Bomp Bomp Bomp Bomp Deedoodeedoodeedoo

I worked the 5:00 - close shift last night and Mia, my coworker, had been there all day and said it was really slow. And it was. But, but but, a Very Exciting Event happened at around 5:30 - I served a medium popcorn, a Poland Spring water, and a Diet Raspberry Iced Tea Snapple to a celebrity. Someone I recognized, which is no mean feat. Care to guess? You'll never guess.

RON RIFKIN! ARVIN SLOANE!

Oh yes indeedy! Ron Rifkin of Alias fame. He even wears those little circley spectacles which I assumed were just a prop. He and his wife saw Every Little Step. He made her pay for the food. She called him Ronnie!

And I am proud that I didn't go all squealy fangirl on him.

That was the high point of the evening. Although I was pretty pleased to find out that the cleaning requirements at this theater are way below that of any Carmike. It's more of a 'brush off the kernals and give it a perfunctory wipe' than 'you must boil water in the popcorn maker and add kettle cleaner and scrape the outside goop and breathe in noxious fumes'.


For all the folks who could not make it to Ponzi Crawl's second gig, you will be pleased to note that some of the fabulousness was recorded.

Hear Jeff's witty banter!

A terrible-sounding segment (my camera's fault, not the band) of "Holiday"!







Dylan-focused video during "Holiday"!











Almost a minute's worth of "Come Together"!


Not the most newsworthy thing of the day, but I found an absolutely enormous bran flake in my cereal the other day. I put it next to the bowl to show perspective.





And you know it's springtime when the Naked Cowboy is back in town.

End of the Weekend

Oh, it's been a worky weekend. I worked a double yesterday and until 5:00 today, and then Daniel and I saw Every Little Step which was a good time. We stopped by Gray's Papaya on the way home and picked up a recession special two hot dogs + drink combo and split it.

And I shall be a bit mindless for awhile and prattle on about how nice the weather has been and ooh, where did spring go? It's supposed to be like, 90 degrees tomorrow. Wasn't it just coat weather. One week of spring is not enough.

I made $10 in tips today, even with another person in concession with me. I just can't help being so personable.

Lauren's coming to town tomorrow, huzzah, so I'll meet her in midtown and we'll take the M7 or M104 up to my apartment and get all settled in. I imagine that there will be a lot of poor man's NYC walking tours in the next few days.

And then Pat moves in next Saturday!

I hustled my buns over to the Upper East Side after work to catch the last half of Dylan's band. Good show, as expected! The main guitar guy had some Billie Joe Armstrong eyeliner homage thing going on, but it kinda looked more like Nestor Carbonell. I'll have pictures and video up eventually.

I am so exhausted and cannot possibly be funny right now. Good night.

Media Barrage

There's a ton of pictures that I have and are in no real order, so let's go chronologically. Journey to the past month...

The handsome fellow on the right is the German that I have described previously. He's back in Stuttgart now, playing his new guitar and charming the ladies, I'm sure.




I did not realize that there existed a market for hybrid Easter/Christmas tree ornaments. This is a disturbingly expressioned bunny snowman.




He's watching you... always watching...








This was awesome. I had a stressful, low-paid night at Swanky's (what night was not stressful or low-paid?) and wanted to stop by a local bar for a cheap beer. As I approached I said to myself, "dear, the cigarette taxes did not hinder the smokers one bit" because there was this squadron of people just hanging outside. Turns out, there was a burst pipe or clogged drain or something up on the 4th floor of the building and water was pouring out of six or seven holes in the ceiling. It was coming down the lights, onto the bar, and then finally in a big puddle on the floor.

The firefighters arrived and told the super to turn off the water main. They then took this grappling hook thing and smacked it on the ceiling a bit to pull down the loose tile. They declared the building fit to enter and everyone who was still waiting inside came back in and resumed drinking. Note the paper towels at the end of the bar. Everything was soaking wet. Luckily, somehow all of this water managed to miss both the pool table and the DJ setup.

Check out my video of the occasion - my favorite part is halfway through when some guy is like, "this is realllly bad". I think I played pool with that guy last week.

The weather on Friday and Saturday was superb. Daniel and I had a mystery shop at Texas BBQ in midtown, and we paused here on the steps of the post office by Madison Square Garden next to some crazy guy who kept yelling.



