9 posts tagged “biographical”
Have you ever had plastic or elective surgery? Did you tell anyone? Why or why not?
Submitted by Beth Punches.
Yep -- at my parents' insistence, I had a bump on the right side of my nose removed when I was a teenager. It wasn't cancerous, but it was apparently felt that at some point long in the future, it could become so. I don't miss it, and I guess it was ultimately an improvement... though my nostrils are two different shapes now, which kind of drives me crazy.
I also had moles removed from my back for the same reason, which resulted in two gigantic keloids (scars). Whenever anybody asks about them (generally in an intimate context), I tell them they're a prison thing and I don't like to talk about it. Always good for a laugh.
What were you afraid of as a child that seems silly to you now?
Submitted by navelgazer.
Lightning. Used to terrify me. But I can pretty much pinpoint the moment at which I stopped being afraid of it: my family was eating dinner in the Columbia Restaurant at the top of the Pier in St. Petersburg -- I dunno how old I was, maybe eight or nine -- and a violent storm was sweeping across the bay. I was convinced that we were all going to die -- we were completely surrounded by water, of course -- but my father told me not to be afraid, in a tone that I find really difficult to describe -- firm, but not angry, but not sappy either -- and somehow, before I knew it, I was standing with my face pressed against the window glass, watching the planes at the St. Pete municipal airport wait on the runway to take off with the rain sheeting down. Ever since, I've loved lightning storms and found them totally beautiful.
Weird little memory-nugget there, but I remember a lot of things about that dinner quite vividly.
Without quite realizing what I was doing when I started typing, it appears that I've just closed the book on my regular blog of nearly six years, Do You Feel Loved?
For a while now, I haven't quite known what to do with that space. It was obvious that my zeal for blogging in the way that I used to (when I was in college, and was much more -- less? Let's settle for "differently" -- self-aware, and had a lot more free time, and far fewer personal and professional entanglements) had pretty much died out. I'd been toying with ideas for turning DYFL into more of an informational, aggregational site, for my own edification more than for an audience's. I like people to know what I'm up to -- I'm not a private person, really -- but I was tired of having to frame that information in a written, performative way. Or perhaps not "tired" of it; maybe I just ran out of the time, energy, and inspiration. I would like to be a person who can write large amounts of entertaining text, but the way I've been living my life these days, it just hasn't been in me. Something's got to give, and it appears that the blog is what went, not the lifestyle.
What is that "lifestyle"? Well, that's a post for another time, really, since I suspect it could get seriously mopey and I've got laundry to do and a haircut to get today. But this momentous event seemed to need to be remarked upon here. More later, perhaps.
What are your personal memories of September 11th?
They look like this (I lived right down the hall from Erin, so the view was exactly the same) and read like this.
I was living on 5th Ave & 10th Street at the time... it's kind of weird to look around me and think about all the people now in NYC who weren't here on that day (there was actually a Times article about this last week). Honestly, the strangest thing about the anniversary is that it's been five years. That's a long goddamn time. It would've been plenty of time to achieve something constructive -- both at Ground Zero and in the Middle East -- but so far, it's a big fat 'no' on both counts. Infuriating. But it doesn't feel like I've lived five years of my life since that day... it's still so weirdly fresh.
I'm not up to the task of writing something big about this topic right now, but the only other thing I want to say is: rest in peace.
When I get married, The Magnetic Fields' "The Book Of Love" will be my wedding song. Big gay cliche? Sure. Great fucking song? You betcha. It gets me every damn time. (And it's well within my range... it'd be too cheesy to sing it to my blushing hypothetical husband, right?)
Yeah... I'm officially starting to panic about my move.
I have SO MUCH FUCKING STUFF and there is NO PLACE TO PUT IT ALL at this new apartment. I guess I could spend many hundreds of dollars adding storage to the place, but if I'm only going to be there a few months, then there doesn't seem to be much of a point. The obnoxious thing is that I've always kind of thought of myself as a minimalist... but no minimalist has the number of books, comics, and CDs that I have. And of course because I put off planning, I've got no option but to take all this shit with me to the new place and then figure out what to do with it there, instead of coming up with a solution before I have to pack and move it all.
I'm taking votes: Does anybody think I could be happy if I sold off nearly everything I owned? Has anybody done this before? What was the regret-to-relief ratio? I'm honestly curious here.
The only good news is that I'm taking Friday off, so I have the whole day to go buy more boxes, pack, clean, etc. I'm going to need every fucking second, apparently. ARGH.
When you were younger, were there any game shows that you religiously watched and wanted to be a contestant on?
