Well! I'm packing up my apartment, taking care of various details related to moving, looking for a job, and now there's a hurricane coming. It's possible that I'll have to evacuate -- or that my parents, who are flying in to help me pack, won't be able to make it after all. As the Chinese say, "May you live in interesting times." Interesting they are indeed.
Since my stuff will be in storage for a month, I opened a PO box today. Put that down on my list of "things I've never thought of having to do before." And here's the rub: In order to open -- and, presumably, keep -- a PO box, you have to have, and prove, a physical address. But the whole reason I need a PO box at all is that I won't have a physical address. It's a head-scratcher.
In order to sidestep the issue, I dumbly handed the guy my lease and kept my mouth shut. After all, I do live here... right now. He nodded, handed the lease back to me, and a few minutes later gave me the keys to my very own PO box. And I thought, whew! I pulled a fast one on a federal employee just there. (I'm just kidding, I didn't think that. Much.)
I'll be couch-surfing for the month of September. This will also be "interesting." I'm a notorious over-packer, so the concept of living out of a single suitcase for a month is daunting, to say the least. As usual, I play out all these scenarios in my head regarding the kinds of clothes I might need, and I pack things like, a pair of sneakers, a fancy black dress, four skirts and a short-sleeved jacket (all of those things are in the suitcase right now), which means that I will be making some perilous fashion choices all month, or else not wearing any of it except for the same t-shirt and pair of jeans every day, all the while pining for the polka-dotted dress and flip-flops I packed in a box I'll never be able to find again. I would make a terrible nomad. Check that: I will make a terrible nomad.
Well, I don't really have much else to say right now (I gave in to temptation on the way back from the post office and let myself eat Popeye's for dinner, and ate it at the "wow I really am old" hour of 5:50 pm, which means I have felt disgusting and regretful for the last several hours yet am now screamingly hungry), but I did want to write something here, just for the hell of it. And now I have.
I will leave you with some of my favorite things from around the Interwebs recently:
Ryan Gosling Breaks Up Street Fight. Yet one more contribution to the increasingly solid body of evidence that Ryan Gosling is, in fact, the man.
Say Something Nice. My favorite: "Hey, you with the umbrella! I like it! It's pretty!" A close second favorite: the little Asian kid. I won't spoil it for you by telling you what he says.
Craziest Beard Ever. What really makes this video is the yelling offscreen. "OH MY GOD, A BEARD DOOR!"
The Daily Show: The Poor's Free Ride Is Over. This went viral, so you may have seen it already. Jon Stewart is on fire here. "That's the problem with poor people. They still have some of their skin." Make sure to get to the 4:30 mark... I'll admit I did get jealous of "poor" people when I saw that 25% have a dishwasher. I don't have a dishwasher. They are so lucky.
Anderson Cooper Gets the Giggles. A week old by now. Already a classic. I love Anderson Cooper. In fact, if I could make one news anchor my new best friend -- Anderson Cooper or Brian Williams -- I'd have a tough call to make.
Pictures of Recent East Coast Earthquake Devastation -- here and here. The first link practically gave me a fit of Anderson Cooper giggles, and I realize from the time stamp that the picture may not even be from this week's quake, but it's funny all the same.
I did feel the earthquake, and since we never get them here, my first thought was that my building was falling down, or (more likely) I was experiencing vertigo. I got up because I figured if there was something wrong with me, maybe walking around would help me shake it off. I then listened for clues from people outside, but I seem to live in a nighborhood of nonchalant Brooklynites, because there were no shouts, no sounds of distress -- and by the time I thought it might be an earthquake and vacillated between ducking under the table or bracing myself in the doorway, it was over. (I picked the doorway, only to realize later that standing in the doorway is so 20 years ago, and I should have gone under the table instead. This is what happens when you leave California and don't get earthquake refreshers.)
I watched New York 1 and CNN for the next couple of hours, and I know it's a cliche to mock East Coasters for their/our reaction to the quake, but I found the news coverage faintly ridiculous. Yes, I get that if you've never lived through an earthquake before, it can be scary. But, as a Californian, I've certainly felt worse (most notably the 1989 quake that halted the World Series), and while this one was alarming, no one died. No one was even injured that I can tell. All those people running outside in a panic? Faux pas!
The anchor on New York 1 kept telling viewers how terrified she'd been. Ma'am, I appreciate your suffering, but after the tenth use of the word "terrifying," you may want to keep that to yourself. Or pick a new word. And watching Hour 2 on CNN with Wolf Blitzer in DC interviewing his second straight "Dude at Train Station Who Felt the Quake" ("Where were you? What did you feel?) was a little too much for me, and I had to turn the TV off.
That's why the most amusing things I saw in the aftermath of the quake were tweets like "We will rebuild" -- linking to a picture of a recycling container tipped against a wall. We East Coasters are self-important wimps... but at least we have a ball making fun of ourselves.
