Stuffy Noses

I tried to describe to John Beamer the other day which sort of weather New York was actually good in.

“The fall, obviously.” We agreed on. “But summer nights too.”

“Not so much the summer days.” John chimed in, questioningly.

“No man, it’s fucking disgusting here on summer days. The humidity just hangs between the buildings. But summer nights, it doesn’t get dark out until 9 or so and at that point your night has just begun. Plus it feels beautifully temperate out in Jeans and a T-shirt, like you’re walking around San Juan.”

“Summer nights,” John repeated. “I regret I haven’t experienced more of them here.”

“Plus, as my buddy Chadd would say, the girls wear less.” I finished.

This was all mentioned in the context of a cold, windy December day spent walking up to Old Navy to go pants-shopping, since for the many-ieth time, my jeans had developed a non-useful hole in their crotch and John, well, John was just a girl who liked clothes.

He had been crashing with me on and off for a few months now, springboarding back and forth from Palo Alto, where life had less trajectory and I was glad to have him around. It had helped, so far, in getting through the transition of being partner-less, even if my former partner was only a visitor in my home.

At least, it was someone I could give my spare set of keys to, so they didn’t sit on my shelf, another curio, next to my big red hair-ball (gross).

“I think I’m developing a cold.” John told me one night, spoken loudly from the ceiling-snug loft he slept in at my place, known as the “John-cave”.

“Fair.” I told him.

“Nah, it’s a bummer.” He said realistically. “But at least I know this, I’ll get over it soon.”

What was unmentioned was my own impending illness, a symptom of the season, but also of the proximity to someone sick. I used to joke with Eva when she came over that the sniffles I had were an STD foisted on me and that I’d be looking out on the streets for men with tissues while we walked, to stare at her accusingly.

I wasn’t fucking John (sorry, everyone?) but living in a small space has it’s consequences and I’d rather accept them than Lysol the shit out of everything, like I see people do at work.

“I feel like I’ve missed out on too many summers here.” John told me. “Too many things I could have been doing.”

“Well, you’re here now.” I told him. “Shit’s here. Stay.”

But John had other places, other friends, other commitments in his life. He’d be home for Christmas and he’d be back again most likely.

When we got to Old Navy, I almost got some flannel-lined pants, until a call to my father (and an unsuccessful attempt at my mother) pointed out to me that they’d be hot when I was inside.

“And I can’t take off my pants when I get places.” I told my father over the phone.

Which must have drawn some approval, parenting-wise, on his part.

***

I sent this picture one morning in the movie theater this week, to Eva, which I didn’t like thinking about later.

I used to send her pictures like this all the time and after hearing from her once in a brief text-message exchange that took place over a vintage Mrs. Potato doll, it felt hard not to send her something like this when I saw it, sitting reading by the concession stand, on a chilly, early morning.

This past week I’d experienced a couple of breakthroughs of sorts. I got a girl’s number who snuck me jungle-juice at a comedy club. I even chatted up a nerdy-cute girl I had a crush on in one of my comedy classes while sitting in a holiday-themed McDonalds, an experience that made me feel “electric” on my way home and stopped me from falling asleep, until I did.

When I went to my therapist, she had little in the way of advice again, hearing my torrent of confessionary information until finishing off with a “what now?” question, only answered with a:

“Nothing. You sound better than most people in your position would.”

Still I feel diverted, I feel wanting, I feel like I’m in withdrawal for something that feels all the more painful for my denial of its addiction in my life. Is love an addiction or was this one just one? Is it an addiction that’s ok to have?

Amidst the responses that I got to my last blog-post was a cavalcade of friends (and my mom) chiming in to let me know it was ok to relax, to recover that in Penny-Arcade reader Matt Chao’s unusually articulate words: “You can’t outrun yourself, no matter how fast you go.”

Still, the words that hit me most were just from someone I didn’t know posting under a pseudonym telling me that the relationship I had entered into was some sort of faustian bargain, where the pain of heartbreak was endemic to the joy of a relationship. That my feelings would fade into pleasantness and nothing and “this girl you dated when you were 23″ would be just that.

