An unspoken transcript

It boggles my mind that Chinese food is so greasy and fatty (we ate fried pork belly…cardiac arrest!) and yet Chinese people are so skinny. On the other hand, I recently learned that Asian people don’t have an enzyme that breaks down alcohol, so they are much more likely to get unbelievably wasted. So I guess their bodies are superior in one sense and under-performing in another sense.

We ate dim sum at Pacificana in the Brooklyn Chinatown – Fort Hamilton – and it was great. Mostly because of the traditionalness of it. The ladies with carts, the people sitting around for hours drinking the tea they brought, and picking at sm, m, l and xl plates of variably fried food.

I went to The Slipper Room with Trout, Luke and Phil. It’s a bar with a Burlesque show; needless to say, I was pretty hesitant. Naked ladies! On stage!

And then I got the text from Trout, “Where are you?”

“On our way. 6 stops on train.”

“Oh God.”

So now Brian, the instigator, was saying he didn’t want to be there without us? AH. But HA because he shows up two hours late to everything, so suits him right to be stuck alone for once. How were we to know this was the exception when we planned our tardy departure

The shows were just strange enough to make the women seem ridiculous, not sexy or sexual. They seemed on edge, defiant, and practically ignorant of the fact there were people sitting 10 feet away watching them. It was weird. A regular looking woman, a super fat woman, and a man (oh FINALLY! a MAN! I thought, now let’s see how these dudes like it!) with tiny T-rex arms (ARE YOU FCKING KIDDING ME?! Rip off! At least the guys got one pretty woman.) and the DJ, who at the end of the night put on an endless playlist, got up on stage, took off everything but her underwear and shut the place down. Not in a barn-burner kind of way, but more like, a “no really, we shut off the lights” kind of way.

I guess the thing that struck me most about this place was the realness. Real bodies and the real people inside of them. Not perfect, not ideal, not outstanding, other than that they were willing to get up on stage and sing “breakin’ the law” with their butt cheeks.

I don’t know what he’s thinking or why.

Justin protecting himself from the exhaust of a motorboat noise.

None of these injustices make sense for a chair. It’s make more sense to see poop on the chair, cause at least they’re made for butts.

Phil got me a beautiful bouquet of flowers – with a cauliflower flower (who HASN’T wondered if you could eat those….now I can find out without having to steal a head from someone’s planters at night)! And several other flowers. I did a really shitty job with this photo; they are much more stunning in real life.

And I can’t say how happy I was to walk into the apartment and see them sitting on the counter.

I really want a scruffy dog. A mangey one with hair flying every which way. This guy’s a good example. A little weirdo who never really got the hang of being a city dog. Phil, of course, is not down with the scruff. Despite his own scruff (and, by association, apparent affinity toward it). So we are working on a compromise. I am thinking I could get by with a dog that only looks scruffy when he’s gotten a little wet – not constantly ruffled. But weinerdogs don’t ever, wet or not, fit into my categorization, so we’ve got a ways to go!

We were singing karaoke, minding our own business, when the guy in the white shirt became such a presence that we HAD to notice him. He sang song after song after song. He butted in on other people’s songs. He tested the mics beforehand to get the one with the best sound quality – HELLO! It’s karaoke, we all should suck! But he didn’t. And he knew it. Oh, and he didn’t buy a drink, instead snacked on nuts and powerbars from a plastic bag on the bar.

We knew it, we could nearly smell it. A D-List celebrity.

As it turns out, it was worse than we imagined: he was on a soap (“daytime TV actor,” he said). We joked: General Hospital, ha ha, oh look how tan he is and how square his jaw is, and how overly ripped his pecs are, ha ha.

Yep, General Hospital.

A true specimen, a great New York experience for Brian, and a piece of work. But in the end, he was just a guy who wanted the spotlight because that’s how he could tell people liked him. And by the time we left, I did. I was three sheets to the wind and offered to sneakily refill his Dasani water bottle for him (cut off by the irritated bartenders for not actually BUYING anything but songs over his four hour appearance), but misguided or not, I guess it was a sign I’d come around to him – the person who only saw himself as an actor.

THOUSANDS of people on 6th ave for the Halloween Parade. Best part was a group of +100 zombies who did the Thriller dance. I want to be part of something like that! But watching from above was pretty awesome, too. And I appreciated that the New York mentality carried into Halloween: this is New York, do whatever you want – so for the first time ever, I didn’t feel weird or shunned for not dressing up. I was still part of the party, even fangless/tiaraless.