Lady Problems

I sent this picture to my ex the other day, after taking it, passing by a window on Bleecker St.

It’s been around 5 months now since we broke up (since I was dumped, since she left me, what have you) and often I question the effect she still has on me.

After seeing “Puppy Whistle”, Rob Malone’s film at the Anthology, that we were both in together, I was taken on some sort of awed walk by Dan Dickerson, of the sometimes-mentioned-here PA-style Dickerson Bros, who wanted to talk about my still uncomfortable reality “fame” and how I was doing in life.

When I mentioned how hard it had been for me to see her up there on the screen like that, pretty, idiosyncratic, herself and looking me, the me in the film, with loving eyes, her arms around me, Dan took a step back on 13th St.

“Really, bro?” He asked, biting a grin. “After all this time?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “It’s probably normal if you love someone like that.”

“Shit, I haven’t felt that way since high school.” The Dickerson replied. “I mean that girl when I was 16, she really fucked me up.”

And I nodded as we walked both back to the karaoke bar, as Dan kept smiling goofily and I just questioned what it was.

For sure, looking back at my history, I’m a case of emotional and romantic arrested development, having practically hibernated throughout high school in newspaper offices and libraries in order to keep the world and my own insecurities from hurting me.

Apart from strange experiences at a multi-program camp at the age of 12, my awakening to the idea that anyone could even be attracted to me didn’t come until I was 17 and a girl stuck her tongue down my throat while we were sitting on the sidewalk in front of the old Joe’s Pizza.

This explains, or rationalizes to me how I got this way, experiencing a high-school level heartbreak at 23, but it doesn’t wrap things up, not wholly.

As I told my therapist, after the sort of introspection that comes out of not having anything listen to while walking down New York City sidewalks, the times I call out for my ex, pronouncing her two-syllable name into the air or out-loud, softly, are not the times necessarily that I want her to be near me, or that I miss her touch or the way she talked about “floppy ears”, though those times come too.

Nowadays, it’s more the times that I think about the things in my life, I’m not proud or am uncertain of, the moments I regret or my anxiety about my future or lack of direction.

The rushes, or panic attacks, where bad moments flood my eyes and I’m taken out of body back to relive a time where I made that bad decision, where I embarrassed myself, or felt shame.

I realized, I say the word “Eva” where I used to say the words “I hate my life”.

When I used to say the latter phrase, it was like a ward or a dismissal against those bad moments, a disavowal of a time I made the parents of an autistic teenager uncomfortable, or when I made a glib remark at my old, haunted job. When I think about embarrassing myself in front of my agents, or just sitting alone, feeling alone, feeling like no one loves me or wants to be with me right now. That loneliness.

I reach out for the word “Eva” in those moments like I once reached out to punish myself with dismissal.

There was a sense, especially towards the end of our relationship, that seeing her, that having her near me, that knowing there’s that someone who loves and accepts you, that knowing it was someone you felt the same about, like that could be something that could turn around a day, or an hour, or a year.

That reliance of love, on someone else’s, on that phenomenon, is both symptomatic of my low self-esteem (the “miracle” of someone I love loving me) and a difficult to break as I focus on not backsliding into self-hatred in the wake of it all and the loneliness.

Still, it’s made me more weary as I go out in the world, even more a somewhat-misogynist than when Eva would sometimes comment on my stirring-angry statements about unrequited love, about the women who didn’t return my affection, or the ones who hurt my friends (or who I perceived to).

Now, I even shy away from people who seem to flirt with me without affection, who wear it as part of their bearing, or use it for friendliness or charisma. Walking from a screening one night, an old friend tried hanging off me, hugging my neck, putting her cheek next to mine. A girl on set stroked my face as I said good-bye, gave me a hug when I wrapped shooting, asked me questions and looked into my eyes. When I went to see a show alone and lonely last night at the theater, a young lady hugged me, recognized me, put her hands through my hair and invited me over with ebullience and charm and a smile.

In summary, I felt revolted at these experiences. I feel shame when I look back at them. Partly because of my lack of quick understanding of sarcasm or irony, of intent and intentions, of a need to to be loved that feels shaken and confused by these cues. But on the other hand there’s that proximity, that feeling that the dark parts of my life might be re-averted, at least temporarily. That something might come from you looking at me that will help me be better at least for a while.

But that’s not what those people were offering. So instead, I have nostalgia, as I call out my ex’s name, once or twice, as I walk down Bleecker St.

As I take picture of floppy-eared loaves in the window of a bread-store.

