My Dog is Chelsea

So here I am in New York City. The transit strike ended up not being so hard to work around—I just took the Long Island Railroad into Penn Station and a cab from there. The last sentence, I think, made the process sound a lot easier than it actually was, but that’s okay. Events thus far:

1) The couple next to me on the plane was dressed entirely in hemp. When their three-month-old started to wail periodically, they gave it a set of crystals to play with instead of, I don’t know, a pacifier or something. The baby did not appear to respond to the crystals in the slightest. Then they would turn on a musical teddy bear, which played the tune to such lovely classics as “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” and “ABCDEFGHIJKellamenoPQRSTUVWXYandZ.” You know, because all three of those songs has the same exact melody, it provided for a lot of spontaneity and diversity in the musical selection.

2) I’m using my younger brother’s computer, which is riddled with Spyware. This means that every 25 seconds or so, I must close a pop-up window that is blocking my blog entry. Periodically the computer starts talking. WTF? “Everyone has trouble sleeping,” it says. “But not everyo—” That’s when I close the pop-up window.

3) Since my mother’s office is near Penn Station and I don’t have keys to her apartment, it was my first stop before heading home. There, I heard her announce the following: “You see, that’s the thing people don’t realize about me—I don’t actually do anything.” Classic. Even more classic without the context.

4) I have 5 hours to do 68% of my Christmas shopping. I’m stressed out, therefore I am blogging.

5) Our Christmas tree is frozen. Isn’t that funny? It’s also funny because it’s locked outside in the courtyard behind our building. We can’t find the key.� My mother told me� to go next door to the building undergoing a massive renovation and ask the construction guys to saw off the lock. “They’ve fixed things for me in the past,” she said. “So they’ll do this, no problem. The�hard part is� to find someone who speaks English.”

6) Walking to the LIRR yesterday, I found myself in a large crowd of New Yorkers headed into Manhattan to start their work day. The police were filing us into this large swervy line. One�cop yelled out in a thick Long Island accent, “IF YOU DON’T HAVE A TICKET, YOU’RE IN THE WROOUNG PLACE.” Toto, you’re not in Oregon anymore.

7) I went to visit my older brother yesterday. I’ve never mentioned him in this blog before, but he has a severe case of�cerebral palsy and in the last year his health has not been so great. He’s in a nursing home in Queens now, after a recent surgery to install a tracheotomy, and so now he’s on a respirator to help him breathe. I have a head cold, so I had to wear one of those masks that everyone wore when the SARS outbreak was at its worst. The bright side to all of this is that he actually seemed significantly happier than the last time I saw him. He was laughing. Actually, that’s not entirely true: when we first walked into his room, he was crying, but he started smiling as soon as we changed his music from the all-Christmas-music-all-the-time radio station �to his favorite �Beethoven tape. Sometimes I think that he isn’t really aware of his surroundings, and then something like that happens, and I realize that there is more going on inside his head than he is able to tell us. And I know that I, too, hate that radio station.

The exterminator just showed up. He had about as much information on the infestation problem as I did: we both knew absolutely nothing. I called my mother to ask what the man should be doing. She said, “Oh, we have rats outside where we keep the garbage.” Um, yeah. I felt silly telling the exterminator that there was a rat problem near the garbage cans on the sidewalk. He laughed and said there’s nothing he can do about something like that. This is New York City, after all. Of course there are rats on the sidewalk.

9) The answering machine in my room had 19 new messages. Seventeen of them were pre-recorded pleas from politicians trying to garner my vote for last month’s election.�Me erasing them all sounded like this:

“Hi, this is Gerald Nadler—” BEEP
“Hi, this is Gerald Nad—” BEEP
“Hi, this is Ger—” BEEP
“My name is Judge—” BEEP
“I’m Ruth Messenger, and I endorse Judge—” BEEP
“Hi, this is Ger—” BEEP
“This is Attorney General Eliot Spitzer calling—” BEEP
“Hi, this is Ger—” BEEP
“I believe that all New Yor—” BEEP
“and I pledge to contin—” BEEP
“to serve this county—” BEEP
“all I ask is for—” BEEP
“thank you for your time—” BEEP
“Eliot Spitzer here again, reminding—” BEEP
“Hi, this is Ger—” BEEP

And so on. I guess the New York Dems haven’t gotten the notice yet that I am now registered to vote in Oregon.

Anyway, the strike’s over and the construction workers next door are back from their lunch break. I’ve got some last-minute shopping and lock-breaking to get to! My younger brother’s coming home this afternoon, which means limited access to his virus-ridden laptop and so I may not have a chance to blog again before Christmakwanzakah. Happy winter solstice!