Je dois reflechir/Il faut vivre

I’m sitting in my room right now, perhaps defying the only rule of vacationing, which seems to be: don’t sit in your room.

In my defense, it’s morning and a while ago I ran out of “plans”.

The joy of travelling alone is the independence you find, the discoveries you make.

Last night, walking along Boulevard St. Germain, I tried to find something to do or just to wander, my backpack growing heavy on my neck, my requisite two-Tylenol cocktail for that time of the backpacker’s day, yet to set in.

I had already seen many of the American films there were to see in Paris, as my French was terrible-going-on-passable, good enough to get people less annoyed at me, but not good enough to understand a film like “Le Havre” without subtitles (English or French). The Cinematheque Francaise was playing only weird Clint Eastwood movies, like the one where he has to infiltrate a mountain-climbing trip or the “reverse Harold-and-Maude” movie as Ro-Beardo Malone described it via text from across the sea.

So I wandered, checking my email when I’d find a Starbucks, not using my phone otherwise. I just wanted to find a place to read “From Paris To The Moon”, which I was determined to get through before I left Paris, when I came upon, like a mirage, first an old cinema (Paris is full of them) playing A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy and the very Brasserie described in “From Paris” as “the best restaurant in the world”.

Paris has had a way of doing this to me, offering consolation in walking, guiding you at the right moments. When I was depressed after a night of snoring and a fumbled attempt at female interaction, I found a DDR machine inadvertently by the Bastille, ended up being better than I ever was at DDR and a had a crowd of pre-10 year-old Algerian boys clap at my rendition of techno–fied “Cotton-Eyed Joe”, on which I got a double-A and took a bow after. That’ll beat about anything.

When I walked all the way yesterday to one of the last restaurants I had been planning to go to and I couldn’t eat anything, I discovered a neighborhood I had never found before, found a nice cafe and had a very silly picture taken of me that again, invigorated me.

When I went to go home from the movie (funny and appropriate) and the dinner (excellent), I almost took the Metro before a string drew me out.

“Really?” I asked myself. “You’re going to walk home? In the damp Paris evening?”

“You don’t have to walk home.” I told myself. “You get to. Through beautiful Paris.”

As always, walking, you make discoveries. One night, I found a Magic: The Gathering store (L’Esplace Du Dragon). One night, I met a couple Arizonans and we retired to a bar after a film. Last night, I ran into two hipsters out of Virginia with appropriate facial hair and had a conversation about where we were in our lives.

I also ran into two French guys who wanted a light, though I thought they were asking directions. (Sidenote: Though I am not out of the woods yet, so to speak, I’m a New Yorker and have a decent sense for danger.)

“I am sorry, I thought I had a lighter, but I forgot I left it passed airport security.” I told them.

“It’s fine, you are American?” One said,

“New Yorker.” I replied.

“You like Paris? You like the French girls?” He asked.

“Yes, but it is difficult. You are all too good-looking.”

“Oui, c’est vrai.” He replied and they went off into the night.

Such meetings are valuable, magical even, but ephemeral.

When I came back to the hostel, 5 euro 90 bottle of wine in hand, a Beaujolais Nouveaux (which I remembered from my pops was fruity and good for drinking on a lark), I sat in the lobby of the hostel as I often do waiting for someone to drink with, but there was no one. The bottle stayed closed. And eventually, I went to sleep. Even for all the good things, on a sour note, though it could have been just coming down from the coffee and the wine at dinner.

I wondered when I got to Paris whether I was addicted to people, my friends, the people I see. I’ve called myself “an interdependent mess” and Rob told me he liked this phrase to describe me. I’ve been more independent here in Paris, but just as I knew in film school, whatever else I am or become, I’m a storyteller and I’m not happy if I don’t have someone to share stories with.

My raison d’etre.

If you will.

While I’ve been gone, I’ve gotten messages from my friends, people checking in, telling me they miss me, wanting to share stories too. Telling me I was “missed” at the Magnet holiday party, which is an ego-inflation I don’t need, but which reminds me, as lame as it is to say, that the connections I have in my life are important. That I love people and am loved in return.

My father said, upon giving me advice, the day I was having girl problems and roommate issues, that it was better to leave reflection alone. Your subconscious will work on that while you’re there. Just try to have fun. My depressive friend over G-Chat told me “Wallow when you get home.” I found that appropriate.

The only “friend” I’ve made here really (Brad was at a different hostel and had that same mentality of impermanence) is Hossein, the kid who loves Clint Eastwood movies who I saw “The Rookie” and “Heartbreak Ridge” with, a film nerd who is glad to have someone else to talk to, even haltingly, in English.

Before I left for Paris, I was talking with my improv group about “an agreement about how to play”. People were a bit shaken by this, they didn’t know if we should plan to much in advance, this is improv after all. But it’s good to have an agreement on how to play, a frame on the wall, a knowledge of what this is.

That’s what New York is, a way of knowing each other, a culture, a sense of dependent permanence, in the best possible way. As much as Paris tries to allow me in and console me on my silly American follies and as much as I find it extremely beautiful, I miss the people who care to miss me.

It’s a nice frame on the wall of my life.

So what to do? A good question. I still have a cheap eats place to try (which I’ve liked better than the fancy places I’ve been, just who I am). I need to get my sister another gift and I know where. And then who knows?

Honkytonk Man at the Cinematheque? Another walk around Cluny?

I guess I’ll just have to wait and see and see what comes to me, whether Paris consoles me, whether I discover something new, or whether I just get to remember when I get home that at worst, they’ll be someone to share that bottle with.

***

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my comfort-food spot in Paris.

Coming in close second to this is the other place I’ve been twice, L’As Du Fallafel, a very silly place in the Jewish quarter that is plastered with signs all over it saying that it is endorsed by Lenny Kravitz of all people. The food there is insanely large portions and cheap and portable. Near perfect.

Also great were normal Thai and Indian take out places, though the Indian was a bit expensive.

However, the winner was certainly apparent.

Le Relais Gascon, right on La Rue des Abbesses, makes fucking huge salads. It’s what they have.

It’s a south-western French restaurant and this is there fomula for a salad:

A lot of good lettuce, some tomatoes, some meat and protein (egg, pork, chicken, what have you) and a metric-shit-ton of duck-fat fried-potatoes on top.

Oh yeah, some balsamic vinaigrette too.

It’s delicious.

It’s so delicious I got on the phone, yelled at my dad about how pissed I was about my snoring roommate and wondered if I should just get the incredibly expensive train to Amsterdam just to decompress from Paris, went there and was fine.

I called back my dad and apologized.

The service doesn’t care, the menu looks like a tourist trap and even has some English on it (a faux-pas). But there it is. Delicious. And relatively inexpensive for the size at 12 euros.

I could not finish one.

The old me could not finish one.

Frank or Simon from back home with their epic appetites probably could.

We’ll see if we can get them to come, next time.

***

LE RELAIS GASCON

Salade Du Chef (sans oeuf)- 12 euro (tar. inclusif)

6, Rue des Abbesses

12 to Abbesses, 4 to Pigalle

“I’ll use it as my profile picture.” I told Ro-Beardo Malone.

“Actually, I was hoping it would be the first picture on the next Feitelogram.” He replied with his half-cocked beard-smile, a tactic he frequently employed to try to inflame my inability to tell the difference between dry-sarcasm and his occasional earnestness. (e.g.: “Not enough films about the Kennedy assassination” accompanied by half-cocked beard-grin.)

It was 10:55, the hour of the always-breathless lead-up to The Chris Gethard Show, where my role as “The Man Behind The Plant” put me to some degree off-camera, getting ready to retweet people saying things like “Give me some jews 2fuk my boyfriend dumpt me” as well as home-brew images or cartoons having to do with the show. People frequently ask me, in bars or first dates, how I manage seeing my comedy friends with my friends from film school and the lucky thing is that the show is like a nexus of all of them.

Here, in one corner, is comedy-man Keith Haskel getting dressed up in a banana suit while his girlfriend helps him zip up. Over there is once-villain-man Andrew Parrish, warming up the audience and rushing around getting ready to punch Chris for an on-show bit, there getting in to an Evil Knieval costume is Ro-Beardo Malone, jimmying around trying to figure out whether his crotch muscles have healed enough that he can break loose and dance his fullest.

That night, a woman tried to book Rob to play a vuvuzela at her next bar mitzvah or event. That night, a woman called in with notes passed to the host with underlines to accentuate her increasing drunkenness. That night, a waltzing-seniors holiday special took over our studio so we were crammed in to a smaller one. I look forward to the show every week.

This week in improv class, I finished my last session of a 401, the class I was stressed out about enough last time around to write regularly about on this blog. Though I spent most of the class fairly confident, I lost that confidence in my last session and felt like crap going out for obligatory drinks with everyone after the show. That night, I started replaying a Mega Man RPG for the Nintendo DS.

In the haze after college that I am still in, I look for meaning all around me, for structure. When I didn’t feel good about my last 401 class, it made me feel down for two days.

I went in to my therapist asking why and she told me that in the absence of a significant other, my relationship with comedy and performance is the primary one in my life.

To that end, I went on two (unsuccessful) dates this weekend but things are looking, well, as they are.

In truth, I have to remind myself that there’s no control. To my friend’s perturbment, everything is like improv.

You can state your idea, your wants, your desires, but you have no control over where the scene or your life goes. Only where you choose to venture, preferably boldly, and the discoveries you make yourself open to with other people.

Tonight I go back to The Chris Gethard Show.

It’s a dating special.

I’ll be there again,

The man behind the plant.

***

My friend Jon Bander outed me yesterday.

The truth: I had been writing self-strokingly about the weight I had lost and telling people as much when they gave me a nice compliment or conspicuously in conversation (“Good show tonight.” “Yeah it was. I lost 50 lbs.”) but to outpour on social media was something else.

I had someone post on my wall that I was an “inspiration” my friends rag on me and people hold me up as some sort of symbol.