I'm intrigued by the "When you were younger" component of this. Are children particularly known for an affinity for game shows?
Anyway, when I was like three years old, my babysitter used to cook me hot dogs and we would watch The Price Is Right together. I continue to love both hot dogs (eaten for lunch today) and The Price Is Right to this day. In fact, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, when I first came back to NYC I refused to look for a job until I'd gotten a chance to sit at home in my bathrobe and watch a game of Plinko on TPIR. Unfortunately, they don't play Plinko all that often anymore, and I had to give up and start looking before I finally saw one. This had nothing to do with the fact that it took me five months to find a fucking job.
I also grew up in a house where Wheel Of Fortune and Jeopardy! were both mainstays. I enjoy both, but I'm pretty convinced that the people who fail the Jeopardy! tryouts get shunted into the WOF green-room. Not the brightest batch of contestants. I would still love to appear on Jeopardy! some day, especially since the questions seem so much easier in the last couple of years (and I don't think it's my own burgeoning intellect and trivia-knowledge that's causing that effect). I think few people are really aware of how important the clicker strategy is in that game... I am also not all that fun to watch Jeopardy! with, as I will insist that you both shout your answer in the form of a question, and -- and this is the crucial one -- wait for Alex to finish reading the question before "ringing" in. But those are the rules, people! If you ring in too early on set, they lock your buzzer! You'd be toast!
UPDATE: I probably should've mentioned that I also got addicted to VH1 / Entertainment Weekly's World Series Of Pop Culture a few weeks back, and the next time they have tryouts I may attempt to put a team together. Seriously.
I made a big mistake.
At the end of June, my roommate, Ashley, informed me that she intended to move out of our apartment at the end of August, i.e. one year into our two-year lease. She intended to move to Park Slope with her friend Gem. I was not invited. I found this to be quite annoying, since I was the person who did all the legwork on finding both the apartments we've lived in in NYC and I feel like I've caught nothing but crap from her about both of them -- the first one (literally a block from her school) was too expensive, the second one (in a gorgeous, safe neighborhood 20 minutes from the Village and Midtown) was too small and she didn't like the neighborhood, even though it is awesome. I would've been a lot angrier with her if our landlord had not let us out of our lease so easily; as it stands, I've just decided not to be all that pissed about it. It's been pretty obvious that we were growing apart (I've sensed a real feeling of contempt on her part for all of us who went to high school together), so maybe this was the best thing.
However. I made a mistake. I decided, shortly after she told me this, that instead of trying to find a new roommate for the apartment we're in now, I would move out as well, and try to find something here in Greenpoint that had more space, as the room I currently occupy is 7' by 9' and the rest of the apartment is not huge either (the other bedroom is a decent size, about 9'x9' or 10'x10' overall, but the living room is not enormous -- the whole brownstone is quite thin). My rationale was that while this place was cheap ($1400 a month), and I could afford to pay $750 or $800 for the larger, nicer bedroom and offer the small room for only $600 or $650, the apartment on the whole was simply too small for me to share with someone I didn't know well (nobody I know was in need of a room right now, so I would have had to just find somebody on Craigslist). So I decided to go out and find a Craigslist apartment share for myself.
I saw a lot of places I liked here in Greenpoint, and some nice places in Astoria too (I wanted very badly to stay in Greenpoint, as I love the feel of the neighborhood and it's starting to seem like I've put down roots here, but I was maintaining Astoria as a back-up neighborhood), but initially none of them panned out. Trying to find a room share combines all the worst aspects of straight-up apartment hunting and, essentially, speed-dating or auditioning for a play -- you've got to come across as exactly what these people want in the space of a five-minute meeting, while ensuring that they match what you want or need as well. Ultimately, I did see a place, at the northern tip of the neighborhood, that I was offered and wound up taking -- it's a basement apartment, in nice shape, with a super-cool guy who couldn't be friendlier and is into a lot of the same things I am (his eyes lit up when he heard I worked at DC). The room is $800, which I can swing (though I'm in a fairly serious financial crunch right now), and I was pretty much at peace with how things worked out -- the block the new apartment is on is farther from the subway and amenities, and is not as pretty as the block I'm on now, but it is close to the bridge into Long Island City and the 7 train, which makes the late-night commute easy (at least in good weather, since there's an 8-10 minute walk).
