someone took a giant sharpie marker and tried fill in all the little concrete boxes. They are great places to sunbathe, especially in those lethargic transition days when the weather is screaming “SummerSummerSummer” while your schedule is loading you down with the trappings of Fall and the pending deadlines of Spring.







The concrete lip, barely two feet high, marking the end of the roof and the beginning of yet another man made cliff in an urban canyon did little to ease my discomfort, even as we were lying on the roof, perfectly stable with no chance of losing balance. The view on the roof opened up to the barren playgrounds of J.J. Byrne Park, extending the feeling of vast forever as the rough industrial horizon met the blue sky dotted with dingy dust-bunny looking clouds. In immediate sight rows of brownstones, redone to reflect more wholesome uncontexted imaginary of the Cosby Show and Sesame Street, are laid out with concrete landscaping broken up by the occasional tree or plastic trash bin.







Markie fancied himself a socialist. I thought of myself as a capitalist. Naturally we were best friends.







“Did you hear, Suzy Walker in my building is moving out.” He dug around in his bag, his tongue protruding out passed his lips as his hand flopped and clawed around for various loose items. He lifted a large plastic ziplock bag out of his knapsack, it was filled with small rubbery two tone balls.







“No,” I said. “Good for her.”







He shook his head, “Not up, just out. Lease expired and landlord won't renew.”







“So she's being thrown out?”







Lengths of metal tubing clanked noisily as he arranged them in a sloppy pile on the roof. Stretched out and focused, he expertly started assembling the barrel of a long futuristic sniper rifle.







“Well technically no, but the rent is going up to 1200 a month, that's nearly double what she was paying and she can't afford that with two babies and no man.”







“Jesus!”







“Open the bag and hand me some balls will you?”







The districts that roughly collude under the name New York City have always been and will always be rife with division. The bit of Brooklyn that can still be recognizable as civilization-- that is the part that overhangs close enough to the area codes where residents consider themselves safe from the nightmarish fairy-tales of ordinary (Note: when did the tired cant 'if you can make it here you can make it anywhere' come to mean boring, useless, petty lives are inherently better if they're lived in New York?)– is divided roughly into two parts: North and South.







North Brooklyn has been staked out by the hipsters. You can't explain what a hipster is, you just have to see them in action to understand it, but if I had to sum it up I would say that a hipster is someone who is living their life as if someone will turn it into a book or the movie later on. That doesn't necessarily mean that they do anything interesting, mostly its a Forrest Gump type of life without the easy excuse of being sincere or mentally retarded.







South Brooklyn, by contrast, is calmly being revisioned by people who would traditionally fit in better in the suburbs but have managed to convince themselves so thoroughly that suburbia is such a breeding ground for soul murdering conformity and follow up soul saving debauchery that they prefer to stay in the city where at least the junkies are identifiable.







Markie was not in the position to criticize anyone for gentrifying the neighborhood, he himself was from Rhode Island, but he was a North Brooklyn type living in South Brooklyn with a serious case of “last one in shuts the door” syndrome. He loaded the paintball gun and scanned the Wednesday morning foot traffic.







“Oooo look at this one, black skinny jeans, mohawk ... what a pretty little specimen.”







Markie got a little sadistic sexual high out of trying to peg skinny jean hipsters in the bum that had strayed this far away from their traditional grounds. I personally believe this quells the frustrations of not being able to do other things with their bums that he might otherwise prefer.







“HA-ha! Got' em!” He tossed the paint gun aside and lied close the lip, his eyes barely peaking over to watch the scene on the street. The short hop of pain followed by the panic of clothes splattered with paint embarrassingly unironically.







From eight stories up the rumbling of traffic on nearby 4th Ave muted out any intelligible sound. It was sort of like watching a real life version of the Sims.







Markie considered this his duty as a concerned citizen, keeping out the rift-raft that might otherwise follow his trail blazing ways. I kind of considered it a lost cause by this point. There's only so much that you could or should do to prevent a neighborhood from changing. It's an age old story, but when community development organizations start building their own projects so that they can import poor people in an effort to fight back it's probably gone too far.











“You can't blame the landlord really.” He reloaded the paintball gun and scanned the terrain for another victim. “Why rent to a nice brown lady at $700 a month when you can rent the same place at double to some twenty something NYU twit who won't care if the place is livable as long as he has a couch to get high on and a closet to hold his ironic T-shirt collection?”







I chewed on the end of a toothpick like Dirty Harry. “You're a socialist, I thought the whole idea was to blame the landowner.”







“It's slimy but I'm not saying I don't understand it. Short term leases at premium market values, you can raise the rent every six months if you want. When even the NYU twits can't afford it anymore, they'll just get roommates.”







“Neighborhoods change.”







“It's not change though, it's an extermination. In two or three years none of these newcomers will live here anymore because this is just their 'starter' place. If they own, they'll sell so they can social climb their way into something cooler. If they rent they'll move to ... the Village, Westchester, Long Island, somewhere else.







“New York is the beating heart of the new age of diaspora, pushing people into transient disoriented life patterns,” he continued. “It's like your friend, the Russian?”







“Illya?”







“Yeah, what is he doing here? Same as the rest, came to New York on a whim, will move somewhere else when the system pumps him out.” The paintball gun fired with a sharp puff of compressed air and he threw himself down on his back on the floor of the roof to avoid being spotted. “It's you and I who are the problem. We want to stay, live here, reproduce here. We're like a fungal infection growing on a valve. Once we're eliminated, New York City will be free to cycle through the richest people in the world and their wannabes forever.”







