In the meantime, I’ll be periodically posting mp3 mix tapes.  This one is basically for stoners, and it’s best enjoyed outside on randomized order.  A soul one is coming soon and you can probably expect more after that (depending on how long the redesign takes).

Tracklist and a mediafire link are after the jump.

DOWNLOAD ZIP FILE HERE (7zip is a free and user-friendly unzipping software, if you don’t already have something)

Song......................Artist..........................Album
You and I.................Washed Out......................Adult Swim Singles
Take Shelter..............Active Child....................Curtis Lane 
Strangers In The Wind.....Cut Copy........................In Ghost Colours
Sometimes.................Beach Fossils...................S/T LP  
Round And Round...........Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti...Before Today 
Just Wait Til Next Year...John Maus.......................Songs  
Friend of the Night.......Teen Inc........................Fountains 7"
Fly Like an Eagle.........Steve Miller Band...............Fly Like an Eagle
Feel It All Around........Washed Out......................Life of Leisure 
Do Your Best..............John Maus.......................Love Is Real 
Darlin'...................Dead Meadow.....................Three Kings  
Cortez the Killer.........Neil Young......................Zuma 
Chinatown.................Wild Nothing....................Gemini  
Can't Hear My Eyes........Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti...Before Today
Air Supply................Sweet Trip......................You Will Never Know Why

If you like this, allow me to also plug Rachel and my DJ night (every 2nd Thursday of the month at Enid’s) as well as DJ Overgold’s (wayyyyy to many to mention, but he’s highly google-able).  See you all again when we land,

Guten Morgan

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.]

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.

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.

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.

So my back is strong. Suitcase schmootcase. Fanny pack schmanny pack. One trip to India and I realize I have long been neglecting an additional surface area for goods: the top of my head. One trip to India and I realize that life in the city prepares you to be unfazed by anything, anywhere.

A common misconception of Other Countries is that they will be “dirty.” OK, if by “dirty” you mean there is actual dirt on the streets, then you might be correct. After a week in India the bottoms of my feet were brown and hardened, ready to walk on coals, maybe. But let’s get one thing straight here: I will not wear sandals in New York. Not if I can help it, not if I have a lot of walking to do. In India the filth was recognizable as organic matter; sand, dust, soil. In New York, I come home with black feet. Black. I would send a swab in for analysis but frankly, I don’t care to know. Chemical detritus, oozing from a methadone clinic, tar, coffee leaked from the bottom of a breakfast cart. Melted plastic bags, from a bodega. Cigarette ash. The shoe leather of all those who have gone before. Gangrene, necrosis.

A common misconception about India is that it will smell. It will smell like an apartment building in Queens, it will smell like all the worst moods of cumin. It will smell like shoes taken off and left outside and like poverty, like the heavy pollution of a country dragging itself into the future. Well. Let me tell you about the smells in India. First: I was spared cumin by way of being far South, as the full seed is preferred to the pulverized in traditional Southern dishes. Any unfamiliar scents on the street were quickly masked by the abundance of fresh jasmine flowers, sold in garlands on the street and strung through the braids of women’s hair. I smelled dosas and samosas and God knows it is impossible to smell a cucumber but for the sake of artistry I will suggest that I did. I also smelled sewer. I also smelled urine. The only difference here was the unexpected; in New York I know which acrid corners to avoid on my regular paths. We will not discuss this now, but men, like dogs, are creatures of habit.

So a city is a city, mass quantities of humans gathered in patience and consternation to live together. I’m not talking about globalization or Americanization or the surprising number of fried chicken restaurants I stumbled across in Chennai. I’m saying that no matter where the city is, if you already live in one, you’re all set.

There will come a time, New Yorkers, when you will be tested.

You won’t know it at first, discombobulated by time zones and boarding passes. You will think it is just your city-slicker savvy; you will say to yourself, “I can get used to anything.” Well forgive me while I testify to the greatest vacation of all:

A vacation from unwanted public conversation and street-side interrogation; a vacation from cat-calls.

I just got back from Chennai, a steamy, tropical city on the east coast of southern India. Was I a Spectacle? Yes. After we’d been at the family home a few days, the housekeeper smiled at me confidentially and pointed at my face.

“WHITE. EYES.” She told me, grinning.  “WHITE!”