Meanwhile, on the other side, my parents were concerned I had lost too much weight (hovering somewhere around 175) and were wondering if there son was going to waste away. Their plans to have me see a doctor before I left were only foiled by a. A New York practitioners inherent lack of availability and b. them realizing I had been given a clean bill of health by that doctor about a month ago.

In the middle somewhere there was me, still self-conscious, still grabbing my belly at any passing moment, still wondering if I’d gain it back, if I’d added a pound. If now that I’d been “exposed” whether I’d just be another casualty, gaining back all the weight I had lost.

Friends told me it took them 5 years to get it back, others nodded knowingly as if it wouldn’t even do me any good to know.

The phase I’m in of “my new lifestyle” seems the scariest, the one without a plan where I try to find my own boundaries, set my own rules, figure out what works for me, what I’m allowed to do.

In Yoga (which I still think jokes and references to are stupid), my teacher talks about posture, as we stretch a belt across our backs to sit tall. When we arrive at our computers, we hunch over. When we sit on the mats we align our spine.

As I look in the mirror before the TCGS dating game tonight and put on a nicer shirt, now I wonder about my posture and how to fix that, how to get my body right.

Where is the happy medium between these things? My parents concern, my neuroses and the possible benefits of eliminating the things hampering me in my life.

What is the goal I’m trying to achieve (as Bander asked me as a necessary pre-requisite before instructing me on the diet I took to get to this weight)?

If it’s romance, as my friend Jason Chan has said, being skinny or even attractive (don’t think I’m there) doesn’t seem a large part of the equation.

If it’s happiness or self-contentment, isn’t that a state of mind rather than a physical pose? Haven’t I said before I was “happier” at my previous weight?

These are questions without too many answers as the holidays or my nearness to my Paris vacation grow closer.

Well, maybe I’ll figure it out in old gay Paris.

***

Or maybe my parents are concerned about me because they saw me split a cupcake into thirds.

My parents (seen above in soft-focus, head-cut-off form) were enlisted on a Sunday morning after a post-Faicco’s expedition to help me try out my latest point of exploration: Molly’s Cupcakes over in the West Village.

The place seems to have some reality-cred which I didn’t know too much about (not being an avid watcher of “Top Chef”-type shows) but I am fan of your down-home-style cupcake joint and the capacious milieu and swing-like chair seemed to draw me in.

Even though Mom pointed out their award-winning cupcake, a Peach Cobbler-blend with a real-peach slice on top, I was not interested. Such things struck me as being unnecessary, cupcake-wise, when for me the bread-and-butter of a cupcake should be simplicity.

I do like Pichet Ong’s cupcake inventions at Spot, to clarify, which often included Yuzu and berries and stuff, but even there, simplicity is maintained with the relatively small size and modest-icing of a cupcake being paramount. For me the monster-truck style-cakes of Crumbs are anathema and the Baked-by-Melissa tinies, while great, definitely suffer due to portion size on their value quotient.

So, I got the alpha-cake, vanilla base, chocolate-buttercream icing.

And I gotta say, it was pretty good.

The icing was refreshingly (unexpectedly) dark as opposed to milk chocolate and the base was also deceivingly lemony, a fact we interrogated the owner about to no avail.

What seemed simple ended up nuanced but markedly enjoyable, by no means a “perfect” cupcake (I think Blue Ribbon gets the closest to that), but certainly an excellent one.

My parents still looked perturbed though when I only ate my third of the cupcake.

“Too sweet for me.” My dad, the wuss, said eating about a third of his third before retiring. Mom and I tried to say something but well, you can bring a horse to water…

At least I ate half my huge Faicco’s sandwich in front of them.

At least they know I eat.

***

MOLLY’S CUPCAKES

Vanilla Cupcake w/Dark Chocolate Buttercream- $2.50

Bleecker St. bet. 6th Ave and Carmine St.

1 to Christopher St. ACEBDFM to West 4th St.

You Are Where You Need To Be

I tried Yoga for the first time yesterday.

It was the sort of thing like Vegan-ism that I admit to disliking, the sort of thing that people use as a crutch to seem somehow spiritually superior to others. Back in sketch classes, when people would make jokes about “ashrams” or whatever I would always just think they were assholes, because really, what an elitist, shitty white-person thing to be making in-jokes about, Yoga.

But it was pretty good, though I’m really sore today.

I still don’t think I’ll be making any ashram jokes (just as I don’t think I’ll be talking about how much better my life is now that I don’t eat animal products) but it did make my back feel better and seemed to slightly improve my posture. It just seemed like a less body-destroying version of the Judo I used to do, which when I left it made me feel like my whole body was vibrating and that I craved meat.

But as I was leaving, the person who’d brought me there pointed out that this was a good way to meet women, since there was a low-percentage of males in Yoga classes and an even lower percentage of straight males. But I told her I thought it would be creepy to hit on a girl in a yoga class, a place where people are supposed to get away from stress and feel at peace and also somewhere in me it felt somewhat desperate.

This same person recommended that I highlight my TV appearances on my online dating profile, when they heard that my appearing on national television had somehow not lead to me being some sort of mighty-mack. But this too seemed desperate me, seemed targeted to attract the wrong sort of attention. I left the class feeling down and not knowing why, though maybe like I wanted to do more Yoga.

Thinking about it today and yesterday has brought me to a rather obvious realization and one that I’ve arrived at multiple times on these pages: for all my serenity and comfort for where I am in parts of my life, I still wonder what’s wrong with me.

In my personal and professional life I feel undervalued. Why couldn’t I explain why I hadn’t found anything meaningful romantically in the time since I’d been on television? Professionally there are problems too with feeling underused and undervalued that I can’t talk about here.

The other day after a good night at The Chris Gethard Show, I got in a fight with my sister that made me feel like I was 11 again and went out to a bar I know I shouldn’t have gone to, to talk to a girl I shouldn’t have talked to, about that something that just made me feel immediately like shit. I was undervaluing myself. I was feeling that way.

As always I can point to my friends and see similar problems, no great serenity or happiness there, necessarily. But maybe it feels frustrating to see their apparent grace in dealing with it.

Just like the Yoga people and the Vegans, my friends frequent seem to achieve some happy balance, or at least find a way not to show their loneliness. It’s healthy for them but it also makes me feel like who am I, but at least they don’t make jokes or gloat about it.

As I’ve written about before here, the best note I ever got in improv was from Ashley Ward, who told me at a bar after a class I took with her, after feeling bad about how I was as a performer that “You are where you need to be”.

It’s a good way to look at life and the situations you find yourself in, a way of seeing things that you make can’t make sense of as part of a larger situation, a moment in your life that is now, but will not happen again, part of a path you may or may not continue on.

One foot in front of the other, going out, doing things. I have friends who don’t go out, friends who wallow in their loneliness and depression and I don’t do that. I put myself out there and perform silly shows and write stupid blog posts (which probably don’t ultimately help win me any romance points).

I am where I need to be.

And I’ll try to figure out a Yoga class to go to.

Probably to the amusement of all.

***

Andrew Parrish is concerned about how he is portrayed on this blog and for good reason.

For about two-thirds of his portrayal, he has been a villain of epic proportions, so much so that Blake LaRue made a really fun Batman-villain origin-story for him, which I think was just Mad Libs pertaining to Scarecrow’s back-story (but still it was funny).

However, sadly, he continues to be a good friend to me.

When Robeardo Malone will have either a “large bowel movement” or a migraine or an attack of lethargy or Beamer will decide he’d rather hide from humanity that evening or Sebastian decides he has “too much homework, bro”, Andrew consistently comes out and does stuff with me and has fun.

This week, we headed to ASSSSCAT, saw a late-night set and then went on an epic quest around the city, wandering into a hotel to attempt to retrieve a pillow that was taken from him by his roommate for a French short-film shoot in a fancy hotel on the Gramercy Park, which we unsuccessfully crashed (something about the pillow being dirty) and then headed off for a night of ping-pong with comedy luminaries, into the wee-hours Sunday night.

Of course during ASSSSCAT at the UCB, a girl who attends the CGS recognized Andrew and started energetically talking to him, which he shrugged off, even when he later saw her on the street during our quest, he didn’t even stop to talk to her.

“What are you doing? Late night, pretty girl, chance encounter…” I demanded

“Eh.” He said.

Bastard.

It was a fun night though as I am epically terrible at Ping Pong and managed to hit the ball into the light fixtures several times before finally being relieved by the much better and funnier players.

Parrish is like me, single, but he’s goddam better at ping pong, non-chalance and now he’s even stolen quests from me.

I don’t know.

I’m watching you, Parrish.

Thin ice.

***

During that UCB show evening, Andrew and I ended up at a Japanese burger place named Kobeyaki over on 7th Avenue which I wanted to try.

They didn’t have any whole grain buns for their “Teriyaki Chicken Burger” (a good version of which certainly exists at Tebaya in lower Chelsea, nb) so I ended up trying their “Teriyaki Chicken Bowl” which came over salad even though I ordered it with brown rice.

It was good, a little overly sweet/sauce-drenched for my taste, but rife with good vegetables and a surprisingly varied-greens salad.

The next day at UCB I saw someone with the same thing as everyone crowded around to see someone’s opinion of the new place in the ‘hood.

“Yeah, it’s pretty good.” The eating dude said. “It’s Bourbon Chicken.”

I literally gasped (or maybe said “Whoa”).

That is quite a put-down as Bourbon Chicken is the sort of crap one gets from Food Court Panda Expresses AND/OR Food Court Rajun Cajuns!

“No diss, man.” The guy said. “I love Bourbon Chicken. But this is definitely it.”

And I guess thinking back on my experience of it.

He’s kinda right.

***

KOBEYAKI

“Teriyaki Chicken Bowl”/Bourbon Chicken- $9.00

7th Avenue bet. 26th and 27th Sts.

1 to 28th St. CE to 23th St.

My Trip To Poly Prep

 

I was awake at 6am.

It wasn’t easy.

