Places I Have Found Strands of My Roommate's Hair

My otherwise lovely roommate Lisa has long and lustrous hair, which either 1. has a mind of its own and travels of its own volition or 2. is strategically placed by Lisa in curious places around our apartment as part of some long-term prank I don't yet understand. Anyway I started keeping track of places in which I have found Lisa's hair (which is unmistakeable; it's long and straight and black, and mine is short and thin and brown, and our other roommate's is Pantone Color F23891 (Conan O'Brien Red)). I don't even really mind it; I'm not grossed out because I know Lisa, and I know she washes her hair even if sometimes it's with a substance known as "dry shampoo" which sounds chemically impossible, and, I don't know, I'm just not grossed out. So it becomes more of a game of "in which part of my bedroom which Lisa has almost certainly never visited will I next find some long black hair?" Here are some places it's already turned up:

1. Wrapped around the left arm of the glasses I am currently wearing.
2. In the toe of a pair of shoes I haven't worn for six months.
3. In the corner of my room next to my desk where I typically keep broken-down Amazon boxes which will be recycled "soon, probably."
4. In the bottom of my laundry basket.
5. Stuck in the incompetent gears of my Roomba.
6. In the smallest pocket of the backpack I use alternately for trips to Trader Joe's and the gym. Mostly Trader Joe's.
7. In the front right corner of my bathroom. I have my own bathroom, which Lisa does not use probably for her own safety. I would estimate the number of times per year she has been in my bathroom at under three.
8. In my sock drawer.
9. In the folded-up cuff of my knit winter cap.
10. In the (closed) storage area of my bedside table in which I keep condoms and micro-USB cables, for the ladies.

I will update this post as I find more examples. Or perhaps this will become a much-loved recurring column, and I can do future articles based on different rooms. This one was limited to my bedroom!

I'm a Pixie Frog!

The African bullfrog, or Pixie frog as it is often called (because of it's latin name, not because it's as cute as a fairy!), is one of the largest frogs in South Africa. Usually, they hang out in open grassland, and if there are any to be found, they'll sit around in puddles. When startled, these frogs will blow up like balloons to scare away the intruder! In the dry season, they will burrow into the ground. These guys eat lots and lots of really big bugs, fish, mice, lizards, and even other frogs.

What kind of Frog are you?

iPhone 4S Notes

First of all, how weird is it that I have a blog for things I want to publish but that I don't actually want people to read? Why is there a need to simultaneously share and not share? I could totally have just started a Word document but NO, I need it to be somehow available to the public at large. Anyway, whatever. I just bought an iPhone 4S. It's my first iPhone. Here are my thoughts.

1. It's pretty. The size is perfect, the screen is perfect, little things like the clickiness of the buttons are perfect. It feels good.

2. Setup was very different from what I'm used to. Every other major platform sans BlackBerry is heavily cloud-based, meaning you should hardly ever need to plug your phone into your computer. The iPhone is not like this. I tried to set up the phone without syncing, not to try to trick it or anything but just because that's what I'm used to. I should be able to plug my Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Rdio, Netflix, and Hulu accounts in, and then everything should be there, right? But no, not so much. I had to plug it in to sync my Google contacts. I had to plug it in to get my apps. And even now, it doesn't do things that I assumed were common to all modern smartphones, like taking my friends' pictures from Facebook and adding them to my contacts list.

3. Um why is it so goddamn difficult to select a custom ringtone? Here are the steps on Android, WebOS, and Windows Phone: open music app, browse to the song you want, tap it, select "make my ringtone," done. On iPhone, I had to manually convert, trim the length to under 40 seconds, convert again, delete all other instances of the file from both iTunes and my computer, re-import back into iTunes, go into the advanced preferences and tell iTunes to show my "ringtones" folder, drag new file from into the ringtones folder on my phone, then go into my phone's settings and select it. What the fuck. This makes me feel even more stupid because the ringtone in question is the first 30 seconds of "Gonna Make You Sweat" by C+C Music Factory, aka "Everybody Dance Now."

4. There are many apps. These apps are universally better than apps on other platforms. Android apps look embarrassingly engineer-y and ugly, WebOS apps look dead because they are dead, and Windows Phone apps are sometimes confusing or buggy and in any case are lacking in number.