I remember having a good day on Saturday, when I read my web-series adapted from my blog to my sketch-writing class full of stand-ups and actors and people who didn’t know me and they commiserated and felt for the characters. It was good to know that people outside my life could identify with it. But it’s strange to think how you stack an outsider’s word against your friend’s. How you wonder what someone who sees your life, your pictures, your facebook page thinks of you and your worries outside of your direct experience with them.

It’s a question I ask when I think about that still active, though less used, online dating profile from last week. But it’s also applicable here, where I write what’s on my mind, or near it, but there are invisible borders between representation and truth. Is the character I play in life more or less desperate for love and acceptance? More or less relatable? And how does this all translate to the way I see myself and my world.

All I know is when I tried to write last night for my writer’s group, I just kept writing about the break-up, stopping, realizing there wasn’t enough time, before walking to Kinko’s and printing out a sketch I wrote earlier about an irredeemable Charlie Sheen. I felt bad just walking in the bar, though people showed up and enjoyed themselves.

Half-way through the group, midway through Alex Hilhorst’s historical-fantasy about lion-headed rape-goddesses, I felt my nasal passages occlude to a place where I could no longer breathe. I struggled and was absorbed as I often am when such things happen, lamenting the alcohol and fighting the symptoms, though I knew there was no stopping it.

A cold is a cold after all, and all that stops it is rest and the certainty that, after reaching a head, it will get better over time.

There was talk of Holiday karaoke afterwards, but I excused myself, even from that, to go home, to lie down, and fell asleep early. I knew then it was right to sleep.

I guess sometimes, in some cases, I capable of some common sense.

I woke up to a cold apartment, after a few snoring stirrings in the middle of the night.

John had unplugged the half-broken electric heater, which lost a wheel when Matt Chao sat on it, months earlier.

As Rob-it’s useful-this-time-of-year-to-have-a-Beard-o Malone would tell you, the loft gets very hot at night, when the warm air collects near the top of the apartment, amplified by its tight walls and mirrored body heat.

John couldn’t sleep with it on though sometimes, so I didn’t blame him.

“I have your cold.” I told him, when he woke up to his chiming cell-phone.

“Really? Sorry about that.” He commented groggily. “I hate that.”

“It’s alright.” I replied. “It’s not like you could help it.”

“I guess it just comes with the territory.”

***

I sat alone for a while, after an improv class with some time to kill before my next event.

John was getting up for a 2 minute 55 second stint at an open mike at the PIT, where I was taking classes, but my last class had gotten out, and though I didn’t feel too bad about it, I still needed somewhere to be in the intermittent hour between class and mic.

I tried sitting lobby in the theater, inquiring if it was ok, hearing an affirmative, but realizing that sitting in such a small place for an hour was still a little too sad.

So  I found a place with four-dollar Peronis and a combination Garlic-Knot/Chicken Parm Sandwich.

I remember in the days I found myself in the fashion district playing Magic cards, Cavallo’s Pizza was remembered as the lesser of the pizzerias one could go to, when compared with the late-game refinement of a brick oven place like Waldy’s or the sheer beefiness of a nuts-and-bolts joint like (New) Pizza Town.

Since Neutral Ground closed however, Cavallo’s has changed it’s game somewhat, keeping its unimpressive slices, but adding the aforementioned Chicken Parm on Homemade Garlic Bread sandwich at the impressive cost of 2.75, which is how much it’ll cost you for a plain slice at some of the overpriced joints in this city.

However, the kicker was the little beer selection, all 4 bucks, which beat out the local bars for me which all were crowded with sports nuts and the 35-plus crowd and would doubtless involve tipping and bad looks. Though I had a Peroni with this sandwich, in an act of lax will/deliciousness, I got two of these babies as well as two of a different kind of beer, a sort of IPA made by Italian maker Moretti (think Italian for “Miller”) called, attractively, La Rossa.

By the time I got to the PIT, 45 minutes later, my stomach was as filled with chewy garlic and sauce as my head was with a light easy buzz, which I would later regrettably compliment with several Bud Lights.

The headache the next day was beaten with a single Tylenol and a good mocha.

So I’ll call this one a victory.