His pretentious manifesto showed his newcomer status to the giant tit of my mother, this city. Every generation they come: the supplanters and those who supplant the supplanters, they will fight, fuck, compete, campaign against one another, lampoon each other, destroy each other's hot spots and martyr each other's folk heros, but when it's done the children of the mangled people who have survived will be New Yorkers.


COMMENTS

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Blood Feast 2 (I did not write this)

02:51 Aug 16 2009
Times Read: 600


Chapter 1: Suspend Your Disbelief (part 2)

08-03-09



“Come on, Vicki. Hurry up!”







“Okay okay, sorr~y.” Her bag was flung on to the coffee table, her keys spilling out and landing hard on the wooden surface before sliding off that with a metal clacking sound and hitting the floor with a dull thud.







“Whoops! Can you get that? I'll be ready in a sec!”







I plucked the keys off the floor, swept the other items-- pens, flyers from various things, a baby blue Chanel wallet she had gotten off of ebay, cigarette accessories, a barbeque lighter (I had long ago given up on asking about these things)-- and stuffed them back into her bag. My friend Vicki is a fairly successful media artist, who is fairly successful I suspect because unlike the majority of media artists (or just plain artists), she's not afraid to live in an untrendy part of town. So she has a pretty little one bedroom apartment in the shittiest, scariest looking building I have ever seen in a more or less okay part of Brooklyn. But not that Brooklyn, not the Brooklyn just a skip away from the bridge and the island of steel that exemplifies every finite image of NEW YORK CITY non-natives have. Vicki lives in the deeper, hard beating Southeast core where streets stretch on for miles without a single open storefront like the most infinite shady back alley in the world.







Turns out-- who knew?-- media artist in the modern vernacular means advertising/branding/web development/designer that you can pay on contract and therefore skip out on paying health insurance, social security and unemployment. But it's better than being unemployed and that's what New York teaches you: for every bit of government enforced social good there will be a line of people trying to get benefits they don't deserve, a line of people trying to shirk their obligations and an extra long line of people forced to enable the whole corrupt charade or be unemployable.







“Okay!” she appeared in the hallway in a charge of clothes: ballet flats, long T-shirt, Club Monaco cardigan and black leggings.







“Vicki...”







“What?”







“Have you forgot the cardinal rule of fashion? Leggings are not pants!”







“But they're comfortable!!!” she whined, her lips curling up in a wicked smile. “It's not so bad, look the shirt covers my ass.”







“Barely, put a skirt on or something.”







“Fine! But if we're late it's your fault!”







“I can't be late to my own party, bitches need me to open the door for them.”







She chuckled from where she was hidden in the bedroom as a flurry of clothing got tossed about in a futile search for something acceptable. Seeing as Vicki spent half of our college years wandering around naked I probably shouldn't be surprised by her occasional aversion to bottoms.







“Is Leo coming?” I asked as I scanned the new mementos on the wall-- the tiny beginnings of a indie art collection sporting artists I've never heard of but whom Vicki assures me are SUPER important, a mix of souvenirs from world travels, then gentle Ikea touches put in whenever Vicki or her live-in boyfriend Leo feel especially homemakerish. Vicki and Leo have the life everyone moves to New York to live: charming little New York apartment well but modestly furnished, clean and bright, an endless parade of local events and trendy restaurants, terribly sophisticated hobbies, and regular vacations to places like Paris, Costa Rica, Venice, Hong Kong ... day trips to the North Shore vineyards, roadtrips up to see the fall foliage...







It's idyllic, so much so that it's possible to overlook the fact that they have this life because they commute to it. Such an existence is not possible inside the places the movies use as the background for a normal New York story, the sound stage zone of NYC if the will.







“I dunno,” she hummed. “He may have to work, you know.”







“Yeah that's cool, text him and tell him to come by after if he's up to it.”







“Sure-- oh! We have to stop at the bodega before we go. You don't mind?”







I shrugged as I awkwardly stuffed my feet back into my shoes. “No, of course not.”







“Right,” she grabbed her bag out of my hand and in a whirlwind of activity ushered me out the door into the hallway of her floor. Walking into the common areas of Vicki's apartment building was like entering a different world. The tiles were so badly scuffed they no longer resembled their original colors and patterns, the walls were painted the same kind of pissed-on baby blue they use to paint boys bathrooms in grade school and each door was a dented, thick hulk of steel painted over in dull brown paint-- perhaps to make it seem like a sturdy wooden door instead of a panel of scrap metal salvaged from a U-Haul post car accident. This is a place where cockroaches and cat-sized rats get annoyed when you move in and damage the value of THEIR real estate, and yet once you crossed the threshold into Vicki's apartment everything was pristine, polished and fully renovated. It was surreal.







The bodega on the street corner is a not as New York as some New Yorkers would like to believe. You can find similar small market neighborhood systems just about anywhere where economies of scale fear to tread. What makes it a cultural touchstone in New York, though, is that it serves as a reminder that this city of advertising light and marquee color was not too long ago cut up with pockets of places where chains, franchises and brands would not and could not survive.







New York is not easy. It has never been easy, but failure in New York has become so much of a romantic fantasy that the hardness of life here no longer seems to deter anyone. It's now cool to be poor. It's cool to live in a gang infested slum. It may not be very cool to be robbed, but it is definitely cool to have some wild and dangerous story about how the City bit back to facilitate the narrative of New York ultimately embracing you as one of her own. How you were smart and resourceful enough to survive.







