My Dark Materials

Should I have made plans for Memorial Day? To tell you the truth, I hadn't even realized it was coming until Friday, basically. Trying to make the best of it, though -- yesterday morning, Nina and I bought food from Matamoros, the cheapest, best Mexican food in Sunset Park, and then took it to eat in, well, Sunset Park. I'd never been there before. There's a great view of Brooklyn Heights and Manhattan from the summit, though it was so hazy that you couldn't really see much except for a row of perfectly-aligned water towers. In the evening, we managed to Tom-Sawyer Mario into hosting a barbecue that Eve and some people from work showed up to. We made vegetable kebabs, burgers, and lamb stew meat, all of which ended up being pretty great. I know it's not the conventional or polite way to plan activities, but I love it when a five-minutes-before-the-fact thing comes together. We drank a bottle of Jameson that Nina and I'd bought at Brooklyn Liquors: CostCo for Alcoholics!

But, yeah, the weather just shockingly warm, right? Don't know whether it's time to start using the air conditioner or not. I was sweating when I drove around with Lester today -- every time I go driving, a few more pieces to the puzzle that is Lester fall into place, some of them bloggable, some of them not. A month or so ago, he'd told me that he had a "girl on the side" in Sunset Park, and I was sort of at a loss for words: Had he taken me into his confidence and just revealed his marital infidelity to me? It turns out, no, his wife's been dead for 20 years. His girlfriend is a "Pakistanian" heart surgeon with a very conservative family. He showed me some sort-of-racy pictures of her that he had to grab out of the trunk while we were waiting at a light.

I scheduled a driving test for July 6th (something I should've done through the school, Lester says). Last year, what was I doing? Maybe by the end of the summer I'll be able to rent cars and drive people places!

Right now I'm eating some frozen pizza from last Sunday, from when Tom and Tedders came over and we baked cookies and watched local news. I just got back from watching X-Men 3 with The Rase. Spoiler alert: It suhcks.

Dirty Heroin

This is my heart
This is my arm
This is my heart

I think I've finally managed to lose my glasses. Nina and I went for a walk in Roosevelt Park on Friday, after eating eel dumplings at this place called XO in Chinatown with an overwhelming menu and getting some pretty great ice cream at the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory. It sort of boggles my mind the extent to which she knows the Avenues & Alleyways of this town far better than I do. We stopped at this playground where I think we both used to play as kids, and spent a while screwing around with this sort of bicycle-operated carousel. I'm pretty sure this guy walking past winged a rock at my head; it only hit me on the arm; a sour thing nonetheless. Then we headed over to the Irish Hunger Memorial, an actual, transplanted Irish homestead with a series of plaques with quotes about the potato murrain. Unfortunately, it was closed, but as we stood there peeking into the entrance, we realized that the huge iron gate that bars the door doesn't have a lock -- it just slides open. There is a locked door that protects the stone homestead part of the memorial, but we were able to clamber up the stones and over one of the walls onto the top of the whole thing, where you get a pretty great view of the Hudson River. I put my glasses on the wall up there for a few minutes and didn't pick them up when we left. They were gone on Sunday when I went to go look for them, so I think that might be it.

Flash ActionScript has got to be one of the worst "languages" on the scene, I swear. Or maybe it's just that the Flash authoring environment is beyond piss-poor. I'm trying to help Tom put together what we have been referring to between the two of us as "Golden Girls: The Game." Play as one of three of the four Golden Girls (that short one won't be playable, I don't think) or as an as-yet unspecified fourth character -- we're thinking either Snaggletooth or Barney Rubble. Your mission: thwart Peter Stormare's attempts to build a basketball stadium over the Golden Girls railyards (and commit rape).

I'm reading the first book in that Philip Pullman trilogy; everyone else has already read that stuff, right? I haven't.

Tom and I watched three versions of this short film, about a strange kid in Montana who does terrible impressions at a high school talent show, including, horrifyingly, Olivia Newton John. The movie's called The Beaver Kid, and the first version is a documentary -- the second two are somewhat exploitative dramatizations of the first, starring, respectively, Sean Penn and Crispin Hellion Glover. Has anyone else heard of this? Konrath lent it to me, and I've been trying to puzzle out the directorial intent for a while.

Went to a Yankees-Red Sox game with Emma and Joel, my boss, last Wednesday at Yankee Stadium -- it was going to be just me and Emma, but I accidentally bought three tickets while trying to follow this scheme that Wass-man described to me for buying sets of contiguous seats from the MLB website. But yeah, it was wild! Yankee Stadium looks dizzyingly huge, particularly from the box where we were sitting, and the field is strikingly green. Nothing exceptional about the game itself, really, although the Yankees had Mariano Rivera close, scaring the hell out of a bunch of awful Red Sox batters with a run of 15 perfect 100+ MPH pitches. They were jumping away from the plate! Emma was right: Yankee Stadium hot dogs are totally delicious, and there were a surprising number of fistfights in the stands. Over in our area, a guy sitting behind us took every jeer-worthy error by Boston as an opportunity to yell at Joel about his Mark Bellhorn jersey. "Bellhorn sucks!" he'd holler. "Take off the jersey! He doesn't even play for them any more!" He kept it up for like 3 hours, no joke.

Are we already half of the way through May? I feel like this year is sort of slipping through my fingers. What do I have to show for all this time? The trees outside my bedroom window are bright, bright green. I guess that's something. I just kind of boxed Kitty's ears for tearing open a bag of baking chocolate in the kitchen; she acted quite offended for a few minutes, but now she's back, milk-kneading the comforter where she thinks my legs are. They always come back!