just a few pictures from my first days in New York. Lots of excellent food and even better graffiti.
I know I've gotten a lot older since the last time I was living in New York. You know how I know? Let me tell you: everyone around me is twenty ("why are we at THIS bar?"), they're totally too loud ("can't we go to a more civilized bar?"), they're wearing all the stupid neon stuff I did when I was twelve (the tattoo on her leg totes clashed with the green on her skirt, can we go to the next bar?") and there are bike lanes everywhere ("please don't hit me when I walk right out in front of you without looking when I'm leaving the bar"). When did this happen? When did I actually pay good money for CROCS and am I in the early stages of dementia since when I bought this footwear abomination I was stupid enough to get a pedicure first? My feet are already totally ruined from trying the crocs on and from walking about 100 miles in flip flops over the last few days while I gathered up my new gear (a gorgeous santoku knife, among other things) for my stage. I'm kind of a moron. As Arash commented on one of my Facebook status updates, "what kind of person gets a pedicure before the do slave labor in a kitchen?" Me, that's who. And I don't even get to enjoy it for ten minutes before I screw it up.
But today is special because today is day one of my stage at an amazing restaurant in the West Village. The Magical Kim Merlin invited me to breakfast as a sendoff into this adventure this morning, and, true to her awesome form, we wound up at Balthazar, which in my 32 years of coming to and living in New York, I had never been to. It was decadent, to say the very least. I loved both the eggs en cocotte (the ten minutes of bake time is totally worth it) and the eggs benedict and I'm now the proud owner of a gigantic basket of pastries that I carried eighteen blocks home in the rain, clutched desperately to my chest so they wouldn't get soggy.
There was even a few rolls of thunder as I was trudging up 1st Avenue, and instead of feeling angry about getting caught in the deluge, I was thrilled. It's been months and months of sunshine back in LA and this was the perfect cleansing. I wished my parched bamboo back home could have had such a treat.
I'll be running away from home in the next few weeks. Yup, just like when I was six or seven and had decided that I was going to move into the oak tree in the front yard next to the Crepe Myrtles. I brought my most important possessions with me: my favorite headband, my "Grease" t-shirt with John Travolta decal (or as my dad called him, "Johnny Revolting") and some sort of stick for hunting birds or squirrels, though I was more interested in befriending them than in killing them, but a runaway gal's gotta eat. Also, if you look in the upper right corner of the photographic evidence of this moment, you'll see there is what appears to be a tambourine. I think I thought I could earn money by performing Linda McCartney-style musical routines from the tree. In this my upcoming new version of a runaway adventure, my treehouse will be a fifth floor walk up in the East Village and I'll be bringing my knives and leaving my headbands at home (my Bangs-Not-Botox make a headband wholly unnecessary). And John Travolta won't be an iron-on on my shirt, but probably will be in a bathhouse getting an erotic massage in Chelsea. Oh how life has changed in 33-34 years!
Hopefully I'll have some funny kitchen tales from my three weeks away from home, and I fully intend to bore you endlessly with iPhone photos and tales of accidentally grating my fingers along with the parmesan cheese, so do stay posted for the live blogging of my kitchen humbling.
But until then I'm teenager sitting in the Pacific Palisades. And nothing, absolutely nothing, brings on feelings of finite mortality quite like being responsible for a now-almost-grown-but-still-kind-of-useless human being that you've known since he was two. Well, that and the RadioLab meditations on death and dying that I heard on my way over to his parents' house on Sunday. And the fact that I'm forty and I'm so untethered that I'm even available and desperate enough to housesit for someone else. I'm clearly the Jerri Blank of the 90272.
Even before I got to the beautiful house with a pool (yes, I'm caring for a kid, but I'm so totally also getting a tan), before I even left the parking lot of my loft for this quick two week detour, I was already feeling anxious and a little sad...