Vicki called the man in the bodega by name. She smiled and enquired after his kids. He gave her a look he usually reserved for neighborhood punks who are more likely to shoplift, spend hours inconveniencing legitimate customers by reading the magazines, or “accidentally” knock a few bottles of beer out of the refrigerated cases. But she didn't seem to notice.







She picked out a few items: Instant miso soup, the packaged paste of which we discovered in college makes a surprisingly good condiment; two bars of flavored organic chocolate, a pack of Little Debbie Strawberry Shortcake rolls, and a new tin of organic rolling tobacco.







“I thought you quit,” I noted, eyeing the tobacco. “Again.”







She shrugged, quickly taking out of her purse two items: a round pink Hello Kitty tin and a lucite cigarette roller. She deftly refilled her tin and rolled a cigarette before throwing the tobacco back into the bag with the other miscellaneous supplies.







“Let's get flowers!” She took the barbeque lighter out of her purse and proceeded to light the end of her cigarette with it, black eyes staring crossly at the mega flame that spouted forth.







“Vicki!”







“What?” A grunt. “You don't like flowers?”







“What is that? Doesn't it seem like overkill to light a cigarette with a barbeque lighter?”







“Oh ... well I keep losing the damn small ones!”







“I need you to stop doing things that could easily kill you.”







“Why?”







“Because you need to live long enough for me to send my kids over to you when the urge to drown them in the bathroom becomes too great,” I said.







She laughed, the freshly rolled cigarette twitching between her lips. “I promise, you can totally send them over and I'll teach them super useful stuff. I promise you, your kids will know how to roll a joint before high school.”







“Good. Because, you know, I was so afraid they wouldn't.”







“You can count on me. Now, flowers?”







I shrugged. “Sure.”







The El Salvadoran keeping a stall just outside the bodega perked up immediately and began preparing the wrapping paper and cellophane. He swept his arm out across the selection: roses, tulips, carnations, various wild flowers not so wild in origin, but my favorite have always been the orange Gerbera so we got a bunch of those while the sounds of construction pounded out a rhythm on the street.







A couple blocks away a tall modern building was peeking out from between the family houses with their sloppy vinyl sliding in worn industrial colors and the chipped and scarred brick apartment blocks. Construction is the one absolute in New York.







“Subway?” Vicki asked.







“F ... we need the F train.”







“No problem!”







After a few transfers and the walk lengthened by chatter, we came to my new home. The freakishly tall building lying in a freakishly tall plantation of buildings.







“Wow. Hey isn't this one of those Mitchell lama areas or something?”







“Hm. I dunno ... maybe.”







New York housing is ridiculously unfair the way all government programs designed to help people end up being ridiculously unfair. But realistically you have two options: ridiculously unfair, or completely cut throat, so you take what policy you can get.







Since most apartment buildings built in the City are funded with municipal bonds through the housing department, they are required to make a percentage of their apartments “affordable”. That means if you live in the city, your neighbor in an identical apartment could be paying half what you are. The conditions for getting one of these “affordable” homes is of course a process awash with paperwork so tedious and complex all the honest people are properly driven away.







Their definition of “affordable” is also rather amusing. An “affordable” apartment in the best areas will run about $1700 a month all included, and you're only eligible if you make less than $60,000 a year. So in other words you can only live here if you can't afford to live here.







Urban planners have the best sense of the humor.







The elevator dinged cheerfully as we came up to my floor. The hallways were empty and quiet as they always seemed to be. Adult hallways in a quiet adult life, so totally unlike the frat house lives I had lived before. So different, maybe the beginning of everything.







I looked down the hallway to the quiet little apartment somewhat separated from the others. Lonely 11B, where barely a sound of life could be heard save for soft stirrings and the occasional shuffle of a sole pair of feet across the room.







I hadn't seen him since I moved in, not once coming or going. And since I worked from home in an apartment building with hallways that had better acoustics than many a recording studio and walls thinner than shoji screens, the fact that-- best I could tell-- no one had entered or left 11B in days was curious and concerning.







“What's the matter?” Vicki asked.







I looked back and realized that-- of course-- she was waiting for me to unlock my apartment door and let her in. She shifted the groceries in her arms and pretended to be too concerned to mind the discomfort.







“Oh sorry!” I quickly slid the key in the lock and threw the door open for her.







“Wow,” she took a few steps into the foyer with an appraising scan. I sat my bags down just inside but didn't follow her in. “Nice ... really nice.”







“I'll be right back, Vik.”







The nice thing about old friends is that you've already freaked them out enough for them to stop questioning it. She didn't say anything, just nodded with an owlish look of surprised curiosity, and I darted quickly down the hall before I could lose my nerve.







The waiting after the knock was the hardest part. I almost left twice. Almost scampered right back down the hallway like a fool or a terrified child. But I got through the second knock and the obligatory thirty seconds of waiting before I finally gave into the impulse and turned to make a hasty retreat.







That's exactly when the door opened.







“Oh!” I squeaked.







I wasn't expecting it. I had planned out exactly what I was going to say, but that was for five seconds ago when I was staring at the door straight on at full attention with decent posture. Now hunched over, frozen mid-flight, with impenetrable dark Russian eyes watching me I had no idea where to even start.







“Hi!” Overchipper. Great. I was so totally humiliated.







“Hello,” he said, his tone cautious and complementing the evaluating scan of my body. It felt a bit like a strip search, but I quick swallowed any reaction and focused on straightening myself out.







“Listen, um ... I'm having a little party tonight, at my place. And I never really thanked you for helping me move in.”