As I wish for the absence of love, or whatever it is that still binds me.

As I want something to replace it, this misogyny in me.

Eva, I don’t blame you, for feeling like this was too much to bear.

***

Alright, Chadd Harbold asked if I was going to write about this and I really neither care nor understand this, but I guess let me try to explain.

Jenna Jameson called me a “fuckknob”.

How did this happen? To be honest, I don’t even really know who Jenna Jameson is (weird enough to admit that probably means it true, guys).

Here’s her Wikipedia page (apparently she is pretty interesting), but I didn’t know most of that until just now.

So, anyway here we go:

When I woke up on Tuesday, April 12th, I did what I usually do, which is check my phone, my email and my twitter (and maybe my online scrabble games).

I took a look and saw that friend, Buckwheat Groat and extremely prolific tweeter Ben Perry had tweeted something dissing someone for saying Bethenny Ever After was their favorite show.

Now, regardless of what I think about my own situation and my weirdo relationship to reality television, I am ON that show and Ben knows that and so he shouldn’t be dissing people for liking it like that.

But Ben Perry is not just a prolific tweeter but a wordy one and, given Twitter’s limit on how long a message can be, instead of writing a full rebuttal and erasing his message, I just quoted what he said with a little online frowny face.

Now, as those of you who read the blog can tell, I’m not one much for “emoticons” so my use of one here was probably a mistake, but the intent was something like “Ben, don’t do that, I’m on that show”.

And in fact Ben got that message later tweeting something like “Well, maybe she’s not so bad for liking that show because my buddy Nick’s on it.”

But Jenna Jameson did not appear to get the message and ended up calling both me and Ben “fuckknobs”.

What is a “fuckknob” you ask (and probably rightfully so)? I have no idea, just as I was somewhat weirded out by being called one.

I tried to explain to her the intent of all of this, but it seemed to no avail. She went back to tweeting about parties and LA restaurants and posting pictures of her shoes.

Ben, on the other hand, engaged in a full-out twitter blast war with her, posting salvos and earning hate from her legion of followers including one particular message from her calling him “not worth my time, cocksmoker, go watch pornstar that actually care about your idiot driven awards” for whatever that means.

A couple people tweeted in my defense. Some people on Facebook appeared to celebrate the occasion. I mostly felt confused and somewhat violated.

I felt my twitter account mostly non-offensive and was unsure if she was such a fan of the show why she called me a “fuckknob” (or even, again, what that was). Probably she couldn’t tell or remember that my account was the same as that nerdy, chubby kid on the show wearing his ratty hoodie. I don’t blame her, I suppose.

Mostly, I just wonder of the significance of it all. One girl told me I should feel honored she acknowledged my existence, while someone else asked me if I “printed out and framed” the tweet. I just asked “Why?”

But still, I feel somewhat victimized. Even if my friends seem to celebrate my “fuckknob”-ery.

As it now had entered all of our lexicons.

***

The Kimchi Truck stiffed me the other day.

I thought I could do it all, heading out on an early Sunday morning, racing myself, to finish the first type-up of a sketch for class later, all so  I could go out to the Sunday morning flea-market where the Kimchi Taco Truck was bound to appear.

All I had been hearing about this place from blogs and chowhounders were raves and awed stories of 40-minutes waits braved for a fresh collision of flavors.

But they didn’t show up. Engine trouble, I heard, or something about the battery.

Still I was pissed and unleashed a marginally tamer twitter rant against them after talking it out with my friends at the Schnitzel truck and realizing it probably wasn’t their fault.

So I waited. I bided my time. I’d tried to find moments even in this semi-jobless free-floating existence of mine that I could be set to go down to wherever the truck was early enough to avoid a line, try it out and flee back home for writing.

Today they were finally  in SoHo, I had no morning plans, no shoots or dalliances, I took a shower and was there.

And was honestly, mostly disappointed. The Kim-Cheesesteak, the much-blogged about semi-centerpiece of the truck (apart from the nominal tacos) was merely an average sized affair, with a good roll, but not enough flavor or punch to distinguish it from the clearly superior “99 Miles to Philly”, who provided me comfort food and shelter from bad love-less nights when I lived up by Union Square.

Worse though were the “Spicy Rice Cakes”, which were advertised as grilled, but were in fact wanly boiled in a pot, served rubbery in a red-glop not even warm. They made me feel a little sick even.

Still, I felt like giving the truck one more chance (and was still hungry from not eating all of the rice cakes) and tried the “Kimchi Arancini” which, in fact, were excellent.