However, I went over there today to give him the checks (deposit for the old roommate and first month's rent for the landlord -- the latter I had to get from my parents, unfortunately, which I hate to do since I'd been so financially independent up until now), and was disappointed to realize that the room is not as big as I'd remembered it in my mind's eye -- it's really only about 7' by 12', without much closet space, and with an angled door that makes furniture layout slightly problematic. At the same time, Ashley moved her furniture out today while I was with my sister and mother, and walking around the apartment I'm realizing how nice it would have been to have taken her room, and how much I really appreciate the block I'm on now. But it's too fucking late. I've paid for the new apartment, and while the checks haven't been cashed I can't ditch the guy who needs a roommate just days before he needs one; the landlord has already started showing our current apartment to potential new renters as well, and I suspect one pair has already taken the place. So I'm left sitting here tonight in a half-empty apartment (packing my hundreds and hundreds -- thousands, actually, in total -- of books, comics, and CDs is going to be a nightmare) coming to the realization that I faced a crossroads and I took the wrong path. It's not pleasant.
Between this whole mess, and my distressing inability to save any money, I feel like I'm really just moving in the wrong direction entirely in my life. Perhaps the new apartment will work out better than I'm expecting, but right now I'm glad to not be on the lease, because I may just want to stick around for six months or so and then try to move on to something better. In any event, the last thing I can really take right now is another period of time where it feels like I'm just killing time, treading water until things can get better. That's what living in this tiny room has felt like for the last year, no matter how much I loved the neighborhood, and unless I can get this new place to feel significantly different, then I just don't know what I'm going to do. Life should be getting better, y'know? It's not like it was already so good that a little setback doesn't sting. My happiness was contingent on a few fragile things going right and they're just not doing so anymore...
So my doctor, unsurprisingly, chastised me for two things when I went in for a check-up last Friday: my posture and my diet. Neither one is particularly easy to correct. The posture thing stems from two primary factors. One is that, quite simply, I'm tall, and the world just isn't quite big enough for me. For example, I've learned (now that I'm taking the opportunity to really pay attention) that my slouching-height is just right for easily going through subway car doors, whereas if I stand up straight, I viciously bang my forehead. Once you start to really think about these things, examples pop up everywhere. The second factor in my perenially wretched posture is that, as an adolescent, I was mercilessly teased by my friends (who, semi-coincidentally, are all people I don't really talk to anymore) for having bitch-tits. Slouching minimized them, and so I slouched whenever possible. I only truly feel that they've started to fade in the last year, since I started to exercise more regularly -- I'm starting to develop what could actually be referred to as pecs, which is a boost in self-esteem, if not an automatic corrective to my horrible posture (though my innate narcissism is helping -- whenever I look at myself in a window or mirror reflection, which I admit is often, I now see that I need to throw my shoulders back and hold my neck up straight). But if I don't straighten my spine out soon, I'm going to be a very, very unhappy forty-year-old.
As for my diet... where to begin. Obviously I eat crap. I eat very few vegetables, I eat tons of fat, and the food I do eat is generally cheap and low-quality (Taco Bell, anyone?). Vegetables have crept into my diet around the edges in the last couple of years -- if something sounds particularly tasty, and has vegetables in the preparation, I'll eat them, but I'll never cook them for myself or order them as a side dish or anything of that sort. One problem is that I've truly cooked a meal for myself maybe five times in the last six months. Honestly. That's both uneconomical (in some ways -- obviously ordered food is expensive, but so is buying groceries that you don't use efficiently, which seems to be the only way that I buy groceries) and unhealthy, and unfortunately the kitchen in my new apartment is very small, so it'll be a challenge to change that particular behavior. I am making a conscious effort to take the slightly healthier option when I eat out (a grilled chicken sandwich with tomato today, instead of pizza), and at my doctor's urging I'm trying my hardest to switch over to Coke Zero when possible. It certainly doesn't taste like real Coke -- there's a hint of that nasty sweetener taste that makes Diet Coke one of the most noxious beverages on Earth -- but it's close enough that I can fool myself if I really try, and the fact that it contains no sugar (WTF?) has got to be making my dentist happy (That is, when I can afford to see him again -- getting my wisdom teeth yanked used up my insurance for the year, which is problematic since I know I've got cavities that need filling). The simple fact is that while I'm extremely thin at the moment (I'd actually like to put on about ten pounds), my body still has enough fat content to prevent me from ever having a true six-pack -- there's a ring of pudge that stubbornly clings to my lower abs -- and if I'm going to be an underwear model by next summer (the original goal was this summer, but y'know, that's another post entirely), it's going to have to go. And no amount of sit-ups can get rid of that; it's gotta be a shift in my diet and metabolism. So: Hello, Coke Zero; goodbye, more than one McDonald's meal a week.