***

CAVALLO’S PIZZERIA

Chicken Parm on Homemade Garlic Bread Sandwich w/your choice of bottled beer (Peroni shown above)- $6.75

NW Corner of 28th St and 7th Ave

1 to 28th St.

***

BONUS 1:

A successful appearance of the “McGangBang” (a McDouble with a McChicken between it, 4 dollars in NYC, 2 dollars elsewhere) and my first visualization of it, courtesy of local fast-food master and eternal 17 year-old Blake LaRue:

***

BONUS 2:

Please check out friend of the blog Nandan Rao (who never calls me anymore, asshole) and Zach Weintraub’s trailer for their new film “Tender is the D”. Obviously they should have cast me in it, but seriously, fuck those guys.

Link is here.

***

BONUS 3:

If you are a reader of the blog but missed this, I will be being (not) funny on stage for my UCB class show on Saturday, Dec. 18th at 2:20pm at the UCB Theater. Improv, the most reliable form of comedy, eh? See, that’s what you’ll be getting if you decide to come.

A Letter to Cousin Nick

This was what the box of cookies I got from Ruby et Violette looked, already partially eaten.

I had eaten mostly through the first layer, containing some I had already tried (the mint double-chocolate “Cool Seduction”) and some I hadn’t (A vanilla-looker called “Berry Blueberry”) but I had left the brownie, deciding that it was too good to eat immediately.

A special occasion, perhaps.

In fact, I had meant to bring the whole box into work on Friday, where I was supposed to be helping my mom out packing gift bags.

“Really? You would do that?” Eva asked me over the phone. “I would just eat all of them. And then tell people about the box. And then tell people, oh wait, no I ate all of them.”

I love her.

But the point was moot anyway, since I forgot to bring the box into work and there wouldn’t have been time for it anyway, since there were t-shirts to be folded and bags to be stuffed and so on and so forth.

But Eva was there and so was Rob, freshly de-bearded, as we found ourselves suckered into a room together, replacing blue ribbons with red ribbons, tied to big, bronzish medals.

We talked about friends and beards and haircuts (I had just gotten one) and what our friends were doing now and, more saliently, what they were doing then. The sort of idle conversation to go with the busy work we were doing.

The rest of the evening was a hodge-podge trapped between attempted cab-rides on Canal St, Michelob Ultra at the Malone-pad on Ave A and a movie we didn’t even get into for the opening night of the Brooklyn International Film Festival.

I tried touting my press-credentials at the door, only to find out that no one really cares if you are a (former) “Contributing Editor to the Film Society of Lincoln Center Blog”. We ended up getting drinks with the directors afterward, who were friends of friends.

I read one of the reviews that was propped up outside of the venue which talked about the amount of “nudity and sex, as a poor-man’s special effects”.

My friend Zach Weintraub was in town (His film Bummer Summer screened on Saturday) so I asked him and his collaborator Nandan Rao:

“Would it be strange to say I want to see that movie to see how all those people look naked?”

“Yes.” Nandan replied.

I wanted to discount his reply (Nandan is a Mormon), but Zach quickly agreed.

“Yeah, pretty weird.” He told me.

“But I mean, like,” I continued. “That’s a natural thing to think right? To wonder?”

“Yeah,” Nandan replied. “But I think that’s the sort of thing that gets filtered out around the first time something passes through your brain. You know, as something it might not be best to say.”

“But it’s perfectly natural to think right?” I asked.

“Well, yeah.” Zach admitted.

And I felt vindication at last.

Later, at the after-party that featured free whiskey-and-wine, I asked them for a screener or a ticket to the next show. They told me they’d get back to me and I realized, awkwardly, that it wasn’t smart to press it.

The next night, I asked Zach a question about Mumblecore at his Bummer Summer Q+A.

His response was a roundabout Q+A answer that, after parsing, meant “shut the fuck up”.

***

I’m not allowed to talk about my work for the census all that much, though it takes up a lot of my time.

It’s a government secrecy thing, a jail thing, a thing-thing.

I talked to a woman though, in my rounds., who had cancer.

I had tried going to her apartment before, but she had told me and my partner, a young lady about my age, that she was about to vomit so we should leave.

“Fuck this job.” I told my partner. But we still went to a few addresses more before we finished the day.