He listened, his face empty and devoid of reaction. I wondered if I was making a huge mistake, but then my adult self returned and kicked me in the ass. On what planet would a simple invitation be offensive?







“So ... would you like to come?”







“Come?” He repeated, and I considered the possibility that he had simply gotten lost in the bevy of nervous words I had rambled out more or less in the right order. Then he tilted his head and I realized he was thinking about it.







“I have lots of weird friends, weird but nice, and you know you could come for a while, try some of my cooking and leave whenever.”







“Cooking? You cooking?” His whole demeanor abruptly shifted. Suddenly he was interested in a way he wasn't before. His mouth hung open a little, his eyes unfocused and I realized that since he lived alone and was foreign he probably hadn't had much in the way of a decent meal in a while.







“Yeah. I love cooking ... almost as much as I love eating. So ... if you want to, you're welcome.”







I made a quick retreat as soon as the door was closed. A quick giggly retreat filled with care free bounces. I would have done a completely ungraceful victory dance right out of the pro-athlete goal celebration hall of fame had I not spotted Vicki still standing out in the hallway-- albeit minus a few bags of groceries-- watching with wicked delight.







“He's hot.”







It's funny. Just about anyone else would have been more subtle, started off with “oh who's that?” or something equally polite and indirect. Vicki cut straight to the quick with certain things, it was a characteristic I admired greatly.







“He's not bad.”







She squealed with a childish 'Ooooooo', exactly the way kids do when they're of the age where boys still have cooties. I grinned at her.







“Shut up, he's my neighbor!”







“So? Even better. Easy access.”







“Ha,” I snorted and retreated back into my apartment, shooing her in with a quick swat on the butt before closing the door. “Come on, I've got a lot of prep to do and you have to help.”







I reached into the fridge and started pulling out bits and bites of various things kept carefully in Tupperware. A festival of small food, a course of appetizers in the spirit of tapas or dim sum or any cuisine where you over eat terribly just by sampling a bit of everything.







“Here.” I set a bowl of hard boiled eggs in front of her. “You have nimble fingers, do you think you can shell these without losing that little bit of skin that's between the egg and the shell?”







“Uhh ... sure? I guess? But these eggs look bad...”







She held up one such egg with ugly corrosive looking brown stains and faint purply smears lining the cracks.







“They're tea eggs, they're supposed to look that way.”







“Tea eggs?”







“Yeah,” I said, head buried in my fridge, a General overseeing an impressive collection of new supplies. The blood rush gave me a ten second high as I swung out of the appliance's belly and back into the day light. “Tea eggs, you boil them and then tap the shell to make those spider web like pattern then soak them in brewed tea.”







“Oh. Do they taste like tea ... I guess?”







“Hm, no, they taste like eggs.”







“So then ... uh ... why bother?”







“Because they smell like tea, not like eggs, and they're pretty!”







Vicki smiled and shook her head a little in acknowledgement that this was a silly thing to put that much work into. But she got it, she understood how important silly little things of great effort with virtually no significance could be in hostess situations, so she started peeling the eggs without further question.







“Hello?” His mop of messy, thick blond hair flopped out of part as he stuck his head in, the door held tightly in a half open position. His gray eyes, small and sometimes beady in appearance, slowly scanned around the apartment settling on the occasional piece of furniture or ribbon of sunlight bouncing off the white walls.







“Jaykles!” Vicki grinned, waving at him from her seat at the kitchen island.







“Oh,” he said. “I am in the right place.”







I rolled my eyes. “Of course you're in the right place, I gave you directions didn't I?”







“Yes, but you left the door wide open, and I thought to myself that no self-respecting New Yorker would be that stupid.”







“It was closed,” I sniped, wrist deep in mushy chickpeas as he came all the way in and closed the door behind him. He carefully lifted the hard nob on the end of the chain deadbolt and slid it into position.







“But unlocked.”







“We were right here.”







Jake-- who was so ridiculously even keeled it was actually a little annoying-- had not for one moment stopped smiling, despite the fact that the testiness in my banter had grown coarser and sandpaper stiff as the conversation went along.







This is not the best introduction to Jake and I. So let's skip ahead a little so you can see us in a better position.







A horizontal position in fact.







Jake hissed a little when he inhaled, stretched out and squirmed against the bedding. He is always like this, holding back the part of himself that wants this so badly ... not the sex-- though he obviously wants that as well-- but the feeding.







As a mentioned before, sex during feeding is a matter of personal preference and, naturally, feeding habits themselves. Being fed on can be unbearably, unexplainably and powerfully arousing, and the intercourse itself is surprisingly useful. The body burns a lot of calories during sex, which helpfully replace what you are actively taking. The other primary advantage is that-- since I'm a girl I guess-- I tend to bond emotionally with my partners and this is useful because I tend to levy an undue level of influence over my donors. This is not purposeful, its just happens. It's hard to keep someone from hanging on your every word when you've disturbed the inner workings of them so intimately. When you've reached in and broken the barrier where people are supposed to be alone in their own skin, maybe moved things around a bit, maybe changed them as a person.







I suppose the traditional word for what I am is vampire, but I hate using that word because people get all the wrong ideas. I think you've read enough to see for yourself, but just in case: I do not drink blood, I do not follow goth culture or play role playing games in the woods, I do avoid the sunlight but only because I tend to burn instead of tan which I suspect has more to do with my Irish bloodlines than any supernatural proclivities.







The rest is better learned through observation. So take notes.







The bonding is useful for me because I have always been afraid, secretly and then not so secretly, that one day I might use this influence with disastrous consequences.







