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ersatz sea creatures
Tuesday, July 23 2002
This morning we had a plumber come out to look at the intermittent dripping coming from the ceiling above our toilet. As expected, the very first thing he wanted to do was go upstairs and look at our neighbor's bathroom. That neighbor is none other than Jane, the paranoid psychotic woman who once sent Gretchen a rambling handwritten note in response to a set of keys accidentally left in the lobby. Unlike ourselves, Jane has a job with conventional hours, and she was gone at the time. Since plumber hours and Crazy Jane working hours are virtually the same, it soon became apparent that getting a plumber at a time when Jane would be around would prove nearly impossible. Gretchen tried calling Jane at work and reasoning with her (I mean, after all, it's her shit water that is dripping into our living space), but the woman started raving about her sick cat and how it can only eat above the toilet and that if a plumber came it would be disturbed, blah, blah blah. There are few fates more horrible in this world than being forced by circumstances to coax rational behavior out of a belligerent, irrational neighbor. The possibility of having to do so is just one of the risks one undertakes when one decides to live in a densely-populated urban environment.
Her absolute impotency in the face of this crisis made Gretchen ill and me angry. "We should break into her fucking apartment," I said, "It's a fucking emergency."
Gretchen's only solace was surfing the web for rural homes upstate near Woodstock. "When you live on eight acres, it doesn't really matter how crazy your neighbors are," she observed. Having grown up on 60-some acres surrounded by crazy gun-toting rednecks, I couldn't completely agree, but there was a certain amount of truth in what she was saying.
Buying houses and moving are expensive undertakings, the sort that require steady income, yet it's becoming increasingly obvious to me that no one wants to hire web developers anymore, at least not in this wretched wonderful city. Gretchen tells me I should be making follow-up calls after sending out my resumes, but it hardly makes sense when I don't even get form-letter responses from these assholes. And now suddenly Gretchen, my mother, and Gretchen's parents are all cooing about how I should start painting pet portraits for a living. Doing so is probably no more of a humiliation than creating Enrique Iglesias promotional pages, but nonetheless I thought I'd found my true calling back when I was programming for a living. I'm not really cut out for being a portrait painter; I'm lazy, impatient, and hate doing anything more than once. But I think I could muster a lot more necessary empathy for a dog, cat, or an iguana than I could for some random human being.
Gretchen and David the Rabbi went to the aquarium at Coney Island this afternoon and she returned with an armload of ersatz sea creatures. These included three glow-in-the-dark jellyfish, a plastic sea lion, and a huge stuffed sea otter. We were watching a women's basketball game tonight between New York and Miami and were going to name the sea otter Richie (in honor of the New York Liberty's coach) if they won. When they lost, however, we named him Sydney instead.
Anna came over at some point and we three sat around watching yet another installment of the inanely addictive American Idol, aghast at some of the personalities still in the running after all the episodes we'd missed in the past weeks. Particularly telling was the fact that the guy with the Backstreet Boyesque pencil-thin facial hair was still up there getting cheesy with the microphone, causing white girls in the audience to cream their thongs in the most nauseatingly audible manner possible.
Later Anna had me take some photographs of her to accompany a dwarf-related internet article.
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