I came back by myself later and she was much nicer.

I sat in her apartment. I listened to her talk about her life. She had a chance, she told me. The doctors thought they got it.

But she was sick. And it was still difficult.

I talked to her about Howard, my family friend, who’s been dying of cancer these past months.

She reminded me of him, her stoicism, her living alone.

I didn’t refer to him by name. I called him “my uncle”. Because to call him a family friend wouldn’t adequately place where he fits in my life.

He’s the person who I would go to with intellectual queries, the person I look up to for his asceticism, his self-imposed rigor, his monastic lifestyle.

Here was a man dedicated to his art, his livelihood. He didn’t need fame or even recognition. He just wrote because that was what there was for him to do.

To be honest, I’m not smart enough to understand him. My parents would place me in front of him, as if I were, talking to him, since they thought I with my rudimentary Latin and D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths could understand his discourses on Dante and Vergil. I couldn’t, I never could. It was like facing a waterfall or a cliff: You know enough to understand the gap without being on the same level.

I didn’t tell all this to the woman I visited. But she commiserated on some of it.

It made me feel better talking about it.

It was the only time so far I’ve cried about Howard.

Later that week, when I went door to door with my census partner, someone refused in front of their family and when I tried to go in the building, confronted me.

We argued and he seemed to physically threaten me. He told me to “get a real fucking job”, which felt like a particularly bad jab, since between the two of them I have, I have none.

My census partner suggested peeing on his doorstep.

No, I said. Let’s just leave the notice of visit form. That’s what we’re paid to do.

***

I read an interesting article the other day on Jewish exceptionalism, written in the Times by Michael Chabon.

I gave it to the person in my life who best exemplifies my connection to Judaism, my cousin Lenny, whom I respect and admire and see not so often.

He wrote a whole response to my question, asking what he thought, on his own blog, called: “Letter to Cousin Nick”.

It was thoughtful and measured and contained explanatory stories from Jewish lore, a quality I admire in Lenny and in learned men all.

Much of his reasoning has to do with the idea of a moral consensus versus a higher ideal.

It’s an interesting treatise on the predicament of Israel, a country I visited only to become more confused by.

In other news, a Jewish boxer was defeated this weekend after slipping in the ring, opening up an old injury.

His wife called for the towel to be thrown in, in the eighth round, seeing her husband barely standing.

His manager through it in, but it didn’t matter, since the boxer still wanted to fight.

He was badly beaten and needs to recover now. He lost his welterweight title.

When asked about it afterward, he told the press that when you have a belt, you don’t want to give it up. You fight until you can’t.

Take from that what you will.

A Brief Run

I uninstalled Magic Online from my computer last night, somewhere around 1am.

It felt kind of liberating, to know, well, that you were liberated from a K-Young Adult online card game on which you’ve spent the majority of your disposable spending for the past month.

As liberating as it could I guess under the circumstances.

After all, it was 1am on a Friday (Saturday morning?) and I had spent the whole night in, doing nothing but staring at my screen.

In the morning there’d been a rush of activity. Eva had been coughing all night long and when she woke up I told her we should go to the emergency room. She had Medicaid and there were some questions about whether it was appropriate or if she would be able to pay, but after looking online for walk-in clinics and calling the number on the back of her card, we were told it was best just go to the emergency room.

We went to the New York-Downtown, since I thought it wouldn’t be crowded and it would let Eva get her cell-phone charger, since hers was dead. It wasn’t crowded and I ended up only meeting and talking to one person: a heavy-set Latino man with an eyepatch and crutches who told me that he had run straight into some low-set marble seating, while running to catch the bus in Atlantic City.

“It’s cause of this, you know.” He said, pointing at his eyepatch. He had already had his leg treated, but it was still hurting and I felt a little bad when Eva and I got to go ahead of him.

“They’ll fix you up.” I told him.

“Man, but there was some liquid coming out of my leg…” He replied.

And then Eva and I were called in.

I was worried that something bad was going on with her. Eva’s a smoker, unlike me, and her cough had stuck with her for what seemed like a couple weeks.

What if it was bronchitis? I wondered. What if it’s emphysema? That just happens to old people, I thought, but it happens to smokers too, what about all those New York State-sponsored posters?

“Allergies.” The doctor told us. Eva had told me she didn’t believe in allergies.

“Well they don’t believe in you.” I told her.

The doctor started prescribing a decongestant and an antihistamine when I took a Zyrtec-D out of my census bag and gave it to Eva.

The doctor took a look at it quizzically, putting down her clipboard, asked me a couple questions (“Is this over the counter?”) and approved.

When we waited for a nurse to come with her discharge papers, the nurse said “The doctor recommends Zyrtec.”

***

The previous night, that Eva was coughing, had also been eventful.

In fact I hadn’t been able to sleep, but that wasn’t even really related.

I had gone to a talent show run by ex-Mormon comedienne and Rob/Nandan friend Elna Baker.

The talent show happened every month, but I had never been and this time Rob-o had a piece in the show, a video montage he was asked to make of famous break-ups from movies and TV. It was funny and had some good clips, though I wish it had been even more disjointed and “Malonely”. At the end while watching the scene from “Annie Hall”, where Woody Allen reimagines his relationship with Diane Keaton going well in a rehearsal for a play and talks about art correcting life, Rob splices himself in, a rye commentary that the audience, I think, read more as Rob splicing himself into the montage shirtless.

But a shirtless Rob Malone isn’t news to me and it isn’t why I couldn’t sleep.

I couldn’t sleep because I had pitched a “This American Life” episode to Ira Glass and I had the distinct feeling I had fucked it up.

Ira Glass had been at the talent show to support Elna Baker, a sometimes contributor to his “This American Life” radio show and Dave Hill, another contributor and a tuxedo comedian.

There had been a lot of acts at the show: a few numbers by the house band, some short-short stories, adult-twin sisters playing “All the Single Ladies” on accordion. Dave Hill had eaten a lot of hot peppers on stage to try to show his cure for heartbreak. Ira Glass had told a story from his life about stalking the girls whom he had decided to break-up with.

There was even a “Buddhist Ms. Lonelyhearts”, whom I got the feeling my friend Langston (who spent the previous weekend building a shamanistic sweat-lodge) would have enjoyed. She made me feel very uncomfortable both by her repeated invocation of the Bodhisattva and the extremely personal nature on-stage of the gay co-host whose break-up she was discussing.

Also, I mean, as someone who has found some happiness in a relationship, it can be a little awkward to keep hearing about how sad others are during break-ups. It’s safer to be in a form of denial, or at least procrastination, ignoring that those feelings could happen to you again, or deciding you’ll deal with them later.

After the show, Ira Glass was standing in the lobby of the venue, talking to fans. I went up to him with some trepidation, unsure if I had anything to say. It was strange, as usually I do say the right things in these circumstances. I was even known for it in school, where the chair of the department would make sure I came to the Q+As so at least someone would ask a decent question. But I get flustered when I go up to talk to him, though I’m not sure why.

“Hi,” I tell him. “I’m Nicholas. Uh, before I start I should probably tell you that I applied for an internship with This American Life a while ago and I didn’t get it, though I think I got some sort of level of consideration.

“Well, it’s very competitive.” He replied. “Do you have any sort of journalistic experience?”

“Well, I worked on some documentaries.”

“That’s journalistic experience.”

“And I graduated from NYU-Film School.”

“I had some friends graduate from there.

“Oh,” I said. “Are they marginally employed too?”

“No.” He said quizzically. “They’ve gone on to make movies.”

“Oh, well. I just graduated. But I guess that’s the way it’s supposed to be. You struggle when you get out of school. Then struggle through your twenties. Then struggle through your thirties. Then struggle through your forties. But I guess at that point it’s a different kind of struggling.”

“I don’t think it’s supposed to be so hard.” He replied.

And it was at about this point that I began pitching him my idea for an episode.

He told me he was flattered, that people are usually too shy to come up to him. He told me he liked the idea but that he “didn’t see the story yet”.

He gave me his email address and told me to send him an email.

On the walk home, I couldn’t focus on the ground. In bed, I couldn’t sleep.

I stayed up all night, writing my pitch.

I sent it in.

I bcc’d my parents.

And I woke up. And I had an email from my mom that it was “brave” but “lacked humor”. My dad on the phone said the same thing.

No one was around on Friday night.

So I stayed in and played Magic Online.

Until I uninstalled it.

***

I watched Deconstructing Harry last night, on Netflix Instant Watch, after I uninstalled the game. I had never seen it (embarrassing, I know) and I figured it was the sort of mental enrichment that all the other ex-film-schoolers engaged in, that I had been potentially missing out on.

It was fun and I fell asleep half way through, but in time to pause it. I woke up and watched the other half.

Today, I don’t know what I am doing.

I’m going to work for the census, I guess, a job which left me sweaty the other day, with a handicapped woman questioning my right to knock on her door and telling me I was “terrible” before repeatedly asking me to leave.

I got that interview, but it took its toll.

I later went down to a new lunch-spot called Rabbits over on Sullivan St. I had gone there before and the people had light-heartedly taken a shot at me for being a “census man” at which point I had sighed heavily and left.

I went back there and ate a Jerk Chicken Wrap with some “vinegar-soaked fries”. They were very good and I think there was some mango chutney somewhere in there.

While I ate my dinner, I counseled the woman next to me, who appeared to be going through a bad break-up with a stalker-ex who turned out to be cheating with her on his fiancee.

She started telling me it was her fault and wondering who would want her now.

“Don’t worry.” I told her. “Just know what you want and keep asking for it. Eventually others who want the same thing will come.”

She seemed heartened so I sent her the trailer for my movie, paid my tab and went home.

I was done with census work for today.

***

But what do I want?

I have a job that I don’t know if I’m better having or not.

When the producer I’m working for asked me about what I was doing throguh September, if I could stay with the film, I told him:

“I don’t have any plans for my life.”

I’ve been checking my email frantically seeing if Ira Glass would get back to me, only to find emails from Bulgarian film festivals and from my boss both demanding and deriding my work on accounting documents I am thoroughly unqualified to tackle.

What am I waiting for? What am I doing?

Suddenly, everything seems urgent, though I don’t know what that “everything” is.

I’ve got a throb in my throat and my stomach and I’m not sure how to handle it.

Well, I think Rabbits has a “Chicken Parm” sandwich.

I’ll try that out, for now.

***

RABBITS

Jerk Chicken Wrap with Vinegar-Soaked Fries- $15.00 (incl. tax and tip)

Sullivan St bet Houston and Prince Sts.

1 to Houston, CE to Spring St.

Me In A Backpack And A Suit

My therapist took this picture, actually a couple hours before a job interview.

When I told her this, she seemed impressed.

“The suit looks good on you.” She said. “One could even say, the suit suited you.”

“”Congratulations.” I told her. “You’ve officially become my dad.”

But the point was moot from there.

“It doesn’t matter whether I look good or not in it. The person who interviews me is going to expect the kind of person who would wear a suit. And that’s not me.”

“Maybe, or maybe they’re bored of that kind of person.”

“But probably not.” I said, glumly.

It had been a tough week.

My job had been stressing me out with my bosses constantly yelling at/abusing me, asking odd-jobs and favors that lay outside the purview of my very modestly paid hours.

A debate as to whether I’d do personal work for one of them (not related to my job as written) began as a moral conundrum so wrenching that I got several stomachaches writing emails and walking over to meet the guy (I don’t think they were lunch-related).

But it ended by me just doing the work for him and going home after, no biggie.

In the process though there had been drudged up some dormant feelings about my life, the direction it’s taking and my parents’ wishes/desires for me.

My dad thinks I need to make a plan instead of “banging my head on the wall”. My mom thinks, as she always had through desires or through proxies like my teachers, that I should go for a higher education, a prospect that only seems to promise only further rejection, humiliation and pointlessness.

Both  of my parents think I should quit my job, a fact that I counter by pointing out that this is the first long-term paid job I’d ever had in the entertainment industry and that for all my complaining, 75-90% of my friends were worse off, not even working in the field, or just not even working.

Jesus, my friend Alex Hilhorst seems only to sit around all day thinking about “LOST”. Poor fuck.

“Well, look.” I told my therapist. “It’s not like I have all these other offers coming in.”