I bent down and ran my teeth along his jaw, peppering the trail of saliva with kisses as my hands raked up his chest. I could feel the excitement driving through him like a live current and sparks of it responding to my touch. It wasn't difficult to snap them up, to draw them in so that little pulses of him were taunting my senses and intensifying my craving.







He was so very very serious. His eyes were closed and his face the perfect image of concentration. He was trying-- and failing-- to hold his breathing steady.







This is how it always happens: I push and he relents. And I push and push and push...







I have become fond of Jake for three reasons-- and I promise sex is not on this list at all-- one he has a very calm, easy going personality that anchors my wild side very well and keeps me from hurting myself; two he's got a level underneath several layers of him that is like the ribbon of magma cutting around the Earth's core: fiery, dangerous, from time to time a bit violent. I love this because he does not repress it really, its like he has built an intricate filtering and refining process inside himself where this searing rampaging core is channeled, redirected, dissected, tempered and slowly circulates until it has become something passive and pleasant. Lastly, no matter how bad life is he is never defeated. It is almost like he knows of things much much worse than any trial the richest city in the richest country in the world could produce.







I push and push and push-- gently, subtly, goading with my lips and tongue and touches. I am a bit and deliberately emasculating not because I'm looking for him to submit but because I want to tap into the wild, hot current that he so expertly controls. That's what I want to feed on, the pure essence not the filtered and censored glow that is for everyone else.







I pushed, biting his lip and nudging my knee between his legs, purring in his ear and trying to coax him into letting that river on incredibly powerful energy rise a little further to the surface. Meet me half way, Jake, don't make me go all the way down to get it.







He exhaled and pushed his wrists together above his head, as if he were tied up under me.







Did I mention the boy has some very kinky tendencies? Sometimes you don't always get what you want. I pulled back, maybe not physically, maybe just vampirically and all of the sudden I was all flushed and embarrassed. His hand left the bed and brushed slowly down my back, fingers drumming lightly over the subtle ridges under which the bones of my spinal cord lie. He smiled, smirked actually, and there's something bright and friendly in his eyes. He was very amused by his victory and sat up, grabbing my thighs and pulling me into his lap. He cupped my cheek gently before he kissed me-- softly, sweetly, on the lips like some fairytale prince-- I growled and he laughed then nuzzled me affectionately before scattered touches explored my body slowly, sweetly, exactly the way he wanted to.







I hate losing. But then, so does he.







Anyway, back to the present.







“What smells so good?” he asked.







“Tea Eggs!” Vicki cheerfully held up a successfully skinned white egg, a beautiful networking of decorative brown lines shaping mosaics and stained glass like patterns.







“Um ... no,” Jake said, a bit of wolfish smile accenting his otherwise 'ick!' reaction.







“Awww Jaykles, you're not supposed to say that. You're supposed to be supportive of our wife's cooking and tell her it's wonderful!”







He kissed me sweetly on the cheek, eyes staying with Vicki.



COMMENTS

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Blood feast (I did not write this)

02:49 Aug 16 2009
Times Read: 601


Chapter 1: Suspend Your Disbelief (part 1)

07-27-09



















Hunger.







That's the word we use for it. And feeding, we use that word too. We use these words not because they are accurate, but because they best describe the process: the craving before, the savoring during, and the refreshed, satisfied drowsiness that follows.







I am so hungry.







I can feel it in my skin, this desperate need for touch, warmth of human contact. Warmth that reaches out to me, seeps into me, teases and taunts until I draw it in. Then there's no going back, a guttural snarl rises from my throat as something dark and predatory stirs inside of me-- dark but not evil, at worst simply parasitic.







My limbs feel like they've merged with the bed. The sheets smell thickly human, a scent I cannot get out no matter how hard I try and now I've just resigned myself to it.







The sun is coming in through the window, bathing my whole body in the purest whitest light. Light that is bright and redeeming but also makes me tired, which is not improving things as far as the hunger is concerned.







After minutes of lying there I finally will myself off the bed and wander out through my apartment, pulled inescapably towards the most convenient fix. Barefoot, I leave my home, cross out into the hallway and past the elevators. My high-rise neighborhood-- a mere collection of doors with unknown and unseen people hiding behind them-- passes by me as I plant one foot in front of the other, bare skin touching cheap, generic carpeting patterned in abstract smudges of orange, gold and purple, until I finally arrive at 11B.







Lily opens the door before I finish knocking on it. He seems startled, but not surprised. When I say startled I mean not just jittery or high strung but unstable at the core, whirling inside at strange uninterpretable events. He's holding his breath, I realize. He's holding his breath in wild anticipation because he knew I was coming before I did.







I can taste him from here, in the hallway, two feet between us. There's something about his scent that is already driving me nuts.







Seconds pass before he moves to let me in. He moves and he closes the door behind me, locking it and then pausing at the deadbolt. I think it's difficult for him when I'm this hungry. Difficult and maybe even a little scary. He wants it, but he thinks he shouldn't and he worries that secretly he's a weak or a foolish person for not resisting more. But in a few moments when his fingers leave the various locks on the door and he turns around, those thoughts will be the furthest from his mind.







He turns around and gives me an expression that looks copied out of a thug magazine-- not violent, not intimidating, just a tough and smug don't-mess-with-me look.







I smile slyly, coax my way into his arms, open him up with my touch and feed.



