I am the queen!


A young visitor told me this week that my apartment building looks like a castle. Yes, it does!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Maskerade

Image
I’ve barely noticed the lockdown, so busy have I been sublimating any anxiety into frenzied and probably pointless activity. In the past month, I’ve made 250-odd (and I do mean odd) fabric masks. Initially they were commissioned by medical personnel to protect and prolong the use of N95 masks, and later they were requested by everyone from Native American groups to food banks to homeless shelters. No one knows whether cloth masks shield the breather or the breathed-upon from COVID-19, but nearly everyone is required to wear one now. The utility of the masks I make, in particular, cannot be known since I work on donated fabrics—different ones on different days, none bearing any mystery as to why they were donated. The conundrum of the masks is that the more impervious they are, the more impervious they are. In other words, a mask that allows you to breathe is not preventing disease transmission. I know more than the average person now about masks, and that means I know nothing, sinc...
Read more

Like Downton Abbey but different

The appeal of Downton Abbey for most Americans is its quaintness—nostalgia for a bygone world. But for a certain class of New Yorkers, Downton Abbey is aspirational. Perhaps we don't long for footmen and butlers and maids and valets. But doormen and supers? Hell, yes. After living for 35 years in a little bohemian self-managed building, Other and I had finally had enough of flushing boilers and fixing water heaters and shoveling sidewalks and picking up litter. A couple months ago, we left our old Bowery neighborhood and moved to the Upper West Side, where rain is just weather and not a gutter crisis. We expected to have buyer's remorse, known hereabouts as the New York surprise—the discovery that whatever due diligence you did was inadequate and your building turns out to be infested with bed bugs or roaches or black mold or totally insane neighbors or ...  In any case, it hasn't happened—so far. We've seen no vermin. And the neighbors seem sane. There's a ...
Read more

The joy of crisis averted

I’m sure Germans have a word for it—they have a word for everything. Witness schadenfreude, the pleasure someone derives from another person’s misfortune. (It’s a little creepy that there’s an actual word for that, with its whiff of sadism.) Or maybe there’s a Millennial acronym for it, like YOLO or FOMO. What is the term for the great long-lasting joy of a small crisis averted? The other day, Other and I took a long walk along the Riverside bikeway. It was a breezy, springlike day, and there were many of us out there. My thick homemade mask was, as usual, impinging on my pleasure. Fussing with the ear loops, I decided to remove my hearing aids to relieve some of the behind-the-ear congestion. I put them in my pocket, and we continued our walk—now silent, at least for me. When I got back home and went into my pocket to retrieve my aids, one wasn’t there. Oh shit! I’m quite hard of hearing, as Other will attest. I’m a misery without my aids, constantly asking people to repeat t...
Read more