Happy 2007

Okay, so I know I haven't been very good about writing in this thing, and it's mostly because I've been doing life things, but I thought I'd start off the new year with something fun for all of my real friends who read this web-log all the time to read.

I shat myself tonight. Not in the sense that I've been using that phrase recently -- "I had to run to the bathroom to shit myself" -- but in the sense that stuff came out of my ass and went into my pants. It happened on 74th St. and 1st Ave., outside the Jan Hus Church where the Balkan Golden Festival was being held. I rode the 6 all the way down to Broadway-Lafayette and went up to my office and threw out my underwear.

This isn't the first time this has happened. 5 or 6 years ago, walking back from Thanksgiving dinner at Sharon and Neil's with my sister, I felt something uncomfortable coming on and I tried to relieve some pressure in my abdomen by letting it out. Seconds later, the seat of my pants was cold and wet. I was lucky -- we were on our home block. I discovered, in my parents' bathroom, that my boxers had been soaked with what Razor had described years previously (on our beloved Delivery Head) when this'd happened to him on the job at Credit Suisse as "some kind of horrible water from the ass." "Gross," said my sister when I told her what had happened. At the time I blamed lamb with mint jelly.

Nina is kind of in love with the Balkans. She did a stint of reporting in Bosnia, personally commissioned by Lewis Lapham, commemorating the anniversary of the massacre in Srebrenica, in 2003. So I was sure she'd want to go to the evening of Balkan folk dancing that we got notified about by Jeff Stark's Cool List. And she did! But first she had to have dinner with her mom and pick up a microwave that she bought off of craigslist.

I decided to head up there myself -- I had to go to the upper-ish East anyhow to pick up the tickets I'd bought for a live-action production of David Rees' Get Your War On. The theater was at 59 East 59th St., which is probably why I texted Nina and believed myself that the Jan Hus Church was on 79th St. instead of 74th St. I ate dinner at Neil's Coffee Shop up by Hunter College -- she and I had passed it a few months ago walking around up there and both thought it looked like a good place to eat. And it was -- cozy and nice, with a kind of salty wait staff. I read the Times and homphed a really greasy reuben sandwich.

And then I hiked up to 79th St. and started looking around for the church. I walked from 2nd to 1st to York and back to 2nd again. I found the Albanian embassy, but I didn't find anything that said "Jan Hus." I started to get discouraged and left several petulant voicemails on Nina's phone before hunting down a Starbuck's on 75th and 1st and hunkering down with my laptop and a huge cup of coffee. I was into some deep Scheme when I realized that there were unsecured wireless networks in range. That's how I found the right address for the church.

It was 9:00 when I got there, but the dancing were in full effect, the dancers trotting in concentric circles, hands joined, led by a man waving a white scarf. They were in the middle of the nave, and there were tables of food off to one side. I tried to keep near the entrance in case Nina showed up, and I just kind of watched the proceedings. Everyone was very casually dressed, and the girls were very pale and pretty and had uniformly thick, dark eyebrows. About 45 minutes in, I started getting some bad stomach cramps. The church had a bathroom, but I knew that what I had to do couldn't be done within close aural / olfactory range of the festivities. So I left. And then I shat my pants by accident in the cold on the way to the train. And I shat more, revoltingly, in the bathroom at work in my silent office with all the lights out except for one. Nina, over the phone, offered to bring me a replacement pair of boxers from a set her brother had just purchased.

It wasn't so bad. But I think I drink too much coffee.

On the toilet I read an editorial in the Post in which the author called Barbara Boxer an "appalling scold."

Guitar Hero update: I've managed to get five stars on every song in the Easy and Medium modes. I'm about 14 songs into Hard right now. I haven't gotten anything higher than a three on anything besides Strutter so far, which, I'm ashamed to admit, I kind of like, song-wise.