quelquefois

Between ten-thirty and midnight, on my hour and a half commute back home to Queens from the Lower East Side, I saw a beautiful man. Not sexy, not hot–beautiful. His skin was tan, with a sheen of orange brushed over his skin. It contrasted well with his light blue shirt. His hair seemed to bounce freely with the shakes and sways of the subway, but carried enough weight to drop down to his brow bone. It was slightly greyed, yet that seemed justified, evidenced by his commuting home at this hour. His facial hair had already started to gather at his chin and cheeks after just shaving this morning. But it was his bright blue eyes (the prettiest blue I have ever seen) that made him seem at least fifteen years younger than he probably is. When you make eye contact, they pierce you.

He paid no attention to anyone else on the train, completely immersed in the morning’s Wall Street Journal. A new one would hit the streets in less than five hours, and I wondered when he’d be able to read it. His cool demeanor contrasted with his cuff links–a silver starlike shape bursting across the fabric. Similarly, chest hairs creeped from where he took his tie off and unbuttoned his shirt.

I imagined what his life must be like. He’s at least modest enough to live in Queens and not in the Upper East Side, where I imagine all Wall Streeters and the other suits must live. Perhaps he does live ther. His fingers were bare. He could just as well be staying with a significant other, lover, partner, fling. Perhaps an artist, someone who could balance out his 70-hour-workweek-caffiene-addicted-money-obsessed lifestyle.

He could cook fancy meals, but often opts for the quickest solution to his hunger–perhaps a microwave dinner. His home has art. Paintings, oil. He wishes he had a dog–Golden Retriever–but does not have the time for one. He must be simple and undemanding in some aspects, but very high-maintenance in others…

From 43rd Street until my stop, I kept thinking about what this man could be like. By 36th Ave, I was already forgetting why I was even thinking about this in the first place. I had no interest in him, personally, emotionally, sexually, or otherwise. Perhaps I needed to take my mind off of myself; perhaps because he was the first beautiful man I’ve seen in New York City so far; perhaps it was simply those blue eyes.

The subway stopped at 30th Ave. He didn’t look up from his paper, and it was time for me to go.

Waiting for the thunderstorms to pass while I sit on the floor at Barnes & Noble on 86th and Lexington.
Waiting until I’m hungry so I have an incentive to move from where I am.
Maybe just waiting until they close, and I am forced out.
Waiting for people to respond to my e-mails.
Waiting over 8 hours for my uncle to finish entertaining his guests.
Waiting over 8 hours for my uncle to come into Manhattan so that we can pack the car with my belongings.
Waiting over 8 hours to imagine my uncle telling me it’s too late to move anything.
Waiting until the moment when I can scream inside my head at my uncle, “Well then, why didn’t you come earlier?!”
Waiting to wear the same outfit for the fourth day in a row.

I’m tired of waiting.

How do I even begin to detail the last week of my life? I met a crazy but compassionate super gay rock star on the bus to D.C. While in D.C., I caught up with my dearest friends and had a wonderful time, despite the 106 degree heat and losing my phone. I came back from D.C. and started work. I bought Raid Ant & Cockroach killer and had a ball spraying my entire apartment and killing the small creepy crawlers on sight.

Some point during the week, I realised that I was also getting bumps on my body. I, being the psychosomatic nutcase that I am, self-diagnosed myself as having bedbugs. Once I did so, I started itching all over and noticing more red bumps show up. If that wasn’t enough, late Thursday evening, an American cockroach (you know, the huge, 2-inch long ones with wings, the one that can run up to 3.3 mph) crawled, ran, and flapped its horrible, horrible wings in my apartment and proceeded to give me a panic/anxiety attack. We probably made eye-to-antennae contact a few times when I shouted in dread whenever it moved.

How could I ever imagine sleeping with that (and potentially thousands more lurking in the building) crawling all over the place? I was going to make a run for it. The insect took a temporary leave behind some boxes on the far wall of the kitchen. I bolted into the bedroom to gather my essentials when it zooms back into my room. I am cornered into the bathroom.

Cue war cry and hysterical spraying of Raid Ant and Cockroach spray.

I was immobilized for forty or so minutes in the bathroom. Scared that any moment, it would pop up right by my toes. I finally convinced myself to grab everything, not look back, and get out.

And so began my three days as a homeless person.

It was about 2:30, 3 a.m. in the morning. I call 311, NYC’s local assistance line.
Me: Do you have any numbers of places I can stay tonight?
311 Operator: What? You mean like a homeless shelter?
Me: I’m not homeless….I meant a hotel.

I stayed at three different places on three different nights. First, I intruded on a friend of a friend’s apartment. I was relieved to know that I did not have bedbugs. This, unfortunately, did not solve the cockroach problem. The following day I didn’t go near my apartment. I booked lunches, dinners, apartment viewings, and arranged to sleep at another friend’s place.

Unfortunately again, I barely slept last night because one of her roommates found bed bugs. This time it was legit. Shit, I thought, where am I going to go at 4 a.m. in the morning? There was no way I was going to lie down on the couch in the common room. I tried calling hostels; I tried walking back and forth for as long as I could to pass the time; I contemplated sleeping at a 24-hour Starbucks or a train station; I also thought I could ride the subway back and forth until morning. Around 5:30 a.m., I passed out for twenty to thirty minutes on the kitchen table, where flies from the neighboring trash pile landed on my body.