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



I first met Illya Ivanchuk in the fall of 2007. I was moving boxes from the elevator to my new apartment ... or trying to anyway: the boxes were overloaded and I couldn't shuttle them all out of the elevator in one shift, causing an initial scramble before the elevator door closed and the machine ran off with a stack of my possessions. Stabbing the elevator call button did nothing and running down eleven flights of stairs to catch the elevator as it picked up passengers in the lobby did not seem practical.







I tried to remember exactly what was in those boxes: dishes? cooking tools? souvenirs from a lifetime lived too fast? clothes?







My apartment building has three elevators servicing the building, all standing in a row. Recalling the correct one turned out to be a frustrating Marx Brothers level endeavor: first the left one would come, then the right, then I had to wait two or three minutes for the right elevator to lose interest and go pick someone else up because if I pressed the call button again while it was still right there the doors to wrong elevator would open up with an enthusiastic ding and the center machine-- where my stuff was being held hostage-- would escape again.







But finally the correct brass colored doors opened and I came nose-to-nose with the owner of a startled gray pair of eyes.







“Excuse me,” I grunted, pushing past him and grabbing the first box off the pile. He wisely stumbled out of my way and into the hallway where he watched me drop the first heavy box against the door to hold it open. See? In the twenty minutes I spent wrestling to get the elevator back I had gotten smart, that would keep the machine from escaping until I had unloaded all my stuff.







He watched me scramble paranoidly as I rushed with a box to my apartment and back as quickly as possible to avoid giving an advantage to the invisible thieves that seemed to lurk in every corner of New York City. He watched, which I thought was very creepy, and then he picked up one of my boxes and started following me down the hallway toward my apartment.







I glanced quickly over my shoulder, not entirely comfortable with the gesture but understanding that in most cultures this is considered helping. “Thank you.”







Nevertheless I gave him a sharp look when I reached for my door knob and he stopped short about two feet away from the door.







I kicked the box I had in with its friends and waved for him to hand off what he had as well. He did and quickly turned around and left. I thought that would be a end of that until I closed the door and ran to collect another load, only to nearly pass him with another armload of my stuff.







Lily looked confused and conflicted as I rushed past him. On one hand I obviously didn't want him anywhere near my apartment, and wasn't especially comfortable with him being left with my stuff unsupervised. On the other hand, he couldn't follow me around like a puppy as I collected the box holding the elevator door open and came back with the key. So he just stood there in the hallway with a stack of two heavy boxes in his arms, looking like he wasn't sure what to do with himself.







When I came back I passed him again, scanning with another scathingly critical glance. He was cute, I thought. Young ... maybe 23? 25 would have been extremely generous. He was dressed in a whiter more middle class version of the current hip-hop styles: low slung jeans, graphic T-shirt, unironic baseball cap, a scruffiness that was bleached of all traces of poverty and struggle. I thought as I twisted the key in the lock one final time that maybe I was being too harsh.







“Hey,” I said as he handed me the last box over the invisible line I had forbidden him to cross. “Would you like to come in for some tea or something?”







It sounded stupid even then, but after a moment of thought or two Lily nodded quickly and carefully approached the door.







I introduced myself, kicking the door closed behind him and rattling off the typical small talk things-- “I just moved in” “Sorry the place isn't put together yet” “Thanks for the help, I should have made my friends come down and help me but I didn't think I needed it”-- none of which he responded to. Not that you're really supposed to respond to stuff like that in a meaningful way, but still the way he sat down on the bar stool waiting for him by the kitchenette island and listened like he was slowly taking this all in was curious.







Finally when I looked at him for a reaction he extended his hand awkwardly and said “I'm Illya Ivanchuk.”







Illya ... Elijah.







“You're Russian.” I said.







He nodded.







“Do you speak English?”







He shook his head with a smile.







“Oh...”







“A little.” Then with some difficulty added: “I understand, but I only speak a little.”







“Oh.”







“I live,” He pointed toward the door. “11B.”







“With your family?”







He shook his head.







“You live alone?”







“Uh-huh.”





“Are you a student?”







He didn't nod right away, that's how I knew that it was a lie. He considered telling the truth, but maybe the truth couldn't be captured in a few key words and phrases stolen out of a phrase book.



...............................................................



“So tell us about the new apartment.”







I pushed a leaf of lettuce around the plate and through the gooey residue of egg yolk before stabbing it firmly with my fork and plopping it into my mouth. “What's to tell? It's not my parents house.”







“Yes,” my friend Jamie pipped up on my left. “Thank god, 27 and still living at home. Good God you must be glad those days are over!”







I shrugged. “It wasn't so bad really.”







What I didn't say is that unlike Jamie I had lived with my parents well into my 27th year only to move into a nice sized two bedroom while she had forced herself out at 19 and was living in Brooklyn with nine roommates.







“It was sad.”







Depends on your definition of sad.







“Oh shut up Jamie,” Stani, impossibly thin brunette across the table, rolled her eyes. “I still live at home, am I sad?”







Jamie retreated, and moved down another path. “Has Jake spent the night there yet? It isn't official until the boyfriend spends the night!”







“God no!” I nearly choked on my Mamosa. “And he's not my boyfriend.”







“Suuureee...”







My friends could be so annoying sometimes. No, sorry, change that. Jamie could be so annoying sometimes. She's smug and condescending the way truly unhappy people usually are smug and condescending. She finds a little rough edge of your life and just picks at it until you want to go nuts. She's not a bad person really, most of the time I think she just doesn't get that others find it mean spirited.







Stani-- short for Stanislava-- was Jackie O hidden carefully behind beautiful brown Eastern European eyes. She could be a little bit ditzy, a little bit distant, but she had left her poor peasant village conditions as an exchange student and dutifully mesmerized Ms Manners Guide to Comportment the way most teenagers study for their SATs. As a result she pulled off an old world grace and sophistication that very few of us could even parodize.







