where I live

I live in a neighborhood in south Brooklyn that few people have ever heard of, even other Brooklynites. I'd like to keep it that way. Too many Brooklyn neighborhoods have of late been colonized by youngish people priced out of Manhattan, and their new neighborhoods have become trendy and expensive (Williamsburg, for instance, and Greenpoint and Bushwick). Ours may not be at risk of falling victim to this trend as we're not very close to Manhattan, but I'm still not going to name it. Suffice is to say that we're somewhat near Sheepshead Bay.

It had been a working-class Italian neighborhood, but most of the Italians are gone. There are still a few Italian grocery stores and restaurants. But for the most part, the neighborhood is mixed working-class. Avenue U is the main drag. On the opposite side of U from where we live, there is a colony of rich Orthodox Syrian Jews, who live in large private homes. So we also have a decent smattering of kosher food stores and other stores that cater to the wealthy (designer clothing, fancy tabletop goods, fine jewelry). It's basically a safe, family-oriented neighborhood.

There are a number of industrial businesses under the elevated subway line (about five blocks from us); the jewelry company where I used to work is one of them. There are quite a few factories and auto repair shops. It's the only stretch of the neighborhood that's less than pleasant. Quite a few Mexicans and South Americans work there, so there are some Mexican businesses near the subway - including a little grocery where I can always get good mangoes and avocados.

The only thing we don't really have is a good supermarket. There's a Met Food about fifteen blocks away, but it's a pretty old market, narrow aisles etc., and I don't trust any of their perishables. But they're not bad for packaged foods. There's an excellent Shop-Rite a few subway stops away - we used to shop there, carry our perishables back on the train, and have the rest delivered. But they won't deliver to our area any more. We used Fresh Direct for a while (shop online and they deliver), but we had problems with spoiled meat a few times (though they always gave a store credit, no questions asked), and the prices aren't that great. So we're back to mixed shopping. Paper goods and cat products at a few cheapie places nearby; chicken and pork and beef from an Italian deli; other groceries, wherever. Produce is a bit of a problem. A wonderful kosher produce store closes during the summer, and is only open on weekdays the rest of the year. There is a really shitty produce market up toward Met Food; every time I go in there, everything looks pretty icky except the bananas. I shop some at the Union Square Greenmarket, near my office, especially this time of year, when there are great tomatoes and stone fruit. I've recently discovered Trader Joe's, also near my office, which has canned tuna at a great price and other useful groceries. It's basically impossible to get a decent loaf of whole-grain bread where I live, so I've been buying unsliced loaves at the Greenmarket, but just discovered whole-grain bread at Trader Joe's for a dollar less. (Counting pennies, as always.)

We have a great mom-and-pop pharmacy near us for prescriptions, and a Rite-Aid for discount-drug-store stuff (cosmetics, shampoo, deodorant). We have a store called Meats Supreme which is good for cold cuts, but we've gotten spoiled meat from them as well. (Got a couple of well-priced and excellent packs of beef and pork from Trader Joe' recently.)

For fish, we're a short bus ride from the second-largest Chinatown in Brooklyn, with many groceries full of gently priced fresh seafood. You can get salmon fillet at $5.99 a pound, which is mostly what I crave. We also sometimes buy white fillets of some sort (sole, flounder, etc) and occasionally shrimp. There is a kosher fish market a few blocks from where we live, but it is quite expensive and of course you can't get things like shrimp.

I don't consider our neighborhood all that great for walking, and we don't have a park of any sort. But we're decently close to Coney Island (a few train stops) and not that far from Prospect Park (two buses).

We've been there about six years and doubt we'll be moving any time soon (although we'd love a bigger apartment). It's still cheap, we have a good landlord, and you need all kind of good credit and hefty income to rent an apartment these days.

things that dance on my head

Money (lack thereof) is dancing on my head, and depression is dancing on my head, and I'm sure they're in some way related.  I keep ending up in these situations a week or a week and a half before payday where I have $100 to last 10 days, or $45 to last a week, and none of it is due to carelessness.  We just don't have enough coming in.  So the least little pressure in any part of my life makes me cry -- or sometimes it doesn't have to be pressure.  I cry when I leave home in the morning, and I cry when I get home at night.  I cry at work.

Work is fine but crazy-busy coming up to the first day of class (Monday), and my fall intern punked out on me, isn't coming.  But I'm also worrying about what kind of health insurance they'll be able to provide, since the clock is ticking on our Medicaid (we only have it until September 30).  Any kind of co-pay is simply going to murder us.  Barry is already going to food pantries a few times a month.