I caved. I laid down for a few minutes, but then the flies started to land on my body again. It was about 6:30 a.m. I got up. Soon after, I noticed two white/reddish welts on my body. The fucking bedbugs! I left the apartment immediately.

It was a long, long, looonnng morning and afternoon. I could be standing and I’d start nodding off. But, wait, it ends well: I found a wonderful place in Astoria, Queens that I can immediately move into.

It was hard to stay positive throughout this entire process. Many times I broke down and cried, wishing that I could be home or with a friend. I was grateful for the emotional support I received from friends, but it was hard to fight this battle physically alone. I’m trying to put it all behind me, but there won’t be a moment in these coming weeks when I don’t mistake a black dot on the ground or a piece of dark lint on my shirt for a cockroach.

I’m doing everything I’ve wanted to do since struggling through my thesis in March. I haven’t left the house,  and sometimes it seems even the bathroom is too far. I’ve been reading the news, reading magazine articles, browsing graphic and web design sites, writing, organizing my photographs, and listening to wonderful music.

Unfortunately, I could not afford to do most of those aforementioned activities. I have a long overdue project for a professor at Brown. I have been slaving away on a seat (that would better fit a Barbie doll than my ass) for the past several hours trying to finish it by Friday morning. I have to send this, and other things (i.e., that damn $115 parking ticket payment) in the mail. So what is this project I’m working on? I have to code Chinese language government websites to determine whether they have certain features such as: presence of publications, databases, and services (if so, how many? Is there a user fee? Can you pay by credit card? Digital signature?), comment forms, a means of  providing updates to users (e.g., RSS, subscriptions), among other things. It’s a tedious process, but I like the professor and it pays fairly well.

What’s even more painful is that since I do not have an ethernet/wireless connection, I have to use this shitty little USB mobile wireless card that makes me want to peel my skin off while I wait for pages to load. It also does not help when Chinese government websites all look like this. Seriously? Who needs that much text on one page?

Like I could not spend the entire day browsing everything at my fingertips on the internet, I’m also saving some money. After spending over $75 on food within the first few days of being in New York City, I had to check myself. I have reverted to money saving behaviors such as not leaving the house (I’m so fucking good at this) and eating what’s around the house. This includes: eating old berries bought in Connecticut while on my way back to Providence to prepare for moving to New York (translation: pretty fucking old); eating an entire box of Annie’s Macaroni and Cheese for a late lunch so I won’t be hungry at dinner; getting full of of $1 Miller Lites at a bar; and making a huge pitcher of iced tea and drinking it to subside hunger pangs.

All in all, life is pretty balanced. Splurging with frugality, indulgences with work.

I went to the MoMA with a friend (and her family friends) on Sunday. Some of my favorite pieces are…First, Vasily Kadinsky’s Four Panels. I looooove his use of color, and how he believed that color exemplifies emotion. He has said, “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with the strings.” Second, Dorothea Lange’s photography is beautiful, and revolutionized documentary style photography. I also love her because many of her pieces are from the Bay Area in the early 1900s, and it’s fascinating what something so familiar to me now looked 60 years ago. She serves as a role model. Third, Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World (below left). I found this piece interesting because it’s almost identical to a piece by one of my favorite photographers, Ellen Kooi (below right). Observe:

Those are a few highlights of my visit. I really liked the contemporary art exhibits, as well, although some of it bordered on kitsch.

My friend and I had made it to the second floor Prints and Illustrated Books exhibit when I started to feel sore in my entire body. I stretched, and one of the guards came up to me and said jokingly, “There’s no exercising in the museum.” He introduced himself as Nelly. He is from Jamaica, Queens. He asked where I am from, and if I am an artist. I told him I am in New York City for the summer, and that I did documentary style photography, but by no means would I consider myself an “artist.”

“Nah, that’s an artist all right!” He started spewing off names of photographers that I may or may not have actually heard of. I nodded instinctively while he did this.

He told me that I could photograph him playing chess, “a beautiful game,” or even poker. He told me he would show me the real New York, “none of this fancy artsy shit you see ’round here.” He proceed to give me his number and ended with, “You gon’ holla at me, right?”

Now, I’m not naïve to the point that I don’t know what it means when someone gives me a phone number. And believe me, there isn’t a single thought in my head that makes me want to do anything in any horizontal position with him. But what if I did want to see a different side of New York? Could I be making a new friend? What’s the protocol for this type of situation?

I was having a dream about cupcakes. Boxes of cupcakes with buttercream frosting smeared heavily on each sugared cupcake floated amongst the crowd. My friends and I were watching some mediocre performance put on by a school. I got my fingers around the sugary jewel and was just about to bite into it when, all of a sudden, loud bursts of a man and woman yelling pierce into my dream.

That’s because some Cantonese family is fighting outside my window and has been yelling for the past twenty minutes at each other. Many times in those past twenty minutes I wanted to shout what little Cantonese I knew at them and end it with a, “Shut up!”