I had had an episode of The Chris Gethard Show the night before, one where I got dubbed my official show-name “The Man Behind The Plant”, which oddly brought me some pride. Everyone always goes out after the show and I have to admit feeling the slight temptation, even now that drinking isn’t too fun for me anymore, just to celebrate my renaming.

But I still had to be up at 6am.

And so I went home and left Keith Haskel in his Banana Suit and Ro-Beardo Malone in his Evil Kneivel costume to get drinks with the rest of the crew and headed home.

The alarm got me up, groggily, as I wandered over to the Prince St NR Station preparing to take my trip, forever, to the end of the R line, Bay Ridge-95th St.

It was a misnomer, really. That area was on the border of Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights, a fact noted in Poly Prep’s school song which begins:

“Far down on the heights called Dyker…”

The song I memorized which would now never leave me, except by Alzheimer’s or death.

I had invited back to Poly Prep out of the blue, by my old 7th grade teacher, a bright spot in my loathed history of attending the school, Mr. Khan.

Mr. Khan had encouraged 7th grade Nicholas to write poetry, to find his voice, to begin to speak to his situation just when he started to have a situation to speak to. He didn’t coach any sports (unlike most of the teachers), he just loved his students and gave them all his energy. I would look forward to his class eagerly the 3-4 days a week I would have it.

The rest of my history at Poly Prep was not too happy as those who know me or read the blog know. In fact, I feel like it’s something now I bring up pretty early in conversations or in dates, how unhappy my high school experience was. When I gave monologues for “The Armando Diaz Experience” roughly half my stories were about how unhappy I was in high/middle school.

Poly Prep, for those who don’t know it, is a huge Ivy League private school in New York City, situated on the tip of Brooklyn on a palatial estate, looking like something out of “The Rules Of The Game” or “Gosford Park”. It has 2 duck ponds, 3 tennis courts, 2 soccer fields, 3 baseball fields, 1 full-size football field and a quarter-mile track. I’m sure I’m forgetting many things but so be it.

Suffice it to say, the focus is on sports and academics, with some minor interest in theater. Everyone else was marginalized to various degrees or left to fend for themselves. When I was there, class boundaries were the biggest “cliques”, with partying Manhattan Kids (“MKs”) making up one sect, Park Slope hippie sons-and-daughters making up another, the middle-class Italian Staten Islanders and then the kids brought in on sports scholarships, a large section of the population, but one that kept to itself.

Why not? If you have some kids talking about vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard and some kids seeing their single mother kill themselves working nights, you’re going to have some disjunction.

But still, I was invited there, a none-of-the-above, spending my time growing a pony-tail and sitting in abandoned corners of the library or the newspaper office trying to avoid people.

The first thing I noticed when I was back was that they now had Ronnybrook Chocolate Milk in their milk dispensers. It used to be “GAF E. SEELIG” whatever that meant. It still didn’t taste that good, but then again, I put it in some bad coffee.

After a couple of announcements, I was put on stage with three other alumni who had had various experience, including a girl who had struggled with coming out at the school (no easy task) an upper-middle-class West Indian woman who mostly enjoyed her time at the school and a kid from my year who had ended up an investment banker, but who had been expelled for a year or two from the school for stealing a laptop from someone’s locker. I look forward to hearing him talk.

I had warned Mr. Khan and my other old mentor there, Mr. Cox, that I would speak my mind on stage and “try not to curse”. They laughed and said it was fine. I mostly marveled on how normal the other people on the panel seemed as they went down and listed where they went to college and what they did now.

“Hi, I’m Nicholas Feitel.” I told them. “Uh, I’m not really sure what I want to do with my life, but that’s cool. For now, by day I’m an assistant to a producer and by night I do comedy and stuff. Uh, I’ve been on TV a bunch of times.”

Pause.

“Uh, check me out on Youtube?” I offered quizzically.

The crowd roared.

I felt good saying what was on my mind. I told students who didn’t like the school to get some perspective and find interests outside it. To know that “this is not it”, even if knowing that doesn’t help because “you are in it”. I told them that Poly conditioned me to hate myself, which is why I didn’t leave. I told them that they should know that “the people who were d-bags to me in school are now fat and have bad jobs.”

Not really values looking back that I want to associate with comeuppance, but it got a lot of applause.

It ended up fine with a mostly positive response, though when asked if I wanted to stick around I told them no and they called me a car which I took reluctantly after my hour-twenty on the R train getting there. It was still just a lot to be there and think and feel that all again.

The only thing that surprised me was the student who had been expelled, who stayed silent about it his whole time on the panel. When I talked about how Poly had conditioned me to hate myself, he said when he got the mic:

“Oh Nick, I’m so sorry to hear that. I wish I had known that when I was there so I could have pulled you on to the happy train I was on.”

My therapist noted that an earlier Nick would have outed him there on stage. Would have made him bring it up.It wouldn’t have been right. It would have been patently wrong.

But I just left it and left the school and went home.

I got an email earlier this week from Mr. Khan.

“My man Nick!” he typed exuberantly. “One of our superstar seniors has to do an interview with a working adult for her project. After hearing your speech she has abandoned her previous choice in favor of talking to you. Would you be willing?”

I’m meeting her at 5:15.

I hope the whole conversation won’t be about Bethenny Frankel.

***

I’ve been feeling less creepy lately.

It’s nice.

I’m still losing weight (yes, I know my personal weight loss is my readers’ favorite topic of discussion) and I’ve recently found a weird phenomenon which is that my stomach folds into itself when I’m reclining. It feels weird, but I’ll take it as a good sign I think.

As my therapist said, maybe there’s less there so there’s more room to fold.

As usual, I still have young ladies sending me subtle signals I’m better at reading that they’re not interested in me. Though now I get to hear these stories of people online dating in my improv classes where young ladies are like “Well, we messaged back in forth for two months and I kept telling him I didn’t want to meet and I wasn’t interested in him and fast forward we’ve been together for four months. He’s a personal trainer.”

When I head that story, I literally said “That’s creepy, I would have just stopped if you told me you weren’t interested in me.” But both the girl telling the story and the teacher of the class (who had done a one-woman show apparently about online dating) both looked at me and said something along the lines of “Well you’ve got a lot to learn.”

Sigh.

I’ve been working hard on feeling more confident and trying to put myself out there unembarrassed. I asked someone on online dating the other day to get a drink to me, something which I never had the confidence (as stupid as that is) to do before. Coffee, lunch, or, MAYBE, dinner, I would think. A drink I’m just telling them that I’m flirting, that I’m DTF, that I’m some confident jerk.

Or just confident.

But as stupid and simple that is, I noticed it and it felt cool.

But then there are still things that hit me, even if they hit me less now that I have some built-up self-confidence or built-up lack-of-creepiness.

Like a girl in my improv class last night thinking that I was going to hit her with a chair.

It’s sounds stupid and it’s a stupid story, one involving stupid improv.

I was in a scene where my game was to prove my courage against this girl who was playing a menacing groundskeeper. So I walked over to her and gently karate-chopped her and she laughed it off and pushed me to the ground and shot me with an improv gun, so I improv died.

But I needed to prove my courage, so I came back as an improv ghost and tried to karate chop her again.

“Hah, you’re a ghost!” She said. “You can’t do anything to me!”

“Oh yeah?” I replied and used my improv-poltergeist powers to pick up a chair and loom it menacingly towards her.

And the scene was edited.

Except after the class when I went to ask the teacher about some notes he’d given me, the young lady from the scene approached our teacher to ask him something and I walked away as I’d have other times to ask.

Except she said, “Actually I wanted to talk to both of you” and talked about how “uncomfortable” I had made her feel, that she “was like What the Fuck is he going to do, hit me with a chair” and again “how uncomfortable it made [her] feel.”

Again, I handled the situation well. I apologized profusely as did Brandon saying that she should never feel endangered and that I would never hit anyone with a chair and that I apologize if I made her feel uncomfortable.

But as I walked home I felt both how annoyed it made me feel now and how awful it would have made previous incarnations of me feel.

I know it was all about her and who knows what this girl’s issues are, but someone thinking I would hit them with a chair? What the fuck do I seem like to them? How terrible or creepy must I seem?

And even remembering how I would have internalized it made me very upset. I didn’t see any shows. I just walked home, the two miles, that heavy backpack on my back, full of half-a-dinner, back-issues of the New Yorkers and my newly-beloved mini-laptop.

Not to use a tired metaphor, but I carry around a lot of baggage when dealing with my romantic life and the way I’m perceived by people.

There’s still that Nick from Poly Prep who is conditioned to hate himself, to feel unworthy, or creepy, defensive or “other”. And as much as I fade away from him, I still carry him somewhere.

And he rests heavy there on my back.

But also, what the fuck?

Even he wouldn’t hit someone with a fucking chair.

***

I still get to have nice things.

After seeing Melancholia with my grams and feeling bummed out (more by the movie and less by naked Kirsten Dunst, which is pretty sweet, what, I’m a guy) I wanted to find something sweet to take my mind off it all.

Luckily, even though there was nothing to kiss, there was at least a good cookie in my pocket.

Although my Grandma and I ultimately ended up going to a secret ‘Wichcraft inside the Lincoln Center Annex on 63rd St, we did pass by Epicerie Boulud, the new “Pret”-type place by Daniel Boulud (DBGB, Daniel, etc…). While the “Amish Chicken” salad didn’t really seem my style, they had a smallish chocolate-chip cookie that looked pretty good.

Now, I have my qualms.

Firstly and importantly, it’s made with milk-chocolate, which isn’t usually my style. I think dark or semi-sweet works better for artisinal cookies with the sugary surrounding batter providing the contrasting sweetness to the intensity of the chocolate. It’s just like drawing, chiarroscurro.

But what this does provide is an intense sugar rush experience, the confectionary equivalent of being 5 again, with all sweetness and buttery flavors coalescing into adolescent glee.

It was small (which is good for me, not necessarily for others) but felt like a welcome thing to small ones or to those who wish to be so.

And that’s fine.