Then again, I sometimes stop eating almost entirely when things get like this.  My appetite just vanishes, although I do eat well maybe once every couple of days.

I saw the GYN last night (boys, you may want to stop reading here), hoping to finally get hormone replacement therapy to help my lichen schlerosis, among other things.  Girls who have joined since I last wrote about this (boys, I repeat:  you really don't want to read this) is a condition frequently found in post-menopausal women when the vaginal skin gets dry and thin, there is often pain and bleeding, and the skin turns whitish (the "lichen" part).  This is now the fourth GYN I've seen in this practice (mostly because of scheduling, not because any of them was bad).  I've had one cream that didn't do anything, another that helped symptoms, and the last doctor recommended hormone replacement therapy.  HRT appealed to me a lot because I figured it would either help or slow things like dry skin and thinning hair.  But my regular doctor said that my liver enzyme counts were high and he didn't want me to start the drug.  So I lost ten pounds, took another blood test, and was pronounced good to go.  (My liver enzymes tend to go up when my weight is high.)  So the doctor last night gave me a prescription for the HRT -- YAY!  He did, however, say, "They told you that you shouldn't be eating tomatoes or spicy foods, right?"  no, none of the other three doctors had told me that.  Suck-o.  Just when the good tomatoes are out, too.  There's another fine excuse to cry.  And believe me, I'll be crying a lot of Medicaid won't cover the HRT.

I'm having dinner with Robin tomorrow night -- I tried to cancel earlier in the week because I didn't have the money, but she said she'd pick up the tab.  I don't have money to eat out.  I don't have money to buy The Herbal Remedy, which I think I'm giving up anyway -- or at least cutting down to weekends only.

Even though Barry does quite a lot around the house, I'd gladly take on half of those chores if he got a job.  I'm really sick of him not bringing any money in.  It puts a huge burden on me, and I always have to be the bad guy, saying he can't buy soda, or chips, or ice cream.  He still doesn't get the food-isn't-entertainment thing.  Food is to sustain you, if you can get it.  We can get enough food to live, but not for fun.

south of north of Coney

In other words, Coney Island.

One:  I had the interview at Luna Park the other day. I was interviewed for the less-qualified position, and there are actually two of them, exactly the same, except that one will start sooner than the other.  The woman who interviewed me was lovely, and I think I did well.  She didn't mention money, but the job developer said it was $12-14 per hour, which is really less than I would like, but I'll try to talk them up to 15 or 16 if I get an offer.  It's seasonal, and would end in October.  The office is right inside Luna, and the job would entail a certain amount of time outside the office in the park, distributing paychecks and schmoozing employees to try to avoid the 67% turnover they experienced last summer.  The temp aspect of it works for me -- hey, who wants to be in Coney during the winter?  Also, they would require a drug test.

Sidebar:  I do not approve of drug testing, though of course I said I would take one.  Here's the thing -- if the issue is illegality, a background check would clear that up.  If the issue is possible intoxication on the job, who don't they ban any use of alcohol?  What if someone comes in hung over?  Also, there are a lot of prescribed drugs that might show up in a test.  I believe that Adderall (prescribed for ADHD in adults as well as kids) contains some sort of amphetamine.  Some people still take old-school antidepressants which are barbiturates.  I myself have a prescription for lorazepam (generic Atavan), a low dosage for bouts of anxiety.  And how about the whole issue of violation of civil liberties?  It's one thing if someone shows up at work obviously intoxicated, but what someone does on their own time should be their own business.  I generally do not apply for jobs where it's indicated up front that they drug test.  I think it's very wrong.

That having been said, I have decided that it's a good idea to start taking a goldenseal supplement and drinking a lot of fresh-squeezed lemon juice.

Two:  I had to go to the Coney Island HRA center this morning (luckily, I was excused for "independent job search," which is actually a Connect-to-Care computer class this afternoon).  They needed to make copies of documents that Barry handed to our caseworker two weeks ago.  These people may be overworked, but that doesn't mean they aren't fucking morons.  The woman who called wasn't our caseworker, but we referred her to him several times.  We find it impossible to get him on the phone, but you'd think this woman could have gone from the second floor to the third, walked to his desk, and asked for out file.  You'd think.  But no, I had to bring the suckers again this morning.  And as I said, it was a good thing I was already excused from Back-to-Work, because they require a document from HRA if you have to be there during work hours, and HRA insists that you don't need a document and they won't give you one.  Which of course, can put you at risk of -- all together now -- being FTC'ed.  Apparently they are FTC'ing people like mad because BTW is so overcrowded.

