I'm looking forward to $7 tickets in NOLA to see:

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• Doubt
• Revolutionary Road

I also can't wait for:

• 70 degree weather for Christmas
• driving a car
• nola coffee
• having my chakra aligned

I currently really like:

• Dustin Hoffman
• parallels between Kramer vs. Kramer and Tootsie
• John Legend
• bagels that touch bagels of a different flavor, so you get a pinch of cinnamon or garlic where it doesn't belong

If you lost 600 billion dollars, wouldn't you throw yourself a party, too?

Note to self: If I ever go into a very public bankruptcy, losing $600 BILLION dollars of other people's money, it might be a good idea not to have an expensive holiday party in New York.

Even if I do think it's clever to discreetly put it on the books as"Mr. X's cocktail party," the supposition that multiple colleagues of mine WON'T get very drunk and start asking the hostess where the "Lehman Brothers Holiday Party" is, just demonstrates a gross lack of judgment.

Then again, I think the whole world knows that "good judgment" was a characteristic that left these persons the moment they received their first Lehman's paycheck back in their early 20's.












I'm sorry but my holiday sweater depicting a polar bear with holly around its neck is basically couture compared to the tackiness of what I saw tonight.

Sure, I understand these guys have gone from being worth multi-millions of dollars to maybe just a million and that we all need some outlet for depression...but really? A holiday party for your now non-existent firm that rang in our new era of bankruptcy, foreclosures, sub-prime blibbity blahs, and Mardi Gras parades getting canceled?

Jesus, if you absolutely need to celebrate right now, just go buy yourself a barrel Johnny Walker Blue Label and drink the whole goddamn thing in your Park Avenue apartment.

I, personally, am self-medicating with some Yellowtail Merlot to ease my way into this recession, but you don't see me slugging it down publicly in the F-train station in front of my resident homeless guy, while crying about how much better Le Clos du Caillou Chateauneuf de Pape Reserve is.

Whatever, Lehman Brothers. You won--I totally hate humanity tonight.


p.s.--consider non-disclosure agreements next time. i mean, unless you like everyone knowing how utterly tacky you are while going down in flames. which i guess you do.

postcards from the coat room

people in the restaurant industry don't get paid to put food on your table or make you feel at home. they're actually getting paid to compensate for the fact that they know the deep, dark secrets of humanity: people lack integrity and don't know how to communicate. but we'll serve you your food anyway...with a smile.

ANYWAY

so nobody in my "real world" job has a forte in communication. neither the customers or managers.

or the decency to communicate with you as a human and as opposed to their tv-ordered Clapper.

and then i met Tyrone.

granted, Tyrone was not a customer tonight, but he was the photographer for the party that i worked. he asked me what i did, and when i told him, he was just so sweet and warned me that it's hard, but if you really love it, it'll work out. he worked at a famous magazine for many years in the editorial department. as he said, "i looked at other people's pictures all my life, and then i realized i wanted to be looking at mine." and so he quit his job and became self-employed. he told me that he gets excited about going to work. "oh boy, i get to capture people's memories for them." he's always been fascinated by photography since his dad showed him a baby picture of him. he thought it was so cool that this part of his life that he couldn't remember was capture for him forever. and he wanted to record other people's memories for them.

even for the glammed-up sausage in a disco ball who was throwing a party for her husband.

even though she treated everyone working tonight, including tyrone, like dirt, he still made sure he got a lot of great pictures.

and yeah, he's getting paid...but we all are. and he just smiled politely whenever she bossed him around.

so thank you, dear lady, for doing one thing right tonight and introducing some stranger into my life who was pleasant to talk to for a change. i may not slit my wrists with the coat check tickets afterall.

much love,

marianna "the coat check girl," "that girl with the ponytail," "the person holding the tickets," "fuck i want my coat...oh you. here's my ticket"

And then...boredom

No wonder people dread retirement so much. I slept all day yesterday, watched both Ellen and Oprah, fed myself, watched my netflix movies, and then went back to sleep.

that was my experimentation as a lazy housewife.

this morning i did the "my only friends are on the internet" housewife. this afternoon is bookish housewife. and tomorrow i may take a step towards athletic trophy wife and spend 5 hours at the gym before i revert to living on facebook the other 19 hours.

my life is very quickly paralleling "about a boy" save the fact that i don't have hoardes of money or a small boy who stalks me.