***

EPICERIE BOULUD

Chocolate Chip Cookie- $2.50

SE Corner of 64th St and Broadway.

1 to 66th St.

At The Argo Tea Cafe

Going home always instills feelings of being home.

If you know what I mean.

In this case, going home meant comments from my parents and my sister about my appearance and grooming habits, obligatory letting my grandmother hold the crook of my elbow and, of course, dressing up in clothes I would never wear for others’ amusement.

This was a favorite game of my sister’s and my mother’s for as a far back as I can remember. Everyone would get very excited about “Let’s see Nick in that!” and I, who have always hated “clothing” in the aesthetic sense, would protest and squirm, maybe have a tantrum or run out in a huff, differing from which point of my childhood or adolescence this was happening in.

It was always at some sort of all-family gathering though, where the social pressure is highest and this time was no different.

It was my grandmother’s birthday, the night before Halloween, and in her attempt to constantly pawn clothing off on me, she had brought a top hat and “two different capes!” (her emphasis, not mine) for me to try on, presumably for some sort of halloween experience. My friends, Rob Malone, Matt Chao, Chadd Harbold and Frank Orio had all gathered as well (at my mother’s request) and they joined in on the pressuring which had a particular pervasive take this time.

First it was my grandmother just mentioning that she had brought the aforementioned hat and capes to the room in her up-tone excited voice as if she was saying “I have a great i-dea!” which then stayed in the room like germs from a lingering cough infecting the air as my parents heard, my friends heard and eventually my sister who, of course, was entirely enamored of the idea.

As I helped my mother set up the very nice dinner she had cooked for everyone, I heard my friends talk with my sister from across the room, feeling the onset in the back of my mind. As my sister continued to inflate the idea like a hot-air balloon, I grew more and more tense as I pointed out the almonds that could be toasted for topping the couscous, building to that moment in the back of my mind.

Slowly, my friends were infected by my sister’s charm and enthusiasm for the idea. Matt Chao, with his penchant for nerdy ideas and general geekery, was, as expected, the first to fall.

“You know what we should do?” I heard from across the living room. “We should see Nick try on that top hat and capes!”

“Yeah!” My sister instantly seconded.

“Oh, that would be won-derful!” My grandmother exclaimed.

“Damnit Cec.” I replied. “You rigged this.”

“I didn’t rig anything.” She said, putting on a faux-shocked face.

“Come now, dearest Nick.” My grandmother told me grabbing the crux of my arm.

“Goddamnit.” I told myself as the traitor Chao and my sister continued cackling from the back of the room, because now if I didn’t do it, I would be disappointing my grandmother at her birthday celebration.

My friends gathered round and Matt Chao took the picture with an iPad 2 that was definitely going to destroy his life (he already found an MMORPG to play on it) as we filed into the other room.

There I was getting dressed up again. I think I even called it out.

It didn’t look too bad.

And I hadn’t bought a costume.

I took it with me in a bag home at the end of a nice dinner with my friends and wore it the next day at the Magnet Theater’s Halloween party.

I hadn’t done any other work on it or changed my clothes, so I just told people I was a magician.

I had a pint of whiskey that I kept taking out (diet, folks) and people asked me if my costume was drunken magician and I said, yes, that seemed appropriate.

I made sure to take good care of it, like my mother texted me and said.

Magician Nick, the end.

***

I asked my therapist today a rhetorical question. Or maybe not a rhetorical question, maybe just a want or a desire.

I asked: “When is therapy going to help me improve my love life?”

I’m coming up on a year since I’ve been in anything really meaningful.

I weighed in yesterday at 182.4.

The Accutane seems to be working even though it’s making my skin dry as hell (the doctor told me this was to be expected and was not permanent).

I even perform some funny comedy and people are starting to agree that the stuff I do doesn’t suck. Scott Adsit sat it on the show I did last week and people seemed to like my sketch I brought in on my Magnet team.

I look at myself in the mirror and see someone who could be with somebody, see someone worthwhile, someone worth at least a date or two.

I feel like people keep speaking past me, like they’re unable to connect, like they’re interested in observing me or looking from a distance or having my acquaintance.

Several times in the past week, I’ve had young ladies tell me “I’m a big fan of your blog” seeming to mean both “I really enjoy your writing” and “Nothing will ever happen between us”.

One of them even said this probably knowing that I had talked about her rejecting me through process of ignoring me on it (Ladies, feel free to comment if this is something that does make you feel good or a fan of something).

There’s something funny about that to me (even if it’s glaringly obvious), the idea that my ability to articulate who I am and what I feel is the very thing that is both what intrigues people and also causes them to make sure they keep a proper distance. I feel like perhaps people wish they could be open or wish they could be honest or unashamed or public with their thoughts. But as have that sanctity of themselves that they choose, that privacy, they don’t want to be dragged into the zeitgeist and who could blame them?

Or they could just not be in to me, that’s fine too.

I still haven’t returned (yet) to OKCupid, though I have returned to going to a party or two and drinking hoping for something dumb to happen, always with disappointing results.

When I told my therapist my rhetorical question, she told me:

“You came to me a few years ago with a strong idea: that you wanted someone who would accept you for who you are, take you or leave you. And that’s good. But you’ve realized that you can change your appearance somewhat, you can put your best “you” forward, without changing essentially who you are.”

But there’s also something to be said for the repercussions of being a public person, it’s a strong choice to live like that, but people may react strongly.

As I was writing this, I got a message from someone on OKCupid, a reply from a message I sent 6 months ago.

 

Well, ladies. I guess I’m still on the market.

***

I apologize for the blurriness of this photo, only vouching in my defense that it is difficult to take a good picture of something when you have an intense desire to eat it immediately.

When I first passed “Za’atar” on Greenwich Avenue it immediately struck me as small and strange and oddly cavernous, a wild, ethnic joint offering 3-buck falafels amidst a string of mid-level restaurants and haute-crap bars.

It’s on my path both of walking to the “Improv Ghetto” (26th-30th sts bet 6th and 8th Aves) from my home and also just a preferred path for general walking for me. I love streets that are diagonals in New York City and Greenwich Avenue is one of the greatest and steepest offenders.

I passed it several late nights where I saw it oddly open with a hijab-clad woman working the back but it wasn’t till I was looking for a meal, running late for a rehearsal I had committed inanely to walking to that I ended up there.

The time I went a skinny, short older man manned the area, while what appeared to be a railroad-style hobo (of the type one used to see in Greenwich Village) sat in the front eating from a plate of kidney beans.

He said he was from “Damascus, Syria” when I asked him and asked me if I wanted “everything” to which I said yes.

What I got ended up as 5, as opposed to the advertised 3 dollars, but hell if it wasn’t worth it.

Light and crisp, but packed falafels, stuffed into a well-toasted whole wheat pita, with non-pickle cucumbers, lettuce, tomato, lightly-pickled onions, tahina, hummus and a potent, but sweet hot sauce.

It was the sort of falafel you wolf down and then spend several minutes after just contemplating the accomplishment.

I’ll have to go back to Taim and do a side-by taste-test.

But this is certainly one of the best falafels in New York City and quite a find.

***

ZA’ATAR

Falafel w/Hummus + “Everything”- $5.00

Greenwich Ave. bet 6th and 7th Aves.

123L to 14th St-7th Ave. ACEBDFM to West 4th St.

So, I’m Skinny. Now What?

An overstatement to be sure, but one that’s nice to make in the other direction than I usually do.

“Looking good, Feitel.” My friend Bobby Olsen told me. “Looking like girls are going to start just eating you up.”

“Well, ya know.” I replied. “I’m feeling pretty good actually. I’m worried, but feeling ok.”

And I was. It feels good to lose weight, to feel like you are lighter than a month or a week before. The opposite worry comes from feeling heavy or guilty that you ate something, assured that your one transgression will cause those 20, 30, 40 pounds to reappear instantly, waiting for the sin to push you over the edge.

In some ways, this diet is as close as I will ever get to being a Catholic.

“Alright,” I told Bobby, revved on myself. “It’s time to start playing that game. Am I skinnier than my friends? What you got bro?”

“Well what do you guess?” Bobby asked jokingly.

I guess around… 170?” I said.

“Yeah, sure.” Bobby said blowing this off and I contemplated my 188 weight as if I had a ways to go.

Then again, Bobby could just have been sick of standing in front of the ATM I wasn’t using in order to ask him such a question.

But nevertheless, I had been getting comments. Frequent invocations of “you look great”, or “you look buffer”, or “slimmer” or whatever. I tend to blow off compliments and internalize criticism as many people I think do (especially those with depressive tendencies), but just as criticism can chip away even at a guarded defense, if repeated over-and-over, compliments can too, eventually even enlivening the glummest of us grouches.

When I went to tape another episode of the TV show I am on, I got even more compliments, questions about “how did I do it?”, asking again if girls were “throwing themselves at [me]“.

Which I keep on looking at in some sort of strange view.

I didn’t get in to this diet to get girls, necessarily (though the spark was a bad dating experience) but while I’ve managed some amount of discipline and serenity about maintaining my eating habits, I’m not really sure how or if it’s supposed to change my life, particularly my dating life.

I still had two girls I dug express in (appreciably awkward) ways that they weren’t in to me, either by not responding to messages or erratic behavior, but that feels just like normal anyway.

I’ve stayed away from OKCupid for about a month now and when I went back to look it today, I first wondered if I should update my pictures, then if I should take a look at my profile, then how this could in any way be representative of me at all.

I almost called this post “My Inevitable Return To The World Of Online Dating” only to realize in going there that it didn’t appeal to me anymore.

Something has changed in me it seems like, a lack of immediate neediness, I guess. Or maybe just an unwillingness to search.

This weekend I found myself acting in my friend’s grad-film project for NYU in an improvised scene where I had to kiss a young lady for 6 or 7 takes, after terribly demeaning her on a badly-gone OKCupid date (The phrase we found through improvisation that I repeated over-and-over to make her break down was “You are an emotionally void person”). As I did it, in character of course, it made me realize how easy it was to just kiss someone. How, with some confidence or just the expectation that you will, it was possible to just sweep someone up and kiss them.

