Rumbly grumbling

Now more than ever, I am convinced that airlines keep their planes' air conditioning set to "refrigerate" for a reason. My theory is that they think if they can slow down our metabolism and keep us in some sort of stasis during the flight, we'll bother them less asking for water and pillows and stuff. They can just come by periodically, in their own time, and check our pulses now and again.

So, I'm in New York. And by "New York" of course I mean New York City, specifically Manhattan. Being from the West Coast and all, I'm unsure of the politics and social implications of this; probably the term "New York" is meant to encompass all the boroughs, but having never really seen them I am not convinced of their existence. And that comment right there probably just sent numerous Bronxians (or whatever you'd call 'em) into conniptions of insecurity and competitiveness... at least, if New York suffers from the same fussy image dynamics as Los Angeles and San Francisco do, in yonder sunny California.

Anyway it is my duty and delight to say things likely to elicit indignation and horror; so I shall continue to imply that there is no New York except Manhattan. Your conniption is my nefarious pleasure. People are so silly, anyway. The San Francisco inhabitants I mentioned once, who ask where you're from and, if the answer is "Los Angeles" (which is so often the case), retort with the oh-so-witty "gee, I'm sorry!" are almost always from someplace far worse themselves, like Phoenix or Reno or New Jersey. Ooh, I'm plucky today!

So. The building sits on a friendly block of Broome Street in SoHo, not quite in the midst of Expensive Shopping Central but quite near it. The loft is huge, and is really a genuine loft conversion with a rather dangerous railing-free mezzanine level hovering over the kitchen area in loft stylee. There's a big shiny old black lacquer piano in the middle of it all, with a sticky key (one of the important ones, even); and two old service elevators at either end of the space, one with a big window for folks to look right in as they pass by ("... well hello! Wait, where are you going? Come back!", I shout up at their knees) and another with the window blackened but from which snippets of its inhabitants' conversations emit as clear as day into the sitting room. The subway runs someplace underneath the building, and every five minutes or so, a distant rumbling refines itself over several seconds into a wonderful deep vibrating of the floor, like an earthquake that doesn't quite make it up to the earth's surface.

The regular inhabitants of the loft are artists, and the gentleman's paintings hang all around. They are huge, colorful, and geometric... like linear depictions of constellations overlaid with rectilinear colored gels. Often they also have warped three-dimensional parallelogram wireframe shapes covering the surface too; and the resulting effect is, physically and conceptually, very complicated and cage-like to me.

In the half-dozen or so visits I've made to New York, I've almost always randomly run into someone I know, even if they don't live here and I didn't know they'd be here. It's an amazing city that way. Ashley, who is now here in NY much of the time, went to see a concert last weekend. Afterwards filing out in to the foyer, who did he run into but my ex-boyfriend, who has been mentioned more than once in these pages but whose name I'm pretty sure I've managed to avoid mentioning so far, and who is currently residing in the New York area. The two of them know one another, and as far as I know dislike (or at the very least distrust) one another; so their meeting was one of curiosity rather than affection.

I know Ash and I are both ever so amused at the antics of the ex-boyfriend, who wrote and published an exploitative book about the gritty details of our relationship (including a section stolen from a page in my personal journal), and nowadays likes to keep a website of pictures of his wife exposing herself, in bad lighting and worse taste -- especially now that she is visibly pregnant -- but, as the saying goes, to each his or her own, respectively.

Anyway, I do know a few other people here in New York I would very much like to see when I visit, and additionally I'd love it if some of my pals would be able to pop over with me on occasion and be my playmates. Cambridge, my previous home away from home, was a bit of a distance over which to casually pop.

Next week we'll be visiting a friend in Tenerife (island off the coast of Africa), so there will be diving and much sunbathing, yay! And *no* ex-boyfriends, that I know of.