5. Battery life doesn't suck. Neither my Palm Pre Plus nor any 4G LTE Android phone will actually get you through a day. The iPhone will.

6. Siri is fucked right now. It "can't connect to the network," even though I have five bars and every other part of the phone connects just fine. This is annoying for work because it's the feature of most interest to PopSci, but I personally don't care that much.

7. Notifications are still sort of stupid. The ripped-from-Android notifications shade is nice, but it keeps pestering me to join Wi-Fi networks with that damnable blue bubble.

8. Uh, yeah, the notifications shade is ripped from Android. Not that it's not bad but I always prefer companies steal from WebOS rather than Android. Also there's no way to tell what's in there without swiping it down. That keeps the status bar free of cluttery icons but means you're constantly swiping it and then being disappointed at your lonely life slash notifications shade.

9. Look widgets are mostly a terrible idea, they make Android all cluttered and ugly and inconsistent, but why doesn't the weather icon on the iPhone just update to show the god damn weather instead of always saying 73 degrees like we all live in god damn California.

11. Universal search works well. Not as well as WebOS or Android, because it only searches your phone, but much better than Windows Phone. Also I don't mind so much that it only searches the phone, it feels more concise, even though it's not as functional.

12. The camera is amazing. As amazing as you've heard. Better than my point-and-shoot, for sure.

13. It's interesting when people say it's "fast," because I find that I don't get as much of a sense for speed in it as I do with Windows Phone--there are fewer (though still a bunch) of superfluous animations, not a lot of eye candy overall. But yeah, fuck, it's the most responsive phone I've ever used. What "fast" means here is: I am never waiting.

14. Maybe I should get a Windows Phone. If only the hardware wasn't so...Samsungy. Light and plasticky and cheap-feeling DEAR SAMSUNG STOP WITH THE CHROME COLORED PLASTIC GOOD LORD. If Nokia can make a solid, metal, thin-feeling Windows Phone, and Rdio can get their shit together and fix that app, I would definitely be willing to switch. Or maybe I'll get attached to this thing first.

Writing About Food, or, Do or Dine

I mostly don't like food writing. I read it, because I'm interested in it, but like the old saying about music writing goes, writing about food is like dancing about architecture diving into a pool filled with Bartlett's Dictionaries of Adjectives, with all the concussions that would likely bring.

Still, I'm compelled to try it, because why the fuck not; I'm posting this on a blog I forgot I had, which I doubt is read by anyone at all. Hell, it's the least popular of my three personal blogs, and that's saying something because one of those is defunct and the other gets about five updates a year. Okay, so: I went to this place last night called Do or Dine, which, believe it or not, is only one of several "ugh" moments involved with this place. That's not to say that I didn't like it--just the opposite, actually, but it has some problems and I think those problems are interesting in a way that's bigger than the restaurant or the food they serve.

So, Do or Dine. The name is a pun on the nickname/slogan for the neighborhood the restaurant marginally falls into, Bed-Stuy. That name is a problem. Bed-Stuy is gentrifying, yes, though not as fast as many other neighborhoods in the city. Historically, it's been one of the most feared and dangerous neighborhoods in what historically was a fairly dangerous borough in a fairly dangerous city. New York City is no longer dangerous, and Brooklyn is something entirely different than it was even twenty years ago, and as go the city and the borough goes the neighborhood. Bed-Stuy isn't so much being gentrified as being shrunk, more blocks swallowed every year by the hungry neighborhoods of Clinton Hill to the west and Bushwick to the north. The "Do or Die Bed-Stuy" that the Notorious BIG rapped about? That's the heart of Clinton Hill now, a neighborhood that for now is pleasantly diverse and very safe. Bed-Stuy is still Bed-Stuy in large chunks, but near its borders, there are oases for white people--between the West African markets and the fried chicken joints (which sounds like a racist stereotype but really is not), a place like Do or Dine can pop up, entirely pleased with itself for being where it is.