Now, of course, this does not disrupt the Solondzian fantasies of me and my fellow nerdy or once-nerdy brethren, who imagine a comical resistance and a slap from any lady we might try to kiss, as well as some sort of expression of disgust (such as “Ewww!” or “Gross!”) for good measure.

But it just makes a self-conscious guy think, huh, well, what if I just did it? Of course, self-conscious or awkward guys are often told “be confident” or “confidence is sexy”, but since there is a lack of experience to found that in (unlike compliments or insults which reinforce or dissolve self-created ideas and boundaries), it’s a difficult note to take.

But as I said, as I gave what I kissed a girl a bunch of times, as I gave a funny performance, as I got on stage 3 times this weekend (and later tonight!) for shows, with some confidence and poise, I felt my general confidence rising. Experience seemed foundational and just like doing improv, the more you do it, generally, the more you feel you can.

All of this, of course, is super creepy.

I kissed a girl in the context of a weird improvised comedic grad-film acting project, not in any sort of real sense. And it’s super creepy to take from that, agreed upon experience, that I could kiss more girls.

But maybe this is how people get to be creeps: they get skinny, they get some false confidence and they start kissing people for some reason.

I guess we’ll have to see if this happens and the (inevitably disastrous) results.

For now though, I don’t want to go back to online dating, to something strange and unrepresentative.

Not for at least 20 minutes.

At least.

***

This was the note I tried to tape to the exterior of my building in the mad rush surrounding my experiment with CLEAR mobile internet.

I had decided (or was conned or convinced) on a cool fall evening to try CLEAR 4G internet, a mobile version of WiMax (which is really interesting and runs on the wavelength that old antenna-era TV used to) which took little convincing since I am a hater of Time Warner Cable and how it seems to represent “the man” in general.

Growing up over in the West Village, I lived in a building littered with Time Warner outages, from expensive “on-demand” services that rarely worked to internet that I, as the designated “techie” (I’m not just a “foodie”, guys) of my family was forced to constantly attempt to fix and reset. I actually memorized the number for Time Warner from the old daytime commercial jingles to begin with (TV growing up), but then just out of use (it’s still 212-674-9100).

My usage of them in my apartment gradually degraded as I read an NYTimes article about cutting your cable and purchased my outstandingly cool Mac Mini-home TV system (which I feel like I could do a whole self-congratulatory blog post about) which has been saving me money ever since and has made me virtually nauseated when I am forced to watch cable at the houses of others with its commercials and its non-optimized programs. We can see whichever movies we want when we want and Netflix is on more devices than ever (not to mention Hulu), so why do we have to endure commercials and reruns and millions of channels of crap? Why can’t cable look more like Hulu Desktop with interspersed commercials and a slick shopping-mall style interface of what we might want to watch, along with commercials targeted towards our demographics?

End diatribe, but don’t think this is over TV. Don’t think this is over at all.

Anyway, when I cancelled my cable, I kept my internet, but ever since I read about WiMax I imagined getting rid of that too, shedding their cable-bound internet and ethernet cables and reducing my invasive attachments to a simple black box that I could just take around with me wherever I went. CLEAR offered me a month to try their service, contract-less, and I took them up on it, with their “Apollo” 4G Hotspot shipping to me the next day.

Thus the note and the panic.

I had to go to work finally and I wasn’t going to be at my apartment. The peril of ordering things online in a door-man-less building! You have to take a little sticky note they may or may not leave at the exterior of your apartment (and wait for it to arrive), call them, ask them to hold it at their facility, go to their facility in the evening (but not TOO LATE in the evening), bring some government ID and then hope that the driver didn’t just lose it or the guy behind the counter waiting to get off cares enough to look those two extra minutes to find your bo in a pile.

This would not happen to me. I would not allow my wireless liberation to happen one-three days and a lot more hassle later.

I tried knocking on my neighbors across the hall who had been leeching my internet (another NY social-tech phenomenon I found out about through an NYTimes article) but the woman there was leaving in 30 minutes! Too much of a risk! I tried calling up friends before realizing the folly of it; they wouldn’t wait for my router! I even considered knocking on the door of the cancer patient on the first floor and asking her but I just didn’t have it in me to bother her, hear about the chemo and then ask her to hold my package.

Desperately I darted around before realizing what people do–yes! The Coffee Shop across the street where I got my morning imbibe-able! I ran in and begged Lucas (who I used to call Tats for his tattoos, punk demeanor, i.e: “What up, tats?”) if he could do me a huge-huge favor and hold my package for me if the FedEx guys came after explaining to him the depths of my conundrum and my quest to free myself from cable as I did here and he said:

“Sure man.”

And I raced outside to place the note on my door, grabbed tape from my apartment came outside and–

There. There was the FedEx Man.

I signed in gratitude as he looked at me with the raw look of a man witnessing a tech-crazed man-child on the verge of salvation and allowed me to sign after some cursory questions.

I was free.

In the time since, I have taken around my square-shaped router on adventures in New York City, testing out the internet. It’s uneven, less consistent than my earth-bound modem. But it’s more wide-ranging and portable and, most importantly, at home it offers me roughly the same speed as my current Apple router does (Ethernet would be faster but that would mean more wires!!).

I am still embroiled in my month, still carrying around my router-puck sharing wi-fi and offering it like chocolate in the ASSSSCAT line and coffee shops trying to make friends and conduct social experiments, as well as testing the puck’s limits.

There’s still that last cord of resistance to get through that worry that I’ll wake up one morning and my internet will be out and it’ll be a huge mistake and I will search in vain for my cable, just as I felt like I’d lost a friend for a while after I cut my TV channels and HBO.

But just like my worry that my pounds’ll come back, it’s a fear to be overcome, not acceded to.

I should point out that friends Rob-Bearded-Still Malone and sometimes-villain Andrew Parrish fear this transformation. They want me to stay tethered fearing this will accelerate my transition from man into hyphenated man-machine.

“Or just make you into a lamer person, bro.” Rob offered.

But in that direction, I hurtle, un-Maloned.

Here’s to a wireless liberation, frantic SoHo packing problems, and geeking out, for sometimes, man.

Here, here.

***

Thursday was a good night.

I did a genuinely good show on two Whiskey-Diet Coke’s out of a house that looked dim, packed with no one but a few performers, assorted girlfriends and a particularly beardy Rob Malone, who generously came out to support and fulfill the two-drink minimum (of which he still owes me for one drink, I’m reminding him now).

(Also Sean Taylor and Shawn Amaro who were our great hosts, http://www.varietyunderground.com)

But somehow my group–full of a brit, a fiancee, a depressive writer type, and an Actor–all really gelled and we did a crazy set about late-30s romance involving S+M gunplay, gay-hate-speech against robots and even a meta bit that went over well. My good friends Shaun Farrugia and Woody Fu were also there, playing with their team Honey and gave me punches and pictures after.

We all took a cab to Greenpoint on Rob’s decision to meet a girl, Shaun’s desire to get home and my lack of sobriety/high off having a good show. It ended up being fun as we ragged on each other in the cab, talked lady issues and improv and Rob did his best to add beardy comments.

We ended up at a Korean joint called Mrs. Kim’s on the beautiful fall evening as we all had the sort of “giving each other shit” conversations that I love having with my friends. When Rob’s lady friend arrived Shaun took me aside, between our attempts to use my 4G modem (to Rob’s chagrin) to stream “The Princess and the Frog” on Netflix.

“Beard guy over there’s a baller.”

“Yurp.” I replied.

We ended up ordering the restaurants Brunch-meets-Korean fair and while my friends got  a chorizo-based “Kim-Dog”, I got myself the Chicken Caesar, which arrived pleasantly at the table, an unexpected treat.

The chicken was cooked in a soy-glaze, happily, which it made it more tender and less dry than “salad-variety” chicken and the caesar dressing had the fishy tang of a highlight of sardines, again adding nice touches to the “still-asian” part of the item.

And for a “fourth-meal” I felt happy that it conformed to my diet and didn’t feel too-guilty sopping up my stomach-whiskey with it.

Eventually Rob left and Shaun went home and I hopped own cab back to the Magnet for a Thursday night Inspirado.

When I got home, I was full of funny and food.

***

MRS. KIM’S

Chicken Caesar Salad- 11 bucks

Corner of Franklin and Kent Sts, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY.

G to Greenpoint Av, or really, just when you’re in the neighborhood.

Hurricane-in

I survived the hurricane.

That’s what I felt like I should start with.

The hurricane, for those of you who were in it, was relatively mild as far as us New York City-ers were concerned. I heard coastal towns and Long Island were hit harder, but we were mostly left with I think 5 felled trees in Manhattan and a couple of days spent in various forms of intoxicated partying.

The strangest thing of all of it were the subways being closed down, something that has never happened in my 24-year history of living in New York City (maybe 21 years because I probably wouldn’t have remembered for the first 3).

I walked around on Saturday before the storm, when things were still closed and Sunday, when stores opened in SoHo (my neighborhood) at around 5pm. It was a hoot to see boutique owners driving in and parking to try to reap the benefits of low-lying non-subway-taking European tourists, mostly amazed they hadn’t been killed.

For me the hardest part wasn’t subsisting. That was something of a joke. The bodega across the street from me stayed over, it would seem, 24/7 even during the hurricane and I know they had their best day ever that Saturday morning as the line snaked around the narrow aisles and people grabbed cheese and packaged meat.

I, for one, was set with Indian curries I had stocked in my refrigerator from a late night excursion Friday night, where I decided, what the fuck, might as well buy something, as I left my friend Alex Hilhorst’s going-away party early to lug curries home, round 11:3opm.

No, the toughest part, as indicated by some of my tweets and Facebook updates, was the loneliness for me of being trapped in my house for 48 hours.

The pat of SoHo I live in is great for me, before West Broadway with all the stores and crazy tourists, on a block with trees and a park and 5 restaurants and a laundromat and an aforementioned bodega.