Sunday morning brunch is a New York institution, that at least everyone knows, but it's an expensive institution which is something that isn't obvious. Not immediately anyway, a $14.99 decadent breakfast with champaign cocktails included may not seem like much, but add the tip, the transportation to the prime brunching spots (a normal breakfast in a normal residential eatery simply will not do!), and then doing it regularly-- every week, every other week, even every three weeks-- it adds up.







“He's not my boyfriend.” I said. “I like him, I wouldn't want to put him through that.”







They laughed, the light clinking and scrapping of utensils across the plate providing enough subtle background noise to maintain privacy from other groups in the human traffic clogged Essex Street brunch.







But Jamie wouldn't leave it alone. “So... what, are you friends with benefits?”







And before I could answer she firmly put down her knife and gasped. “You're not his beard are you?”







“What? NO!”







Jamie looked at the two of us, surprised that we didn't find this comment to be a perfectly natural thing to ask over eggs benedict and breakfast greens with mini danish on the side. “Oh come on, you've never gotten a little vibe from Jake? Just a little?”







“A gay vibe?” I tried to daintily recover from putting a too big piece of spinach in my mouth and failed utterly, sounding like a sputtering, crunching mess. “No. I get the bisexual vibe from him sometimes though.”







“Ummm... hello? What exactly is the difference?”







“You've never slept with him.”







Perhaps that was the wrong thing to admit.







“Ah-ha! So he is your boyfriend!”







“I never said that.”







“But you've slept with him?”







“Well...” I glanced briefly at Stani, who shrugged and nibbled on her danish. “Yeah.”







“So he's either your boyfriend, or you're a total whore.”







“No, he's not my boyfriend. But yes I like having sex with him. What does one thing have to do with the other?”







“Do you sleep with other people?”







I cleared my throat and reached for my napkin to wipe a bit of sweet lemon pastry filling off my lip. See here's the difference between Jamie and I and Stani. When we eat flakey pastry we come up with a lap full of crumbs and lips glossed with sticky sugar glazing. When Stani eats a flakey pastry it's as if the danish melts and separates from the whole in one clean bite. No mess, pure elegance.







And yet it's weirdly normal to have a conversation like this in front of her.







“No.”







“Then you're monogamous.”







“You're confusing a correlation with a causation. We're sleeping together because neither one of us has someone else to sleep with, not the other way around. If he were to find another girl he wanted to be with, we would stop sleeping together.”







“So it's casual.”







I could never explain it. Not accurately, not to her anyway. The truth was Jake was my current donor, that he willingly, voluntarily allows me to feed from him. The sex is simply an efficiency issue, it floods the body with energy and makes it easier to draw it out. Easier and less stressful for the donor. Just about any high energy activity will do, but sex is particularly useful because it's physically pleasant for both parties. Besides he's really really good at it.







But I could never explain that to her.







“Hey, no judgement.” I said instead. “Least we bring up your sexual experiences.”







“What's that supposed to mean?”









Every New York woman, whether native or transplant, at some point harbors certain romantic notions about liberty and empowerment through lovers. It's an idea that has taken root after being fertilized by the failed assertions like “being worshipped/loved/desired is empowering”, “you'll love yourself if someone else loves you”, “guys don't want commitment” and other generous loads of shit. And so while no one denies millions of New York women are looking for love, a few of those millions are looking for something much more basic, much more epidemic and not easily expressed on a Hallmark card.







But you know, having sex with someone doesn't make him (or, let's be fair, her) a lover. There's a whole courtship and borderline victorian level pageantry to it that girls receive little education in. Perhaps the number one rule of lover-taking is that you have to be okay with not having sex. If you think virginity is something to be ashamed of, you count the days since “the last time you got laid” and gasp in humiliation as dry spells develop, or are already training to improve your numbers in the sexual Olympics, then get a boyfriend because having lovers is not going to work out for you.







If you can't handle not having sex than you can't honestly enforce any standards about who you have sex with-- let's face it, there are so many single women in New York because there are so many completely undate-able men in New York-- and without standards you're not taking lovers, you're having easy, meaningless, cheap sex. Hardly the romantic fantasy.







I think most women in New York realize that after a while and shyly move back the endeavors they are better suited for: the career building, husband hunting, and children spoiling ways of a life sculptor. But in the transition leaves one with a half a dozen ugly, semi-gross war stories to bear. And like all traumatized veterans, New York women go out into the world to unburden their souls among those who were there.







Preferably across the internet.







The great overshare phenomenon. Cashing in on life mistakes and tragedies by converting them into street cred' among an audience always willing to pull over to stare at a train wreck that is your life.







You might know my friend Amy, she's kind of famous. Or at least famous in that very abstract sense that plagues the 2.0 decade. Web 2.0, Government 2.0, Medicine 2.0, Philanthropy 2.0, Porn 2.0, the familiar blend of social institution, cultural construct and the unique ability of the internet to aggregate us into mob rule. Fame 1.0 were your movie stars, artists and significant figures, whether talent was actually involved was up for debate, but you could rest assured that somewhere out there, someone thought this person produced quality work and was willing to pay for it. Fame 2.0 has no such hang-ups, because the bulk of stuff on the internet is free. It's a new form of fame that people achieve simply by being as talentless and pathetic as possible.







“Are the cameras off?” I asked before even crossing the threshold.