We would take an auto-rickshaw around town, and when stopped in traffic, men and women alike would peer into the backseat and take a polite gander. They would avert their eyes after a brief interval, leaving me with the impression that I was a radiant princess, a glowing icon, so unusually pale as to be some form of holy ghost.

I would lower my eyelids, bashfully. See how peaceful I am? Can we remember, for a moment, the daily melodramatic lesbian domestic dispute outside of my Brooklyn apartment? Can we remember the grunted obscenities, hurled at me – and all women – at any given moment on the phlegm spatter streets of New York? But I wasn’t remembering that, because the dollar was strong, the handicrafts were stunning, the food was tantalizing, and it was a perfect 81 degrees Fahrenheit.

My suspicions don’t just sink to the bottom, weighed amply with treats and souvenirs. We left the city for the day, to visit some ancient temples on the coast. Suddenly, I was not the only fair tourist around. A group of teen-aged boys was gathered near the base of a giant rock, milling, and laughing, as boys do. My instincts flared up; I sensed I was the object of some mockery. I muttered something under my breath, and my friend, (who lives in the most optimistic locale, Berkeley) admonished me with friendly optimism:

“It’s Sunday! They have they day off. They are just trying to enjoy themselves.”

We trudged on, making our way down the side of the cliff.

“Wait a minute,” she said, stopping. Fluent in Tamil, she listened for a minute.

“What are they saying?” I demanded, furrowing my sweaty brow.

“They are saying – Go on! Now’s your chance! Say something to her, in English!”

these guys.

I dropped my cynicism off the side of the cliff.

For the rest of the day, I smiled directly at anyone interested. Occasionally, I would benefit from a short conversation. It went something like this.

Indian Local: HELLO.

Me: Hi!

Indian Local: Hi!

And then, having completed the first course in Conversational English, we would walk on.

My joie de vivre stayed with me all through the week, through to my final day.  I had to return to the airport in the dead of night for the impending 22 hour voyage.  Having lugged my suitcases through the main lobby and been stickered and inspected by several bureaucratic officials, I came to the check-in desk.

“Where are you headed?” asked the polite young man, and I told him: Abu Dhabi, then New York.

He giggled nervously. “Haven’t you seen the news in the last few days?”

“No. I am on vacation,” I replied, smiling.

“JFK is closed due to extreme fog!” he said, eyes wide with concern. Another clerk came over, looking worried.

“Oh.” I said. “When is the next flight?”

“Tomorrow night,” they said, wincing.

I was thrilled. Another day of sunshine and spicy dosas.

“OK! Thank you!” I said, brightly and turned to walk away.

“Wait!” he called out. “May I ask what you were doing here, in Chennai?”

I took a moment to explain to him about my trip, my friends, and their family who live nearby.

“Are you single?” he asked, seriously.

“Fresh!” I admonished him, grinning, and turned, wheeling my suitcase with a squeak and heading back into the inky, steamy night.

I need to leave my house at precisely 8:23 or else everything falls apart. I need to have a cup of coffee and get my tights on and leave at that exact time, allowing for the broken door handle, the depth of my handbag and the inevitable dig for the spiky key cluster, the potential for ice on the sidewalk, the height of a heel, the geometry of walking.

At 8:21 the other morning, my private reverie, my somnambulant choreography was jolted out of sync by a mysterious cry from outside. Whatever it was, it was hysterical, loud, and unceasing. Stamping my foot in consternation I ran to the window and threw up the sash. There she was, squatting at my gate. Squatting, in cartoon print pajamas, arms to God, wailing:

“IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII JUUUUUUUUUUST WAAAAAANT TO DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIE!”

“The lesbians are at it again,” I yelled up the stairs to my roommate, who I could hear shuffling about at the uproar.

If I leaned into my bookshelf and squinted, I was able to see the partner in crime; a squat woman in a leather jacket. She stood, helpless, hands at her sides. The time was now 8:22. The pivotal minute. “I’m going to be late,” I muttered. It is, however, a personal policy of mine not to place myself physically between a woman with a death wish and her erstwhile lover.  Our little local Lindsay Lohan & Sam Ronson, not to pigeon hole all on-again off-again drug addicted female lovers, but, there you have it.