The flowers looked so nice over by Rockefeller University that I had to stop what I was doing (walking) and take some pictures.





















































I have such a love/hate relationship with typos on business' signs. I crave them...but I loaaaaathe them....





This was taken in the middle of Central Park last week. There were lots of children, strollers, frisbees, and dogs.
































Am I not turtley enough for the turtle club? In the pond by Belvedere Castle. By the way, I just noticed this castle for the first time like, last month. I'm quite observant, don't you know.



This guy was so adorable I had to take a picture of him. Adorable. So I have a type, don't judge.







I was assigned a mystery shop last night for a hospital hotel over on 68th and York, and the hotel room itself was fantastic. There was a full kitchen and very comfortable beds. The only downside was the extreme heat and dehydration that I always experience in hotels. I never seem to get a restful night's sleep. I should try that wet towel over a chair thing next time.

Anyway, this was the charmingly olde timey notice they had on the back of the door about the safe. It seemed decidedly pre-depression '20s style.




Small print: "Whenever the proprietor or manager of any hotel, motel, inn, or steamboat"... Steamboat? Like on the ole Mississip? When the heck was this written?



They needed to replace the flowers in the lobby.








I cannot even tell you how much I laughed at this sign. People were staring at me in the street, and that is something in this town. It was in the window of a pottery ceramics do-it-yourselfy kind of store, usually populated by kids' birthday parties. Anyway, they used props along with window paint to create this work of art, but they should have invested in better tape because the 'you' plate that had been there on previous days fell off.

Now it says, "roses 'r red, violets 'r blue, sugar is sweet, and so 'r adult nights". TRUTH! Bwahaha, I am still chuckling.


Speaking of things that made me laugh: fat dog in a little coat, over at CraftFail.

I was waiting in line for the Q46 last month in Queens on my way to class and I noticed this bag going crazy in the wind, American Beauty style. Check out the video.

New Job

Good news! I got a job. Bad news! I cannot escape the vortex of fun and fulfillment that is the movie theater concession stand. Five years, people. Five years I have spent filling drinks and serving popcorn and making change. I'm good at change. I scoff at register aids.

On my first day of work the manager wanted to show me how to use the popcorn machine. I look over and it wasn't just a similar model - it was the exact same one that I had been using for all this time. Apparently there is only one industrial popcorn-making vendor in the biz. It even had that lame 'cornditioner' button. That made me happy.

Everyone there is really nice to me, and going to work is like being at a United Nations of cinema - we have people from Peru, the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Haiti, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and more that I just can't remember right now. There was this incredibly cute boy working door on Saturday who gave me his copy of the Village Voice in exchange for my Time Out New York. Literacy! Yesterday, I learned two interesting tidbits about him: first, he's attending a special music school to be a professional tenor, and secondly, he's sixteen years old. Ohh... hm. Yeah. So now he's a hypothetically gay underage stunningly attractive coworker. This is adversity, y'all.

Oh - another interesting tidbit - he lives on 96th street on the West Side. So he's like my neighbor, too.

Going back to the work for a second, I'm very glad that I'm there. The customers are all eighty year old rich women who go to the movies at 11:00 in the morning. However, they are not the crotchety old people of yore who would complain to me about every little thing, for the most part. We have a tip box on the counter and when I saw that I was like, "pfffffffft, no one tips at the movies, it's like the Golden Rule". NOT TRUE! We split the tip box between the two concession workers at the end of the shift. Friday, I made $6. Saturday, $7. Yesterday.... $11. Amazing!

At Carmike we weren't even allowed to accept tips. I remember vividly this kind of creepy guy in his mid-fifties who tried to tip me $5 and how I had to choke back the bile and tell him politely that company policy dictates that employees are not allowed to accept gratuities.

And instead of just the standard popcorn-soda-candy fare, we have a wide selection of pastries that are delicious. We get the shipment in on Fridays from this bakery in Brooklyn and I sample the broken bits. In addition, there are four different kinds of sandwiches, two cakes, and coffee, tea, and a cappucino/espresso machine. We treat you right at the LPC.

Which leads me to the next point - thanks be to the gods that I am not working in some lame multiplex with three screens of Fast and Furious 4 next to some other dumb movie. It's six screens, so already there is a limit, and it's all independent films, which means that the rowdy idiotic patron ratio is lowered.