Three small Jawbreaker-sized golden nuggets came with a red-spicy dipping sauce and a sensible bed of lettuce to cool them off and to soak up the debris.

Dipped and bitten into, the balls revealed a melange of gooey parmesan, mozzarella and some red-pepper flavor, which made them hard to eat slow.

Perhaps the disappointment and the tease of missing out on the Kimchi truck so many days led to my let-down.

But at least I grew some balls and got some there.

(sorrythatsprettylame)

***

KIMCHI TACO TRUCK

Kimchi Arancini- $4.00

Location varies (Follow @kimchitruck on Twitter)

***

BONUS- WARM-WEATHER SPECIAL

Coffee does strange things to me, even still, but I do get a hankering for a nice iced, especially to lift me out of the drudgery of an unknown day.

Jacques Torres’ Mochas are known for their cocoa-fab excellence in the ‘hood, but they’re too hot for the upcoming weather and JT won’t be sporting their impregnable “Frozen Chocolates” for at least a couple more months.

Instead, try to finagle an Iced Choco-Coffee like I did. It’s an iced coffee with their milk-brewed hot-cocoa instead of regular milk.

It gave me a caffeine buzz with a mellow chocolate pillow-y sensation walking down a sunny King St.

At the same price as a nearby Starbucks’ regular iced coffee, it could for you too.

***

JACQUES TORRES WEST VILLAGE

“Iced Choco-Coffee” (off-menu item)- $2.18

King St bet. Varick and Hudson Sts.

1 to Houston St. CE to Spring St.

Intern Fever

I farted on a co-worker at work on Thursday.

I could list the mitigating circumstances, but the fact remains.

Well, I had been rushing about the office doing work, I felt nervous about the week, I was leaving for Maryland that night and, worst of all, lunch had been not only late on Thursday–it had also been Mediterranean.

Falafel, hummus, tabouleh, tahini, tzatziki all pooled in my intestines, swirling around as I ran about the office, culminating several hours later at a meeting.

Often I had wondered about my own flatulence. How much one farts seems to be a question of existential comparison: since no one openly discusses how much they fart, or their methods for farting, one has no point for comparison.

I know I don’t hear people farting that often (a matter of proximity or poor hearing perhaps) and that there was a time long ago when I was told and believed that girls don’t fart, only releasing some mysterious whiffing known as the “queef” a phenomenon still unexplained to me to this day (sitting in long car vacations with a mother and sister would decisively disproved the “girls don’t fart” rumor).

Still, I was left with the fact of my own flatulence and my lack of control over it.

Put simply, I fart. A lot. I fart often and loudly.

I’ve often tried to attribute this to my taste in ethnic foods (new foods=more gas), or to my heritage (coming from “good farting stock”, as I would romanticize it) but neither notion would change the loud, wet reality of it.

Eventually, it was just something I came to grudgingly accept little control over, like acne or psoriasis or the lisp in my voice that my brain filtered me from hearing.

But the young lady, my co-worker, who I sat with at the meeting was not so accepting.

I had attempted to squish the fart into my chair but it came out loud and protracted, like a raspberry blown by a professional and as it came out, my co-worker turned on me, first in shock, mouth-open-wide, then in anger and disapproval as if I had slapped her mother or, at least, farted on her somewhat intentionally.

“I was trying for the chair!” I say, re-imagining the moment. “I couldn’t leave! The person sitting on the other side didn’t complain!”

But whatever signals I sent through squinting, shrugging or awkwardly-attempted facial expression was lost as my co-worker stormed from the meeting, driven by fart and outrage.

And as I slunk in my chair, I wondered how this would look when I explained it to HR.

***

When I ended up in Maryland, one of the first things I noticed was that people had jobs.

Real jobs. Not the sort of jobs me and my friends had talked or bullshitted about having. Not “the future” I had imagined for myself. But jobs with one-word titles, jobs with the sort of finaliy of association that seemed out of place for a 22 year-old.

“Teacher”, “Nurse”, “Auditor”. These were the people we met in bars, people with salaries, jobs, paychecks, uniforms. People who had lives and structures.

Meeting this people made me wonder how to define myself when I met them.

To tell them I was unemployed was not quite true, but if I told them who I worked for, they’d ask more about it and the truth would come out: I’m an intern.

“You’re building up some resume.” My father told me today on a walk down to Jacques Torres to get a chocolate-chunk cookie.

