Payday!

With exactly $4 in my wallet and roughly $22 in my bank account, I got my first paycheck today - and that not only means that my net worth has multiplied a hundredfold, it also means that I can afford to go to Therapy and go to Marie's this weekend. Yay!

The saddest part is that that was not even the highlight of my evening. Lee moved the last of his stuff from Cambridge to New York today, to an apartment about five minutes away from mine. He called me at work to say that he stopped by Hi Rise this morning and saw Holly, who literally brightened every morning that we stopped by for coffee - so basically, every morning of my senior year - on the way to campus. When I couldn't stave off the carb lust, I would get these tiny cookie stars with my cup of coffee, and Lee called this afternoon at work to say that Holly sent a present to New York for me. And it was a bag of cookie stars. And not only a bag of cookie stars, but a bag of cookie stars decorated with fuzzy stickers of whales, elephants, birds, and bunnies. There are some things $2200 can't buy, and that is one of them.

Christine Pedi!

Maria and I met up on this side of the Atlantic (for the first time ever, I guess) to see Christine Pedi, who was AWESOME. Her Angela Lansbury was actually terrifying, and she came upstairs to hang out with our table afterwards and we talked about how difficult it is to voice Elaine Stritch. (I almost congratulated her for wearing pants, because when Brady and I saw Elaine Stritch and she did the whole show in tights and a button-down shirt. From the front row, you notice when people aren't wearing pants.)

The night was made more enjoyable because my dinner consisted of a raw carrot and a glass of chardonnay after I misjudged the time that I'd have to get back to make dinner. Thank goodness for grocery-shopping over lunch and carting a bag of carrots and a zucchini in my purse all day.

Buses and Wine

Three things you do not want to hear on a bus:

"Everybody hang tight, because we're running about an hour late."
"It's just like when you stab somebody and run."
"The thing about being incarcerated - and I speak from experience - is..."

The girl next to me smelled like old sweaters and tomato soup and kept muttering for people to shut the fuck up and then winking at me, which was weirdly reassuring as the rest of the bus had a lengthy conversation about the penal system.

(The highlight of my weekend was when David and I came across a table of bottles of wine and Dixie cups when we were shopping at Giant tonight, and we were like, um, can we drink these? So we did, and this woman popped around the corner and was like, "oh, I hope you two are 18!" and we laughed and reassured her that we were, and then she poured us another round of free samples. It was not until we were retelling the story six hours later when we were like, wait, 18? In retrospect, she may not have been an employee.)

Drinking, Liberally

Luckily, Lee and I took about 45 minutes to catch up over the phone before meeting up at this event last night, because it was not especially conducive to catching up after like nine months. We bumped into each other right by the door, which was lucky, because I promptly beelined to the bar, where they were like, um, registration is the other way, and then I got my wristband and charged for the kitchen, where they were like, the party is downstairs. We both killed our drinks with stunning rapidity and Lee got another round while Cleve Jones and Christine Quinn told us to go to DC and generally fired us up for equality. (I was like, "that guy in the corner is totally Lance Bass," and Lee was like, "pay attention.") And then we got a third round, and a little voice in the back of my mind told me that three drinks every twenty minutes is not an especially sustainable rate.

So then we went upstairs and I saw Sean (who longtime readers will remember as the Republican, which I can't call him anymore) and I more or less zoned out while Lee and Sean chatted about law and politics, because a) it was deafening and b) they've both dated the same guy and I think they'd heard a lot about each other, and I couldn't tell how weird it was that they were meeting for the first time and I was just standing there. (I began to think about the Camp David Accords, but I couldn't really change the topic of conversation.)

We ran into a couple of Lee's friends from law school that I hadn't seen in two years, and then a guy I knew who I literally hadn't seen since my first year of college. Two people I didn't know came up to me and remembered me from queer activism in college, and I was like, lovely, you're really seeing me in top form tonight. Then I bumped into my friend Andrew, who was one of the many people I was supposed to catch up with. And we did, and then I met a couple people from Columbia and NYU Law and harassed them about their programs and whether they liked them, and then was like, ha, I'm suddenly conscious of the fact that I have to go home and pack for a trip to DC tomorrow, and that I have to get up for a human rights conference in like six hours.

With all the people I bumped into, I think my plan to meet five people for drinks at once backfired, as I'm now having drinks with like eight people over the next two weeks. And this is after I kept telling people we should hang out on the Mall and then getting blank stares and then laughing uproariously.

Eating Bagels for the Next Week for Equality

As a present to myself for a day-long scavenger hunt through the footnotes of obscure UN documents, I bought a ticket to tomorrow night's fundraiser at Elmo for the National Equality March. I wasn't planning on doing this, mostly because I'm insanely poor until my paycheck arrives at the end of the month and this event costs more than I'm spending on groceries this week. But then it turned out that like five people that I've been meaning to grab a drink with are going to be there, and that actually makes it a fairly economical night on the town, especially when you factor in the open bar for Grey Goose cocktails. It's practically a MasterCard commercial, what with all the vodka and good friends and the somewhat flimsy pretense of striking a blow for justice. Which is good, because that is how I pay for these things when my checking account has dwindled to the double digits.

Glad We're On the Same Page

Bouncer at Splash: "I'm going to need to see your ID, because you look like you're twelve."
Me: "And I will give it to you, because that is the look I'm going for."

One Great City!

I'm not sure whether this is because my work keeps me legitimately busy or because I'm in a city that does not shut down at 5pm, but I feel like the pace of my life has increased tenfold since I got back into the swing of things in New York. On Thursday, I went to Williamsburg for the Weakerthans concert and it was MAGICAL. As I was waiting for the concert, I stopped to read at a cafe where this guy was like, "would you watch my bike?" and I was like, "sure!" because it was neon yellow and hey, that's pretty easy. When he came back, he was like, "what are you reading?" and I said "Proust" and even though that is maybe the most toolish possible answer to that question, I think I recovered when he asked how the book was and I confessed that I had made it as far as page eight. We had a really good chat about Proust, and folk rock, and Brooklyn, and realized that we live in the same neighborhood, and then he invited me to his gallery opening and said his name and I was very calm but inside I was like, holy crap, even I know who you are. And we were like, hey, let's run into each other at our local bread store and basically he's my new best friend.

The concert was pretty good, too. They pretty much played every good song ever, including a singalong to One Great City! that more or less made my life. And one of the last songs in the second encore was Watermark, which is one of the five songs on my Top Five Self-Defining Pop Culture Playlist. WIN.

So I left with a glow, and then on the subway platform I ran into this girl named Jenna and the night just got better. (Everyone at Harvard will know who I'm talking about when I say that we hugged twice and that I suspect that she has not stopped spelling her name with two exclamation points at the end and that she's AWESOME.) She is like the most carbonated person I know, and maybe the most fun person to bump into on a subway platform, ever.

And then we amped it up with Brady's birthday on Friday. And David arriving for the weekend, and shopping for curtains, and spending the day studying in Central Park. And then our first dinner party, complete with brie and wine and everybody sitting on the floor because the Emmys were on but we had no chairs. I'm worried that I'll keep finding that I don't have time to blog, and not worried for precisely the same reason.