My cousin once lived across the street from a purported methamphetamine lab. Sure enough, one day, it blew up, and a Hazmat team was called to clean up the wreckage. My cousin, just as curious as me – but more intrepid- approached a Hazmat worker and told a little lie. She told him that she had given these neighbors a spare key, and could she possibly go inside and retrieve it? Well, as you may or may not know, you require a Hazmat suit to enter an exploded methamphetamine lab so she was denied access; but the friendly worker, plastic mask and all, offered juicy details about the interior of the house: burned spoons, etc.

With my cousin’s love of underbelly, I alerted her to the presence of the warring lovers.

“I wonder where they live,” I said.

“Follow them,” she replied.

It turns out they live about four or five houses down from me, in a mysterious living arrangement with a third party male. One night, coming home from work, I noticed the three of them turning the corner just behind me. It is difficult to follow someone from ahead, but I slowed my pace to eavesdrop into their grunted conversation. I regret to inform you that it was the least intelligible human communication I have ever witnessed. What was not unintelligible, however, was the depth of the pajama woman’s despair, and so, we return to our scene.

Fortunately for my job security, she managed to pick herself up from the low squat that blocked my exit. Down the block she went, lover in tow, wailing all the way.  I tiptoed down the front stairs, opening the door gingerly, locking it with careful intention. Looking over my shoulder all the while, but subtly, so they would not notice me, noticing them.  They stood at the end of the block, silently, staring off into space when I finally walked past, feigning disinterest. Then it occurred to me: they had no inclination that their little show was the morning pay-per-view special for the entire block. They had no concept of the echo chamber effect of a double-brownstone street. And as far as I could tell, they had no weapons, save for a huge dose of shamelessness and a powerful set of vocal chords.

Until next time,

Horrible tale of street-side interrogation? Disgusting unwanted public conversation? Also does anyone know if that red headed woman on the other side of the streets is, in fact, a prostitute, former or current?  If not, then why does she keep using the pay phone?

Email me at: spectacle@glassesglasses.org

At this point in my life as a megalopolis-explorer, I am smart enough to know what I don’t know.  Which is to say: don’t take any chances.   On the weekends, when the cackling puppeteers at the MTA set out to ruin us all, one must be especially on their guard.  East side? West side. Up is down, green is red, numbers lose all assigned meaning.  I gave myself ample time, I brought a book, and a bottle of wine: as a party favor, of course, but I like to imagine that it could also be used as an effective bludgeon.

I was mindful of my numbers, two, three, and made the appropriate transfer while still in the familiar confines of Manhattan.  I waited for the train, and, herewith is my first fatal error, gleefully noted the availability of seats on a further car.  Hurrying along the bumpy yellow edge of the platform, I boarded swiftly, proudly, let’s remember about my (faux) fur coat here, shall we…oh lord.  At the end of the powder blue expanse of seats, a hunched man, buried in his coat, the mountain source of the river, the Amazon of filth; streaming along the entire shiny seat and flowing into the failed metaphor of an ocean, the floor, the floor, the floor, my… sandals.

Let us note the importance of a rigorous yoga practice, which allowed me to maintain a sense of calm and a contorted lunge, warrior two on the two train- salvaging most of the bottom half of my high-heeled sandals.  Sandals:  fatal error number two. Express trains: only good when you want to be on them.  From 42nd to 72nd I breathed deeply, though not through my nose, and waited.

Once I was on a different, drier car, I thought my problems were over.  Life lesson: your problems are never over.  The train idled in the station, first stop in the Bronx, and as it idled, the people grew restless.  Then, the dreaded announcement: “Ladies and Gentleman, we have a sick passenger on the train…” It seemed that the man from the next car had, in his liquefied stupor, attempted to get up and was immediately rejected by gravity. Or rather, accepted.

“Throw him off the train and let’s go!” screamed one eager woman. The chorus grunted in approval.  The two high-school aged kids standing by me hung out of the train, trying to get a peek at the action.  An energetic middle-aged man in sportswear walked over to our open train door and gave us the blow-by-blow.  Finally, the EMT came strolling in, and yes, I did just use the word “strolling,” though perhaps “sauntering” might be more appropriate, given his tortois-ian speed.  At this point I had been on a subway for one hour and forty five minutes.  Worst of all, no one wanted to talk to me.  I tried to describe my experience with the pee puddle to the kids in front of me, who looked at me warily and forced a half-smile.  Oh, I guess I wouldn’t want to talk to me either; lone white girl in a fur coat, all “I’ve got pee on my shoes!”