It’s times like this I wish I had inquired about the “culture” of this area, as well as: a) physical dimensions of the apartment, b) the condition of the A/C unit, c) the presence of insects, and d) whether or not pigeons were breeding and nursing their young outside my window, before I decided to move in to this apartment. I guess this is a lesson for next time!

I know earlier I said that you could trade places with mice, but I would like to rescind my offer. I understand the ubiquitousness of your presence (as well as the interminability of it), so I have, in these past 36-48 hours, conceded to your creepy crawly selves. Instead, whenever I see you around the house, I have my Clorox Cleaning Solution with Bleach to spray you with. (HAHA HA, DIE!)

But hey, I can always ask again: please leave?

Thanks.

Sincerely,
Cockroach’s #1 Enemy

I know you’re very resilient creatures, surviving wave after wave of civilization as far back as the Stone Age (or something like that, but I’m not going to check Wikipedia to fact-check because there will undoubtedly be a photo of you, and that will make me faint), but do you really have to come into my [temporary] home? I know, I’m living on the ground floor of an apartment building that borders Chinatown, but seriously, can you cut me a little slack? At least you could be considerate enough not to bombard the place with your presence. One or two every so often would be tolerable. Or hey, how about this, you can invite your pest friends, mice, to come take your place. At least we’re in the same class of animals.

Are you preparing me for life in China? I remember you and your over 2-inch long selves often surprised me by coming up from the shower drain and paying my room a visit. Well guess what? When I get an apartment, I’m going to find one on the 210398120420th floor so you can’t get there.

Sincerely,
A panic-stricken tenant in the Lower East Side

I finally made it to Manhattan. I had to drop a friend who was traveling with me off on the Upper West Side before I could move in. After dropping her off, I careened down Henry Hudson Parkway slash West End Highway slash 500 million other names Highway to Canal Street. I know that Canal Street hits East Broadway, which is one block away from where I want to be. But there’s this thing called the Manhattan Bridge that intersects the street. Not wanting to get honked at for turning out of the wrong lane to avoid getting on the bridge, I decided to see if maybe, just maybe, I could get to the other side of Canal Street by going straight………………….straight onto the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn.

It wasn’t fear of getting lost that gave me cold chills down my back. Rather, I thought, “Oh god, please don’t have a humongous toll charge at the end of this bridge. Please don’t take any more of my money, New York, I am already so poor.” Repeat this thought exactly 79 times.

Luckily, there was no toll, but the question now was, “How the fuck do I get back to Manhattan?” After about 20 minutes of driving in perpetual circles, I found my way back Manhattan. When I found my block, I circled around (circles should be the theme of this story) and–oh my god, did I just find a parking spot in Manhattan that’s actually close to my intended location?

I parked and immediately started moving boxes and bags of my things into the apartment. After a while, I came back to get the last of my stuff, when I noticed a bright orange envelope on the windshield. Ahhh shit. I parked within 6 feet of a fire hydrant, and now I have to pay $115 for it. Oh, New York, you always find some way to get me back and make me poorer.

I took that as a sign that it was time to return the car that I had paid over $200 to rent. Even though I paid for the entire tank of gas, I didn’t even use half of the tank. I had thought of doing donuts in Times Square to use up some more gas, but decided against it to, you know, conserve energy.

Now I’m sitting in a café, writing in my blog, and drinking iced coffee. How metropolitan of me.

Towards the end of finals this semester, underclassmen and seniors alike continually asked me, “So…how does it feel to be done?” After so many times of hearing that question asked, the default response becomes, “Great!” Or, “Finally!” But now that the underclassmen have gone home, the seniors are partied out from Senior Week, and the words start to flow out of the speakers’ mouths, the feeling of closure really starts to sink in.

It doesn’t really feel great, but it definitely feels good to be done with that routine. At least temporarily. It seems like the consensus among my peers. But at the same time, a lot of people seem unready to cope with this closure. Those who feel that way say, “I’ll see you soon! We don’t have to say goodbye yet.”

If there is a word to describe the past week or so, I think it’d be “rollercoaster.” My life has been a whirlwind of love and spite, laughs and tears, frustration and content–just a huge amalgamation of emotions. I am unspeakably sad, but happy from all the memories created in the past four years. Most importantly, though, I am absolutely ready to move on. I was ready to say some goodbyes, even though I did not say as many as I should have or could have. But I know that those who matter to me most will never be too far, even as I fly off to another country in August.

Speaking of flying to other countries, I got notified earlier on 30 May that I received both a language enhancement award as well as gain acceptance into my study abroad program in the fall for that language award. Things are finally coming together, and before I know it, I’ll be on flying on a jet plane to China!

Tomorrow, I will be completely moving in to my NYC apartment. Having already moved a carload of stuff to the place, I thought that I’d only need to take a bus and a subway to get to my Lower East Side abode. Unfortunately, things started amassing and I realised that I needed to rent a car. Wooosh. That’s the sound of money disappearing from my bank account. Well, regardless of being a huge financial kick in the ass, I am really excited to be living in Manhattan this summer.