But the bad part about living there is that, well, no one else does. Which is usually fine, because I’m located conveniently near almost ever subway, except when the subways aren’t running.

As Rob Malone headed over on the last train to Katie Rotondi’s house and Andrew Parrish headed out to PA, I was stuck there in my apartment, with ample Netflix, a DVD collection, a new video game and the electricity never even went out (like it did for my boss who got stranded for 3 days in Vieques when Hurricane Irene hit there).

But the thing is, I’m a social person. Even more than that, I am someone who is not agoraphobic, but rather hates being trapped in my house. I’ve broached the subject before, but not recently, so for those unaware, a reminder:

When I was in middle school and high school, I didn’t have many friends. I mostly slunk around the school in a leather jacket (in the high school days) not talking to people, carrying a backpack with all my books in it, because I didn’t want to deal with the jeers of the locker room. Just trying to survive the hellishness of adolescence.

When I went home for the weekend was arguably even worse, because just as other people were going over to each other’s houses or hanging out, I was at home, calling people up. And if no one wanted to do anything, as no one so often did, I was there at home by myself all weekend, just feeling bad and beating myself up for no one wanting to spend time with me. Sitting in my house, in my room, became time for brooding, time for accepting that no one cared for you, that you were a freak, that you were unloveable.

When I came to college, after surviving that, I met people who seemed to dig me in the social reset of freshman year, I opened up, started talking to people and in the freak-fest of NYU-Film, I managed to seem cool just by virtue of my seeming unrestrained social non-graces, a loquaciousness born our of the ignorance of how to act around people and made tolerable by earnestness and the humor I had acquired from Woody Allen movies and my punny parents.

From then on and to this day, when I sit in my house alone, with nothing to do, nowhere to go, for an unrestricted or long period of time, I feel that same pressure, that same brooding sneaking up on me. The sense that no one wants to see me. That I have no friends. That I’m alone with my self-hatred.

Of course, nowadays, this is disconnected from reality. I have many friends, some of whom, like Rob and Katie, even video-chatted with me those nights giving me at least some virtual company. But I was companion-less and the talk of “babies being born 9 months after a storm” or just someone to cuddle with, gave a new dimension to that feeling, a new loneliness.

It may not seem like much, but 48 hours in your own mind, brooding, can be a long time to not like yourself.

***

But of course, I did survive the hurricane, as I said earlier.

My dad, like me, gets wanderlust and we went a couple times out to get some coffee, looking around for a place that was open on Saturday and Sunday, at my request entirely (my dad doesn’t even drink coffee).

It felt good to go on a quest for some food, to be out in the world, even though it felt so strange to see New York City dormant and mostly closed, the diners and coffee shops we went to, flooded (with people) and only getting busier.

And my life after?

Well, I’m still the same, seeing my friends a bit more.

My buddy Chadd Harbold just wrapped his first feature and Is aw him yesterday for lunch (though I ditched him when we were supposed to see Our Idiot Brother, which, I rightly predicted, sucked)

I went back on my dating website, encouraged by my friend Ilya, who had some success there and, having moved to New Haven for Yale, now had none of the problems of meeting people that we used to share, other than being awkward Jews, which we still both are.

Life is back to normal in this post-hurricane world.

I had a long-haired cabby rant at me yesterday about how Rick Perry would make a great president and he hadn’t slept for 48 hours (probably normal for a cabbie) before spouting a bunch of stuff about his workout regimen and “the fucking ragheads”.

I’m back to reading scripts and trying to perform enough that I can tell people I’m an improv performer at least instead of just an improv student.

It’s my life.

I’m not sure if I have anything more to say about it than that.

There’s some other stuff going on with an improv-possible-rape confession and the coolest Magic: The Gathering player in the world getting unfairly dissed (the former of which enough has been said and the latter which is an ongoing travesty) which would probably be interesting to talk about.

But right now, there’s a whole-grain sandwich calling my name.

And a chance to get out of my house.

***

Just as sometimes I like to quest for great restaurants to witness their greatness, sometimes I like to go to places that look like they conceivably cannot be good, to try to be surprised.

The best example of this category, in my mind, are restaurants that are attached to hotel chains.

Simply put, there is no incentive for these places to be good. They need only be adequate and non-offensive in the extreme.

They are there for the tuckered-out New York City tourist who is sore because he thought he could walk down to Ground Zero and back but, wow, that’s really a lot of walking!

So there, instead of another adventure, is the hotel restaurant, a place that caters to his laziness.

After all, if you weren’t exhausted or bewildered by New York City, why would you ever go to the restaurant attached to your hotel, in one of the finest bastions of dining in the world?

So, the hotel restaurant can’t be crazy or super-adventurous or any “weird” cuisine like Indian (“Is that like Chinese food, honey?”) but has to be something that a family can eat, something that has non-spicy options.

Something that serves french fries.

But even based off these necessary restrictions, I’ve been amazed by what I’ve found.

A place attached to a Marriot Express near me was an improbable Japanese/Mexican non-fusion restaurant! And the guacamole was delicious!

And this place I went to, attached to a Hilton near the Holland Tunnel, was great.

I had been recommended to a little Italian place by my boss, whose recommendation had been cut short by his sleepy script partner, who wanted to get the draft finished so he could finally catch Zs.

But I had forgotten I had a TWO HOUR (apparently) conference call and the Italian place didn’t have any whole-wheat pastas and only one chicken dish, in a day I was already near-suicide over my consumption of a white-naan sandwich (FOR SHAME!!!).

So I headed across the street to Pelea Mexicana, seeing a dish it looked like I could eat.

The place was deserted at 6pm and I had a booth all to myself. I spread out my things.

I got three different kinds of salsa to taste, all distinct and spicy. The corn chips (of which I had few) were warm.

My chicken breast came, finely bone-in, served on a delicious bed of fantastic garlic-sautéed spinach,, which was flavored by the jus and the wonderful pepper-tomato salsa the dish was cooked in.

It was under 20 bucks, they dealt with my sign language due to my conference call and I got to relax.

And now, when friends come in and ask me for advice, I can direct them to that Mexican joint attached to the Hilton near the Holland Tunnel.

And look at their faces.

And grin.

***

PELEA MEXICANA

Guajillo Chicken w/Chips+Salsa, Rice+Beans- $18.00

6th Avenue below Canal St.

ACE to Canal St.

 

No Sleep Till…

So.

This is the corner where I get pseudo-mugged.

It’s a stupid story, full of stupid decisions, that somehow turned out ok.

But as it’s vaguely more dramatic than the usual me just complaining about my life, I’ll tell it here.

It was a sad night, to begin with.

I hadn’t just gotten out from my class show, having done two crappy sets with a talented group of people, the sort of show where nobody even really attempts to drink with each other afterwards. Everyone just scatters their separate ways to try to pretend that this didn’t just happen.

Except I had nobody to scatter with.

I didn’t have any close friends in that particular improv class. I hadn’t invited my friends because I knew that this was not going to be a good class show.

And, perhaps more saliently, I had been disconnected with my main group of people, due to my intense dive into the world of comedy, I had not seen the Robert Malone or John Beamers–

Or even the Andrew Parrishes of the world for a while.

The people who I had known for the longest and was closest too were now all distant from me, not in their friendship, but just in our worlds. My diet had taken me mostly off drinking and partying, leaving me not wanting to go out to Brooklyn late at night for adventures and not seeing movies as often, because I was seeing so many improv shows.

So when I walked out of my class show on a Saturday night, with no one to talk to or drink with or commiserate over how crappy that just was, I felt bad.

And Andrew Parrish, to his credit, told me he wasn’t doing anything when I asked “How Parrishes” and he walked over to meet me down on 7th Avenue as we marched slowly downtown.

***

I’m sorry to tease y’all or break up the (still non-existant) action, but this was the point in the evening where we to Dirty Bird to Go, where I found out, happily, that the chopped-fried chicken wrap there was whole wheat and thus I could eat it for my diet.

It was huge and full of pieces torn off the bone, with hearts of palm and tomatoes and romaine lettuce and a mix of buttermilk ranch and hot sauce that was recommended to me the first time I ever went there, taken by my ‘rents.

I could only finish half with my sadly and strangely newly-diminished appetite, but it filled me up, was more delicious than Andrew’s roasted version and, quite importantly, reheated well the next day, with all the hot sauce and buttermilk evaporating into pure flavor.

It was comfort food, on a night I wanted it.

***

Anyway.

Over chicken wraps, Andrew and I began to discuss the crappiness of the shows I’d just been in and how I felt so weird about my love life. I’d been seeing my ex in mostly fun situations, but I had invited to a show she really wanted to see and I wondered that she had chosen to reconnect with me, if that meant anything more than wanting to hang out and watch movies.

It’s dumb, I know. and I’ve been there before.

But sometimes, you just wanna know.

As I walked, Andrew, who recently had experienced a break-up of his own, did not act villain-ly, or goob-ish, or any of the other ways I’ve described in my blog, jokingly.

He just walked with me and listened to my spout of uncertainty and self-loathing and rationalization and talked with me for a long while as we walked down 7th Avenue, just offering his best advice and giving me an ear of someone who knew me.

I appreciated it.

And then we got psuedo-mugged.

We had reached the corner of Spring and West Broadway near my house but Andrew wasn’t going there and if I went home the conversation was over.

So we stood on the corner, leaning on a building as Europeans passed us by sometime before 11, just shooting shit about getting over exes and being ok with one’s self and the Chester Brown book that we had all read at this point.

When some guy asked us if we were dealing drugs and we said no, obviously.

“Well there has been that sort of activity here and there’s an ongoing investigation. I’m an undercover cop and I’m going to need you two to open your bags.”

So we did, dumbly. Neither of us were drunk, it just sounded like a cop-like request.

“What are all those wires?” He asked.

“It’s a solar-powered backpack.” I explained expertly. “That’s a battery and my PSP.”

“Let me see your phones.” He said and I, of course, gave him my phone.