So Mrs. Abramova at HRA said that I had to bring the documents this morning by noon, and that I should go to the second floor and call her extension.  I was there before 10, and called her extension several times, and it didn't answer.  The receptionist didn't know who she was.  The receptionist asked me for her extension, and then she dialed it and got no answer,  Gee, thanks.  Finally, on my tenth time calling her extension, another woman who happened to be walking past Mrs. A's cubicle picked up the phone, told me Mrs. A was in a training session, but that she, Mrs. G, could copy the documents and put them on Mrs. A's desk.  Since I was a little concerned that these might meet the same fate as the documents Barry handed to the caseworker (not left on his desk -- HANDED to him), I came home and left a voice mail for Mrs. A and said that Mrs. G had left the documents on her desk, and that she should please call if she still didn't have them.  (I left out the part about her asking me to see her by noon when she was going to be in a training session.)

I hadn't noticed before that the HRA office is right behind the old Child's on the Boardwalk, which I believe Lola Star has converted into a roller rink.  HRA is about eight blocks west of the amusement area, past the baseball stadium (which used to be Keyspan Park but I've forgotten the new name).  It's kind of creepy and deserted there this time of year.  I thought about walking back to the subway via the Boardwalk, but my feeling was that the Boardwalk would also be creepy and deserted.  Plus, it was extremely cold.  It figures that I was at Back-to-Work yesterday when it was 51 degrees out, but at Coney Island today when it was 28 (plus the wind off the water is mighty strong).

Whether I'm working there or not, I look forward to seeing Coney in the summer.  I look forward to having a hot dog at Nathan's, even if I can't eat the roll (and have to skip the fries).

I'm not sure if I ever mentioned this, but I wrote a poem some years back called "palm sunday, coney island," which was actually published.  It was in a small literary magazine called "Exit 19" or Exit something, comprised of poetry and stories that all involved a place.  They never sent me my copy, and I no longer have a copy of the poem.  I do remember the phrase "the sturdy inaugural turn of the wonder wheel" (I wrote everything in lower case back then...maybe I thought I was e.e. cummings).  I know that I actually wrote it on the subway -- I had traveled backwards to Coney to pick up another train line (a number of lines terminate there).  And it was Palm Sunday, which is the first day every year that the rides begin to operate.  (They run on weekends only until Memorial Day.)  I looked out the subway window and felt very Coney, and scribbled down the poem then and there.  (I wrote poetry very quickly and usually at one sitting.)  Most of my poetry is lost now, but I do remember parts of a few good ones.

Mitzvahs (or is it "mitzvoth"?) of the week:  my sister-in-law Elise, who would be a saint if there were Jewish saints, went to a Jewish non-profit (she works for one and knows them all), and brought a pile of free dressier clothes for Barry.  Three suits, maybe a dozen button-down shirts, and as many ties.  (You can't wear jeans to Back-to-Work, so Barry's basically been doing it in one pair of black chinos.)

Then Elise offered to take me to the supermarket and she would pay.  (This is a double mitzvah since we don't have a good supermarket close by and she drives.)  So I did a pretty serious shop, and got us stocked up on things I can eat and things Barry can eat (which are almost total opposites at this point).  It was a good shop, and except for the fruits and vegetables, should last us for a good bit.  I'm hoping we'll get food stamps within a couple of weeks.

I'm concentrating my job hunt on creative companies and universities.  I need work soon, but I'd prefer somewhere that I can be happy, and hopefully make a decent wage.  After these CTC classes, my Word and Excel will be sharp, and I'll have Powerpoint and Quickbooks.

best pizza ever

This in and of itself is a reason to live in Brooklyn.  Barry turned me on to this place soon after we met, which would be about 13 years ago.  It got to be very well known about five years ago; before that, you never saw people lined up around the corner.  We were in there sometimes when you could pretty much get a couple of slices within five or ten minutes.  I don't know if he makes Sicilian any more, but that was also wonderful.


The Best Thing I Ever Done HQ from MargaretEmily MacKenzie on Vimeo.

happy thursday

Well, I'm not so sure what's happy about it, but it's not a bad one.