I had to talk to someone, though, if I was going to figure out how to get out of there.  I was one stop away from the party, but one stop of what?  One stop in the South Bronx?  Was it five blocks, seven blocks, seventeen blocks?  One block, but of open gun warfare, gang vs. gang?  Jesus Christ, I told myself, this is not Kabul.

I remembered, then, middle school.  I was, unfortunately for everyone, on the soccer team and our first game was against girls from a wealthy suburban school.  They played poorly and it turned out that they had thrown a fit on the bus ride over, weeping and shaking and fearing for their lives.  Yes, the girls of the inner-city soccer team were going to beat them up.  Though I held that story with a sense of pride, hey, people thought we were tough, it is also humiliating.  I could not ask someone at the train station if it would be safe for me to walk, when clearly, they do it themselves, every day.  I asked instead, how far, and five blocks seemed do-able.

The only danger?  Sore feet, bruised ego… fashionably late.  Oh, and every cab driver slowed down to give me their opinion.

“Mami! You too pretty to be walking outside!” Too pretty? Aw, shucks.  It’s just the coat.

I have my spies now, intrepid reporters, walking the streets and riding the public transportation of America’s finest cities with their eyes wide open; both in eager anticipation to – and in abject horror at – what they see.

Lately, a text message from a friend in Boston.

In just a few, typed, characters, she was able to convey the horror of her situation.  Without power of gesture, tonality, or facial expression, she transmitted this story of horror to me via her cellular telephone:

She was sitting on the T, riding to work.  I understand that mornings are a difficult time, especially in the dark of winter.  To drag oneself out of bed and into the public sphere is painful and should be avoided at all costs.  I understand, as a woman, that an important step before entering the public sphere is the application of some sort of makeup.  When the sun is furthest from the earth and our (my) skin turns sickly white, a little rouge never did anyone any harm.  And I understand that sometimes, yes, sometimes, this delicate application process simply must happen on public transportation.  Fine.  No one is arguing about that, today, anyway.  I’ve done it.  Maybe you have, too.  What I have certainly never done is use tweezers to remove hairs from my chin while riding the subway.

And that, I am sickened to tell you, is exactly what this woman did.

Discuss.

I used to get a ride to theater camp with a friend and her mother.  At a red light, she would slam down on the brakes and smack open the sun visor to get a look in the mirror.  She used this opportunity, and the bright morning light, to pluck her eyebrow hairs.  We were young and thought it was pretty funny, but we were concerned when she reached for the gray feather hanging from the rear-view mirror, fanning it over her body at yield signs, stop signs, left turns; “Girls, I am balancing my chakras.”

You know how there’s that thing, the law of multiples, or whatever, where when you learn a new word and then you start hearing it everywhere?  Unfortunately, in my line of work, or rather, blog, when someone brings up one disgusting thing, I begin to see that particular offense everywhere.  Imagine my nauseous delight when I was able to text message my friend back, one-upping her with a second tweezer-related tale.

I was riding the subway (obviously) this time during the middle of the day, perhaps it was a Saturday.  Engrossed in my book, I hardly noticed the woman who sat down across from me, but I grew distracted by the unusual motions I saw over the top of my novel.  The woman, who upon closer inspection was or had at one recent point been considered a man, was stunning. Johnny Depp, maybe, in lite drag.  She wore winter boots, jeans, a red fleece jacket.  She carried one crutch, gingerly resting across her legs, which jutted out comfortably across the train car floor. She had taken her long hair out of its elastic band and was grasping handfuls of it with her strong hands, scrunching and styling.  Flipping her head over, she continued this serious task, filling the train with the fresh smell of shampoo.  I was entranced with her beauty, but had begun to realize I was staring.  I turned back to my book.  I looked up again.  She was applying hot-pink lipstick.  Back to my book.  Now she was eating sour gummy candies from a small yellow package.  I turned the page, and the words blurred into a great gray cloud as I looked up again, what was she doing? Oh. Scratching-off a scratch-off ticket with the back of a metal pair of tweezers.

Thank you.

What is confusing to me about the whole thing is that the point of makeup or hair removal is beauty.  For these bold, urban citizens, however, their preening has some specific target.  I don’t know who he is but he is not riding this train.  Public transit riders may be ’saving the earth’ by cutting down on carbon emissions, but let’s not underestimate the psychic pollution caused by unobstructed vanity.