“Working on feature films, television shows, acting and writing.” He listed. “It’s pretty impressive.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Now if only I could find someone to pay me to do any of those things.”

Back in Maryland, faced with these people with jobs like actual jobs (one person even worked for FEMA!), I was flabber-gasted, definition-less.

I could feel proud of who I was and what I’d done. But when I got the utilities bill and some lab fee collection agency envelopes, I gave them to my dad.

“Well, I’m unemployed.” I ended up telling the job-ers. Because I couldn’t say with good faith that what I did was something that I could live from: a job.

***

Internships have been my life for some time now, an additional structure to the structure of college, like a patio built for a bright spot in a house.

As I walked through NYU with Eva, my girlfriend, and buddy Matt Chao, I recalled an early internship, squatting illegally in an apartment that was sold but not yet occupied since the director of the documentary was banging the real estate agent or property owner or both if the guy was the same thing. They wouldn’t feed me lunch, telling me there wasn’t enough money, but they instead gave me the indignity of taping the director’s receipts for 25-dollar lunches from Negril, charged to the company credit card and used for taxes. She would skateboard to the “office” everyday and occasionally her cordoned off room smelled like pot. Finally, when production was halted so the interns could find her dog, lost as she forgot to close the door to the illegal apartment, I felt bad for Fido, but dumped the fliers in the trash as I headed home to play video games or be alone–anything for the lack of indignity.

Immediately after this though, I found myself in another ‘internship”, apprenticing myself to a cool Jewish Tisch Film senior, who had a hot Jewish girlfriend and could get me in to bars. I would do random work for him, shooting b-roll, picking up clams (a prop for a video) or working as an extra PA on shoots he was on. I looked up to him as a big brother, as it was my Freshman year and in my own insecurity about film school and how I could transition to the world of “cool”, I thought that this senior, who seemed already to have everything I want, might show me a way to be.

My dependence on him was my downfall though, as I assumed too much closeness to him as his lackey and when I asked a question I shouldn’t have asked to one of his former professors, it got back to him and he fired me furiously.

Neither internship was particularly fruitful and I was duped into both of them in various degrees–The documentary had promised lunch, while the senior had called himself “Maurice Kanbar” in the ad posting–and I got little out of them except for some credits on iMDB and a half-good story I can tell to people about those times in my early college career. But still, they were a bulwark in the battle against worthlessness that I felt in my lack of earning power in school. The idea of “being productive” could be easily fulfilled by saying that you had an internship and it precluded you from the decision-making process–you didn’t have to set your own goals as long as you followed the ones given to you.

An internship back then was a place to hide your own sense of indecision and fear about the future, until that worthless-sense caught up with you and you fled back to school or the next one.

After all, losing a patio, just meant you needed to get some new lawn furniture. A loss, almost not at all.

***

In practice, the job-ers probably faced their own senses of self-despair, the idea of terrible confinement in a hospital or cubicle, just as I face terrible freedom.

But just like my own flatulence, our own inherent sociopathy, our lack of empathy and understanding, denies me the abilities to know others’ experiences, to know how they feel and whether the uncertainty I feel is more terrifying than their own supposed certainties.

I was back in New York then, later, back from Maryland, in New York where I saw Eva and Matt, back among the interns and the students and the job-less.

And as I returned to my computer I saw the emails from my co-workers, co-interns, sick with the flu in bed, looking for covers for a day with promises of shifts returned and home-baked cookies.

Tomorrow, they’ll stay at home and face a lack that could be taken as a vacation, a sick day, or a denial.

It’s complicated, I guess.

Me, I’ll just have to deal with the aftermath of my own flatulence.

And I still don’t know what I’ll say to HR.

***

JACQUES TORRES CHOCOLATE HAVEN

Chocolate Chunk Cookie (best in the city?)- $2.50

King St bet. Varick and Hudson Sts

1 to Houston St

Chocolate in My Pocket and The Fucking French

I hate French movies.

Well, not Truffaut–I find him humanist–but other French movies.

Godard and Company and those endlessly stream of oh-so-french youths on screen trying to separate their multiple lovers from their existensial ennui.

Of course, my principal qualm in all of this is not really the ennui, as that’s something I sometimes in engage in, or the filmmaking, which varies, but the situation:

Here are these froggy fucks complaining over how they can’t decide between la blonde and la brunette, while I’m sitting at a bar in the East Village hoping that girl across the room won’t notice the caked snot on my sweater sleeve.

I should really dry clean it anyway.