A long dramatic sigh echoed around the loft as Amy marched down the foyer, grumbling something about something or other. She returned a few seconds later, her mouth drawn up in a tight impatient line. “You don't get the point of Lifecasting!”







“You can Twitter through this if you want.” I offered, even though I'm pretty sure I don't mean that.







Critics kind of miss the point of Fame 2.0 I think. Fame 2.0 feeds off our narcissism and the inevitable void between a dream and a reality shaped by unreasonable expectations. Year after year twenty somethings move into the big city thinking that they will live in amazing apartments, eat at all the hot spots, club every weekend, wear the top designers, spa on Sundays, and ultimately indulge in a few years of the most wonderful, adventurous social calender before they land an amazing boyfriend who becomes a husband and new delusions are picked up. Even though the average salary in New York City is a hefty $50,000 a year, it doesn't take an accountant to see that for a normal girl this is beyond an unsustainable course.







The problem is New York currently has a small infestation of upper class scions and insanely upper class scions living this life who are portraying themselves as “normal girls” instead of exactly what they are: children of privilege. Factor in artistic license from romances like Sex and the City, and you have a whole lifetime of want eating away at the minds and common sense of a generation.







Strictly speaking this isn't Amy's problem. She is one of those children of privilege, true, but rather than simply living off her parents in absentia she has used their support to create a business plan to make a small fortune off of this divide between dream and fiscal reality.







I really admire her for that.







“I don't understand why you're so camera shy,” she petted my hair and cooed affectionately. I tried very hard not to flinch. “You're pretty.”







“Maybe I don't want my existence broadcast out into the ether for anyone to track down ... like, for example, future employers.”







“Oh please,” she sighed.







Having completely unrealistic expectations doesn't take any of the burn out of failure. The feeling that everyone is watching and judging, that your inability to have the lifestyle that would yield Minolos and Rum laced mousse is a sign of incompetence, that not turning out to be the glamazon with the romantic career and the wit to surf the social currents with elegance and grace is a personal shame. As if it's so easy to have elegance and grace in a world where it's easier to find a public bathroom with a working condom vending machine than a tampon one.







What I'm saying is there is a overabundance of truly miserable people in this city and maybe beyond it. I know this because I can literally taste the heartbreak through the slight tickle of even the lightest touch.







In that sense, New York really is a very hard place for people like me. Miserable food is rancid food. Better off starving, I think.







But to all the truly miserable people in this city, Amy is their heroin. What is going to numb the shame of your own failings faster than watching someone completely humiliate herself for attention? Nothing. There is nothing in this world more satisfying than watching talentless people behave pathetically.







Except...







Except watching talentless people behave pathetically and then succeed anyway. Success is the hook. If you're just talentless and pathetic eventually everyone short of the sociopaths is going to have a little tinge of guilt about mocking you sour the experience. But success highlights the universal unfairness of the world and makes it okay to continue to punish you over and over again for being the beneficiary of nepotism, classism, racism, nyphomanian, gun mollism, sexism, VAXism or practically any other form of -ism.







The other possibility is to simply be a horrible human being. That works too.







“So when are we having the house warming party for your new apartment?” Amy's voice was perky and clipped like a bobbing cheerleader gone business exec. She was typing on her laptop-- smooth, expensive, and the output of hundreds of hours worth in design meetings and consumer tests that she was more or less oblivious too ... like everything in her apartment-- which made me think she wasn't so much listening as she was waiting for me to stop answering.







“That depends. When do I get the release forms I know are coming?”







She laughed, her bouncy and shiny brown hair sliding from her shoulder. She sparkled. Really she did. If she wasn't always throwing herself into the photographs of strangers and trying very hard to become the muse of a never ending string of tech-geek entrepreneurs, or dressing up in outfits made entirely of ruffles she would be charming. But mostly you leave with the impression that you've seen this movie before and the rabbit ends up boiled.







Still ... sparkles. She tastes a bit like the mini buttercream dabbed cupcakes she's obsessed with, sweet and delicious with just a small bite but stomach rotting and nausea inducing if you have more. Well, at least she's not miserable. There are some underlying insecurities, but not to the degree you'd probably expect from a blatant exhibitionist. In fact, as I drew just a little bit of it in (just skimmed the surface of the essence around her) I was struck by the calmness and steadiness of her thoughts. Flickers of things came to mind seemingly out of nowhere: party dresses, tree houses, tea parties with little bakery cookies. Her skin was soft and her lips flushed under a thick coat of fuchsia lipstick.







It was nice.







“I'll leave the camera at home, but trust me when our reality TV deal comes through you'll be begging to get air time.”







“I doubt that.” I was not going to ask who 'we' was. Amy seems from time to time to be able to hire people to work for her self-exploitation company despite the fact the company has no revenue to speak of.







“Have you given any thought to where you'll have this house warming party at least?” She still hadn't looked up from her computer where-- I'm sure-- endless twits are still twittering at this very moment.







“Ummm ... at my apartment?”







“No! Then you have to deal with neighbors and stocking the bar yourself. Here, I'm emailing you a list of hotspots to consider. Pick one, and we'll reserve a private room.” She stabbed the keyboard with her fingers and with a satisfying beep the email was already away. Finally she looked up from the machine.







The problem with people saying things like that, is that talking like you are going to become the biggest cog in the shifting machine behind some grand life event for me doesn't actually seem to stop anyone from losing interest and going galloping off towards new adventures at the last minute instead. So inside a part of me freaked and ran into a little steel panic room that the comment.







“Uh, sure. But I think I'd still rather have it at home. No cameras. No blogs.”


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