happy christmas, everybody. see you in the new year (or maybe before, who knows?).

susanne, you're all that i wanted of a girl

it's been a while, no? i'll bet you were worried. visions of my beaten, dusty fingers poking through a tiny hole in the ground above my cell in some top secret prison would wake you from your sleep, drenched in sweat, heart heavy with dread.

well, fear not. i'm fine. in fact, i'm great. god, nothing saps the blogging momentum right out of me like a good mood. i've been working when i should be working, playing video games when i get a chance, and spending a lot of time out on the town doing the kind of things that i think anyone who lives in this town should try to make time to do regularly. eating in questionably sanitary places, drinking in dismally unsanitary places, catching a show here and there. lather, rinse, repeat.

i'm really insecure about my holiday gift-giving prowess. that's something i can talk about for a minute. a lot of people i know are really great at picking the perfect gift. i become paralyzed by the fear that whatever gift i may have picked is less than perfect, which causes me to keep looking, which makes me leave everything until the last minute, which creates more panic. i'm just a bundle of nerves. and huge muscles.

i had been cautiously optimistic that they're more afraid of you than you are of them would make pitchfork's annual top albums list, but those assholes must have been under a rock all year. i guess there's always next time. i'm kidding, btw. christ. don't look at me like that.

a tourist in my own town

this weekend i went on a walking "tour" of queens and brooklyn. i put "tour" in quotation marks (twice now) because i expected it to involve some knowledgable person telling me what i was looking at. not the case. there were a few highlights, though.

we started in long island city at this gigantic art space complex that is covered in sanctioned graffiti (there's a guy you're supposed to email for permission before you go to work). inside are studios, and it happened to be "open studios" this weekend so we strolled on through and peeked in at people doing all kinds of weird shit dressed in all kinds of weird clothes. oh, how badly do i wish i understood art. really though, it was cool. above is a pretty good picture of my eyelids. my dad closes his eyes in basically every picture we ever take of him. maybe i'm turning into my dad. which really isn't such a bad thing at all. he walks around the yard in his underpants all the time.

then we went to the pier. it's right across the water from midtown manhattan, so as you can imagine, there's quite a view. this is one of the many times an actual guide to the "tour" would have come in handy, since i have lived in this city for two years now and i still don't know the names of any of those buildings. honestly.

probably the biggest thrill for me (please don't ask me why, i have no good answer) was walking across the bridge whose name i already forget that goes right over the midtown tunnel and connects long island city (queens) to green point (brooklyn). this is also where my camera's battery died.

in green point we ate pierogies and "pyzy" which is a sort of potato dumpling filled with meat. i wish i had a picture of it because it's quite imposing (and quite good). then we took a break at this bar where a bunch of people in the group i was in ordered coffee based drinks because it was chilly and there was a big sign encouraging people to do so to fight the cold. not me, though. i got a beer. later the bartender not-so-subtly flipped out to a coworker saying he was a bartender not a fucking barrista and he was going to kill whoever made that sign. saw that one coming.

the purpose of the break at the bar was for everyone to regain their strength before the final push to dumbo, but for me, it served only to sap me of any desire to continue. so soon after we left the bar, i left the group in the middle of williamsburg and wandered around until i found a subway. then i didn't get on it because i had to pee really bad so i found a mcdonalds.

if you're into it, there are a few more pics up at flickr.