OH, but there was this older woman that bought some ruggelach the other day. She seemed very high strung, but not out of the ordinary until she started talking about how high strung she was. She said it was because there's a younger woman taking care of an elderly lady in the building and she smokes. I was all, "oh, yeah, that's too bad" and then this lady went way off the deep end and leaned in close and was like, "and do you know what she does? She turns tricks too! She has all these men coming in and out of the apartment". Yes. That's the most likely explanation. I said, "perhaps she just has a lot of friends?" but even as I started saying it I knew I shouldn't even bother because this woman probably loves having some drama in her life. She went on and on about what kind of person would pull these stunts in an old woman's house, blahdee blah. Unstable! She ended the conversation with, "and I know what pot smells like!". If she had a walking stick, it would have been brandished at that moment.

That's Why You Need the Master's

Recent conversational snippet between me and a creepy, overfriendly guy stocking the vending machine:

Vending man: So, you go to school in the city?
Me: Yep.
Vending man: What are you studying?
Me: Library science.
Vending man: You mean like to be a librarian?
Me: Yep.
Vending man: I didn't know you had to go to college to be a librarian.
Me: Actually, you have to go to graduate school.
Vending man: No kidding! You know, I always liked librarians. I liked their glasses and how they had the sexy intellectual thing going on.
Me: Well, we study that too.
Vending man: No kidding!
Me: ...


Speaking of stocking, where is my favorite pseudo-anonymous follower? You know who you are. March 14th came and went, my friend.

Home Again

Back in New York, and it's still cold. Lame.

I had my physical today for one of Mt. Sinai's research studies. This was part two and involved me answering a million personality questions. Thank god my favorite thing in the world is to answer personality questions. Some were not-so-interesting (social anxiety, etc) but others were crazy great, like "I believe that people are plotting to kill me" or "Sometimes I feel like I am rotting on the inside". TRUE and TRUE!

Then I had to walk two blocks away to get my physical, and coincidentally my second favorite thing in life is a medical examination. They put me up in this super-comfy hospital bed and gave me a remote and let me watch infomercials for ten minutes while they took seven vials of blood. Then came the pee test, of course, and an EKG. Those little sticky things hurt like the dickens to take off.

The physician's assistant was this suave, distinguished gentleman who looked like he should have played a doctor on ER or something. And I got a clean bill of health, huzzah.

Oh, and this gem was in a post on the Craigslist volunteer section: "Study involves viewing images on a computer screen and responding on a computer keyboard. This experiment takes only 5-10 minutes and I can award $2 per participant. Referral to additional paid studies is possible." WOWSERS! A whole two dollars? That will pay for half of my transportation costs to get down there.

Speaking of transportation costs, I just went through the whole Chicago rigmarole associated with travel, lodging, and registration. $120 for the conference + $200 for the flight + $115 for three days of hostel = reimburse me soon, please.

Luckily, the next annual conference is in Washington DC, so I can definitely work that one on the cheap. Hi Queshia!

Oh man, I had the best lunch today. It was so good, I made it again for dinner. I took the old food from the fridge that was on the precipice of going bad and said, "what can I cobble together?". The final result, predictably, was an omelet with a hodgepodge of ingredients. I sauteed a quarter of an onion with a cup of frozen spinach, then cooked the egg part with some cheese. Yum!

Can't wait for Daniel to come home. Three more days!

Home

Happy Fake Easter Day! I'm sitting in the living room stuck watching That's so Raven because I'm a lazy foo who doesn't want to get up and change the channel. I'm liking the advertisements even better than Raven since they're the most ridiculous things I've ever seen in my life. Rescue Pets Swim-To-Me Puppies? Sketchers Twinkletoes? Okay!

We're leaving for dinner at 3:15 PM and picking up a gourmet Bob Evans dessert. Oh, and tonight I picked up a mystery shop at a mystery Inn near Oakland. It's the same old same old - check in, get name, evaluate carefully. I have to come up with some problem before tonight. Last time, I called down and requested more shampoo. The shampoo never came. THE SHAMPOO NEVER CAME. Thank god I wasn't really invested in the problem or I would have been cranky.

I'm sure that everyone will be pleased to hear that I was only able to put off doing work for so long before I battened down and got it all done. Prison report? Check! Collaborative efforts? Check! Case studies? Nope! Apparently it's not due until next Friday. This can be done next Friday afternoon.

What else? Well, I've packed about a month's worth of social activity into four days. Tonight's plan will hopefully include $5 poker at Pat's place. Happy almost birthday, Pat!