My first thought, of course, was DOG. Easy enough, to blame man’s best friend. A stray, down on his luck and searching for scraps in our garbage. My second thought was low-level neighborhood terrorism, a feeble and matchless attempt at the old classic, the flaming bag of shit-in-the-doorway.

Unhappy thought! But forgive me, forgive me: the pile was not artfully placed. It was delivered. Like Trader Joe’s, there had been no middle man. Whosoever deposited the brown surprise did so directly at the scene of the crime. The wheels in my head began to turn. I have read every book by Agatha Christie. (True.) What dog, I ask you, would clamber up three brownstone stairs to do his business? No dog, my friends. No dog at all.

When someone does something awful, like, take a shit on your front steps, not only does it bring up looming questions of public health, quality of life, and the lack of a garden hose on a city apartment, it shakes one’s faith in humanity. I don’t mean that I have trouble understanding why someone would do it. I get why they did it. It is a natural, daily necessity and the 90 degree angle of a staircase comfortably mimics that of a commode. It’s more the idea that on a regular weekday morning I was standing in front of my house figuring out that a staircase might make a better toilet than the ground. That the stench of shit rose up and permeated my sense of well-being and left me feeling guilty for something I had not done.

“We should make sure to close the gate,” my roommate emailed, after I had explained the situation. “It’s like an invitation.”  Or maybe it was the trash, blown around on the sidewalk. Rain soaked bits of paper and napkin were dried up around the entrance like sidewalk scabs. We were just breeding an atmosphere of filth… or providing free toilet paper.

So what to do?  The only thing I could think was to alert our landlord, who lives downstairs. We are lucky enough to be able to text message with him. But there was just no good way to say it.  The following is the [verbatim] conversation.  Let this help the next hapless fool who awakens to find his own home besmirched with feces:

Me: Not sure quite how to put this … but there is poop on our stoop! Unrelated, the locks have been a

[Ed. Note: my phone only allows a minimum number of characters per message. I usually forget how I end the last sentence before I begin the new message, allowing maximum confusion]

Me: sticky lately might just need some wd forty thanks!!

[Ed. Note: Kill two birds with one stone.]

Landlord: I’m not home but imma take a look when I get home

[Ed. Note: He sure will.]

Landlord: Where on the stoop? That is very nasty

[Ed. Note: Correct.]

Me: OK great! Sorry! So gross!

[Ed. Note: Not my fault! Why am I apologizing?]

Me: Yes and by the mailbox too.

[Ed. Note: More was discovered in the evening.]

Landlord: Wow. That’s crazy

[Ed. Note: Thank god it rained.]

I want to finish reading this essay at my desk.

I wish I had invented this artistic idea but am glad I did not have to execute it.

I want to download all these songs.

File under: terrifying morning commute visuals.

File under: makeup tips for Halloween time.

File under: helpful quotes for the artist.

The city’s proclivity for a haphazard encounter is so rare that one is tempted to draw great meaning from it. A friend of mine once ran into a boy upwards of five times in a two month period.  They had been friends during college. She saw him all over the city, from Bed-Stuy to Lincoln Center. Lest you cry “stalk” I assure you this was not the case. Both parties were equally jarred by the sight of the other, time after time. I concluded, reasonably, that they should get married. What else could it mean? By the fifth or sixth time it happened, my friend yawned as she told me, explaining that she had held her book up over her face until he exited the train. I was astounded at her lack of wonder, and began to question my own magical thinking.

I attached great meaning to every minute vibration surrounding the author’s lecture. Perhaps I would attend this university, looking back later at this particular evening as a turning point in my life. Did I fit into this community? My god, they are serving us stuffed grape leaves!  What would it be like, to study in these hallowed halls, my feet treading the oriental carpets of wisdom? What does it mean that she, this respected author, chose to mention the very book I am reading? Am I ordained with some noble task? Imbued now, with heroic purpose? And so on, and so forth. Even that morning, as I opened the doors to my office building, a man walked past me, catching my eye with his peculiar, stiff gait. He wore white sneakers with a black suit, and a pin on his lapel which read: I [HEART] CHESS. I thought to myself: “Today will be a good day”.  I was right.

Conversely, we have all experienced illogical regret over baseless decisions regarding the subway. You wait for the express train, believing it to be the quicker option. You curse yourself as the announcement comes on: all B trains are stalled at Atlantic-Pacific Street, why oh why did you not think to hop on the local train when it arrived? You will be late to the job interview, you will miss the doctor’s appointment, forever altering the course of your life with one breath of false intuition.