The restaurant subscribes to that curious and misguided notion that it is cool to move into a space and retain the awning and signage used by whatever the space was prior to the restaurant moving in. A few blocks further into Clinton Hill, a decent but not exceptional northern Italian spot called Locanda Vini e Olii resides in a beautiful old Brooklyn pharmacy. The restaurant is branded with a huge LEWIS DRUG sign outside, with no accompanying sign to let diners know that um this place is actually serving wild boar meatballs and not bottles of quinine. Do or Dine is the same, marked by a loud red-and-yellow awning proclaiming it as a "West Indian-American Restaurant" of the sort that serves curries in steamer trays and litters that section of Bed-Stuy. In tiny, misaligned letters--like, an inch tall, maybe--under that proclamation, it reads "Do or Dine." Underneath the awning is a carpet or wall hanging or something that reads "Do or Dine" in much bigger, albeit less legible, letters, which you cannot see unless you are standing directly underneath the awning and thus within three feet of the restaurant's front door. This is annoying. I asked our server about it, and I'm pretty sure he thought I was complimenting the awning, which I wasn't, because it's annoying. It's a weird kind of false authenticity, like the name Do or Dine itself, like a white kid bragging about living in Bed-Stuy rather than acknowledging that he lives there because it's cheap.

Do or Dine does not belong in that neighborhood, which is of course not to say that it shouldn't be there; it serves other people like its servers, or like me, to be honest, of which there are a growing number nearby, and it makes some very good food, and I don't begrudge it being there even a little. Any location in which a restaurant can survive is a location in which that restaurant should be. But I don't much like the boasting, the idea that it's cool to live or work in Bed-Stuy. Mostly, I feel uncomfortable with gentrification: I don't know why, but I feel like if I have to participate in the process, the least I can do is refrain from flaunting it. It seems more respectful, somehow. But regardless, this whole idea of race and economics and gentrification is way too big and too sensitive an idea for me to write about, especially at 2AM while slightly drunk. Not that I'd be capable of writing about it at other times, but, you know.

Oh, the food. The food's pretty good. The small plates are mostly very good; the foie gras doughnut with apricot marmalade is excellent, as are the deep-fried deviled eggs with culantro (sic) and bacon, and the lamb belly with cumin and lime. The octopus tacos suck, as all tacos in New York are contractually obligated to do. The beef tartare was laced with some kind of mayo or creme fraiche or something and was creamier and milder than I like, and could have used more croutons, but tasted fine. Curiously, the entrees were mostly not good. The salmon was not only boring but also badly overcooked and dry--a hard thing to do with salmon. It was served with tomatoes and olives and smashed potatoes, which, snore. The beef was fine but dull. The duck with kiwi and fennel (a friend of mine, unaware apparently that the New Zealand bird known as the kiwi is both not a duck and severely endangered, stated he was looking forward to eating some "kiwi breast." Mockery ensued.) is pretty good, but the way to eat at Do or Dine is to order basically every small plate that looks appealing and share them, and drink beer.

The place is nicely cheap, and (thank god) BYOB. At my meal there, I paired, well, everything I ate with a giant, two-dollar can of Yuengling, which I highly recommend. Beer would be better than wine here, I think. The space is nice; there's a fair-sized outdoor area hung with Christmas lights, which is preferable if the weather makes it preferable. Service was attentive and honest--the server admitted the entrees are not the restaurant's strong point, which is very true, and nice to know. For maybe six small plates and three entrees, split between five people, the meal came out to $30 a person, including tip, which I think was about half what we had been expecting.

I'll probably go back. It's two long blocks from my apartment, and the food is sometimes great, and I am easily swayed by offers of BYOB. But I will also probably roll my eyes a little, or point out to any guests that I do not think the misleading awning is cool.

Image via Brownstoner

Nobody Knows What a Dep Is. Don't Be a Dick.

This morning I went to my local corner store/convenience store/bodega/depanneur/deli for some essentials, unshowered and in yesterday's clothes. (But with clean socks and underwear, so I had already decided to have a lazy day.) I picked out a bottle of Bogle Vineyards pinot noir (2008, from Sonoma Valley), and bought a box of Cheez-Its and one of those 25-cent Lindt chocolate balls (mint) to pair with it. When I brought my bounty up to the counter, the guy who owns the place, with whom I exchange pleasantries or at least friendly nods on a pretty regular basis, asked me what happened to my girlfriend.