It was for this reason that I was initially hesitant to watch Two Lovers.

Sure, it wasn’t French, but the title itself implied the sort of movie that a studly sort-of fellow (Joaquin Phoenix) has to decide between the bangin’ Jewish chick (Vinessa Shaw) and the indie party-girl (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Subtract Paris, add Brooklyn and you’ve got A Bout De Hipster.

Friend and DP/Director/Watcher of Pretentious Films Chadd Harbold was ultimately the one who convinced me.

Chadd’s the sort of guy it’s fun to argue about movies with, not only because he doesn’t precisely have your same tastes, but mainly because he sees and engages with films. Emphasis really on the “sees” part, but Chadd is that rare-particular human specimen like myself that obsessively attempts to see everything, anything that is supposed to be “good”. He is constantly on a quest to see good movies which is very refreshing for a film nerd like myself.

To give some sort of broad analogy, in real life, talking about movies in a general audience is like talking about March Madness to the guys throwing beanbags at each other down on the lawn and calling them “+4 fireballs”.

Not that I know anything about March Madness.

Other than that it’s in March.

And that people are mad.

For some reason.

Anyway, Chadd’s refreshing as a movie-watching ally, someone to watch with, someone to argue with; the sort of sparring partner necessary in order to hone one’s movie-watching skills and also, of course, let’s be honest here, to reinforce one’s own pretentiousness and one’s sense of geeky film-cool.

Unlike myself, Chadd aspires to a more “Jean-Paul Belmondo” life style–while I trudge more toward “Harold Lloyd”–and so he is a fan generally of that type of French movie previously discussed. Still, he pointed out to me the rave reviews for Two Lovers, nearly unanimous and the down-home-jewy setting of it all and finally, through much texting, I was convinced.

And impressed. Two Lovers is as much a movie about the titular females as it is about the world of the main character, Leonard. Leonard’s a melancholic and a prisoner of the benign-seeming machinations of his parents and of the Brighton Beach Jewish community around him. Even the initial situation of the film, a suicide attempt preempted by a separation, is the act of parents splitting young ones apart. At its best the film functions as a meditation on Jewish identity and the self, balancing past and present, assimilation and dudty to one’s elders, finding an inescapability in the hierarchical chains of identity; that is, there is no escape from who you are.

Even though I called the story out as specifically Jewish, it’s really something anyone, college student, New Yorker, young person, could feel for. And an excellent performance by Phoenix, with an appendix.

For those interested, this is an interview with James Gray, the filmmaker. The appendix comes here in the form of a story.

Apparently, Mr. Gray was trying to give Joaquin Phoenix a note, talking to him about his character.

Mr. Phoenix, perturbed, closed his eyes and self-consciously interrupted him, saying: “Eight.”

Mr. Gray, who had been working with Mr. Phoenix for some time now, was confused.

Mr. Phoenix explained: “I’ve been doing this, I’ve been acting since I was eight, I know, I know.”

With that out, the filming resumed.

Still, however bizarre, it’s a fanatastic performance and worthy of a praise and an interesting movie that balances comedy with serious matters, romance and family.

Chadd, I suppose I owe you a beer.

But Vincent Gallo still sucks.

***

When I went to see the film, quintessential beardo Rob Malone asked me why I no longer had chocolate in my jacket, a policy I had upheld for a while.

You see, as a fan of dark chocolate, in my freshman and sophomore years, I pitied the poor film students who might not know the joys  of such confectionary pleasure, assuming their needs filled by a Snickers or some such abomination.

Thus, every 2 weeks or so, I would purchase two different chocolate bars and put them in my jacket pocket of my beat-torn paint-smeared leather jacket and hand them out to students and faculty with the pleasant offer:

“Do you want some chocolate?”

As summers came though, the chocolate would either melt or I would eat it, neither one of which was helpful to my cause and I eventually, over time, abandoned my chocolate crusade.

But now, what with this inclement weather, with the prompting of a beardo, I have decided to resume my chocolate-giving ways, like a red-jewy-Santa-Claus or a Willy-Wonka-Yid. I purchased recently a small, burlap sack full of bulk 72% dark Jacques Torres Chocolate Haven chocolate and have decided to make room for it in my winter coat.

So now, brave Nickolyphytes, readers of this blog, I invite you, if you see me on the streets with a shock or a slump, or in the hallways of the school pretending I have three more years there, feel free to ask a chocolate.

Upon askance, I will produce my burlap sack and yum-liciousness will begin.

Avast!