A story goes that my family member had not heard from his elderly father at the prescribed time and grew worried that something might have happened to him. Jumping in the car, my uncle began the drive out of the city and into the small town in which his father lived. Slowing to stop at a red light, a shadow came swooping over his windshield. In the afternoon sunlight, a great gray owl flapped past the car, stopped for the briefest of moments, and looked directly into the driver’s seat. It was suddenly clear to my uncle that his father had passed away, though he wouldn’t know it for sure until he arrived at the house. A nocturnal bird in the afternoon, a pair of perfectly round eyes gaze intently through a pane of glass.  This goes against the natural order of things.  This is a sign to be interpreted.  In a city, there is no natural order of things. The baseline is chaos.

I don’t know which is better, to draw meaning from everything or to draw meaning from nothing. One option borders on insanity and the other borders on boredom. Walking home from the lecture with great thoughts swimming in my head, words, forms, meanings, expansions, innovations, a man yelled at me on the sidewalk. “Damn girl, you got some big legs.” From this I can only conclude: my legs are not small. It simply cannot be a coincidence, as I have heard this same remark on several occasions.  Or maybe this IS the natural order of things: a recurring factual statement on my limbs.  Maybe I am just not yet spiritually ready to receive the true message, which is either to take a limb-slimming pilates class, or, kick someone in the groin, swiftly, with my great strength.

- Better yet, move to a farm and weave my own tunics

- Scratch tunics, I want to wear this

- Say what I mean, preferably with a BIG ASS MESSAGE.

-Write myself an artist’s manifesto

How to cross the Atlantic ocean in a rowboat.

How to buy something remarkably hideous.

How to shop at Walmart.

How to get freaked the fuck out. If you haven’t already, of course.

It is frustrating to me that I should be so dependent upon a machine I never asked for. I was happy with my Walkman, pleased with my Discman, and then, upon purchasing a new computer for college, was offered the luring prize of an iPod mini mail-in rebate. OK, fine. What would I do with this sleek beast? Oh, I don’t know, maybe everything. Podcasts! Music! Playlists! Solitaire! Thank you and yes please. When that iPod up and kicked it, which they are designed to do, my mother won a new one at a public library raffle. Being competitively ‘luddistic’ herself, she had no use for it and presented it to me.

The year was 2009, I was an American, and I had yet to spend one green dollar on an iPod.

A few weeks ago, Library Raffle passed on, choking on Gnarls Barkley and never returning to life. Unlike a cassette tape, you cannot blow on it, untangle it, wheel the film back into place with the end of your pinky finger. There is no examining for scratches, no foggy breath followed by gentle wipe with a shirt-sleeve. There is no duct-tape solution to be applied to the loose battery cover. The modern technology sets us back to pre-tool era, as we grasp the damn thing with our opposable thumbs and bang it against a rock.

So I had to buy another one.

Them shits is expensive.

… I overheard someone say, on the shuttle train. Riding the subway sans iPod is a cruel fate indeed, forced to commune with the legion of yellers, coughers, sniffers, canoodling couples, and wailing babies. I was on my way out on a Friday night, trying to make do with the printed word, when I felt someone’s eyes on me. She was a girl in her early twenties, petite, with a ridiculous, flower emblazoned knit cap. She looked terrified, lost, and seemed to be looking to me for guidance. I ignored her, of course, for why should I succumb to her uninformed prejudice? Just because we were the only two white girls on the train from Crown Heights to Bed-Stuy does not, in my opinion, mean that we should be friends. Let’s not pretend we have more in common than we do, flower hat. As the train pulled into the station she approached me, catching her balance in the unfamiliar lurch of the train. She needed directions. I could not feign deafness without my trusty iPod.

“Let’s walk and talk,” I said, in my imagination. “Get a move on.” I was explaining the intricacies of the transfer to her as we descended the stairs to Franklin Avenue. So well versed am I in the language of the MTA that my mind was left free to observe my surroundings. With an eagle’s vision I spotted it: something shiny in the corner of the staircase landing. As though with a hawk’s talon, I snatched it up. An iPod Nano!

1. I have no shame
2. I have a new iPod
3. Hat girl was so distracted by Bedford Stuyvesant that she failed to see my sly deed.

[A moment for moral rectitude: I will have you know that I posted my discovery on the Lost and Found section of Craigslist. No one could guess five songs contained on said iPod though a few Nigerian spammers tried their darnedest.]

Perk of city living: the potential for subway swag.

This leads us to this week’s

Modern Quandry: Which is more vulnerably intimate? Physical nudity, or nudity of the playlist; a full-shuffle reveal of the contents of one’s iPod?