It caught me completely off guard. I don't have a girlfriend, haven't had one recently, and have as far as I know never been in his shop with any particular girl more than, at the very most, twice. I couldn't figure out whether to just say "no, you're wrong," because I knew whatever he was thinking was wrong, or to ask "what?" I sort of mumbled something in between, a questioning but negative response.

"Oh, that's not your girlfriend? I haven't seen her in a couple months, was wondering if she'd moved."

That just brings up more questions. So there is, or was, a girl who shops, or shopped, at my local corner store who according to the shopguy could or should be my girlfriend. She must live somewhere very close to me--there are other corner stores on just about every block and mine isn't so spectacular that a non-local would seek it out.

What does this shopguy know that I don't? Who is this mystery girl, who might live in my own building for all I know? Is the shopguy going by her purchases? Does she also find that the greasy and salty faux-cheddar flavor of Cheez-Its matches well with the herbal and fresh berry notes in the Bogle pinot? IS SHE MY SOULMATE?

I'll probably never know. She probably moved away. I just laughed and said no, whoever you're thinking of is not my girlfriend. We talked for maybe a minute, by far our longest conversation in the ten months I've been going to his shop, about how regulars come in and out of his life. He didn't know who my roommates were--we don't normally shop together--and was pleased when I identified four of his other customers as such. But then he mentioned that people usually say goodbye when they leave, which sort of surprised me. I've been a regular at a few different corner stores over the years, and have never said goodbye when I left the neighborhood, city, or country.

I didn't say goodbye to Henry, whose real name was Harry but who I called Henry for reasons I don't remember. Henry had a battered and graffitied dep, or depanneur (Quebecoise for corner store), at the corner of Clark and Duluth which shared a wall with my very first apartment. I used to walk the twenty feet through the snow in my ridiculous-looking bright red slippers to buy four-dollar Labatt 8.1% forty-ouncers and candy bars. Henry was crazy, but as with most everyone I met that year, it was an entertaining and good-natured kind of crazy. I and my roommates found out more about him throughout the year--first that, in addition to French and English (as required in that city and that profession), he also spoke fluent Spanish, which is pretty unusual in Quebec. It turned out Henry hailed from Guyana. He was dark-skinned and I suppose I had assumed he was South Asian, but nope. Guyana. I never found out how he ended up in Montreal. A few months later, I walked into the dep to find Henry speaking Chinese with a dark-skinned five-year-old Chinese boy, who Henry introduced as his son. "I haven't seen him since he was a baby," Henry told me. "He's been living in China with his mother."

We had naturally assumed Henry was dealing drugs in the store, a fact he half-confirmed when he announced one day that he had put a stop to his drug and alcohol habits. This was shortly after I had met his son, and a few months after he hosted an impromptu and illegal after-hours party in the dep. At that party, according to my roommate Mike, he stripped down to his tattered boxers, stood on his counter, and vigorously thrusted into the air, revealing his balls to the crowd while Mike stood awkwardly with a six-pack in his hand, trying to buy it before the 11:00 curfew on alcohol.

Henry remembered me after I moved, or at least he returned my waves when I walked by his dep. I tried to make it a point to buy my booze from him if I was in the neighborhood, but I moved farther and farther away until I graduated and moved to New York. I never said goodbye, and now I wonder if I should have.

I'm moving in a few months. I'll make an effort to say goodbye to my San Francisco shopguy. I'll even make a effort to learn his name before that happens.

I'm still trying to decide if I'll ever ask him which girl he was thinking of.