“And I mean, look at me. You saw me when I was jobless and depressed. I hated myself! I got addicted to online card games that weren’t even poker! I think you even told me that I lost weight!”

“I told you you seemed folded in to yourself.” She replied.

“I’ll take it.” I said. “Anyway, I guess we’ll see how it goes today.”

“We will see.” She repeated. “And I will see you next week.”

“Oh,” I got up. “Before I go, do people do this?”

I gesture at myself.

“A backpack and a suit?”

“Because I feel like I am just… fucking up my suit and looking ridiculous.”

“No, sure.” She reassured me. “All the time. On the street.”

“OK. Because I just didn’t know how I was supposed to take my stuff otherwise.”

“Look up.” She told me. Or maybe that’s just what I wanted to hear.

***

The interview went something like this:

-I went into a Qdoba in midtown where the woman was supposed to meet me.

-She was interviewing another young fellow in a suit and giving him career advice. She told me to come back in 15 minutes.

-I went down the block and ate a pretty superlative treat that I didn’t photograph and which I had to look up on Google Maps because I forgot the place’s name (Royal Pizza) which had two-for-one mini-chicken rolls for 1 dollar that were extremely delicious and which I was extremely worried I would get on the suit (which I had borrowed from my dad) and thus violate his rule he had given me about only “imbibing clear substances” before the interview, but which I managed to keep off my jacket, but goddam they were good and fresh too, that place was great.

-Went back to the Qdoba after 8 minutes, having successfully discarded the plate and wiping my face, trying to keep the evidence off, and even popping a lemon-menthol cough drop to clear out odors.

-Saw a missed call on my cell-phone from a number I didn’t know. Returned the call and saw the woman who was supposed to interview me on her phone, motioning me in the door.

-Was informed by my interviewer that I had left against orders (I hadn’t) and that she had to leave now but she would take a minute to look at my resume.

-She looked at my resume, asked me what I wanted to do, came up with a great off-the-cuff answer about seeing the “behind-closed-doors method of moviemaking” (it was an agency position advertised)

-Was informed that my interviewer didn’t have “anything in the entertainment business”, but that I was “wonderful” and she “will call” me.

-Was left sitting at a Qdoba by myself.

My dad’s commentary on all of this:

“Well, I hope you go home now and change out of the suit.”

***

It was also a tough week because this was graduation week for the class below us at New York University.

I hear their speaker at least was a little lamer than ours. We had Hilary Clinton, they had Alec Baldwin. But I guess even that’s debatable.

As I walked around the Washington Square Park area, heading towards my writing group, it felt not to think about how much I had disappointed myself in the time between last year and now.

My plans for myself: to get my film into festivals, to finish two features, to try to be working on getting my first feature script made at Sundance or Cannes. To do well at NYU, at least making it to the finals and getting a screenwriting award, I mean, come on, right? To have a good paying job in the biz, or at least, to not want one.

But here I was trudging down West 4th near where it turns in to East 4th, with 5.2 pages I had written that afternoon that I’d hated, stuffed in my U.S. Census Bureau bag, a job I got depressed about not having before I got depressed about having.

It was spring, allergy season in New York and the wildly fluctuating temperatures and pollen counts had my body reeling and resorting to Zyrtec-D in order to be able breathe with any ease, a drug which left me barely able to move when I arrived at the bar for the meeting.

The meeting up well. It was small, only five people. A bunch of people didn’t show, or canceled, or never even replied to the meeting-notice email. But, the people didn’t hate my pages. Andy Roehm was there with his self-proclaimed “shitty ending” to his horror script. Nandan was there, answering question time about Mormons. Ant Jones was there with his braces. And Eva was there, with her self.

I remember when I was unemployed, I’d take solace in these meetings. I’d make them my strength when I wrote here on this blog, my “up-ending”. I don’t know. I don’t know how I feel, other than it was a good night.

But in the end, I am where I am.

And I guess I haven’t given up.

I still have my dad’s suit in my closet.

***

ROYAL PIZZA

2-4-1 Mini-Chicken-Rolls- $1.00 (lunchtime only)

3rd Avenue between 38th and 39th Sts

4567S to 42nd St- Grand Central