...in other news, it snowed in new orleans! a lot!



That city is a constant source of amazement. Do you know that we GAINED 10,000 jobs in November?? So while the rest of the country/world becomes victims of this stormy Recession, NOLA is that old lady who comes out of her house after the hurricane and wants to know why her cable went out.

I mean, gawd, isn't it such an inconvenience for us New Orleanians to have to listen to people talking about cutting back? I mean the space that the TP uses to cover that stuff could be used for a stuffed mirlitons recipe.


For twice we are getting things right: we have winter weather and an economy that doesn't parallel a 3rd world country's.

maybe the south really will rise again.

When you feelin down and out
and you feel there's no way out
you get dropped off in new orleans



THANK GAWD.

nola ache

all i want to do is lie by the fly on the mississippi and listen to wwoz. then go hear rebirth play at the maple leaf later in the night. and get beignets. and run along the lagoons and bayou.

one of my teachers, when she found out i was from nola, told me that she went down there to go to jazzfest and was amazed by the humidity. she thought i wasn't looking too well in class, i told her i'd been sick, and she said to make sure i drank enough b/c i'm probably dehydrated. she went on to say that she thinks the humidity is what makes everyone down there so "feeling."

we are so conscious of every pore of our being because there's either water resting on it or coming out of it. so we're a feeling culture. we feel music, food, life. i was like, yes. yes indeed.

i will never take the humidity for granted.

i don't know if listening to tin roof blues will make me feel better or worse. i miss every single thing about nola. including the crappy mall at lakeside.

i even miss metairie.

i want cc's. or pj's.

i want to wrap myself in nola and hibernate for a long while.

god, i want a drink.

The manager from Per Se called me for an interview.

PER SE.

Everything was going sooooo well until he realized that my classes didn't end early enough for me to make the dinner shift every night.


Sigh.

Oktober

is the month of Martha Stewart and pumpkins.

If there's any time of year that'll turn me domestic, it's fall. Best breakfast-- oatmeal, soy milk, pumpkin, cinnamon, and strawberry preserves.

I wish I had the patience to bake. Or knit. Or clean up.

............

Saw a dress rehearsal of Speed-the-Plow last night with Jeremy Piven, Elisabeth Moss, and Raul Esparza.

It was exciting to go see. For their third time doing the whole thing, it was pretty good. That is all :-/

State of my mind

I don't know what's going on with the economy

or the presidential debates



but I really wish that H&H would make cinnamon wheat bagels. mmmmmmmmmm.

Record-keeping

All throughout middle school and high school, my brother would joke that my AIM away messages was my only way to confirm my own actions, nay--existence. Wait, we're going to dinner? I HAVE TO PUT UP AN AWAY MESSAGE THAT I'M GOING TO DINNER. GOD FORBID ANYONE NOT BE PRIVY TO MY DAILY ROUTINE.

and it was capslocked because i was in middle school. inexplicably (maybe explicably but i don't have time to wonder about it), my away messages died with the rise of facebook.

but now i'm so f-ing busy all the damn time that i do need some mode (preferably electronic and self-indulgent [geek!]) to confirm my existence. if i dont, i'll be 75 and in denial. That means I'd be a wrinkly cougar wearing American Apparel. EW WHAT.
So here it is guys (MB in the future). I existed today.

Not only did I exist, I had an existential crisis regarding furniture and yoga. I spent a good two hours trying to rearrange all 3 pieces of furniture in my room so that I have enough room to spread out a yoga mat and do shit for class. But I live in a broom closet, right? So I had to actually sit down and draw a variety of possible layouts so that my bed, a coffee table, a suitcase doubling as a desk, and my yoga mat could all co-exist in the same room. Once I picked the winner, I dragged everything around, cleaned, reorganized, and saw that it was good. On the seventh day, I did yoga.


I felt better after the yoga, but not as good as I felt before I reorganized my whole room in order to do the yoga. And then I realized, This is what my life has come to? Reorganizing in hopes of doing better, driving myself into the ground with effort, and raising myself up only to break even? Like, why did I ever bother crawling out of the womb then? I guess there was a reason I was 2 weeks overdue--because I knew that 22.666666 years later I would stress myself out in order to give myself space in order to get as close as possible to how I breathed the day I was born.

GOD! If I wanted to be this ironic, I'd live in Williamsburg.

And that is what I did today.