Let's Bring This Back to Livejournal With Some Whining

So I'm listening to Mike Doughty sing about walking along the Williamsburg Bridge, leaning over and thinking 'Hey man, this is Babylon.' I've never walked along the Williamsburg Bridge, for the record. Never walked over any of the Brooklyn-Manhattan bridges, actually. I don't even think calling something 'Babylon' is a compliment. And yet here I am, totally fucking nostalgic and bummed about how my immediate future is not in New York City, a place I spent a solid five years of my life absolutely trashing. I even wrote in some entry on Oh Em Gee that NYC is, and here I quote myself (fun!), "huge, loud, rude, dirty, ugly, and dehumanizing," none of which is exactly untrue (although calling it ugly is unfair; it's really only ugly compared to Montreal. It's better-looking than Philly or Chicago, for sure), but which is definitely a way to hide that I miss that fucking place. I've lived in five cities in the past three years, and NYC was the only place where I quite literally got punched in the face. But NYC was also the last place I lived that really felt like home, felt like me--it's partly a geographic thing, I guess, since the city is only a couple hours from where I grew up, but it's also a cultural thing. I felt like the people I met there, the people I knew there, the things I did there, the work I did there, that's who I am.

Maybe it's also because NYC was the last place I lived while I really felt like my life was going somewhere. I was doing my internship at Gizmodo at the time, just out of school, and things were happening very, very quickly. One day I was smoking pot at noon on a Wednesday while a Montreal blizzard raged outside, and the next I was writing my first feature, working with my first editor, making a difference in the first job I've ever really cared about. And then my internship finished, the world economy collapsed, the publishing industry imploded (selfish bastards), and I moved back to Montreal, dispirited and discouraged. Ever since, I've been employed, but never full time; I've been occupied, but never busy; and everything just felt kind of stagnant. So maybe I'm just longing for that feeling, the feeling of doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing, exactly when and where I'm supposed to be doing it. Maybe I'll get that feeling in San Francisco, too. I mean, I'll be working full time there, with more responsibility than I've ever had before, doing things I've never done before. But I can't seem to shake the feeling, especially after a couple months in Chicago (where I never even began to feel comfortable, not that it's fair to expect such a thing in two months), that goddammit, NYC is where I should be.

This is a whole lot of fucking whining. I really hope nobody remembers this blog exists. In case anybody does actually read this (and I'll be checking StatCounter, just in case), I'm fully aware that I'm being silly. It's a really nasty recession, and I've been offered an awful lot of money to move to California and write, from home, in my undies, pretty much whatever I want, at age 23. It might not be 100% perfect, but I feel like it's way closer than any other job I could get. Other jobs have pants requirements. Other jobs wouldn't let a snotty writer call Steve Jobs a white supremacist because he, and probably nobody else, thinks it's funny. Other jobs don't let employees call in "sick" with a hangover. And more than a few of my friends, people brighter and more ambitious than I, have gotten absolutely fucked over in the last year. Some haven't been employed in months, some since school finished, and others have had to take jobs they hate. I haven't. I've been lucky. I'm a whiner, what can I say.

I'll have fun in California, I'm sure, even if I may have to live in Oakland to avoid the hippies that bothered me so much the last time I was there. I've even possibly lined up an NYC-expat roommate. I hope this comes off as more introspective musing than insufferable whining. It's a fine line with me sometimes, I think. But I'm interested that I'm having such a strong reaction to seeing NYC removed as a possibility, even just for a year. Anyway, I'm going to post this, and check it in the morning. If I'm embarrassed tomorrow, which I kind of think I will be, I'm pulling it.

Is Babylon a compliment? Wikipedia says it means "Gateway of the Gods" but that my people use it to mean "confusing." Mike Doughty probably meant the latter, even though he's a more vocal New Yorker than anyone I know.

Summer 2008 Timeline

Montreal.
June 3: Take unbelievably anticlimactic last final exam.
June 4-8: Pack up apartment, tearful goodbyes.
Pennsylvania.
June 8: 10-hour drive to PA with the family.
June 9: Eat cheesesteaks, watch MTV.
NYC.
June 10: Train to NYC, get into new apartment in Bed-Stuy at 11 PM.
June 11: First day of work.
June 12-July 3: Work full-time, though mostly from my own bed.
Pennsylvania.
July 4-6: Celebrate America's birthday by watching acquaintances from high school play beer pong. Feel less than thrilled about the Land of the Free.
NYC.
July 7: Mugged. Sucks.
July 11: Move from serious ghetto Bed-Stuy to serious yuppie Brooklyn Heights.
Photographic evidence: