concert in the park

sorry i suck! i've just been SO tired lately, y'know? and sitting on my butt posting takes a LOT of energy. that, and it's just pretty much been business as usual around here, so nothing exciting to report.

i went to a free philharmonic concert in central park tonight, and it was quite the cultural experience. i went with two girls from my internship, and since i like bragging about my multi-cultural friendships, i'll tell you that i went with the french girl and the kenyan girl from my internship, and the french girl's sri lankan boyfriend. it was pretty weird when i mentioned something about disneyland and no one knew what i was talking about.

so anyway. apparently every summer nyc does a "concerts in the park" series. tonight was a philharmonic concert from 8-10, followed by fireworks. it was PACKED. we're talking thousands and thousands of people, all crammed together on blankets, with their spreads of cheese and bread and fruit and their bottles of wine, lit by candles, with fireflies twinkling around. somewhere around 9 the smell of marijuana wafted over towards us (not that i know what marijuana smells like.....), and i felt like i was at a rich version of woodstock or something. it was like 4th of july fireworks events injected with massive doses of sophistication steroids.

in other news, no matter how much i try to fight it, my obsession with the amc show "mad men" has just grown and grown, and i'm spending WAY too much money renting the first season from blockbuster. in case you're not familiar with it, it's about men in the advertising industry at a company on madison ave in the '60s. so basically it's totally disgusting and misogynistic and heteronormative and all that stuff feminists hate, but it's sucked me in. the fact that the leading man is a BABE has nothing to do with it.

p.s. i quit my job. oops.

my roommate beats me

mentally, that is. the quality of my home life has detoriorated enormously in the last few days, and the tension is almost tangible. now i feel like i have to creep around my apartment and only venture out into the main area when i know for sure SHE isn't gonna be there:

doesn't she just LOOK like she can be a huge BITCH? (i apologize for the strong language, but i'm quarantined in my room right now while she monopolizes the rest of the apartment and i'm getting more pissed off by the second).

now, granted, she has a right to be mad at me. i would most definitely have been mad at me had i done what i did (damn that sentence got away from me). basically, i was a little late in getting the rent check to her, for a variety of reasons that eventually came down to the post office taking their sweet little time getting the check from cali to ny (fyi: because i don't trust myself not to spend my rent money, i'm having dad keep it and mail the checks). basically she was PISSED and MEAN and has now made things incredibly awkward between us. so we don't really talk or acknowledge each other when we're in the same room, and considering how small this apartment is, that's a LOT of opportunities for tension. yayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!

tomorrow, instead of going into the office, all the interns are meeting at sam's apartment to talk about redesigning our website. we're gonna be there from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and i'm scared to death because i have NO IDEA what we're possibly going to talk about, or what i'm possibly going to be able to contribute, for 8 hours. i'm excited to see her apartment though, because she used to be/still kind of is an artist, and i hear from other interns who have been there before that her apartment is filled with all kinds of cool art and stuff. and she's feeding us, and word is that she's a great cook. and i also hear that their last meeting like this ended in alcohol, so hmmmm...... but my friend ellen from smith is coming into ny from boston tomorrow night and we're gonna paint the town red and i'm super excited, especially because i didn't realize until last night that....

FRIDAY'S A HOLIDAY!!

yesterday, one of the women who works in an office adjacent to ours was listening to leonard cohen. it was almost inaudible, and i was on the opposite side of the room, but dammit I HEARD IT and it was BEAUTIFUL. i couldn't contain myself, and i went to talk to her about it and we both started going ga-ga over him (she's probably in her 60s, to give you a visual), and then she turned it up and the rest of the day was spent basking in the warmth of that majestic voice. not too shabby.

leonard cohen is my religion.

archive pic:

FIREFLIES

i was sitting on a bench reading in central park right around dusk today, and i happened to look up from my book to see fireflies dancing all around me! it was AMAZING. i wish i had had a camera with me, but even if it had i know i couldn't have captured even a thousandth of the magic of it. annoyingly, the only thing i could think of as i was watching them was the "pirates of the caribbean" ride at disneyland.

something major is being filmed all down my street and the avenue perpendicular to my street. there's trailers and cameras and equipment and roadblocks and stuff everywhere. i can't figure out what it is, though. but it's so funny....the new yorkers walking around don't even seem to be giving any of it a second thought, like it's something they see all the time so it doesn't even register anymore.

this is a short post cause i don't got nothin else to say. thanks to all you peeps who comment...it makes me very happy. love you!

and today's picture from the archives is.....

d.c.

hello to all my loyal readers! i hope you'll forgive my lack of posts lately; it's the result of a week of laziness and yesterday and today spent frollicking around the capitol. d.c. was pretty awesome, especially considering the government paid for my whole trip (except for the hamburger i ordered at midnight last night, dammit). while all of the monuments were incredible, as was getting to visit the offices of both california senators and meet with their top staffers, as was getting to meet some pretty goddamn amazing kids (ya'll think you're worried about ME? think about the family of the kid going to IRAN. or how about bosnia herzegovina? or tajikstan? yeah.), the MOST TRULY AMAZING PART OF THE ENTIRE EXPERIENCE WAS..............

MY HOTEL ROOM.
i got a HUGE, luxurious room ALL TO MYSELF, and i felt so sophisticated and grown-up. i even ironed my blouse, because i felt like it was an appropriate thing to do in a grown-up room like that.

so let me give you a little context. some of you might remember the arduous boren scholarship application process, through which i really don't know how i survived, and others might know that i actually received this award. to sum it up, it's a scholarship awarded by the u.s. government to undergrads who plan to study in regions, and study languages, that aren't often visited/studied by students and that are deemed critical to national security. check it out, i'm on the list! -- http://www.iie.org/programs/nsep/undergraduate/2008scholars.htm

so the government (the dept. of defense, specifically) brought us all to d.c. and put us up in a nice hotel so we could have a reception ceremony and information sessions and meet each other and bla bla bla. last night at the reception table they organized the tables according to region, which was a pretty interesting means of deducing what regions america deems "critical." let's just say there were about 40 people crowded around the middle east table, and the sub-saharan africa table had 6. counting me. SIX. i guess the government doesn't really feel like a bunch of starving, aids-ridden africans are much of a threat. go figure.

then today we all had appointments to visit our senators (or, as was the case for almost everyone, their staffers) and congressmen. luckily there were about 20 kids from california, so that diffused some of the potential awkwardness. so we got to go to barbara boxer's and dianne feinstein's offices and talk to their foreign affairs staffers, which was pretty interesting. then i snuck away from the group and went to another building and crept around until I FOUND IT:

HILLARY'S SENATE OFFICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! thank god no security guard saw me trying to take this picture, because i must have looked hella suspicious.

i also had some time to do some tourist-y stuff yesterday. i saw......

the capitol

the washington monument


the lincoln memorial (it was really breath-taking, so props to johnny for guilt-tripping me into walking all the way up to it, which i wasn't going to do because i'm LAZY)

a really, really creepy trail of some kind of animal poop leading all the way up to the lincoln memorial, and....

the white house, of course.

i'm wiped out. the bus ride back tonight took like an hour longer than it was supposed to because of traffic, so i was not a happy camper by the time i got back to ny. now i'm gonna crash.

but i think i'm going to make it a tradition of ending my posts with a cute, random picture from the ashley archives. today's pick:


me and johnny eating a healthy, homemade supper in some midwestern state on our road trip last summer.

the met

i went to the met yesterday.



they have a lot of stuff there. it was overwhelming. at first i was gonna try going in the order of the map so that i could visit everything, but after i spent awhile in the byzantine section and all that middle age european stuff, i said screw it and headed straight for the modern section. thank god i dropped art history, because i DO NOT have the patience for all this stuff. i just want to like what i like. and i know it's cliche, but boy do i like the impressionist stuff. it's just so much more ALIVE than everything else. they had ROOMS FULL of van gogh. i almost wanted to cry.


and monet....
and matisse....
and on and on and on....
and then inevitably we arrive at the contemporary stuff, where we find THIS crap:
i don't care how much someone wants to try convincing me that pollack, or any of this other canvas-painted-one-color crap, is art; i'm going to continue plugging my ears and singing la-la-la-la-la-la because it's terrible and i'll NEVER believe them.

i had a good time, though. but right when my museum-weariness hit its peak and i HAD to get outta there, the second i stepped out of the building it started bucketing rain, so i had to stand around for an hour and wait for it to stop.

HOWEVER i did happen to have the energy to take photos of my street and apartment building when i got back! here's my street:


and here's the distance from my front steps to central park:
and here's my apartment! it's #27. you can kind of see the number above the door. it's the building second from the right.

okay i'm all posted out. i need to go find a proper blouse to wear to work tonight. but before i sign off, i thought i'd post one last picture. i found this one in the depths of my computer and i thought it was funny cause johnny looks funny.

poison coconut

my roommate lauren and i were walking down the street when we happened upon a cracked coconut just laying there on the sidewalk. all the parts were there and there was a puddle around it (a puddle of coconut juice, we're presuming), so we're figuring it fell from somewhere? the sky? god sent it? i don't know. but it was so beautiful and it smelled so good, we couldn't resist bringing it home. now lauren's peeling it and washing it, and i don't care if it's smothered in anthrax, we're eating it. we're just going to resist looking at our situation objectively, because if we stop to consider that we just picked a cracked coconut up off the streets of new york, then we won't be able to justify eating it.

don't hate.

waitressing is HARD

i'm going to say it again, for emphasis: WAITRESSING IS HARD.

i started another job today, because for some weird reason i think the other one might have slipped through my fingers, and because i think the shifts at the new one might work better with my schedule. it's called edgar's cafe, and it's only 1 street over from my apartment. how's this for cool: the cafe is situated on the former site of edgar allan poe's mansion, where he wrote "the raven."

cute, huh? kinda corny the way the ceiling's painted, but it has a nice atmosphere. and the desserts look INCREDIBLE. they have every type of cake/pie/tart imaginable. i was salivating while she was showing them to me.

anyway, i started training today (for which i apparently don't get paid...?) and it was cool but hella stressful. it makes me have an INSANE amount of respect for waitresses. not only is it physically exhausting, but it's mentally taxing, too....so much to keep track of! and i have a feeling new yorkers aren't as forgiving of their waitresses as restaurant patrons in other parts of the country might be. oh well. maybe it'll help me develop a thicker skin or something.

so now i need to do work, because apparently fridays are working-from-home days for my internship. mehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.....