I went to the farmer's market at Cadman Plaza (Brooklyn), and while it's not as big as the Union Square one, I managed to score some nice stuff: arugula, heirloom tomatoes, nectarines, kirbys, a red pepper, and some colby cheese from the Amish.  The tiny plums and the peaches were kind of hard, and we're due to get some basil from the landlord's garden.  The landlord has a little garden in the backyard, which is off-limits to the tenant, but a guy who lives downstairs is kind of in charge of distributing the overage.  We got some fresh figs today...I wait all year for them.  I can see the fig trees from our bedroom window.  What's better than fresh figs?

After the market, I took a nice stroll down Montague Street.  I mostly grew up in Brooklyn Heights, when it wasn't entirely obscenely expensive.  Most of the old-time stores are gone, of course.  But what's a drag is that when I was there a couple of years ago (serving jury duty at the court that's right behind the farmer's market), there was a wonderful used book store in what used to be Kleinman's Pharmacy (where I bought my first tampons and first make-up).  The bookstore guy and I were convinced that we knew each other, but couldn't figure out from where.  Anyway, the bookstore's gone now.  Shit.  We do have a good used bookstore on Coney Island Avenue, near Kings Highway (it's called Here's A Bookstore, which I love), but I hate to see a used bookstore go out of business.

I listened to my mp3 player the whole way there and back, and am particularly enjoying songs from the new Los Lobos album, Tin Can Trust (I downloaded it from Amazon).  Also loving this song:



I'm not sure I've heard anything else by this band, but I love love love this song.

My uncle and his wife are coming in from New Jersey (they live near Princeton) on Sunday, to try a brunch spot in preparation for a big family get together in October, for my dad's 80th birthday.  We're going to Colicchio and Sons...I'm psyched about seeing Howard and Tina, and also about eating at C&S.  I haven't eaten at any upscale restaurants since Penguin -- we occasionally went to Blue Ribbon for a birthday or an author lunch. 

And of course there was the famous private-room luncheon at Gramercy Tavern when David Lynch was in town the first time, with some Penguin sales reps and buyers from Barnes & Noble and such.  The food was amazing, and let's face it, just having lunch with Lynch was amazing.  He was easily the most fascinating of all of the authors I worked with, though not necessarily my favorite.  He was certainly one of my favorites, along with John Strausbaugh and Marc Hartzman and Martha Frankel.

My uncle is certainly one of my very favorite blood relations.  He's actually closer to my age than to my father's -- my father is 15 years older than Howard, and Howard is 13 years older than I am.  He's very intelligent and very well-read, which my father is as well, but also very generous. 

My brother is not in touch with anyone, and we're all kind of pissed and scratching our heads.  We're not even sure if he's coming to dad's 80th birthday.  I wouldn't mind so much...my brother's been more and more distant since he got married, and even more so since he moved away.  But I basically have no contact with my nephew, with whom I was hoping to have a close relationship.  They had already moved to Riverdale when he was born, which was enough of a hassle, but now they're in Providence, RI, and I've basically missed Walter's childhood.  He's eight now, and we've never been invited to visit in Rhode Island, not once.  Family can be a huge pain...sometimes a pleasure, sometimes a huge pain.  Barry's family was at least nice enough not to move away from where they all lived and grew up.  Mine all left Brooklyn or Manhattan.  (My uncle grew up in Philly and lived there for many years, until he and Tina moved to New Jersey, which is actually a good deal closer to us.)

Well, I think the brunch should be great fun, anyway.

I've changed the template for this blog, and I think it's more attractive and easier to read.  All comments welcome.

online communities, jobs for smart people, food (again)

Sometimes I think Face-itty Book-itty is waste-itty time-itty.  Just sayin'.  It's nice to connect with old friends and old schoolmates, and network with musicians and music-lovers and writers, and even to support causes and such, but when people get deeply involved with things like Farmville...I'm not 100% certain I even know what "Farmville" is, although my best guess is that it's a game where you grow pretend crops on a pretend farm.  I watched an episode of No Reservations today when Tony Bourdain went to Sweden and vented his (extremely) negative feelings about ABBA.  That's sort of how I feel about Farmville. 

I've been involved with a number of online communities.  Back in the stone age of the internet (text-only, nothing graphical, pre-mouse), there were things called "newsgroups," which were originally called "electronic bulletin boards."  People would post things, other people would read them, and everyone would comment on things.  I remember a time when there were only about 1800 groups, all classified by interest groups and interests and sub-interests.  There were group prefixes like "Rec" (recreational), "Biz" (business), and "Alt" (miscellaneous).  So there would be a very big group called rec.music, and smaller, separate groups called rec.music.folk or rec.art.cubism.picasso or rec.writing.romance or rec.novels.stephen-king.  I don't really remember if you had to join or could just participate; I believe you had some sort of subscription widget that would list "your" groups, something like a blog compiler.  Anyway, I participated in some of those for a while, and even made my first good internet friend there.