My first realization that something wasn’t right was when the dude didn’t take Andrew’s shitty flip phone.

“Wait a second,” I asked. “Can we see your badge?”

Of course, this would have been smart to ask when he did not have my phone already, but I asked.

“This is getting really uncomfortable.” Andrew said.

Which prompted me to repeat: “Wait a second, where’s your badge?”

“I have a badge.” He said backing off a bit.

“No.” I said. “This is not happening.”

And I got on the other side of the guy slowly and deliberately, using my improv skills (laugh) and just took my phone from his hand.

“Snatching something from the hand of an officer. You guys are in trouble. Stay here while I get backup.”

And the dude just walked away.

“Want to get out of here?” I asked Parrish.

“Yeah.” He replied and we zipped up our bags and left.

Leaving my first thought was, was that guy really a cop?

10 minutes later, my thoughts ranged from “Why didn’t I  get stabbed or punch trying to take my phone from somebody?” to “Why didn’t I ask to see a badge earlier?” to “Was he just doing some sort of weird drunk game?”

It was all very confusing but it shook Andrew and I up and I went home and Andrew to a party.

Full of strange and unresolved emotions.

***

The next day was mostly anti-climax.

The nice thing was that I saw Parrish and Malone and Beamer and Alex Hilhorst. And we all had fun seeing stupid Conan and bitching. And Beamer even said he missed living with me which I told him was sweet.

The show with my ex was fine, I drank too much, but did nothing stupid to my ex, except feel weird (though not awful) seeing some dude hit on her.

I found myself drinking more to keep the buzz going through another show and then some time spent mutually rapping with an improv friend about our lack of romantic prospects, back to regular life.

The only thing was that through the combination of 3-or-so too-many drinks, a stomach bug I was fighting, and spending too much time in depressive-commiseration, I didn’t get to bed till 5 and woke up at 9, held together by leftovers and the 65-cent coffee refills I could get with the cup I smartly saved from nearby Porto Rico.

I ended up talking it out with my ex after seeing Out Of Sight, her choice which I dug actually and appreciated that we both thought J-Lo reminded us of a young Barbara Streisand in that movie.

After the mostly-fine, surprisingly, after-math of that (the worst torture is in lack of clarity, or wondering, or second-guessing) I ended up drawn in to:

a. A beautiful dinner with my Grandma.

and

b. An event called Punderdome.

I had a good reason to be there. A cute girl had invited me. End good reason.

But my friend J-Sam had shown up too and we ended up dragged in from me, a falling-apart on four hours of sleep spectator, to a full-on balls-to-the-wall competitor.

The competition, which turned out to be extremely fun, involved making up puns on the spor based on prompt with 90 seconds to think on it, multiple rounds of competition and a human applause-o-meter.

“A pun competition?” My dad said when I told him about it this morning. “That reminds me of a story. A British dude said that he could make a pun about any subject. A crass American asked him, OK, make a joke about the Queen. To which he curtly replied, the Queen is not a subject.”

To which my Dad laughed over the phone for several minutes.

But J-Sam and I competed yelled and mugged for the crowd for our puns. I was even called up to the stage to sing, improbably, “Copacabana” during another group’s 90-second interlude. I knew about a sixth of the words.

Our first two puns were pretty impressive. The first prompt was “That’s What She Said” and I came up with the non-sensical but slick:

“What did Ulysses S. Grant say to the South after banging their Mom? That’s What Lee Said.” J-Sam was real impressed and we made it to the next round.

But it was Sam in all of his Jew-fro-y-ness that got the next round for us when the prompt was “The 31 Flavors of Baskin Robbins.”

He came up with:

“I watched the Shawshank Redemption last night, because I wanted to Bask In Robbins.”

I thought that was pretty cool.

In the interlude we got some cheers and jeers. Some old dude in front of us called us “Slimon and Garfunkel.”

“Are you Garfunkel?” I asked J. Sam.

“I’m always Garfunkel.” He said.

“Well I think it’s better to be Garfunkel than Slimon.” I told him. “I mean, you can knock Garfunkel, but he’s calling me Slimon.”

“Yeah, glad I’m not Slimon.” He replied.

We got knocked out of the competition in the semi-finals when the prompt was “Great Works of Literature” and all we had was me saying “James Joyce” and collapsing to the floor, while J-Sam told the crowd I was having a “Ulys-seizure”. Weak, I know. The pun we came up with later was not much better in it’s cheapness which was:

“Fans of electro-pop despair! Terrible news! Moby’s Sick!”

Might have gotten a laugh but wasn’t as good.

The finals was “uses of ketchup” and both guys did real well with super-slick punny stories and won lame prizes like a bucket of cheese-balls and waffle-iron.

But when I got home I thought to myself, that if we had made the finals, we would have elected to go second and after one of those punny long stories, I would have just said:

“There’s no topping that.”

And walked off stage, killing.

A man can dream, can’t he?

***

DIRTY BIRD TO GO

Fried Chicken Whole Wheat Wrap w/Hot-Buttermilk Dressing- $7.75

14th St bet 7th and 8th Avenues.

123FML to 14th St-7th Ave, ACEL to 14th St-8th Ave.

***

PORTO RICO COFFEE

Refill of your saved cup (You’re smart!), with Splenda and Milk, if you’re me- $.65

Thompson bet. Prince and Spring Sts.

CE to Spring St. 1 to Houston St.

 

Dick Night

It’s been an interesting week.

Perhaps I should give some explanation to the poster above.

Or maybe it should just come later.

Let’s start here: I’ve been dieting.

For those of you who follow the blog, or at least read the last post, you know that I tried doing a carb reductive diet and, mostly, I’ve stuck to it.

I haven’t eaten a significant portion of bread or potatoes or rice in about a week and a half. I’ve stayed away from anything with added sugar.

My only times breaking were drinks, with no mixers, once to celebrate the launch of “Skinnygirl Sangria”, which I think would have been disrespectful if I wasn’t drinking it at the party, and once to commemorate good-man Chadd Harbold’s first week down on his first feature film.

Both times, I tried to keep it to a limit. I break rules sometimes about fried things, because they are delicious and their restriction seems less based on the science of my diet and more on heart concerns for people who are not 24 (I said “23″ out loud when I typed that).

But mostly I’ve been good, which has changed me, how?

Well, I’ve been cycling through rapid mood swings in the mornings even for me, veering between sadness and anger and a nervous energy, the last of which is at least applicable to some improv. My book calls this “sugar withdrawal” and it’s the first real withdrawal of any kind I’ve gone through, at least in my memory.

Sometimes this means I just need to drink a coffee (sugar-free vanilla, 1-percent milk, not allowed Soy, too much sugar) or a swig of the Diet Coke in my refrigerator. Sometimes it means I need to eat a salad somewhere and wait.

Or sometimes, like Thursday, it means I get anxious and upset and my eyes see red and I tell most of my friends to go fuck themselves to their faces and storm out, catch a cab and retreat to an improv show, wondering why, as soon as I’ve extricated myself, I was just such a douchebag.

It’s the diet, but is it the diet? I counseled a friend who recently went through a bipolar break that they didn’t have to own their behavior, this was something they couldn’t control, the first time it had manifested. But they told me, laughingly, in the psych ward that was the only thing they kept telling them: that it was their behavior, their thoughts, their ability to control.

Maybe I should tell the story:

It was a Thursday night and I’d spent most of the day whittling down a 2-minute monologue about my blog that I had to perform for an audition I’d been asked to. It was the story of getting over a girl and how writing about it had helped and it was raunchy and weird and funny-ish. I rehearsed it over and over in my head, in the mirror, in the hallway of Shetler Studios, waiting to be called. I headed in and gave my monologue, thinking I had confidence in it, that it would kill, I had been asked to audition, after all, I could use this story, go to Moth or RISK story-slams and tell it, my pseudo-celebrity would help, this was one of the nice things, I bombed.

Or I don’t know if I bombed, I was fine, they didn’t laugh. But they called me in to read a bunch of other stuff, lines tweets, other people’s blog posts. I kept doing three or four callbacks into the room until they let the person next to me stay and told me to go.

And I hadn’t auditioned in a while. And I just felt silly in my expectations. And an hour earlier I had dropped my halal chicken platter into the cart-man’s metal bucket of lettuce, to much Arabic cursing.

Basically, I felt like a fuck-up.

I went to the end of my improv class that I’d missed, was told a rare “good work today” on my way out, but literally didn’t hear it with my headphones in and then when I took them out, still didn’t hear it either. It was another situation that was the bane of me, commitments to two different groups of friends I’d made, to see my friend’s show at the Magnet, or to go out karaoke-ing with Rob and Blake and Andrew Parrish (who had gamely come with to the Skinnygirl party earlier). I chose Karaoke but didn’t tell them I was definitely coming, thinking I just needed the catharsis, to yell, to croon, even if I couldn’t get drunk, I felt it, it’d be enough. Shaun Farrugia would understand if I missed his show, as long as I could tell myself and him that I was doing what I needed to to let off steam.

When I got to Planet Rose, the screens were all funked-up and Rob and crew were nowhere to be found. I discovered via texting and calling that too many of the machines were broken and the only ones working were in the back where people were concentrated and that they had all gone to play billiards and I should come.

Billiards? Billiards! I thought. This is what I would ditch my friend Shaun for? This is what I would not do unto others as I would have them do unto me for? I would violate my ethical code to go stand around and watch people play pool while I couldn’t drink because of my diet and just feel like crap and continue to feel like crap.

And of course what made me angriest of all is that I let myself be talked into this, I made decisions I shouldn’t have.

And when I walked into Amsterdam Billiards I was angry already and started yelling at them and being sarcastic as they obvious were just standing around playing pool. Where was my catharsis?

When Dan Pleck came in, who I had invited off his late-night work to tell me that we had to pay-up or leave even if weren’t playing pool, I told my friends to go fuck themselves and got in a cab.

The show at the Magnet was good and I even made it in time. It felt good to support my friends there and to see people I knew. But it just kept nagging at me after.

