Well well well dear readers. It has been quite some time since your sex-in-the-city gal set fingers to keyboard and addressed her loyal fan base. To what do we attribute this lack of column? Non-stop fun and excitement? Unfortunately, no, although there has been some of that. I am afraid, my poor devotee, it was simple laziness. Call it the laziness of summer. But just to show that I have not forgotten my followers entirely, here is a smash-banging column just for you.
Yesterday was the Fourth of July, in celebration of which, I attended the annual Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Championship at Coney Island. The winner, for the fourth year in a row, was a slight (132 pound) Japanese lad named Takeru Kobayashi. If you have not already heard it on the news, Kobayashi downed an extraordinary 53 ½ hot dogs WITH BUNS in 12 minutes, breaking his own world record by 3 hot dogs. It was truly an amazing sight to see. Perhaps the best part of the contest was the announcer, who spent an inordinate amount of time pontificating on the theme that Kobayashi was defying the rules of the universe as we know it and was not governed by the same force of gravity that we are governed by. After the contest was over, Kobayashi stuck around to sign autographs and the like (he apparently has a very strong young female fan base). My boyfriend and I withstood the crushing crowd and made it to the front where I took a picture of my boyfriend and Kobayashi, the champion "Tsunami," standing together and smiling.
That evening we went up on the roof of my building to watch the fireworks and discovered, to our amazement, that we had access to two different firework displays at the same time! There were actually three different displays at various locations in the city, and we were just lucky enough to be able to view two displays from one location. Let me tell you, it was quite the whiplash I received trying to watch both simultaneously, before I finally realized that the two displays, while in different locations, were exactly the same.
On Saturday night I went to the movies and saw... you guessed it... Fahrenheit 911, which is still getting sold out even though it has been open in NYC for over a week. I am sure by now you have either gone to see it, or been assailed with reviews from your friends or the media, so I will not go into the details. Suffice it to say it was interesting, and actually a little bit less sensational than I expected it to be. The highlight came for me, not from the movie itself, but from the black girl in the row ahead of me who shouted "Oh no he didn't!" when Wolfowitz licked his comb before running it through his hair.
As I write to you, gentle reader, I have at this moment a candy cigarette dissolving in my mouth. "Where," you may gasp, "did you ever obtain such a piece of illegal contraband??" Why, from the neighborhood candy store. This candy store, which shall remain nameless for fear of reprisals from the po-lice, sells, among other things, such illegal items as candy cigarettes and Kinder Eggs. Let me tell you, visiting this candy store can be quite the addiction. Today is a witness of the full extent of my addiction as my visit to the store (to buy candy cigarettes, a Kinder Egg, and Swedish Fish) coincided with a tremendous thunder and rainstorm that greatly inconvenienced and soaked me.
On Friday night I made the PATH train trip to Hoboken, New Jersey (which will hereafter be called "Cute Town, USA") to see Hasil Adkins play in what may well be his last tour (he's got to be near 80 years old now). Hasil Adkins is an insanely awesome one-man band, rockabilly pioneer, and bucket of insanity. I'd never been to this particular Cute Town, USA before, so we arrived early and walked around the streets a bit to see what was happening, which was nothing, except that the houses were nice and the pizza was expensive. We therefore arrived at the show early and watched the space fill up with the oddest mix of music geeks, rockabilly fanatics, and the occasional punk rocker. Now. How to describe Hasil. When he spoke, it was an indecipherable muttery jumble, and when he sang (in between swigs of beer and drags off his cigarettes) he never made it more than 45 seconds into a song. He did perform a highly entertaining medley of Johnny Cash songs (I call it a medley; others may call it a mess). To end his set, he first demanded a different guitar, then when it was given to him said that he was going to play his best song, then played the first few bars of "Great Balls of Fire" (which he had already played portions of twice that night), then threw his guitar down and was done. He was kind enough to come down into the audience after the show to shake hands and sign autographs. I believe this really was a treat since I was told by a friend that had seen him before that he ended the show by throwing down his guitar, kicking the drum set, and walking backstage.
I saw a large turtle on the sidewalk as I was walking home from work about a week ago. He was chomping on a piece of lettuce and looked mean.
My company, which is really not a great company to work for but is starting to make an effort to be, bought a house in Florida for its employees to use. It is right next to Disney World in a gated community. When they made the announcement, everyone got to submit 3 different dates that they would like to use the house. If more than one person wanted to use the house at the same time, decisions were made based on seniority. To my surprise, I got the very first dates that I request, which were at the end of May, beginning of June, right around my birthday. So I got a bunch of friends to go (hey, want to stay in a house with a swimming pool in Florida for free?) and we road tripped it. We did not go to Disney World. We did spend a lot of time lying in the pool. We did go to a Pirate's Dinner Adventure (not really worth it), mini-golfing (fun), and we rented a boat and went out on the swamps looking for gators (the most fun, even though we didn't find any gators).
The strangest part about the trip was that it was the first time I had been out of NYC for more than a couple days at a time since I moved down here about 7 months ago. Coming back to the city was such a wake-up call to me. Everything looked so different (and so dirty and dangerous). It is easy to take any place you are living in for granted, even NYC.
The city in the summertime is a very different kind of place than in the wintertime. It is much more alive, people everywhere sitting on stoops or walking the dog, and there are so many more events. In addition there is the heat factor: as you walk you are blasted alternately with heat and cold. Whether you pass by a bus' exhaust pipe, an open door to an air-conditioned store, or a vent blowing hot air out of the laundry mat, they are all a special kind of experience.
