Crappy Coincidences, or Bad Omens?: or, how to tell you're going to have a bad day.

When I woke up today, I absolutely could not convince myself to get out of bed. It was warm in the bed and cold in the room, it had snowed all night and looked soft and quiet outside, and I knew that today would be a very long day of sitting in a chair in various places if I did get up. It didn't look promising. But I told myself I'd been so productive the past few days and had so many things to accomplish that getting up would be worth it. So I did.
And then the shit started happening. Small at first, but escalating slowly. I had slept in too late to yoga, which I've been trying (somewhat successfully) to do every morning to help keep my energy up. Instead I got in the shower to soften up my skin so I could give myself my two weekly injections of anti-joint-hurty medicine, but then remembered that I'd left the refill of Enbrel at work because they have to be kept refrigerated and I hadn't gone straight home after they were delivered yesterday. So I gave myself the other shot when I got out of the shower. When I was done with that, I set about making eggs to go with the Korean-style kimchi-fried-rice bowls we had half-prepared the night before, but all the frying pans were dirty. So I had to wash one, and of course I chose the one that had the most stubborn grossness in it, which took me a good ten minutes to clean out of the pan, only to get it dirty again, which seemed wrong and made me angry. As I set about cooking the eggs, the ferret came up and started giving me the most mournful, "I-know-you're-going-to-leave-me-all-alone-here-all-day" looks and pawing at my leg, which made me feel really shitty. And then, for no reason at all as far as I could tell, both the eggs I broke into the pan had broken yolks.
I had no time to eat breakfast after this, and left my house later than expected. On the way to the subway, I got dripped on three times, all over my face, the makeup I had just put on, and the hair I had just blown dry. I told Connor I was sure this was going to be a bad day, and he told me these weren't omens. I disagreed.
Once at work, I realized how little money I have when I glanced at my banking account. Then it turned out that my coworker had called out sick, which will make it much more difficult for me to leave here in time to get to my first night class of the semester. Showing up a half hour late for the first class would be embarrassing and unpleasant.
Just now, I decided that I'd give myself my second shot in the bathroom on my lunch break. Giving oneself an injection in the work bathroom is not fun. Not only because this particular injection hurts like a motherfucker and then stings for hours afterward, but also because the bathroom here is like a middle school bathroom. A row of four stalls and four sinks and no way to lock the door to keep out the constant stream of other women who need to use the loo. So there I was, with my shirt rolled up and my pants pulled down so I could see my stomach, where I was preparing to inject my Enbrel subcutaneously. I'd brought a cotton swab and alcohol in a plastic bag, and as the woman in the other stall made the usual preparing-to-pee noises, I was standing creepily in the other stall and crinkling a plastic bag a whole lot. I'd already gone to the bathroom a half hour or so before so I couldn't even fake like I wasn't doing something shady by popping a squat. As she left the stall to wash her hands, I actually injected myself and bit my lip--hard enough to really hurt--to keep myself from sucking in a breath at the stinging pain of the medicine going into my body. I think it might be one of those things where the molecules in the medicine are too big to fit in with the molecules in the blood stream or something, but I'm really bad at remembering science-y facts so maybe I made that up. Whatever the case, injecting this shit hurts really bad and I had to try really hard not to make some noise that would fit the context, but to someone else in the bathroom minding her own business, would sound really, really creepy. It hurts so much that no matter how much I try to inject the very small amount of liquid into my fatty tissue, I just cannot push the plunger down very quickly. At home, when I'm being more of a baby about it, it can take me up to a minute to get it all in. This time it took me maybe half that long.
Finally the other woman left the bathroom, I finished injecting, and I put the used syringe on the makeshift 'shelf' I'd fashioned out of the toilet paper holders. I got all my clothes back to where they were supposed to be, and as I reached up to put my instruments of torture back in the plastic bag, I accidentally knocked the syringe into the toilet.
GOD DAMN IT.
There was nothing else in the toilet, and our toilets get cleaned every day by the building cleaning guy, and I've heard a billion times that the water that comes into the toilet is just as clean as the water from the tap, but... There are like 20 women at the gallery who use this bathroom every day. I did NOT want to stick my hand in there.
Luckily--I thought--the air in the syringe and the plastic of the stopper and hand-grippy-thing at the end were keeping the syringe floating, needle-down, in the potty. If I could reach in and just grab the very end of it, I might be able to avoid getting wet.
I grabbed a paper towel/napkin I'd been using to set things on and folded it up so it was long and thin, then bent over the toilet. I balked the first time, and rearranged the way I was holding the paper towel, then reached for the floating end of the syringe. As soon as my hand brushed against it, the entire thing stopped floating and landed with a soft 'chink' at the very bottom of the toilet bowl.
No words for my frustration. The skin on my stomach burned and itched where I'd injected it (this happens every time... actually, it still does...), but it was really annoying right now. "Fuck it," I muttered, plunged my entire hand into the toilet bowl, brought out the dripping syringe, stuffed it in the bag, and stormed out of the stall.
Thank god nobody saw me come out, all wet, and stuff a plastic bag into the garbage, muttering obscenities to myself. I washed my hand for a LONG time and went back to the desk, where I'm writing this now. If you don't hear from me for a few days, rest assured it's because something even STUPIDER happened to me, and I am hiding out in my bed until the bad days pass.