After newsgroups, there were things called "listservs," which was a subscription interest group where you would e-mail a post to a single given address and it would then be automatically forwarded to all the members.  You had to have access to a server that would host it, or do as I did, when I started a listserv:  forward the posts manually.  I didn't even have a home computer.  I started a listserv for some obscure, eccentric musicians and their musical circle; I fished out about half a dozen fans on a rec.music subsite, and just put them on the list.  (It still exists, and though it's now web-based, it was still referred to by its members as "the list.")  It grew to the size where someone got us an electronic host, and eventually was hosted by Yahoo Groups.

The List was a big part of my life for ten years.  The community grew to 500 members.  I knew one of the New York-based musicians who was a central figure in this small musical constellation, and ended up hopeless intertwined in all kinds of music and business and squabbles.  The List built a lot of interesting friendships and alliances; I do believe it was a factor in promoting the various musicians and their gigs and projects.  Two members got married.  Because of my closeness to certain people, I got invited to all kinds of interesting private gigs and events and rehearsals and recordings.  I went to a book party for the rock critic Robert Christgau and to Dave Van Ronk's memorial service.  I am thanked on a handful of albums and in the credits to a documentary film. But when someone didn't show up for a reunion gig in Portland, Oregon, and couldn't be reached at home, I was getting calls at work from people in Oregon I didn't know, as if I were Crisis Central for the whole thing.  I lost sleep over the missing musician.  New members joined who didn't quite get the love-and-peace vibe of the list and were often vicious to other members, which led to a schism and the formation of a second list, where vile behavior was tolerated.

After maybe five or six years, some of the musicians who were the subject of the list joined, and that was weird.  It became something other than a fan list. As you may have guessed, it got way too intense for me and became way too important in my life.  I used to be sought out at gigs by list member fans -- I was easy to find because I always sold CDs for the band at the break.  But things started to happen at gigs...someone showed up and threatened me.  I did not take well to people who supported this individual.  The no-show-in-Portland person again vanished.  It just got really ugly; also, the musician who was the closest of my list friends stopped being a friend, and when it seemed to me that there was about to be a break there, I just turned the reins over to someone else and left.

Another factor in my pulling out of that online community is that I had, as they say, gotten a life.  Getting married hadn't quite done it, but the job in publishing changed everything.  I had a job that wasn't a boring chore, where it was actually necessary to be intelligent and to be a talented writer and editor.  I no longer had a drudge job which was lightened by my job online and my voluntary servitude to a musician who was basically a walking definition of narcissism.  I didn't define myself by my relation to other people, by being at the center of a gang of (mostly) bizarre and lunatic music fans.

Though I have to say, I did meet some very lovely people through The List, real-life in-person friends.  One List member lived in Aruba, and greeted Barry and me at the airport when we arrived on our honeymoon.  We saw a show in Central Park with one of them, and his family, last week.  The dozen or so I keep up with, maybe a dozen others, were wonderful folks.  But I'm very happy to be shed of the psychotic assholes.

For me, the internet has mainly become what the framers of the "World Wide Web/Information Superhighway" intended:  a source of information and a means of communication.  It's my medium of job hunting and of news and information gathering, and I shop on it, but it's not my social world.  It facilitates some social interactions, but it's not where I live. 

 Speaking of job hunting, I have an interview tomorrow.  What stood out for the employer was my publishing experience and my editing coursework at NYU, so it sounds like another job where brains are not optional.  I don't really want to go into detail about the business, but it sounds like hard, interesting work that is unlikely to become boring.  Wish me luck.

I watched a lot of food shows the past couple of days, it seems.  Between cooking a whole lot more in the past few months, reading half a dozen or more food blogs, and getting very involved in seasonal produce, I seem to have a bit of a foodie thing going on.  It may even be rubbing off...Barry came home today with one of the hard-crusted Italian breads he favors (can't remember the name), but also with a raisin-fennel semolina loaf, and a whole-grain with walnuts.  (The whole-grain one is strictly for me, since he won't eat bread with "bark and twigs" in it.)  I watched Tony Bourdain in Sweden (dissing ABBA and eating reindeer), Andrew Zimmern in the UK (haggis was involved), and Adam Richman in Kansas City (eating absurd amounts of barbecue).  I seem to be eating chutney with everything, and wishing I'd bought one or more of the even hotter ones.