phamos

i forgot to mention from yesterday:

i saw scott mckinney, that guy who got fired for hoarding all the bequest checks at work and then after he left we found porn and lube in his office, walking around with a couple of friends up at broadway and 115th. he didn't see me, and i felt too awkward to say hi.

we waited outside haagen dasz for 15 minutes while they were supposedly restocking, but then when we went inside it turned out that they didn't have any vanilla ice cream. it would have been nice if restocking had actually involved placing their ice cream stock in the front room. the door to the storage room was open, and i could see about 6 giant vats stocked on top of one another that said "haagen dasz vanilla." and i asked the counter girl if they were out of vanilla and she just nodded her head boredly. lazy bitch. grr.

there were other people waiting outside with us at haagen dasz. there was one girl, about 7 years old, who was having a grand old time throwing a paper towel up in the air and running after it with gleeful abandon. her father was shaking his head bemusedly. "the things that amuse her," he said. "she got a playstation, a computer..."

"and all she really needs is a paper towel," i finished for him.

he laughed. "hell, that's fine with me. she can have all the bounty she wants."

hee!

i just heard linda, the head of human resources, yelling at the copier, "there. is. no. MISFEED!"

and all i could think was, "PC load letter? what the fuck does that mean?"

there's a guy who works on the fifteenth floor of my building who apparently didn't get the memo that toupees are, like, the ugliest thing ever. his is particularly bad, too. it's a slightly different color than the rest of his hair, and it's always slightly disheveled, and i think it may be made of ferret hair.

his pants never fit right either.

the sad thing is, i think he's actually pretty well off. i think he's a bond broker. can't buy taste.

we just got a check from the "evall-lynn fund" of some foundation. hee hee hee. evil-lyn. i'm waiting for the grant from the "man at arms foundation" or the "mossman corporation." heeee.

ok, cool random note: justin from Real World Hawaii works at some law firm in my building. i saw him outside on a smoke break today. he's pretty cute, but my coworkers and i agreed he was a manipulative psycho on the show. but i'm such a dork -- that my friend melissa said "oh, look, look!" and i looked and i knew exactly who he was. cult of minor celebrity, huh?

ALRIGHTY THEN!

ok, looks like we're up and running again, and ad-free, thanks to the generous gift of mr. mark kormes (who is apparently really the only person who reads this *wave*).

i've had lots of thoughts and really no way to post them, and now i don't want to go back through them all. i'll see if i can pick out a couple.

downtown is weird. the dust and the smell comes and goes, depending on how the wind is blowing. apparently yesterday the fulton street stop on the 4/5 line was filled with this awful stench. people were rushing onto the train from the platform holding their noses, unable to breathe it was so bad. having not been there, i can't tell you if it was the smell of rotting bodies or the smell of river much slowly flooding downtown's underground because the steel supports of the WTC aren't holding the Hudson out anymore. all i know is that around here, there's often this really thick smell of burning in the air, dust that makes it hard to breathe without sort of choking.

there are national guardsmen with rifles on every corner and camoflauge humvees driving around on the street. i'm usually fine when i'm in my office, i can cope, but walking around outside is just one of the most depressing things i've ever experienced. walking down south street along the river, right outside my building, there are lines of flatbed trucks, each carrying a few pieces of scorched, mangled steel to a ferry that's depositing all the rubble at an old landfill on staten island. these are enormous steel girders that have been melted, twisted, and cooled again, so they're frozen into these frightening shapes that just emphasize the extent of the destruction. it makes my brain hurt.

yesterday we finally got the mail. i was processing a batch of checks when i noticed one from Fiduciary Trust. The address on the check was 2 World Trade Center. It was dated 9/7/01. And I just sat there for a second, thinking about how on that day, two Fridays ago, those people were just doing work as normal, printing up checks, going to lucnh, going home at the end of the day. i try and remember what i was doing that friday. was that the day we went to Scarsdale? or was that the week before? everything is a blur. i feel simultaneously like i've been in this city forever and like i just got here. it's home and it's not. i have no one to go to if anything goes wrong. it's just me and segev. it's lonely and scary and i hate it. i want everything to go back to normal. i want to have nothing but shallow concerns like how to afford that shirt i wanted at banana republic or whether someone will respond to my post on fametracker or when i'll be able to go out drinking with larry again. i don't want to think in really real terms about war! i mean, sure, that's what i read about for fun and education -- i read about foreign countries, foreign politics, foreign regimes. but it always seems very far removed, very academic. i read about the Taliban. i don't want us to be BOMBING the Taliban; that's something completely different and totally immediate. and i hate it.

i hate that there is so much irrational dogma in this world that leads people to hate and envy and destrution. it's the same thing i hate about christianity -- it's not a strictly muslim thing. anything that preaches vengeance and anger over love and understanding with one's fellow man -- where the hell else do you think the world's going to end up! when people are intolerant of others, THIS is what you fucking get! DUH!

*sigh* i'll stop now.

this is like that episode of the sopranos where tony tries to take some of the heat off himself in re: the fbi investigation so he goes to what is ostensibly his place of business, namely the waste management company, and goes to his "office" which has been for all intents and purposes turned into a storage space. and then he sits around and does nothing all day, because he actually has nothing in said office that he could do and could possibly consitute "work." i am also sitting in an office that isn't really mine (yet) and doing nothing because there is nothing to be done.

of course, tony deals with the situation by deflowering the twentysomething born-again-christian receptionist of said waste management company. i don't really have that option. which is why my work travails are not the basis for a critically acclaimed hbo drama series that has year-and-a-half-long hiatuses.

i swear to god i dated christopher, though. only less shooty, more borey.