Baby, It's Cold Outside: or, winter shennanigans in NYC

Ah, my lovelies, life has returned to normal after all the holiday jibba-jabba and the ensuing travel to exotic locales (Vegas and Boston). I've slept a lot for the past week, and now things are returning to their normal, frantically-paced rhythm. This week is outright insanity, and next week looks like it will be about the same, but my birthday is coming and I am gritting my teeth and determined to stay chipper.

The city is also settling back into its usual, bat-shit insane self. I've been seeing and hearing some interesting stuff lately, which I thought I'd share with you:

1) Last Wednesday, after a panicked morning of almost-guerrilla-style-because-it-was-so-low-budget filming for pornocracy, I was on my way to work at about noon. The subways at noon on a weekday are pretty deserted, so there weren't many people on the platform at 86th Street. I walked down toward the end for some seclusion, but as I walked I heard singing from behind me. I slowed down to hear it, then turned around. Two men, one on either side of the platform, were making music together. One, who I couldn't see because he was behind a column on my side of the station, had turned on some sort of background music, I'm assuming on a boombox, and had begun singing "Easy (Like Sunday Morning)" in a slow, jazzy style. Another man, on the uptown side of the station, stood and lazily beat the snare drum he was carrying, and sang back-up vocals. It was beautiful. Even as the trains came into the station and cut them off, they kept singing. I could see the backup singer's face through the flashing windows of the train.

2) A few days later, I was once again on my way to work, around 10:30. I'd ducked into a Starbucks, which I rarely do, to grab some coffee and yogurt for breakfast. I'd just been poked with needles, drained of blood, and told to take more medicine, so I was not oh so very happy. As I was stirring some milk into my cuppa Joe, "My Girl" by the Temptations came on the store's sound system. I don't know about you, but that song has got to be one of the best songs ever recorded, in my humble opinion. It gets me dancing, or swaying, or toe-tapping most the time, and it gets me singing every time. So there I was, singing away in Starbucks, stirring my coffee. One of the baristas came over to inspect the counter and supply situation; she was singing, too. We stood side by side for a moment, singing, before she stopped and looked at me with a huge smile. "You're singing, too!" We laughed and I left for work in a better mood than I'd been for days. Music really is amazing.

3) On Friday night, I watched "Bukowski: Born Into This," probably one of the best documentaries I've ever seen in my life. I was pretty drunk and I talked through a lot of it because I was in such a good mood, but the long stretches of Bukowski reading his poems jagged into me like a fishhook. I'd read Bukowski before, and I could recognize his genius, but sometimes the brutality, the alcoholism inherent in his poetry and especially in his novels, got to me and made it difficult. But hearing him, really, for the first time. His slow, nasal but very soft, very quiet, very measured voice, the rhythm of his poems, the bare and shocking truth of it. It really got into me. I spent the remainder of the night talking about what it is that makes real art, and how Bukowski's pain was the mark of art. And how the scary thing about Bukowski was that he was such a gentle man who longed only for peace and quiet and above all for love, but could not find it on this earth and so was turned into a nasty, violent, belligerent old man—and yet how, at any moment, he could burst into a beauty so fragile, in tears or honesty, that he could lure in a butterfly to his fingertip.

4) On Friday night, I went to see my favorite singer/songwriter/poet/novelist Simone Felice. He was doing his first ever solo acoustic set of whatever songs and poems and prose he felt like performing for us, in the tiny back room of the tiny Pete's Candy Store in Brooklyn. It was... Well, you know what, I'm not even going to try to describe it. Because some things are better kept locked up inside to keep warming you up than aired out so they can lose their flavor. Like soda in a bottle. I want this to stay bubbly in me. But, suffice it to say, all my musings on art and what makes it real were there in front of me, singing away and bringing the whole room together in a way that was stunning to experience. We sang together, and I got so deeply hooked that I almost had to get up and go cry in the bathroom for the beauty of it all, but I stayed where I was and soaked it up. Afterward, I gave Simone a vial of Fairy Dust and this poem by Bukowski. It's exactly like that soda-bottle feeling. It was the first full moon of the decade.