I’m Amanda. I’ve got wide eyes, a smart mouth, and a MetroCard. And I’m not afraid to use them.
Last time I blogged about the universe farting in my face, commenter extraordinaire Sherri mentioned that I was begging for more. I mean, she’s read The Secret. I just read some blog posts by people who read it and then made fun of them, you know?
I’m not the informed person here.
Well, guess what? The cosmic force that propels The Secret - a coalition of goddesses or Allah or Bill Cosby or something - is real.
The Northeast has been pounded by snow in the last few days. NYC is no exception, though it hasn’t endured power outages or NBA-sized snowdrifts or anything.
Not like New Hampshire or Vermont or those other places that currently look like white blobs from space. Now those are hairy-chested states that can open beer bottles with their teeth!
Recently, I tried to recall the last time I didn’t have trouble sleeping.
I’ve always needed less sleep than other people, yes. But I mean, when was the last time I was able to get in bed and turn my brain off enough to sleep soundly?
It was June.
Now it’s February.
There’s this other thing that happened, too - something with a time frame I have an even harder time figuring out.
At some point, I started finding it hard to maintain this blog.
1) Woke up at 7:30 to neighbors having loud, unsexy relations. The bed bouncing; the woman shrieking. The man makes no noise, though I assume he’s partly responsible for the skidding of the mattress into the wall, the bedside table or something else crashing and grinding into the floor.
As oxymoronic as this may sound, the woman’s shriek is a passionless shriek. It’s a metronome, a baby doll’s programmed squawking while its eyes flutter open and shut.
The shrieking is her little way of saying “I’m retarded and very excited about something.” Or maybe “I’m not dead yet.” God, how it sounds like her partner is trying to remedy that.
I was tired after going to bed just a few hours earlier, but not too tired to bring my Bose SoundDock into the bedroom from the living room. They annoyed the folk out of me. I played Ani DiFranco full-blast for almost two hours.
Saturday was Annie’s first birthday. My mom served her a ribeye steak to celebrate.
My body’s going through some tough stuff this week. You may have read about it in a Judy Blume book or five back in the day.
My estrogen-heavy internal organs are getting divorced. Or maybe they’re feuding friends who miss bonding over training bras and secret crushes.
All I know is I’m so cranky, I could cut a bitch. And so ravenous, I would probably then eat said bitch. With that leftover Manchego cheese in my refrigerator.
On Saturday, I was fortunate to get a free ticket to the Magnetic Fields concert at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). I’d tried unsuccessfully to buy a ticket at face value, so I resorted to the last-minute date thing. I found two different guys with a ticket they were hoping to put in the soft clutches of a lady who would be friendly, and hey, maybe even cute.
Anyway, both guys were real people with real extra tickets. I went with one, and shared an armrest with another. And they didn’t know each other.
This story might come off as a sort of highly coincidental Memoirs of a Geisha tale, but it turned out to be more like an episode of Three’s Company. (Don’t be gross - I don’t mean it that way).
After Mike kicked off Project MAMM, I started getting nervous. Eating food my friend prepared for me was a great idea. Having to reciprocate without giving anyone salmonella poisoning? Tricky.
I don’t know how to cook. It wasn’t something I intended not to learn - it just happened. Well, didn’t happen.
But I know how to clean most surfaces and decorate a living room, so Martha Stewart hasn’t killed me. Yet.
The easiest option for my turn at lunch was sandwiches. I envisioned something like the kind my mom once made me, except maybe with more than just ham in them. (I was a picky eater). I also decided to pass on the Capri Sun and ever-constipating fruit snacks made with strawberry-flavored rubber.
A good book is a good friend. Some books - the really special kind - are lifelong loves.
But even if you have a briefly entertaining fling, it’s all good. Books don’t start immediately sleeping with trashy girls from Craigslist once you turn that last page.
Well, maybe some library books do.
NYC got something like eight inches of snow today. School was cancelled, shops closed, sidewalks salted.
I could’ve worked from home like many of my co-workers, but there’s something you may not already know: Precipitation does not kill me.
While many people apparently chap walking two blocks from the subway to the office in cold weather, I don’t. I also manage not to slip on slush, fall through a subway grate, and freeze into a giant popsicle to be nibbled by rats.
Perhaps it’s my unattractive down coat?
Or maybe I’m just one of the chosen.