As I made that lade night walk, as I do so many nights now, to that 23rd St CE train station, I saw a post-dated poster for Mike Birbiglia’s “My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend”, a storytelling show my mom had seen and thought was good.

And as you can see, someone had visually told him to go suck a dick.

I wish I had a better reason than that to through that in there, but I don’t. I guess just looking at that at 20 past midnight made me just think or surrender a little bit. Or back down.

When I got home, I texted my friends apologies and they all accepted.

I don’t own a scale, but I tried stepping on a novelty “Weight/Horoscope” machine in Penn Station about a week ago.

It told me I was about as heavy as I thought I was. So I’ll step on it again when I’m done with this.

And try to tell how crazy at least a few things are.

***

So in case you guys were wondering what I ate during all this dieting, it sometimes looked like this, though actually, this was a night that I was treating myself.

I had just helped my boss Jason move into his new apartment, shipped a bunch of things and schlepped around the city with my laptop in my backpack, weighing me down and causing me to sweat clean through the back of my shirt, which I wish I could say does not happen often.

Anyway, he lives near Tamarind Tribeca so that’s where I went afterwards to recuperate.

I ate a bowl of Chicken Tikka Masala, no flour or sugar in it, they assured me, with no rice and no naan, eating less of the sauce than I normally would.

With this diet, it seems like the way to survive is to find ways to treat yourself, to find things that would seem bad but are permitted, to find ways to indulge other pathways, thus super-ceding the need for potatoes and stuff.

Chicken Tikka Masala from Tamarind Tribeca is perhaps the best example of such a thing, creamy, with saffron and fenugreek, brought steaming to you sitting over at the hyper-modern bar.

The attendent outside recognized me and invited me in. I even met up with a girl I knew from college.

But, in both cases, I didn’t get anything special because of who I am.

I guess I’ll have to find a way to treat myself emotionally, someday.

***

TAMARIND TRIBECA

Chicken Tikka Masala- $21.50 (!) *Not my normal expenditure.

SW Corner of Hudson and Franklin Sts.

1 to Franklin St.

 

Openings, et cetera

I karaoked for the first time in a while on Tuesday.

And it was good.

It almost didn’t happen, in its own roundabout way.

Rob-beardo who had initiated the want to go back to our hallowed Planet Rose of summers past, was not even the one to let me know.

It was that dastardly Andrew Parrish who inconsiderately foiled what was doubtless Rob’s plan to surprise me with a night of karaoke and beards.

“Who told you?” Rob asked demandingly. “Goddamit, now it has to happen.”

But like I said, it almost didn’t. Rob and Katie Rotondi saw “Passione” at the Film Forum and were so depressed by the musical quality in that film, they thought to abandon the whole endeavor entirely.

Plus, well, um, they weren’t sure who was going to come.

“I just don’t know if it’s worth it.” Rob said through the sweat-soaked rubber of my phone. “I just feel like it won’t be any breaks if we’re just sitting there doing song after song.”

“Three people is enough.” I replied. “You’ll get some breaks. Drink some beers.”

“I guess so, babe.” Rob said. “Where are you?”

“About, um, 20 blocks away.”

“Why?”

Why was because I had employed several of my strategies for getting through pockets of empty time on a free-day:

1. I had gone on a quest, this time to a library to read Mick Napier’s book “Improvise” which I heard was a good one for those studying the craft. It was interesting though I felt the usual amount of daunted by how many years I’d have to do this if I wanted to be “good” at it.

2. I went t the Apple Store to dick around and continue a previous quest, which was to jailbreak one of the iPad 2s that was on display there using jailbreakme.com. Unfortunately, I was thwarted by AT&T’s delightfully crappy 3G service.

3. I dropped by the Time Warner center to pick up a cookie, be annoyed they were out of a different cookie and bother friends who work there (My friend Sam Song is a baker there but he’s unfindable in some hidden kitchen).

and finally

4. I decided to walk to the place I had an hour-and-a-half to be at. It’s something passed down from my dad, an avid walker, who recently had to be dissuaded utilizing the combined jew-guilting forces of me and my mother from walking to Red Hook from my parent’s place in the Far West Village to pick up a rental car (a distance of 5.2 miles).

It was poor idea on my part, this time, that last one, because it was hot out and sweaty. I soaked through my shirt, my back especially. I got dehydrated. I spent too much time playing Words With Friends on my phone.

The only can say for myself is that at least I felt I was doing something, because all of that sunlight was charging my phone through my cool backpack that whole time.

The allure of cool things.

Eventually we all made it there, Rob convinced over time, Katie getting over her anti-Karaoke bias.

My attempts at rehearsing Rob Thomas’s “Lonely No More” which I thought appropriate given my love of Rick Astley, were not so successful though my rendition of “What I Like About You” was pretty spot on if I do say so myself, though Rob critiqued it for “just generally being one of [his] least favorite songs”.

As I’m wont to do when my friends dither, I chose songs for them, letting Rob do a sadly half-hearted version of “Uptown Girl” and watching Katie pretty much nail 4 Non-Blondes, though she complained because she was an alto, though she pretty much nailed all the tonal shifts and I told her so.

We went on the three of us, transitioning through the hard-core early crowd who had been there to watch Law+Order SVU (the pre-karaoke entertainment) to an empty bar with just us three doing songs, to a bar full of our friends as my relentless texting and twittering paid off and our friends came in with their own friends, like branching into some sort of beautiful karaoke tree.

As I drank Bud Light, after Bud Light, after Bud Light and went from songs I knew, to songs I was just drunk enough to sing.

Blake LaRue even showed up, cast on-foot to belt a few 2000s-era raps from his couched perch, to everyone’s delight.

It was a time.

If I had a complaint about the evening, it was that the bartender (who had a good voice/song selection himself) was new and didn’t buy me back any drinks or beers, like they usually do there after a while.

I guess I felt pretty high on my horse as the person whom everyone knew in that karaoke bar of friends.

Also, in my drunkenness, I took some pride in my pseudo-celebrity. Very dangerous (though I have never even come close to “do you know who I am” territory).

But I got through my songs, including Gaga’s “Bad Romance” because it’s a gravelly song with parts for the whole bar to sing and doing man/woman swaps in Karaoke can be one of the more effective and impressive techniques. I even did a finisher that I stumbled through of “Dancing in the Dark” by the Boss and mumbled along to “You’re So Vain” which I had picked for Katie and came up several hours later and which she was embarrassed into doing when someone complimented her on her song choice.

I stumbled home, Smart Water in hand, catharsis achieved, not even sad for my drunkenness.

I was proud that I didn’t get Taco Bell on that long walk back.

I only got KFC.

***

I was also part of this hip new (old) thing recently called “The Mp3 Experiment”.

My friend Keith Haskel, of the coolness and the professionalism and (even) the hot lady action (come on man, you don’t have to have that too, that just sucks) helps run the event and films it, as part of “Improv Everywhere” the organization he’s a part of that helps do things like no-pants subway rides as social/art experiments. It’s pretty much as cool as you can get in the street-art-performance world nowadays and Haskel’s at the epicenter.

The concept of this event was relatively simple. Show up at a specific location (Pier 25 near TriBeCa) at a specific time (8:30). Bring some items (in this case, a mask, a flashlight, a glowing object, a glowstick) wait until precisely 8:30 and then press play on mp3 on your device. And then, just see what happens.

What happened this time was a massive mingling of people, a sort of combination, dance, meet-greet, walk, sillyness, high-five parade and massive aerial light show.

Within the confines of the structure of “two tribes having first contact” we took pictured of each other looking silly, slow danced, tried making weird clapping noises and generally smiled a lot.

It’s difficult to describe except to say before it I was worried about writing a sketch and afterwards I just did.

I went to bed happy having accomplished what I needed having not imbibed any mind-altering substances.

I saw Haskel a few times, from the crowd, filming with his Canon T2i only for a moment as he ran to catch up with the migrating crowds.

At the finale we all were instructed to take a picture ourselves and mine you see before you.

I ran into Keith on the way out talking to a pretty lady.

“This is my friend Nick,” He introduced me, gesturing. “Star of stage and screen.”

“And this is my friend Keith.” I replied looking at her. “He runs this thing and makes funny stuff and cuts funny stuff and has chiseled abs.”

“Alright, thanks Nick.” Keith said desperately waving me off.

“Chiseled abs.” I repeated.

And left the park, over toward the West Side Highway.

***

After my previous post, in which I tried to incite some sort of response to the food-truck craziness in NYC, it felt good to have a conversation about it with a real live person.

That talk came when I finally got my druthers up to visit the Mexicue Store over on 7th Avenue, in a district I found out bizarrely from my OKCupid app that is called “The Tenderloin” (bizarrely both from the name and the fact that I was using OKCupid’s disturbing new Grindr-like function).

The owner I had a long talk precipitated by my blatant declarations within the store about the nature of food trucks that caused him to approach me, where we discussed many things that were mostly espoused in the last post.

The point was, he recommended the Mac and Cheese.

Which I can tell you is both delicious and not offered in the traditional Mexicue truck.

It’s called “Green Chili” mac and cheese and I’m not sure if that’s accurate, but it’s yummy.

Full of subtle, subdued spiciness and my favorite man-add-on, green onions, it balances a nice tight-rope walk between creaminess and subdued flavor, enough to compliment the BB(or Mexi-)Q it’s supposed to be serving.

It comes in a little cup, sealed tight and hot and nice.

Some of the other items are still being tweaked, they’ve only been open for a week.

But this one.

This one should stay.

***

MEXICUE: THE STORE

Green Chili Mac and Cheese- $5

7th Ave bet. 29 and 30th Sts.

1 to 28th St NR to 28th St ACE to 34th St- Penn Station. BDFMQ to 34th- St- Herald Square

***

BONUS: This is an episode of a recent public access show directed by successful friend J.D. Amato, featuring the dancing stylings of Robert Martin Malone. Apparently it’s quite the viral hit. Enjoy.