I posit the latter, as I would have preferred a brightly-lit strip-tease to the embarrassment I suffered at a dinner party last weekend. I gaily offered up my iPod to the crowd only to be experience the ultimate red-faced betrayal of Sheryl Crow:

I used to ride with a vending machine repairman. He was born on a Tuesday night.

Perhaps it was in the spirit of my long-lost Walkman, calling out to me.  I stuttered, attempting to recount the story above, all diners stopped short, gnocchi resting unchewed in their mouths.  “But, I found this, it’s not, oh, I don’t take responsibility for, oh, well, yes.”

He was high on intellectualism. I’ve never been there, but the brochure looks nice.

The brochure says: our bodies are outsourced by technology.

The brochure says: at least there is a soundtrack.

The Oscars were on recently.  If you missed them, a nice substitute is here at McSweeney’s Meta Awards.

In case you DID miss them, get hip to the first lady of film, Kathryn Bigelow.

Maybe you are a sourpuss and already miss winter, like this lynx here who absolutely loves the snow.  Get cold and purse-lipped with Otto Dix at the Neue Galerie.

Maybe you love being sad, if you do I highly recommend this gorgeous poem which is also about winter.

So the other evening I was making my way to something cultural, oh I don’t know, a book signing or something. I am a lady of society and therefore was wearing a long coat. Also it is winter outside, and it always will be. I am proud of this long coat, because it is cutting-edge. By “cutting edge” what I mean is that it has an “interesting shape” which is just a fancy way of saying “it doesn’t look that good on me”.

Just because you like an article of clothing does not mean it likes you back. That evening I wrestled with the green beast – no, not jealousy, I mean this coat – squeezing it into new shapes with a belt, sprucing it up, like a Christmas spruce, with different accoutrements.  Something was wrong, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

I sighed, giving up on Fashion for the evening, grabbed my bag and … oh. That’s when I saw the problem. In the mirror. The long, green coat, which had always seemed a little bit World War II, Rosie the Riveter out for cocktails or something, had suddenly revealed its true colors. Dusty green, and, well, I looked like a Civil War reenactor. Complete with leather satchel, which had suddenly transformed, in my mind, to my trusty musket case.

Imagination can be simply debilitating.

But maybe I am not making it up. I have written before about the ideal outfit to prevent Unwanted Public Conversation and Streetside Interrogation. Usually it involves a delicate balance between crazy and dangerous. Just looking bad is never enough, as, and I’m sure women everywhere can vouch for – I have never been harassed MORE than when I am greasy, sick, sweaty from athletics, or just generally wearing sweatpants. Set the bar low, men. You will never grab onto it.

I am quite certain that I drew the attention of no men whatsoever, clad in this newly christened Civil War coat. I imagined the jangle of my musket case, the beat of my revolutionary drum, the toot of my flute, and other such notions gathered from the entire span of American History. Plan backfired: the moment you appear brave and confident is the moment you are approached – this time, by a young woman. I was ascending the subway stairs, long coat hitched, prepared for battle. She bounded up next to me, breathlessly. We were all alone on the gray staircase, alone save for the mottled memories of chewing gum’s past, pebbled beneath our feet.

“Excuse me,” she said, confidentially. She was chewing gum and her lips were perfectly lacquered, crystalline and reflective. I began to feel nervous. Why? She looked NORMAL. What could this attractive young girl want with ME, the Civil War veteran? I racked my mind: she could, of course, be insane, or a criminal, but none of those warning bells were ringing in my head – just a strange self-consciousness, the ever-present and subtle Competition of the Female. With these thoughts trumpeting through my mind, like Joan of Arc’s distracting voices, I did not hear the girl’s request. “What?” I said, making a terrible face and squinting at her more closely.

“Would you mind looking at the back of my pants? And telling me if there’s anything on them?”

OH. Um, of course?

She ran up ahead of me, jeans perfect from behind, cinched belt, cropped jacket. Nothing.

“You’re fine!” I called up, and she threw me a dazzling smile, a distant light reflecting from her mirrored lips.

Truths:

-This is New York City. You are never the weirdest person in the room.
-This is New York City. You will never determine who the weirdest person in the room is.
-This is New York City.  You might sit down in fresh chewing gum.
-This is New York City. The girl with a regular coat will ask you to look at her ass in a public place, and you will not expect it.
-This is New York City. There exists a cross-cultural, pan-class, no-holds-barred sisterhood of the traveling pants.
-This is New York City. All costumes encouraged. Accepted. And ignored.

Do I recognize you from… that Palmolive commercial?

Best of the best: Writing Advice.

And then: one girl did it.  One Girl, One Novel.

New York, I Love You is on Netflix Instant now.  It is the worst. Let me prevent you from making that mistake.

I opened with feminism, I will close with it.